Rick Perlstein: take down that racist POW/MIA flag

There’s a stank-ass hippie by the name of Rick Perlstein who thinks he’s using critical thinking by writing in Newsweek that It’s Time to Haul Down Another Flag of Racist Hate, meaning of course, that evil POW/MIA flag. It’s also posted at the Washington Spectator. According to Perlstein, the authorization of the flag was all based on lies and propaganda;

Whenever Nixon or one of his minions talked about the problem, they tended to use the number 1,400. The number of actual prisoners, was about 550. The number of downed, missing pilots were spoken of, prima facia, as if they were missing, too, although almost all of them were certainly dead.

Yeah, well, there were 591 POWs released for Operation Homecoming on February 12, 1973. According to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, there are still 1627 Americans missing from the war in Vietnam. Yeah, odds are that they’re dead, but they’re still missing, dimbulb. By the way, there are 83,117 Americans missing from all of our wars back to World War II. Even though the flag was borne out of the Vietnam War, it represents all of our POW and Missing – which is why the DPAA is still recovering World War II remains.

[President Nixon] declared [the POWs] 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.

This was bullshit four times over: first, because in every other conflict in human history, the release of prisoners had been something settled at the close of a war; second, because these prisoners only existed because of America’s antecedent violations of the Geneva Conventions in bombing civilians in an undeclared war; third, because, as bad as their torture of prisoners was, rather than representing some species of Oriental despotism, the Vietnam Communists were only borrowing techniques practiced on them by their French colonists (and incidentally paid forward by us in places like Abu Ghraib)….

If asking for the release of prisoners as a precondition to peace is so outrageous, why are we releasing prisoners from Guantanamo and other prisoners around the Middle East as a precondition to peace talks with the Taliban and al Qaeda these days? Dimbulb.

The treatment of American prisoners by the North Vietnamese was horrendous and not even close to a little water boarding that they got at Abu Ghraib. Those prisoners in Iraq were well-fed, their medical problems were attended, but, some criminals made them into a naked pyramid once, so yeah, that’s comparable. Dimbulb.

Being a partisan animal himself, Perstein figures that anyone who supported POWs were doing it for political purposes, too. Even the families of POWs.

[National League of Families of Prisoners of War] was founded by POW wife Sybil Stockdale, during the Johnson administration, in an effort to embarrass LBJ and challenge his line that all in Vietnam was going swell. Johnson tried to silence them; Nixon’s people, however, spying opportunity, coopted the group, sometimes inventing chapters outright, to fan the propaganda flames.

I suppose that Sybil Stockdale was more interested in embarrassing Lyndon Johnson than bringing her husband home to his family. Dimbulb.

Perlstein wants this to all be connected to Richard Nixon, and Nixon is his boogeyman reason for removing the flag, but the thing is that the flag was designed in 1972, four years after Lyndon Johnson left the White House. It was first flown over the White House in 1982, eight years after Richard Nixon left the White House. It first flew over the Capital on August 10, 1990 when the Democrat-controlled 101st Congress passed U.S. Public Law 101-355.

Of course, Perlstein needs to crap all over the POWs themselves by claiming that they were mostly anti-war protesters when they were POWs. He can’t bring himself to call them collaborators.

[M]any of the prisoners were anti-war activists. One member of the “Peace Committee” within the POW camps, Abel Larry Kavanaugh, was harassed into suicide after his return to the U.S. by the likes of Admiral James Stockdale, who tried to get Peace Committee members hanged for treason.

Many? How many? Abel Larry Kavanaugh was accused of being a collaborator with their captors. Charges were dropped against him, even though many of the POWs reported that Kavanaugh did indeed receive preferential treatment from the prison guards and some reports were made of his propaganda broadcasts urging other Americans to throw down their weapons and desert to the NVA. He was a Marine Corporal who was captured in April, 1968 and released during Operation Homecoming. He killed himself in June, 1973 – his pall bearers were also accused of being collaborators, but charges were never brought against any of them.

So basically, what I’m saying is that Perstein is probably the worst historian to touch a keyboard. This is probably just clickbait for the stank-ass hippies who still hate Nixon (and there’s a little bit of BDS in his piece, for the youngsters, too).

By the way, Perlstein was born in 1969, so he knows more about the Vietnam War and the POWs than you know because he read it in a book once.

Category: Dumbass Bullshit