Columbia Leaders Grilled at Antisemitism Hearing

[GMDino]

(05-09-2024, 11:52 AM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: 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.


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.  

No knot tying needed.  As I said it was a discussion in another thread.  It went on a long time.  Everything was explained.  But you, like a dog with a bone, hate Dill so much that you had to keep ignoring the bigger discussion to maintain your point.

(08-10-2023, 07:11 AM)Dill Wrote: I don't think anyone is disputing that protests occurred either of the Vietnam or the Iraq War.

The question is whether veterans were spit upon by protestors when they got home. Or to refine this a bit--the question is about whether and how much such alleged "spitting incidents" should be taken as representative of vets homecoming from the Vietnam War, since the issue is rarely raised in a political vacuum.

So this is more about establishing history than rewriting it. As far as I can tell, no one can find photographs or news accounts from the period in question which confirm the spitting--though there is a great deal of news footage and many photographs.  And many vets dispute it.

This columnist from Desert News, Bob Greene, got over a thousand replies when he posed the question to his readers. He selected some here for interesting reading. Many claim the spitting stories are bunk.  But the common thread that runs through them is that their service was not acknowledged. People had no idea what they had gone through and didn't seem to care. (As with many current A-stan and Iraq vets.) One claims he was indeed spit on, every day in Vietnam by Agent Orange and the government which sent him on a losing mission. https://www.deseret.com/1989/2/4/18800994/vietnam-vets-recall-their-homecomings-often-painfully

My own memories of the period (I began college in fall of '69, with vets all over the campus) are dominated by returning veterans joining the anti-war effort. They were probably the most visible group of returning vets. Most appear to have just gone home and integrated back into life. Of the 7-8 vets I knew from HS, only half went to Vietnam, and only one was killed. 

As far as your question "why are we rewriting history," in this particular case, the rewriting appears to have begun in earnest in the late '80s and early '90s. I've wondered if Hollywood films might have something to do with it as well. (Didn't Rambo say he was spit on?) Events which may not have happened, or happened very rarely, became a dominant representation of  the war for people who learned about it decades later, a fact easily integrated with the U.S. very own Dolchstosslegende--liberals stabbed the military in the back. The war was lost on the home front, etc. 

Seems to me that David Sirota's conclusion, from the ST link in my previous post, suggest why some groups would want to rewrite history, not only of Vietnam but other wars, like the Iraq War, as well.

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.

Part of the "news legs" this issue gets is, it seems to me, derives from the ideological club it provides for revisionist history. If there are vets who were spat upon and otherwise disrespected when they returned, they'd have to experience this question as one more act of disrespect. Can't question the right wing revision of the war, then, without questioning those personal experiences--so "attacking the troops" yet again. No one who seriously wants to know what happened will treat the question that way, but there are strong ideological motivations here to keep the issue hot and muddled, in hopes the villains in U.S. history continue to be the people who wanted us out of such disastrous wars, not the people/policies that got  Americans into them. 

(08-10-2023, 09:34 AM)Dill Wrote: No one can determine for certain that no vet was EVER spat upon on returning home--over 2 million returned--but one can determine whether it was a "common experience" as SSF puts it. Just as one can determine whether pro-war demonstrators more commonly attacked anti-war demonstrators--which often included vets.

So Dill cited some polling and historical research which pretty much settles the question of how "common" spitting was, without disputing that some vets have claimed it. I.e., not very. The overwhelming number polled in 1979 remember their homecoming as positive. And when they remember protests, they seem to recall them as directed at the government, not the vets whose support they welcomed.

One of the books referred to in Sirota's Times article (linked in my previous post), Vietnam Vet Jerry Lembke's The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam, includes accounts of veterans who claim to be spat upon. But could not confirm any of them (e.g., by interviewing other vets who returned with the a guy who claimed he was spit upon and don't remember spitting). 

Spitting gets termed a "myth" in this book, as in others, not because the author claimed it never happened, but because of how, through the machinations of politicians and Hollywood, it comes to be taken as something that regularly occurred. Representative.

Lembke thinks the myth really took off in 1990, as George H.W. Bush referred to VV spitters in a speech to drum up support for the Gulf War. And the use of the spitting image in revisionist history is what keeps people talking about it now. Like missing POWs. It would be interesting to survey still living vets to see if spitting stories break down along party lines.

(Another strange phenomena about the VN War--the number of people who claimed to have served there but did not. Millions according to David Hack's US Wings website: https://www.uswings.com/about-us-wings/vietnam-war-facts/ It would be interesting to know if and how many of those wannabes remember being spit upon. That would confirm the "myth" status.)

(08-10-2023, 09:30 AM)GMDino Wrote: I'm not willing to say no soldier was ever spit on.  It's a big country and everyone has their own individual experiences that we can't discount.  We also can't extrapolate them to encompass everyone else either.

I am willing to ask if some of the "soldiers were spit on" was metaphorical also.  I didn't know about any of the above writings and have not even bothered to go through it all yet though.

I don't know if that's "moral courage" or just having a discussion.  Someone will let me know.

(08-10-2023, 09:54 AM)Dill Wrote: No one is willing to say "no soldier was ever spit on." 

The interest for me is just how the notion took off decades after the war to become, for younger generations, a stereotypical but false image from that period in U.S. history.

Many vets claim it was the government which forgot them, and have claimed that since the war, 
so from a certain ideological position it becomes very useful to deflect that critique onto people who rightly protested the war.

THEY (protestors) mistreated soldiers. etc. While true patriots supported the troops--and, of course, the government's policies.

I always keep the wider ramifications of this kind of revisionism in mind as well, and whom it might serve. E.g.  Ramaswamy wants to abolish the Dept. of Education and, I guess, start from scratch with a kind of education that instills students with "patriotism" and pride in their country. I think that will mean an embrace of revisionist history wherever opportunity presents itself. And if you critique the spit myth in that hodge podge you are attacking the vets, yet again. 
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/vivek-ramaswamy-abolish-department-education-overhaul-education

(08-10-2023, 11:58 AM)GMDino Wrote: That's a shame.  I'm sure some, many, were met with all kinds of different people when they came back. Protestors at a military base seems more likely to have had the vitriol then a small town in SW PA where my family was.

I think that's all I and Dill have said:  Everyone had a different experience and some of what is "well known" thanks to the media may not have been as wide-spread as we were told when we were growing up. 

If it happened to your own family you are probably more likely to feel like it happened more everywhere else too and probably take it a lot more personally.  

Back to the topic of the thread I'm not sure what any of this had to do with Ramaswamy' crazy "ideas" though other than trying to make youth "love our country more".

(08-10-2023, 06:46 PM)Dill Wrote: LOL "Us" again.  Your quote below, from post #60, was the occasion for my use of your term "common experience."  

"As SSF puts it," followed ONLY by the two words singled out, just means that I am appropriating your TERM as I state one can determine WHETHER spitting was a common experience. I did not say "as SSF claims" it is, as I would have if that is what I meant. And even if I had, the appropriate response would have been a simple, "No that's not what I'm saying," rather than stridently accusing me of lying and linking me, by misconstructed analogy, to Holocaust denial.*  That sort of hyper-emotional and unjustified personal attack, while you are revealing MY character, shuts down threads as well as debate.

In any case, based on the case I've referred to in previous posts--books and polls of vets and documentary evidence from the period--being spit on was not a common experience. Not even close. So why are you "avoiding my points," as you frequently put it? 


The flipside now--Dill has not been "arguing that it never happened." And you just responded to a post which states that plainly. 

So why isn't the misrepresentation bolded above a "flat out lie," as you put it?

My posts are not about "invalidating the experiences of some of the men returning home from Vietnam";
They are about invalidating the MYTH that this was a common and representative experience.

And I've given the reasons why so many Vietnam Vets agree with me on this point--it's really THEIR argument, after all--e.g. it deflects criticism FROM the people and policies who created the Vietnam mess and deflects it TO the people who criticized that war and will likely be criticizing future wars as well. But you are not interested in THAT evidence. It's "anecdotal" coming from vets whose experiences you don't mind invalidating to keep your private grievances against "the left" going.

You cannot refute that argument, so you once again make it personal, framing the issue as "personal invalidation," ignoring that I specifically acknowledged how a vet who actually was spit on might feel. You claim to put forward your father's testimony, then make any further contextualization of it a personal insult to him if it does not support your narrative. That closes any further possibility of open discussion and assessment of the factual record of this issue in veteran history, but leaves you in your preferred position of strident, personal moral condemnation of anyone who disagrees with you. Not the first time. 

I'm not going to trade accusations of "ingenuousness" with you. And you are not going to respond to my evidence-based argument as an evidence-based argument. So "we" probably don't require any further revelation of my character. 

*Holocaust denial does not start with people trying to verify historical facts, but with denying facts to create an alternative history based emotional appeal and predetermined political goals, not the historical record. Have you even bothered actually reading such denials? Have you forgotten your recent complaint about people who argue by linking opponents to the worst people? Why do you always except yourself from the rules you want others to follow? 

I'm sure THOSE quotes are all "wrong" and you are right and I am "defending my buddy" in your eyes.

And honestly that's ok.  I've seen enough to understand where you come from with this.