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From: orb@whuxl.UUCP (SEVENER)
Newsgroups: net.politics,net.flame
Subject: Re: Don Black's "America First" viewpoint
Message-ID: <725@whuxl.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 7-Oct-85 16:08:50 EDT
Article-I.D.: whuxl.725
Posted: Mon Oct  7 16:08:50 1985
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While Don Black's very extreme view of "White Anglo Saxon Protestant
America First" is held by only a handful of Americans, unfortunately
views of "America First in Violence and Militarism" are widely
disseminated by the media.  Thus Mr. Black's comment:
> 
>      This rash of bombings, arson, and murders has apparently been 
> precipitated by the movie "The Execution," a story about a group of vigilante 
> Jews who take the law into their own hands and kill an alleged Nazi.  This 
> movie was filmed in part at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.  The 
> center also provided "technical assistance."
> 
>      Rest assured that if the Klan had made such a movie, any theater showing 
> it would be picketed and/or firebombed.  .......
>      --Don Black
 
Is quite ironic given the rash of movies, "Missing in Action", "Rambo",
"Red Dawn", "Invasion USA" and other movies promoting the same sort of
"America First" violence and paranoia promoted by Don Black and his colleagues.
 
To my knowledge none of these films has been picketed although I have felt
the urge to do so.
 
These movies attempt to make war and violence glorious and heroic
in contradiction to the likely extinction of the human race which could
occur by continuing to support the institution of War.
 
Moreover such movies as "Missing in Action" and "Rambo" promote several
right-wing myths about Vietnam:
  1)we could have "won" in Vietnam if only enough force had been applied.
    Incredibly enough Richard Nixon, who continued the War to the bitter end,
    has recently written a book blaming Congress and the lack of force
    for "losing" the Vietnam War when that same Congress provided funds
    for Nixon to drop more bombs on tiny Vietnam than were dropped in all
    of World War II.
This of course assumes that:
  2)we *should* have won in Vietnam, notwithstanding the fact that the War
    began as a struggle by the Vietnamese themselves to gain their independence
    from French colonialism. Rather than saying we "lost" Vietnam it might
    be more accurate to say that the Vietnamese people won Vietnam in the
    same way that we won our independence from British colonialism 200 years
    ago.
And
  3)that there were significant numbers of Americans still "missing in action"
    held in Vietnamese prisons for spite rather than simply missing.
    There were far more Americans listed as missing in action after both
    the Korean War and World War II, yet nobody claimed this as an excuse
    for vengeance or as anything more than one of the unfortunate consequences
    of War.  Pilots whose planes are downed over the jungle, and others
    will always be "missing in action" when their dead bodies are rotting
    away deep in the jungle.
    Given the difficulty the right-wing had in justifying the Vietnam War
    they have manufactured the bogus issue of "missing in action" to
    justify their spirit of revenge towards Vietnam for being the first
    country to defeat American militarism.
 
What I find scarey about the chauvinism promoted by this rash of glorifications
of War is that it seems similar to the sort of false pride in a country's
military strength promoted by Hitler to salve German humiliation after
losing WW I.  We cannot afford this sort of chauvinism and militarism in
the nuclear age.  The next World War will be the last.......
            tim sevener whuxn!orb