It's Official: Americans are Fascists

Polls don’t lie. 5

I’ve been feeling this way for 30 years or so, that Americans are fascists. I’m wondering if it’s always been this way though? Was there ever a time when polls have showed that a majority of Americans were not fascists?

For instance, Barack Obama’s fascist Administration is trying to prosecute Assange under a fascist US law called the Espionage Act, passed during the First Capitalist World War in 1917. It’s one of the worst laws ever passed in this country, and it was used to criminalize dissent during WW1. It was used again during WW2 to criminalize dissent again.

The court rulings during the war said that the act could be used to restrict any political expression that the government considered a “clear and present danger.” Apparently this is only operative during wartime, or at least during world wars. But subsequent rulings found that the Vietnam War did not meet the test of clear and present danger.

The fascist Nixon Administration tried to prosecute Daniel Ellsberg using this fascist law. The courts ruled that Ellsberg was a journalist, and he had whistle-blower’s rights to release the Pentagon Papers. There have been repeated attempts at prosecution using this Act since then, but all have failed in the courts. At this point, the courts have slapped down Espionage Act prosecutions so many times that the very constitutionality of the Act itself is in question.

I am curious what the polls at the time showed? Did they show support for Ellsberg (the anti-fascist position) or did they support the state (the fascist position)?

It’s a poignant question. Have Americans always been fascists? How sad that I should even have to ask that.

More from Wyatt Jewell on Tom Metzger’s Show

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4pEXDtsPfs]

Part 2 of Tom Metzger’s interview for Wyatt Jewell. It’s clear that Jewell puts primacy of the class war over his racist beliefs. We do see a bit of his racist beliefs here unfortunately, but they seem to be somewhat subdued.

He went over to Vietnam because he had been brainwashed into thinking he was fighting the Chinese enemies of the Whites. When he got there, he realized he was fighting for the Vietnamese, who were not his people. He said, “Fuck it, I’m not fighting for these people,” and got a honorable discharge. Then he went back home and was involved in street protests, often violent, against the Vietnam War. Good for him!

Metzger admits that, like almost all racist Whites, he supported the US state in the Vietnam War.

Then Jewell went over to Europe where he participated in the Paris 1968 Uprising. He then hitchhiked and rode buses through Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan to Pakistan and India.

He makes some racist statements here. He says The Alamo is surrounded by a very low class Latino slum that is downright dangerous, full of criminals, pimps and whores. This isn’t so much racism as White disgust at Latino ghetto trash. There’s a bit of other racist stuff here and there, but it’s clear put on the back shelf to class.

Metzger’s agenda is clear. Metzger says little to nothing about the class war, and he keeps trying to steer Jewell back from class war to race war. Whatever you think of it, race war is just bullshit. It’ll never happen anyway, and it never liberates anyone. All it does is divide the workers, which is another plot the capitalists are always cooking up.

I really like this Jewell guy on class though, with his 1980’s Wobbly Speak.

I’ll take him over 1,000 “non-racist” corporate Republiscums and “anti-racist” bourgeois corporate Democratic National Committee Barack Obama Democraps.

So the guy’s a racist? So what. The only thing that matters to me anymore is class. I’ll ally with this guy in a New York minute. Anti-racist and non-racist bourgeois neoliberals of either party are not my allies!

The Significance of the Refoundation of the Maoist Movement in Pakistan

This is an interesting document outlining the prospects for revolution in Pakistan.

If not for Islam, Pakistan would probably already be in a revolutionary situation right now.

Bangladesh, where objective conditions are just as bad as in India, if not worse, has seen little progress in an actual armed struggle by Maoist forces, mostly due to the presence of Islam. Islamic Bangladesh has recently seen a large movement towards Islamism, though the nation’s elites are still secular. The Islamic parties are very large and popular.

Your average poor, starving peasant, who ought to be on board with revolution, is instead wasting his time jerking off with Islamist reactinaries. The Islamist militias have attacked the Maoists many times, killing many cadres. The state is probably using them for this purpose. This is reminiscent of the situtation in Indonesia in 1965, when Islamist militias were used to kill 1 million Communists in less than a year, a massacre that the CIA was involved in from start to finish.

Every time revolution rears its head in the Islamic World, the Islamists immediately condemn them as “atheists” and slaughter them. I assume that your average religious Muslim supports this massacre of the apostates.

Since Islam is so embedded in the population, I am dubious at the prospects for revolution in Pakistan. The Islamists will quickly condemn the Maoists as “atheists” and will be free to slaughter them. Further, the state will use the Islamist militias, as it already does. For instance, the Pakistani state used the Islamist militias to kill Benazir Bhutto recently. Further, getting pegged as atheists will make it hard for the Maoists to get support.

The revolutionary situation in Hindu countries is much better for some reason. Maoism went over great in Nepal, and the Maoists are doing well in India. In Nepal, the Maoists simply asked, “What’s Hinduism done for you lately?” The answer in general was nothing. Hinduism was used via the caste system by local elites to repress the peasants in a feudal to semi-feudal manner. In India, most of the Hindu Maoists have not really given up Hinduism. I suspect that Hinduism is not as deeply embedded in your average peasant’s psyche as Islam is.

Nevertheless, I understand that the PMKP is already quite popular among peasants oppressed by semi-feudalism. They hold large rallies in favor of land rights and lots of peasants show up. I assume that they don’t directly attack Islam – that would be idiotic in Pakistan. I have a Pakistani friend who comes from a feudal landlord family, and even she supported the PMKP, saying they were good for the peasants.

At any rate, I don’t think a revolutionary situation exists in Pakistan right now, and it will be a while before one starts up. And that’s almost all due to Islam.

The Significance of the Refoundation of the Maoist Movement in Pakistan

August 12, 2010

A Statement to the Seventh National Congress of the Pakistan Mazdoor Kissan Party

From the General Secretary of Revolutionary Initiative

With our fists raised as high as our hopes for the future of the Pakistani revolution, Revolutionary Initiative, a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist pre-party formation in Canada, offers a red salute to the comrades convening the August 2010 7th National Congress of the Pakistan Mazdoor Kissan Party (Pakistan Workers and Peasants Party).

We understand that the 7th Congress will mark a return of the PMKP to the Maoist origins of the party, as established by its founders Major Ishaq Mohammed, Afzal Bungish, Eric Sperian, and Ghulam Nabi Kaloo in the 1960s.

The new program of the PMKP will effect a decisive break with the pseudo-alternatives currently being presented to the people of Pakistan: the perpetuation of a backward semi-colonial, semi-feudal society maintained by the pro-imperialist military and civil bureaucracy, comprador bourgeoisie, and feudal ruling elite; versus the equally backward social program offered up by the Taliban of Pakistan. By breaking with the revisionist Left, which looks to U.S. imperialism for enlightenment through its brutal “War on Terror”, the PMKP is setting a course to truly rally the peasants, proletarians, and the progressive petty-bourgeois elements to the anti-imperialist cause.

Further, by exposing the program of the Taliban as fascism in a different form, the PMKP has truly placed itself at the vanguard of all the toiling masses in Pakistan.

Pakistan’s lackeys to the imperialists and the Taliban only appear to be irreconcilably opposing forces, but in practice they are two sides of the same coin. The world will never forget that it was U.S. imperialism, during the course of the Cold War, which helped create the Taliban with the unwavering support of the Pakistani state.

Due to the Pakistani ruling classes’ subservience to U.S. imperialism, the vast majority paid a steep price for the maintenance of the country’s incredible state of economic backwardness. Today, this relationship has brought only new sufferings, with U.S. imperialism raining down drone attacks upon the heads of Pakistani civilians.

With a population of 170 million people, 4

As the PMKP’s new draft program reads, it is the semi-colonial aspect of Pakistan’s countryside that remains the “main obstacle to the release of productive forces and the progress of our country”. This is what makes the heavily exploited and oppressed peasantry the “main force in the peoples democratic revolution carried out under the leadership of the proletariat.”

It is these conditions that make Pakistan ripe for People’s War. If the Maoists do not lead the struggle of the people, the Islamic forces will continue to prevail in their reactionary mobilization of the masses in their pseudo-opposition to U.S. imperialism.

The floods that are currently ravaging Pakistan, bringing great misery and dislocation to as much as 1

It is our hope that the floods do not derail the plans for the 7th Congress, but if they do, we know it will be because of the urgent need for the revolutionary vanguard to serve and guide the people in a time of great hardship. It is inevitable that the imperialists and the reactionaries in Pakistan will use the catastrophes to strengthen their legitimacy and order, just as the imperialists and reactionaries have done in Haiti with the great earthquake there in January 2010.

In addition to the great consequences that the rise of the Pakistani Maoist movement will have at the domestic level, the Pakistani revolution would also affect historic transformations at the regional and world levels.

Regionally, the revolution in Pakistan would carry the revolutionary tide sweeping South Asia deeper into the Muslim world, breaking the monopoly of the clerical fascists in the struggle against imperialism, which they do not fundamentally oppose and do so in appearance only for their own opportunistic and self-aggrandizing purposes.

At the world level, the rise of a revolutionary communist tide in Pakistan would deal a blow to the ideological basis of the imperialist ‘War on Terror’. In the Western imperialist countries, Muslims are being scapegoated to divert the rest of the masses from the true geopolitical and economic interests of the NATO bloc of imperialists: to plunder the world, exploit the toiling masses, and gain the upper hand in the inter-imperialist competition with the other imperialists and regional geopolitical rivals, especially Russia and China.

The masses in the West are blackmailed into supporting the imperialist war of aggression in Afghanistan through the specter of Taliban rule. But we know that the war against the Taliban, a war on domestic reactionaries and exploiting classes, can only be the class war of the toiling masses, not the imperialists. The world was reminded of this on May 1st, 2010 when the PMKP rallied and marched in North-West Frontier Province for the support of the revolution in Nepal.

We look forward, comrades, to the great feats that the people of Pakistan will achieve under the leadership of genuine communists guided by Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and we will show the masses in our country that the people of Pakistan are our friends and comrades, and that they strive for genuine democracy, for socialism and for communism, just like ourselves.

If the PMKP, alongside our comrades of the Shola Jawid (Communist Party Maoist of Afghanistan) and Sarbederan (Communist Party of Iran-Maoist), successfully organize and arouse the masses for national democratic revolution by way of anti-imperialist People’s Wars in Central and South Asia, genuine communists all around the world will rally to your cause, learn important lessons from your struggle, and promote them amongst the proletarians of their home countries.

If the PMKP holds fast to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism after the convention of the 7th National Congress, deeply uprooting the revisionism of the past decades, and boldly applies MLM to the conditions of Pakistan, then a glorious future lays ahead for the people of Pakistan and South and Central Asia. The era of imperialism is the era of world proletarian revolution. In this phase imperialism’s strategic decline, the phase of the second great crisis of capitalist imperialism that has plagued the world since the early 1970s, the conditions for proletarian revolution are inexorably improving.

Finally, this message of solidarity would not be complete without our own organization clearly identifying Canadian imperialism as a leading enemy of the people of the world, including the people of your country. A leading player in the occupation of Afghanistan and NATO is Canadian imperialism, the basis of which is Canadian monopoly-finance capital. As the imperialist war in Afghanistan more and more spills over into your country, your connection to the Canadian proletariat’s revolutionary struggle deepens more and more.

The proletarian youth who are being sent to Afghanistan only to return to Canada in body bags are also the victims of imperialist war, but they must be driven from Afghanistan just the same. The ruinous war in Afghanistan sets the basis for revolutionary agitation amongst the soldiers, no less than the Korean War and the Vietnam War radicalized whole generations of youth and soldiers in the West.

Together, let us hasten the movement towards socialism and communism on a world scale before the imperialists drag us further into a hellish world of war, avertable disasters, ecological catastrophe, and the day-to-day grinding exploitation and oppression of capitalism.

Red salute to the PMKP for taking up the banner of Marxism-Leninism- Maoism!

Onwards with the People’s War in Pakistan!

From Canada to Pakistan, long live the international proletarian revolution.

From Trotskyites to Neoconservatives (Short Version)

A commenter asks if there is something about Trotskyism that turned them into neocons:

Do you think there is something fundamentally sinister about Trotskyism that makes such transformation inevitable?

Not really, but they are super-revolutionaries. They believe in worldwide revolution. Spontaneous worldwide revolution. They don’t believe in socialism in one country, remember? They want the whole world in revolt.

The Trots used to just be a bunch of Jews. They liked Trotsky because he was a Jew and supposedly Stalin sacked Trotsky due to anti-Semitism. Trotsky was running around telling everyone that Stalin was an anti-Semite. Also, Stalin was a conservative and a nationalist and he undid a lot of the radical changes that the Trot types had done before 1927. So anyway, if you were a Commie and a Jew in the West, you were supposed to be a Trot.

Then with Khrushchev’s secret speech, the full weight of Stalin’s atrocities, 3.2 people just murdered in peacetime, came out. Actually they were throwing around numbers like 20-110 million. Lot of Commies in the West, including most of the Trots, abandoned Communism and turned into Cold War liberals in the 1950’s associated with a CIA publication called Encounter. They were regularly trotted out to show how liberals hated Communism as much as conservatives. My Dad came out of this mold. Fierce liberal who hated Communism.

With the 6-day war in 1967, the group radicalized. They supported Israel, and they got behind the Vietnam War in a big way as a Cold War thing. Also they became these cultural conservative Jews who were sort of waging war on their fellow Jews. They saw the Counterculture as a bunch of traitorous Jews, and they were pissed. So they were pro-Vietnam War, pro-Israel, pro-Cold War and anti-counterculture.

In the 1970’s this movement grew around a few very obscure journals which have since gone under the names of which elude me. The group coalesced around Henry “Scoop” Jackson’s office in the Senate. He was known as the Senator From Boeing. Jackson represented Washington State. He was this “liberal” who was all tied in with the military industrial complex, a hawk on Vietnam in the 1970’s and a Cold Warrior. My father loved him.

He was a Gentile, but the neocons saw him as Israel’s best friend. All of these guys, Perle, Wolfowitz and the rest of them, come out of this environment. They still wanted to be Democrats though because they were still liberal Jews at heart.

When Reagan came in, they saw their opening and joined on board for the pro-Israel Cold War ride. They formed a BS committee called The Committee on the Present Danger. The whole reason for its existence was to say that the CIA was lying in its estimates on Soviet strength and that the Soviets were stronger than we were and about to conquer us.

This was all lies and apparently they knew this, but they pushed it anyway. They got the CIA to revise its estimates of Soviet strength to dramatically overestimate it. This was the Reagan defense spending ramp up thing. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Frank Gaffney, Perle and other scoundrels were all involved in this.

Most of them were turning into Republicans already when Bush Jr came in, and they made a rush to sign up. Most of his administration came out of the CPD and JINSA, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. The purpose of JINSA is, through corruption and propaganda, to sort of merge the Israeli military and its MIC with the US military and its MIC. It has sort of worked.

The rest is history.

Trace the trajectory of Norman Podhoretz of Commentary Magazine and Irving Kristol of Public Affairs Magazine (William Kristol’s father). Those were some of the original proto-neocons who are now full-on neocons.

“A Guess About Why Men Went Along With a Feminist Agenda,” by Alpha Unit

The Vietnam War is to blame.

It’s because of the Vietnam War that so many men today can’t stand women.

There isn’t a force in creation that can stop the attraction between male and female, but if you listen to the way a lot of young men talk about women, you are struck by the degree of intense loathing so many of them express. And the seeds of this loathing were apparently sowed by feminists.

Not those suffragette-type feminists you see in old photographs, with the long skirts and hats and sashes – the ones who wanted women to be able to vote. No, all this trouble was begun by those other feminists – the ones who were so vocal and demanding in the late sixties and early seventies, when men were being exposed as The Font of All Evil.

Evil like the oppression of Blacks in the South. It was men – older ones – who were causing Blacks to get beaten up and hosed in the streets and attacked by police dogs, and killing Black people and White people who were trying to register Black people to vote. And it wasn’t just the South where Black people were being mistreated.

Everyone had seen this on TV.

It was men, that same generation of older ones, who were sending young men to Southeast Asia to fight a war that many of them wanted no part of. It was a war you could see everyday on TV, and you did.

A lot of these young men who wanted no part of it were being incredibly disrespectful to authority in ways their fathers wouldn’t have dared. Gathering to display contempt for the military, chanting rude slogans about the President of the United States. And then, after an unfortunate incident on a college campus, singing inflammatory songs about tin soldiers and Nixon coming…it was deplorable, really.

Why couldn’t more of these kids today be like The Carpenters?

It was too late. People were getting killed in Vietnam and Ohio. Older men were ordering these deaths. Older men were not to be trusted. Older men were liars.

Older men had made life hell for everyone, and that included women. Anyone who had a beef against older men was to be listened to and deferred to. That included women.

Young men nodded in agreement with young women. The young women were right about men. You know, those older men who had screwed up so badly. The young men had seen for themselves how screwed up the older men were.

The sins of men were being broadcast everyday on TV.

The old way, created by men, had to go. The older men got the message, didn’t they?

They did get the message. Once your message has gotten through, you don’t stop. You keep pushing. And pushing.

Women and the men who agreed with them kept pushing. They’re still pushing. And now we’ve got young men who want nothing to do with women in this country.

At some point people push back.

Even The New Republic Now Calls for a Party Purge of Corporate-owned "Centrists"

Even The New Republic Now Calls for a Party Purge of Corporate-owned “Centrists”, by Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald is one of top liberal bloggers. His site is Unclaimed Territory and gets tens of thousands of hits a day. He was formerly a constitutional law and civil rights attorney, but his blog has been so successful that apparently he has mortgaged it into a writing career and left his lawyer job. He’s authored three books in the past three years and now gets regular writing gigs. It’s hard to believe that he’s making more money writing than practicing law! Here is his former blog, now moved to Salon. The guy made the bigtime with a Blogspot blog! Incredible. I have not talked any about the health care debate, but I am sure that you know where I stand. Fully 7 The pubic option is much misunderstood. It just means that you will have a choice to buy into a government run health program, which I guess will be something like socialized medicine, i.e. Medicare, Medicaid and that horrible health program that every Congressman has. I really favor single payer, and it’s the best program out there, but I guess it doesn’t have the votes. The insurance-company run for-profit medicine system is shit. Michael Moore’s movie Sicko makes that quite clear. I don’t understand all these Whites yelling about how great health insurance is. I guess they have not yet gotten too sick or too hurt. After all, the shit insurance model is all based on making money off denying you care. The more care they deny, the more they make. The more care they approve, the less money they make. Now why would it be a good idea to be covered by private medical insurance, given that obvious capitalist reality? If and when you get too sick or hurt that your insurance plan dumps you (matter of time for most of us), you will have to burn through every nickel you have and every tangible asset you own until you are so damn poor that you can go on Medicaid. I guess conservatives think that’s cool? What’s so cool about that? I don’t have money or many tangible assets, but if I did, why should have to burn through all of them and go poor just because I get sick or hurt? Why would anyone with money or assets support such nonsense? Why not have the state pay for the care due to my injury or illness, and that way I get to keep all my money and stuff? Which is all conservatives care about anyway, money and stuff. One big lie is that the public option will drive out all the private insurance companies. Lord, I wish it were true that anything would put this gang of thieves and vipers out of business, but surely a government plan would not. Left unstated is why the public plan would theoretically put all the private folks out of business anyway. I mean, competition, right? If private insurance is so sucky that anyone with a brain would take off and go buy the public insurance instead, then according to market logic, the private entities deserve to die, right? That’s like Neoliberal Economics 101. Anyway, there’s nothing to worry about. All you fools who so love your evil private insurance needn’t worry your little heads one bit. My understanding is that in most every nation that has socialized medicine (other than Communist countries), you can still go buy private insurance if you are stupid or masochistic enough. But indeed, my understanding is that hardly anyone does. Once again, if it’s so wonderful, why does hardly anyone buy it in states that have socialized medicine? So with 7 You see, as Greenwald points out, this is really all about money. Both parties are controlled by corporate interests, just the Dems somewhat less so. You get a Liberal Corporate Party and a Conservative Corporate Party. Turning the Dems into a corporate party was the brainchild of the Democratic Leadership Committee. Rahm Emanuel is the DLC point man for Barack Obama. The idea was either Dems or Repubs take corporate money, and if we let the Republicans get the corporate money, they will win every time. If Dems take it too, then we at least get to win sometimes and can come in and kind of sort of maybe almost a little bit once in a while do piecemeal, half-assed reforms here and there. A health care plan with no public option is shit. There’s nothing in it for me or anyone that I care about. All it does it force everyone to buy the evil called health insurance. If you’re poor or low income, the government subsidizes you so you can buy the shit called health insurance. How is that good for anyone’s health? It’s not. Supposedly it’s good for taxpayers, because we fork over lots of dough to serve the uninsured in emergency rooms. This way they have to buy insurance so we save. Whoop-te-doo. What good is that? Everyone else is forced to buy this overpriced insurance poison, and many are going to go broke paying for it. If you don’t want to go broke, now the state will force you! Wow, such a wonderful plan. What it really is is the biggest piece of corporate welfare in the history of the US. So billions of working people’s ill-affordable dollars get shoveled to some of the most vile corporate slime in the country. Somebody show me the upside? Greenwald’s post is interesting. The New Republic is basically the liberal wing of the neoconservatives. The jerks who known as the Neocons, so prominent in the Bush Administration, are really just the rightwing of that movement. The liberal wing has similar roots as the conservative wing, coming out of the 1970’s, the aftermath of the Vietnam War and in particular the aftermath of the 7 Day War and 1973 Wars in Israel. The liberal neocons are as Jewish as the conservative ones. These guys are basically the same “Cold War Liberals” as the neocons, but they did not go as far to the Right as the rest of them. TNR spent most of the 1980’s fulminating against the USSR, welfare, liberalism and Arabs while supporting genocidal Latin American regimes like the Salvadorans and of course, Israel. I used to subscribe to this magazine, but finally I gave it up around 1983. I wasn’t hip to Jews yet, so the magazine mystified me. After it got taken over by uber Israel-firster Marty Peretz, he stacked it from top to bottom with liberal Jewish neocons. About half of every issue was about Jews, Jewry, Israel, Judaism, Judaica or whatever. Even the book reviews was usually some Jewish reviewer reviewing a book by a Jewish guy about Jews. The whole exercise was one of endless Jewish solipsism. I read all this stuff at the time, but the solipsism never made sense. Only when I figured out Jews did I understand the solipsism. Jews are probably the most solipsistic humans on Earth, part and parcel of their hyperethnocentrism. To Jews, it’s all about the Jews. What’s all about the Jews? Well, everything, pretty much. They just can’t get enough of themselves. Up until this year, TNR has continued to beat the drum for the Blue Dogs, the liberal neocons, the Democratic Centrists and other losers. Jew Lieberman or Joe Lieberman or whatever his name is is like God incarnate to TNR. SuperJew and Liberal Neocon Jonathan Chait is one of their top writers, and reading him gives you a good insight into the mindset of TNR. Well, finally, even TNR has had enough with the Rahm Emanuel  – Barack Obama Centrist corporate controlled Democratic Party. They’ve become even too Republican-like for the original Democratic Centrists. The about-face by TNR, among other things, shows there’s a liberal rebellion growing in the Democratic Party, and it’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen in a while. Let’s water it well and let it grow.

"They Spit On the Returning Soldiers!" The Journey of a Nazi Lie

Perhaps most of you are familiar with the line from the Vietnam War days. The line is: “The anti-war people spit on the returning veterans!” The story, told endlessly by pro-Vietnam War folks, is that long-haired, hippie, anti-American antiwar protesters spit on the returning veterans coming back from the Vietnam War. They also supposedly called them, “baby-killers.” As the story is usually told, it’s always women, young, beautiful women, who spit on the haggard, wounded, ill and psychologically battered heroes as they disembarked off the plane or ship or whatever and set their first steps on US soil. “Their women spit on our brave heroes!” is the line. A journalist, Jerry Lembcke, investigated these claims and wrote a whole book about it, Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam, published in 1998. Lembcke went back over every single case of someone who said they got spit on, or who reported soldiers getting spit on, and he was not able to substantiate a single case. None of the soldiers reported getting spit on, though you might have expected some of them to lie. It’s was always, “someone I know” or “someone told me.” Same thing with the civilians. A friend witnessed soldiers getting spit on, or told them about soldiers getting spit on, or a soldier they knew got spit on. None of the stories panned out when Lembcke tried to track them down. Furthermore, Lembcke noted that there were no regular flights or ships coming into civilian airports or ports bringing soldiers in uniform. The story always is that the uniformed soldiers are disembarking the flight or the ship at a civilian airport or civilian port to waiting throngs of jeering antiwar protesters. It is here that the dirty deed of girls spitting on brave patriotic men occurred. One problem here. All soldiers coming back from Vietnam disembarked at Navy, Air Force or Army bases. These are places where no civilians are allowed. There’s no way for waiting throng of protesters to greet uniformed troops coming off planes or ships. The protesters can’t get anywhere near the scene of the disembarking in order to line up and protest. So it turns out that one of the worst lies of Vietnam War is just that – a great big fat lie. I believe that some antiwar protesters may have shouted, “Baby-killers!” at some soldiers, but after My Lai and other massacres, you had to admit there might have been some truth to that. Actually, considering how crazy a lot of those Vietnam protesters were, I am surprised that they didn’t spit on returning troops. That’s something I fully expected the most whacked out of them to do. Perhaps you were wondering where that line originated? It did not have its genesis in the Vietnam War. The reporter, on doing some digging, found something far more sinister. The story about beautiful young, unpatriotic antiwar protesters spitting on wounded, shell-shocked and beleaguered heroes originated WW1 postwar Germany. At the time, it was said that as the brave German soldiers trudged home from the front, battered, freaked-out and defeated, throngs of beautiful, blond young German maidens lined the streets and spit on them as they passed by. After all they had been through, it was the ultimate insult. Problem is it was a lie then and it was a lie in Vietnam. Lembcke went back and researched the cases in Germany, and it turned out that German historians widely agreed that this never happened. Guess who made up this lie? The Nazis, and the proto-Nazis. After all, Hitler himself, as a wounded returning soldier, came out of the hospital after three months and was outraged that his society turned his back and him and his fellow returning veterans. Worse, the vets seemed to be blamed for the war. That was the last straw. The vets formed rightwing populist groups like the Freicorps and rampaged through the streets of Germany in the 1920’s, attacking Communists, socialists, pacifists, trade unionists and anyone deemed un-German. They were used by the German elite to attack their enemies on the Left at a time when Left wing revolution threatened Germany in the early 1920’s. Problem is, the monster got out of hand, turned into the Nazis 13 years later, seized the government and went nuts. If the story ended there it would be bad enough, but it does not. Lembcke found that the story emerged again in France, when returning vets from the Algerian War were spit on beautiful, unpatriotic young French lasses as they trudged home, bitter, wounded, defeated, thousand yard stares poking holes in the Parisian landscape. The author researched the story there, too. French historians looked into the case and found that it never happened then either. It’s never happened anywhere, not in Germany, nor in France, nor in the US. Sure, it could happen anytime, but historically, it never has. It’s important to shoot down this lie because even I believed it until a colleague told me about this book. Note that the beautiful young women are an essential aspect of the story. The evil unpatriotic antiwar protesters convince the most beautiful women of the land to turn against its very finest men, men who risked their lives for the nation. There is something particularly humiliating about a grown man being spit on by a woman, especially a beautiful young woman, especially when he is a brave warrior, especially when his pride, dignity, manners and chivalry prevents him from fighting back against a woman. The scene implies all sorts of things, especially men humiliated in their manhood after it has already been battered by war and especially by defeat or quasi-defeat. There are overtones of impotence and women mocking men for their impotence or lack of masculinity. The symbolism runs deep and it’s designed to make blood boil. It all adds up to one nasty equation. You do the math. It’s also interesting  that this lie originated with fascists, in particular ultra-nationalist Nazis. Then it went to ultranationalist French colonizers of the early 1960’s. The French who supported the war in Algeria are generally considered to be a far Right grouping. It emerges again in nationalist Americans fighting another more or less colonial war in Indochina. I don’t like to call my fellow Americans fascists or Nazis, but the trail of this lie is quite clear. Shame on anyone who knowingly repeats it.

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