{"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/186208333818/", "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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scrapironfloaties:

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argumate:

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kontextmaschine:

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collapsedsquid:

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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

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Well one point to bring up is MIAs were disproportionately pilots, who were officers, that\u2019s a class angle that doesn\u2019t come up often.

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(The thing about John McCain\u2019s fabled Vietnam MIA turn was that his forbearance in refusing prisoner exchange as a high-profile officer\u2019s kid was about maintaining the morale of the other prisoners, fellow officer-aviators, and boy, if \u201cgoing to extensive pains to guard the spirits of the elite, when the real problem is a total abandonment of the commoners\u201d wasn\u2019t John McCain in a nutshell\u2026)

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But no, I don\u2019t 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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Vietnam and Afghanistan, two very dissimilar countries linked by having the US pass through as the last in a very long line of colonising powers?

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Wasn\u2019t part of the thing about US pilots the North\u2019s declaration that they weren\u2019t actually PoW\u2019s as there wasn\u2019t an actual state of war between the two nations?

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Like the bombing campaign was really seen as criminal or to use WW2 terminology, terror bombing. So between that and the awkward proxy thing going on, the downed air crews weren\u2019t treated according to the Geneva conventions and the North could make it pretty good use of the situation for propaganda.

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Yeah they didn’t treat their prisoners to modern standards, they tortured them for years before releasing them (instead of torturing and then guillotining, as the French and comprador regimes had done to them), that surely built ill will.

Another background plot was that in the Korean War 22 POWs had defected and this absolutely fucked the US establishment up for the next decade, this was what the ideas of “brainwashing” and “mind control” were invented to explain; looking back on the Cold War now we “know” that America was not always almost about to undergo a destabilizing revolution but this was not at all obvious at the time, everything about the 20th century pointed otherwise

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