Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [17]
The myth also became the basis of popular culture accounts in movies such as The Deer Hunter, Uncommon Valor, P.O.W.: The Escape, and Missing in Action, in which Rambo-like heroes slaughter evil Vietnamese as they save our betrayed and tormented POWs. These movies turned history on its head. As Vietnam war historian H. Bruce Franklin points out, “America’s vision of the war was being transformed. The actual photographs and TV footage of massacred villagers, napalmed children, Vietnamese prisoners being tortured and murdered, wounded GI’s screaming in agony, and body bags being loaded by the dozen for shipment back home were being replaced by simulated images of American POWs in the savage hands of Asian communists.”83 The powerful cultural myth of abused POWs as the central feature of the Vietnam war not only allowed the war to be extended, it helped justify the U.S. failure to aid its victim in accord with end-of-war promises and it provided the basis for an eighteen-year economic war against the victim country. It also functioned as a potent agent of militarization and force weakening the “Vietnam syndrome.”
In his recent book Vietnam and Other American Fantasies, H. Bruce Franklin, who had previously exposed the fallacies and cult qualities of the POW-MIA myth, addressed this issue once again, as well as other fantasies (such as the claim that the antiwar activists often spit at returning veterans).84 Franklin’s book was reviewed in the Los Angeles Times but was otherwise only twice mentioned in passing in the U.S. mainstream press. On the other hand, a book by Michael Lind, Vietnam; The Necessary War,85 which explains that the war was justifiable because communism was on the march, U.S. “credibility” was at stake, and the Vietnamese communists were cruel and ruthless—demonstrated in part by their refusal to surrender and consequent responsibility for those killed by U.S. bombs!—was treated differently. It received forty-four reviews and was mentioned twenty-seven other times in the mainstream media, and Lind was given Op-Ed space in both the New York Times and the Washington Post, among other opportunities.
In his review of Lind’s book, Vietnam War historian Lloyd Gardner noted that any U.S. “credibility” problem that arose in connection with the Vietnam war was a creation of the war managers themselves and flowed from their own decisions; and Gardner also comments, after analyzing a series of Lind arguments in defense of the war, that “the evidence simply washes away his positions like a sand castle on the beach.”86 But Lind was saying what the elite wants said, and Franklin was not, so that mainstream media treatment followed accordingly.
LAOS
Laos’s Plain of Jars was subjected to some of the heaviest bombings of civilian targets in history, especially after 1968, when Washington was compelled under domestic pressure to enter negotiations with North Vietnam and had to terminate its bombing there. It turned to Laos, although that small peasant country was a marginal factor in the wars; but Nixon and Kissinger could hardly leave U.S. bombers inactive. Overall, some 2 million tons of bombs were dropped on Laos. These raids wiped out 353 villages and killed thousands of civilians, and they continue to kill now, as the Plain was saturated with hundreds of millions of “bombies”—tiny antipersonnel weapons specifically designed to kill and maim. With their 20-to-30 percent failure-to-explode rate, they remained as potential killers, and their casualty rate is still high, estimates running from hundreds to 20,000 or more per year, half of them deaths