Leftists have found a new flag that they consider racist. It’s the POW-MIA flag! You know why Talking Points Memo and other leftists nut jobs consider this flag to be racist?
Now considered racist by left: POW-MIA flag |
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You have this left wing nut job Muslim from Alternate happy to agree with Talking Points Memo that the POW-MIA flag is racist:
This story is intense and will provoke furor, good on @TPM for having the cajones to run it http://t.co/MtVZyYtiNT pic.twitter.com/JVj1OT5EE5
— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) August 11, 2015
POW flag represents rewritten history of Vietnam War in which Americans were the real victims: http://t.co/72BWLviyMI pic.twitter.com/C55j5tx4oo
— Talking Points Memo (@TPM) August 11, 2015
You know that racist flag? The one that supposedly honors history but actually spreads a pernicious myth? And is useful only to venal right-wing politicians who wish to exploit hatred by calling it heritage? It’s past time to pull it down.
Oh, wait. You thought I was referring to the Confederate flag. Actually, I’m talking about this.
I told the story in the first chapter of my 2014 book The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan: how Richard Nixon invented the cult of the “POW/MIA” in order to justify the carnage in Vietnam in a way that rendered the United States as its sole victim.
It began, as cultural historian H. Bruce Franklin has documented, with an opportunistic shift in terminology. Downed pilots whose bodies were not recovered—which, in the dense jungle of a place like Vietnam meant most pilots—had once been classified “Killed in Action/Body Unrecovered.” During the Nixon years, the Pentagon moved them into a newly invented “Missing in Action” column. That proved convenient, for, after years of playing down the existence of American prisoners in Vietnam, in 1969, the new president suddenly decided to play them up. He declared their treatment, and the enemy’s refusal to provide a list of their names, violations of the Geneva Conventions—the better to paint the North Vietnamese as uniquely cruel and inhumane. He also demanded the release of American prisoners as a precondition to ending the war.