Welcome to today's edition of "Someone Was Paid To Write This":
In this vomit-worthy piece of art, writer Chris Lehmann reviews a book called How White Men Won the Culture Wars by Joseph Darda, which argues that white veterans who were injured, disfigured, and disabled helped strengthen white supremacy in America.
Returning Vietnam vets mimicked the rhetoric and strategies of the era's homegrown protest movements while developing a powerful narrative of abandonment and trauma to convey their own sense of disaffection.
Soak in what this sentence is implicitly saying. It's laying the groundwork for an argument that Vietnam vets used their war trauma to strengthen the power of "whiteness" in America.
As white Vietnam vets struggled with the challenges of adapting to an American social order transformed by the politics of anti-discrimination and cultural representation, they were not simply echoing the well-worn refrains of white reaction. Rather, as Darda shows in this wide-ranging and provocative tour through the post-Vietnam cultural and political scene, they fashioned their own new brand of therapeutically inflected grievance politics, poised to capitalize in a host of ways on America's emerging postliberal backlash.
That's right: those boys waded through blood and fire just to create their own brand of "therapeutically inflected grievance politics"!
This dung heap of a book review goes on to talk about how Vietnam vets worked to create a culture of "white blamelessness," where white people made themselves victims at the expense of blacks and other minorities.
Lehmann even mocks their PTSD, going right to the edge of calling it a farce:
When they recounted stories of atrocities that they'd carried out in Vietnam, the psychologists who moderated the [Vietnam Veterans Against the War] encounter sessions diagnosed them as "survivors" of PTSD, effacing difficult questions of accountability and guilt in "a dehistoricized trauma culture in which all could claim the status of survivor," Darda writes.
Yes, how dare these white dudes complain about the barbaric commies known as the Viet Cong or being drafted to fight??
For that matter, how dare any of our vets struggle with mental trauma after war!
Lehmann goes on to target John Kerry, who was a member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and John McCain as the archetype for the victimized white man. I'm going to include a rather lengthy segment here so you can fully appreciate the lunacy at work here:
The returning prisoners were acutely unrepresentative of the actual forces serving in Vietnam: They were mostly college-educated officers. None of them had been drafted. They were all men, and 95 percent of them were white; the most famous among them, John McCain (another future senator and presidential candidate), built a political career on the idea that his sacrifice and suffering were emblematic of his generation of veterans. From this lily-white, mediagenic presentation of returning prisoners of war, an activist movement took root, seeking the return of allegedly still-living POWs in Vietnam who were chiefly figments of urban legend—and the broader optics of the American veterans' movement ensured that these imaginary figures had to be white. "The whiteness of the Operation Homecoming vets, the most visible and distinguished former prisoners of war, made the POW/MIA movement a vehicle for white racial grievance," Darda writes, "and the POW/MIA flag has been a common sight at white supremacist rallies ever since.
Did you get that? Whether you agreed with John McCain's politics doesn't matter: he was apparently just an opportunistic charlatan who wanted to use his war trauma to advance his career.
Oh, and POW/MIA flags are a "vehicle for white racial grievance" and white supremacist in nature!
Just for fun, the article takes a shot at Rambo, because everything is racist and nothing resembling "whiteness" can ever be good:
As Darda notes, Rambo's manufactured Indigenous backstory gave a character played by a white actor a way to co-opt a narrative of discrimination: "The white ethnic revival had made white minorities the most American thing of all.… In the 1980s, that meant a white actor starring as a half-Indian soldier—a minoritization that, as simulated rather than embodied, allowed all white men to see themselves reflected in it."
Of course, no woke article would be complete without a side-swipe at Orange Man Bad:
Even after he'd maligned the military service of John McCain earlier in the campaign, Trump won the enthusiastic support of the assembled POW/MIA activists—and of the white nation that vicariously identified with them. In the 2018 midterms, Democrats sought to follow his lead, recruiting a slate of nearly 100 mostly white veterans to attract voters from the long-fetishized center right.
He's still living rent-free in their heads I see.
Here's the garbage conclusion to this grotesque clap-trap:
In other words, the national consensus rested pretty much just where Bruce Springsteen and John Rambo had left it—and white men could comfortably reclaim their historic role at the center of American power, shrouded in a gauzy mythos of innocence violated and reclaimed. As Joseph Darda makes clear in this eye-opening study, they had won something far more valuable and enduring than a culture war.
Don't you see? Military service is all about white supremacy!
And the 58,318 Americans whose named are written on a wall in D.C. for giving their lives in service to their country during Vietnam?
That was just about "comfortably reclaiming" white power.
The next time you see a vet – no matter when they served – make sure to tell them woke writers said their service had nothing to do with protecting life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Make sure to also tell that to loved ones whose parents, spouses, and children gave the ultimate sacrifice.
Remember, it was all about white people's "historic role at the center of American power, shrouded in a gauzy mythos of innocence violated and reclaimed"!
