BrickArms Bazooka M9 prototype (left) by Dunchaser licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 GenericIn "Tough Guise", the scene that I found particularly striking and shocking was the part about the Vietnam War. Although Katz tries to be a little away from politics and nation problems and just dabbles in them, the part about the Vietnam War was strong enough to make its mark on me. It is said that the USA lost the Vietnam War because it had lost its status of "superpower" and "hypermasculinity". Those critics state that the nation was "softer", a fag maybe, so couldn't show the required strength and hence were defeated. I don't have the detailed knowledge about this idea of lacking hypermasculinity as a reason of loss but I just can't believe it. Even if you forget about ethics just like some do, it is painful to see these statements. Neither the American nor the Vietnamese soldiers are toys.
I was of course immediately attracted to the title of this post. I am very interested in the Vietnam period.
ReplyDeleteIt was so difficult for many Americans to accept that "we" could lose a war, and it has had a massive psychological impact on the nation's confidence. But I, along with Chomsky and many other intellectuals, take a much different view of this. We killed over 4 million people in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. We poisoned their land with chemical warfare, destroyed their economies and left them utterly impoverished. And that's just for starters. So who really lost the war? Vietnam was a tragedy on so many levels. The idea that we lost our masculinity is just a piss-poor excuse for a failed foreign policy based on extreme arrogance and imperialism. But Jackson Katz is so right to point out that certain segments of the American population felt "emasculated" by the "loss" of the war to "Commie bastards". If we could ever get any honest discourse about Vietnam into the mainstream media, we could start to understand it differently. But the media prefer to maintain the useful fiction of the "good Americans" fighting nobly against the "evil Communists". It's good for capitalism, and it doesn't matter how many people died.
oooh, 15 posts! We're neck in neck!
ReplyDeleteI'd better get writing... :))
Oh you're so angry about this =) Of course it's just a piss-poor excuse, I meant exactly that... Capitalism has been a brutal killer but it'll lose too. One day I received a text message from a close friend, saying "if there was a bet on will capitalism end in this this many years I'll put everything I have"
ReplyDeleteBy the way, I'll win =)
Everyone is counting on you Beri =)
ReplyDeletethank you =) maybe you can write some more and everyone starts to count on you? There are only a few weeks left, so come on!
ReplyDelete