- Paperback: 272 pages
- Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press; New edition edition (Oct 1 2001)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1558493328
- ISBN-13: 978-1558493322
- Product Dimensions: 23.7 x 15.7 x 1.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 463 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,370,268 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
"Human memory," Primo Levi once wrote, "is a marvelous but fallacious instrument." Memories change and reconstruct the past, and in this provocative study, Rutgers cultural historian Franklin argues that the American memory of Vietnam has left fact and experience behind so that what remains is myth and denial. The Vietnam War, says Franklin, was an imperialist war of aggression built on lies and deception. But as this is an unacceptable truth, we have had to create images in films, books and the popular imagination to dispel such a notion. In film, lone heroes like Rambo battle both the VietnameseAportrayed as heartless monstersAas well as timid American bureaucrats to win a war we could not win for real. Cynical politicians, Franklin says, perpetuate the myth of the "POW/MIA." War protesters have been demonized as mindless dupes; the "alternative press" of the 1960s, which, Franklin contends, covered the war more honestly and deeply than its mainstream relatives, is now all but forgotten. More subtly, he argues, cultural conservatives battle in academia to restore "Western" values that were shaken and challenged by America's participation in and loss of the war. Franklin thus wanders far afield in exploring the unreality that is now called "Vietnam." His analyses are at times strained, his conclusions overwrought, but he is never uninteresting or timid in challenging accepted wisdom. Though not always successful in its argument, this is an honest attempt to remember the complex legacy of Vietnam.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Library Journal
A former antiwar activist and author of M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America, Franklin (English and American studies, Rutgers) offers an all-inclusive cultural history of the Vietnam War and its continuing impact upon contemporary American society. Like Fred Turner in Echoes of Combat (LJ 11/15/96), Franklin shows how the proliferation of books, plays, films, and television programs whose scenarios reflected the conflict in Vietnam influenced a generation raised on superheroes and John Wayne stereotypes. Not just obvious examples such as the Rambo films or Coming Home but war-era sf such as Star Trek and underground comics are viewed in a Vietnam context. Franklin also demonstrates how mythmaking influenced support for the warDeven in the face of the harsh realities of what Vietnam had becomeDcausing a generation to protest government policies. Often citing underground sources and other antiwar activists, he shows how the divisive schisms took place within the power structures of government. This well-documented study presents another facet of this important and controversial period of American history and its cultural aftermath. Recommended for academic and large public libraries with lively Vietnam collections.DGeral Costa, Brooklyn P.L.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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The industrial revolution was only about one century old when modern technological warfare burst upon the world in the U.S. Civil War. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
The industrial revolution was only about one century old when modern technological warfare burst upon the world in the U.S. Civil War. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
American fantasies explained,
By Son Nguyen (San Francisco Bay Area) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Vietnam and Other American Fantasies (Hardcover)
As a Vietnamese living in America, I have always been puzzled by different historical accounts of what went on during the Vietnam war. One account was what I learnt while growing up there. Another account was the Vietnam that many Americans know from the media. This book explained some of those differences well. The two Viet Nam (North and South), the gulf of Ton Kin incidence, the liberal press, antiwar activists spitting on returning GI, and the emotionally afflicting POW/MIA myth were the few fabrications concocted by various imperialistic American administrations. With the help of the jingoistic corporate press, they brainwashed the ill informed American public to garner support for the genocidal war in southeast Asia. Four million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians died from the "good intentions" of the United States.Americans may have a free press. But are Americans free from the bias, prejudice, and bigotry of men who decide "all the news that's fit to print" and what is fit for us to read? Read the book and make up thy own mind.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Alarming, frightening, but truly revealing,
This review is from: Vietnam and Other American Fantasies (Hardcover)
This book provides a gripping examination of how the Right has redefined "Vietnam" (a war, not a country). Franklin reviews the horrors inflicted by the United States on the people of Vietnam, and shows how our culture has made us the victims. He shows how the famous photo of the Saigon Chief of Police executing an enemy prisoner has been reversed in movies showing Americans POWs in cages with the gun to their heads. He reminds those who would blame the anti-war movement for our failure, that every President from Truman to Nixon ran as a peace candidate, knowing the American public would never support the war. He discusses the first American anti-Vietnam-war protests, in 1945. Franklin himself was fired from a tenured position at Stanford for his stand against the University's involvement in making napalm, a truly horrific weapon which has only been used against people of color. He reveals that Nixon's need to prolong the war and declare victory by focusing on the Americans unaccounted for (extremely few though they were) led to the creation of the post-war POW/MIA myth. This myth, never substantiated, has justified our refusal to pay Vietnam the reparations we promised in the Paris Peace Treaty and our longstanding lack of diplimatic relations with the country. This book explains the war and its cultural fallout better than anything I've read. Reading this book made me truly alarmed for the lack of democracy in the United States.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Experience is your best teacher, unfortunately!,
By
This review is from: Vietnam and Other American Fantasies (Hardcover)
To whom it may concern:As a pacifist and one who was, actually, a participant in the evil and avoidable Vietnam "undeclared" war, a FACT that Mr. Franklin didn't bring out, and the ONLY war that this country ever lost (another FACT that wasn't brought out, either), I still live with the horrors and traumas of that miserable war, even though it has been over 35 years since I was part of the initial invading forces in the spring of '65. Since I had the great misfortune of being drafted, I had really no choice as to whether to serve or not. When the "peace" president, LBJ, specified in his campairgn rhetoric, that as long as he was president, there would be peace for ALL Americans and that he would NOT send American boys to do the fighting that Asian boys ought to be doing themselves, I felt very secure and I was married on these false promises while stuck in the hated army, and as a slave! By being drafted, it violated the 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the U.S. which guarantees freedom from involuntary servitude! So much for those empty words. I returned "home" as a total stranger with an entirely different outlook on life. My "thanks" to the empty words and promises of two "peace" presidents, LBJ and Nixon, and those other leaders, going back to 1945, for making the writing of this superb book possible. I highly recommend it for anyone's library.
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