{"version": "1.0", "type": "rich", "title": "Hey kontext do you know anything about the \"Vietnam War POW\" conspiracy theories? I hear about it sometimes and think of it as...", "author_name": "kontextmaschine", "author_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "provider_name": "kontextmaschine", "provider_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "url": "https://kontextmaschine.com/post/186206939628/", "html": "
collapsedsquid asked: Hey kontext do you know anything about the \"Vietnam War POW\" conspiracy theories? I hear about it sometimes and think of it as just a vague \"We should have stayed\" feeling but with Ross Perot's death I realize I don't actually know much about it.
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collapsedsquid:

kontextmaschine:

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Oh that was a thing for a while, \u201cPOW-MIA\u201d, the idea that all these combatants who were written off as dead were really captured and still held for purpose

There was a flag about it that got flown from real government offices, there was a Rambo about it

The Vietnam Wall really helped with processing that though

I was wondering if you thought there could be anything, even extremely minor behind it.\u00a0

Well one point to bring up is MIAs were disproportionately pilots, who were officers, that’s a class angle that doesn’t come up often.

(The thing about John McCain’s fabled Vietnam POW turn was that his forbearance in refusing prisoner exchange as a high-profile officer’s kid was about maintaining the morale of the other prisoners, fellow officer-aviators, and boy, if “going to extensive pains to guard the spirits of the elite, when the real problem is a total abandonment of the commoners” wasn’t John McCain in a nutshell\u2026)

But no, I don’t think postwar prisoners were a thing, it was projecting onto the Vietnamese the American idea that the war was part of a Cold War story about America, such that even after the fall of Saigon they were still doing things about America, when as far as the Vietnamese were concerned the war was one more part of a decolonial story about Vietnam.

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