05-09-2024, 11:52 AM
(05-09-2024, 09:07 AM)GMDino Wrote: I don't know if you are white or black or Asian or what, but if you are white and never experienced racism you're gonna tick off a lot of people who claim whites are as oppressed as every other group due to reverse racism!
SSF has twisted what Dill said in another thread to say that Dill said it "never happened" that veterans were the victim of protests or bad treatment. That is not what Dill said. It was clarified many times to SSF but he continues to lie about that.
So when it brought it to this thread that his personal experience trumps everything else I responded.
No, you're lying. He flat out said that vets being spat on was a "myth". Myth is in quotes there because that's exactly what he said. Now, please inform the class if a myth is something that happened or did not happen?
Here's the post in full so you can't weasel and say it was edited.
(08-09-2023, 10:17 PM)Dill Wrote: Could very well be. The question of whether such things happened is often raised in college history courses on the '60s. From my memory, protestors and hippies and the like were more worried about being beaten up by gung ho active duty types. I do remember returning vets being largely welcomed into protests movements, which many eagerly joined. They became one of the most important constituents of the anti-war movement.
As far as the myth of the spitting protestors, it seems to have emerged in the '90s.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/13/opinion/myth-spitting-vietnam-protester.html
“So where do these stories come from?”
The reporter was asking about accounts that soldiers returning from Vietnam had been spat on by antiwar activists. I had told her the stories were not true. I told her that, on the contrary, opponents of the war had actually tried to recruit returning veterans. I told her about a 1971 Harris Poll survey that found that 99 percent of veterans said their reception from friends and family had been friendly, and 94 percent said their reception from age-group peers, the population most likely to have included the spitters, was friendly.
A follow-up poll, conducted in 1979 for the Veterans Administration (now the Department of Veterans Affairs), reported that former antiwar activists had warmer feelings toward Vietnam veterans than toward congressional leaders or even their erstwhile fellow travelers in the movement.
There are several books on the subject. Could be written by "leftists" though.
Spat on Veterans: An Enduring Myth
https://www.fromthesquare.org/spat-on-veterans-an-enduring-myth/
The Los Angeles Times editorialized that it was a mythical image—an edifying myth, said editor Michael McGough, but still a myth.
Apparently, Wall Street Journal editors did not get the memo. Its January 30, 2023, pages carried Jerry Davis’s “Vietnam War Veterans Deserve an Apology.” In the article, Davis claims that “veterans were often advised not to wear their uniforms lest they become targets for mistreatment. Some were cursed, spat on, and worse.” He goes on to say that “Vietnam veterans often had trouble getting jobs.”
Little in what Davis says is true. To fly home free on a commercial airline, returnees from Vietnam had to be in uniform. Employers were required to hire-back men drafted for Vietnam upon their return. It is true that plant closings in the auto and steel industries in the late 1970s hit Vietnam veterans hard—but that is not what Davis is writing about.
There is no evidence that Vietnam veterans were spat on. Nor could they have been, at least not in the manner described in the most often told stories. Those stories tell of landing at San Francisco Airport and being met by groups of spitters, often hippies. But flights from Vietnam landed at military airbases like Travis outside San Francisco; protesters could not have gotten on the airbase, much less near deplaning troops.
Legend of the spat-upon Vietnam veteran
https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/legend-of-the-spat-upon-vietnam-veteran/
In his exhaustive book entitled “The Spitting Image,” Vietnam vet and Holy Cross professor Jerry Lembcke documents veterans who claim they were spat on by anti-war protesters, but he found no physical evidence (photographs, news reports, etc.) that these transgressions actually occurred. His findings are supported by surveys of his fellow Vietnam veterans as they came home.
For instance, Lembcke notes that “a U.S. Senate study, based on data collected in August 1971 by Harris Associates, found that 75 percent of Vietnam-era veterans polled disagreed with the statement, ‘Those people at home who opposed the Vietnam War often blame veterans for our involvement there’ ” while “94 percent said their reception by people their own age who had not served in the armed forces was friendly.”
Meanwhile, the Veterans’ World Project at Southern Illinois University found that many Vietnam vets supported the anti-war protest, with researchers finding almost no veterans “finish(ing) their service in Vietnam believing that what the United States has done there has served to forward our nation’s purposes.”
In the face of such data, why would the current president nonetheless repeat the apocryphal myth about spat-on Vietnam veterans? Because — facts be damned — it serves a purpose: to suppress protest and perpetuate the ideology of militarism.
This objective is achieved through the narrative’s preposterous assumptions. Metaphorically, if not explicitly, the mythology equates anti-war activism with dishonoring the troops; implies that such protest is kryptonite to the Pentagon’s Superman; and therefore insinuates that America loses wars not when policies are wrong, but when dissent is tolerated.
So in the same post he claims vets being spat on was a "myth." He cites sources that claim there is "no evidence it ever happened", that such events are a "legend", and that they are an "apocryphal myth."
So please tie yourself in knots trying to defend your buddy from the fact that he claimed such events never happened. I think the above rather speaks for itself.
