Vietnam: Who's to blame?

Stockholm Syndrome, I think they call it. Stanley Karnow has it bad. In the opening chapters of his over-philosophized book is all the evidence one would need to convict Karnow of classic self-loathing. This fellow seems to have about as much love of his country as the Biblical Herod.

It's not overt. Neither can it be missed by one who reads the book, not as an eye-witness of the war nor partaker of the nightly berating of the American military by the U.S. media that accompanied the war, but as one who was born quite after the conflict had ended. This guy has an axe to grind. His axe is not intended for the invading Vietminh army, as they were called at the beginning of the U.S. intervention. Neither has he any malice towards the brutal and heavily indoctrinated Vietcong. No, the target of his ire are three fold. First, conservative and pro-American thinkers and policy makers; Second, the American people with their "arrogant" view of ideas like "an American Century", or "manifest destiny", or "American inevitability"; and third, the "defeated" American military.

Karnow despises even the prospect that an American might think his sense of reason, religious holdings, evaluation of life, or value of liberty might be anything more than different than their communist opponents. While admiring the North Vietnamese sense of nationalism, he deplores American nationalism. He ends all American pre-suppositions by stating how simple-minded they were, and quotes the likes of Ho Chi Min amidst his own opinions both to complete his thoughts as well as proof of his assertions.

He couches his language in a way that makes difficult any direct attacks upon his character and loyalties, yet it is clear that he laughs at American ideals and goals, leaders and failures. He revels in an American "defeat". Karnow spends paragraphs expressing his deep admiration for the communist generals who would sacrifice 10,000 men as easily as a normal person throws away the heel off a loaf of bread. Yet, he spends equal time magnifying the moral failures of our fighting men embodied by half-breed children left behind, abandoned by their GI fathers and scorned by their communist countrymen, defoliated jungles and dozens of brothels around former U.S. bases.

In the first several pages of the book, many words are spent trying to establish the unequal use of force by U.S. troops and American atrocities against the enemy, and virtually no recognition of the brutal world-view that our troops and government were opposing. He states the low-end estimates of those killed by the communists after our exit from Vietnam and those killed by the Khmer Rouge.

Karnow approximates the view of many Americans that it was the daily attack of the war effort, our troops, exaltation of our enemies by the U.S. media establishment, and exaggeration or even fabrication of American atrocities in Vietnam that caused popular support and finally congressional support for the war to wane. He acknowledges that many believe this to be the the second front against the American war effort that was key to American defeat. But he dismisses this opinion as scapegoating. The real blame, he contends, is to be laid at the feet of our leaders, military, and citizenry. While some blame is to be shared by every American, I believe that the media played a vital role in favor of communism in general and the North Vietnamese war effort in particular. From all I've seen and read, I can only conclude that there was a persistent and calculated effort by left-leaning media figures such as Murrow, Cronkite and many others to deprive the American people of U.S. military heroes, to cast unending dispersions upon the leadership of our government to make mundane mistakes seem like treachery and conspiracy, to demoralize our troops by depicting them as monsters and baby-killers, to reduce the perception of the American public that communism itself was a brutal, Godless world view, and to lend aid and comfort to our enemies by taking a neutral to negative position against the United States and our military during time of war. The reporting of our media during Vietnam seems indiscernible from the Nazi propaganda against us during WWII. In short, the media adopted and owned the idea that America was as bad as the Nazis and Communists said we were.

So, Stanley Karnow, I know you won a Pulitzer for this rag, but you are a traitor.

It's going to be a disturbing couple of months.