CENTRAL VIEW for Monday, July 6, 2020

Vietnam War: America’s great dividing scar

To understand the virtually unfettered rioting in some of America’s major cities today, we turn to Barbara W. Tuchman’s classic history The Proud Tower and her description of the cultural and political divide created by World War I: "The Great War...lies like a band of scorched earth dividing that time from ours. In wiping out so many lives....in destroying beliefs, changing ideas, and leaving terrible wounds of dissolution, it created a physical as well as psychological gulf between two epochs." By two epochs, Tuchman (1912-1989) meant the British/European Golden Age prior to World War I and a nascent, post-war Golden Age that would eventually be led by the United States of America.

If we substitute "Vietnam War" for "The Great War," we start to understand the band of scorched earth that wiped out so many American lives, destroyed so many beliefs, left terrible wounds of dissolution, and left a huge scar between two divergent views of American history.

Fast forward to President Kennedy inching the U.S. into an Asian ground war that was bungled by President Johnson into a geo-political, but not military, defeat. To avoid the Draft, some young men hid out in academe, collecting the advanced degrees that got them hired inside the Halls of Ivy as teaching assistants and, later, tenured professors.

Inexorably, from the 1960s on, they began to teach generations of their students that America was to be reviled, not to be celebrated as before by the Greatest Generation that fought World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. The Me Generation plus Generations X, Y, Z, and Alpha have been taught to hate America.

The people we see looting, burning, maiming and killing today are a consortium of anti-American interests combining in the hope of achieving a Revolution that does away with the "old order" and replacing it with a socialist state founded on the teachings of Marx, Lenin, Mao, and on the tear-down tactics of the Taliban. Race relations are merely a pretext and a cover.

Meanwhile, what Barbara Tuchman called: "the mute, inglorious, anonymous middle class" shrinks in size and influence, awaiting a man or woman on horseback to come to its rescue. Tuchman wrote: "...it is an illusion that it is ’they,’ the naughty statesmen, who are always responsible for war while ’we,’ the innocent people, are merely led. That is a mistake." Another way of saying: People get the kind of government they deserve.

Yes, we, the traditional-values Americans have allowed four decades of elected officials to sell out fly-over America to the coastal elites and corporate CEOs who are kneeling before the Antifa/Black Lives Matter/Anarchist/MSM/Revolutionary Mob.

Anarchists, while violent, always fail because they abhor order. As Tuchman writes, "Revolution demands organization, discipline and authority." Exactly what Anarchism abhors. A new world order is the goal of Revolution, making the Revolutionaries far more dangerous than Anarchists.

As a smoking America careens toward November 3, 2020, the electorate will have three choices: 1. The Marxist, Leninist, Maoist new world order. 2. The old order of the previous four decades with its endless, unwinnable wars and slow submission to the Red Chinese. 3. Or, President Trump’s rough-and-tumble rejection of the other two choices.

(c) 2020. William Hamilton.

Suggested reading: Tuchman, Barbara W., The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1984. Tuchman, Barbara W. The Proud Tower. New York: Random House, 1962. Revel, Jean-Francois, How Democracies Perish. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1983. Formula for Failure in Vietnam: The Folly of Limited Warfare. McFarland Publishing Co, 2019.

Dr. Hamilton can be contacted at:

Email: william@central-view.com