Is there evidence that soldiers captured after 1968 were “most suseptible” to pressure from NVN? Could other factors have come into play like the length of the war, a decline in confidence in their command, a lengthier exposure to jungle warfare?

In addition, there were full on mutinies and AWOL French soldiers during WWII. Was that due to French politics? Or maybe just maybe they were sick of fighting a losing battle with losing strategies.

Let’s not put a lot of stock in pvt. bottom of my class McCain.

dugg ———-thanks for this important post Cliff.

hopeless

hapless

helpless

wayyyy too much baggage to get traction.

*crosses fingers for luck*

Did McCain perform credibly?

Surely being tortured didn’t make them “suseptible” to cooperating with the NVN. /s

Not to diminish McCain’s service and all that but wonder if he was one of the suseptible ones. I can’t imagine that anyone would’nt crack under torture at some point.

Can we have a summation from a doctor of psychology or psychiatry about McCain’s state of mind? I imagine it would be most interesting.

Wait a minute didn’t the Bush Campaign when they ran against McCain claim that McCain was a Manchurian Candidate and a traitor? If you can’t believe the President of the United States then who can you trust?

George fool is the one who came in on a lie of the modest or humble foreign policy. And now we know that he probably wanted to invade Saddam even before Florida had been stolen. W never gave the inspectors or diplomacy a chance to solve the phony weapons problems. He is a disgrace. Will we ever recover from the murders and duplicity of a warmongering leader? How hard and tragic might it be for troops to want to support that chicanery?

Sixty - Its not diminishing his service, McCain admitted as much.

From Wiki “In August of 1968, a program of severe torture began on McCain. McCain was subjected to repeated beatings and rope bindings, at the same time as he was suffering from dysentery. After four days, McCain made an anti-American propaganda “confession”. He has always felt that his statement was dishonorable, but as he would later write, “I had learned what we all learned over there: Every man has his breaking point. I had reached mine.”

This illustrates that he is ideologically bankrupt. He knows torture produces bogus results, yet he panders to his constituency that supports it.

T-

Maybe if America’s position on the war had been correct then more people would have resisted?
Just what did America lose when we lost Vietnam besides men, money and pride? Was it a disaster did the Dominoes all fall down? Did fighting in Vietnam help or hurt America making our case to the world?
Many of the reasons to stay in Iraq sound like Viet Nam.

New Hamsher

yah. But if it takes brainwashing to go along, don’t you have to question th e soundness of the idea to start with?

If we make them Manchurian candidates first, then the other side can’t. It’s an extension of the Bush Doctrine, pre-emptive brainwashing.

My pleasure

conditioned minds……….. not

Hi, Cliff - I’ve never commented here before, and I hope I don’t come off as a troll, but [famous last words]… for the last 7 years, I’ve been unable to let a reference to the ties between Leo Strauss and the neocon cabal go unchallenged. I haven’t, of course, read everything the man wrote, but I’ve read a fair bit; and I’ve also studied under three of his students who are definitely not right-wingers. Seth Benardete, Hilail Gilden and Eva T.H. Brann are some of the best teachers I ever had, and what each seems to have distilled from Strauss is the understanding that true politics begins within each of us - that regardless of whether any of the forms of government imagined in Plato’s Republic are possible, or even desirable, the philosophical person will be concerned primarily with the founding of a city inside himself. Democracy, tempered by constitutional law, is the best regime in the end, because it is the only one that sanctions this plurality of constitutions within its citizens.

The question of Noble Lies was for him just that, a question. And a highly relevant one at that, considering the rapid advent of mass culture in the 20th century. Strauss never, to my knowledge, advocated telling people what to think. Rather, he supported a notion of education that teaches people how to think reasonably for themselves. The compatibility of organized religion with ethical, responsible liberty was also just that, a question. Nothing, in my opinion, could be further in purpose from McCain’s blathering about the corruptive influence of the American anti-war and countercultural movement. Strauss championed the notion of reasoned dissent and the importance of a loyal opposition, concepts anathema to the ideology of a permanent majority and the unitary executive.

Most of the worst offenders in our government who claim to have orbited Strauss’ star were actually proteges of defense analyst Albert Wohlstetter, or else they fabricate their connection. Harvey Mansfield, Bill Kristol, and Don Rumsfeld come to mind.

The man certainly had friends, colleagues and students from across the political spectrum. People point to his associations with Charles Maurras early in his career as evidence that he was a crypto-fascist. What then can be said for his friendship with Alexandre Kojeve?

In my reading of Strauss, which has mostly concerned itself with the works of Plato, I’ve come to respect his ability to marshal contextual, subtextual and dramatic evidence in an effort to open up writings that people from a wide array of political positions have disagreed about for two and a half millenia. I certainly haven’t swallowed him whole, but I do give him some credit for actually showing me how to critically approach the American spectacle without losing my mind in despair.

I apologize if this all seems a bit much, but this is the first time I’ve seen the name of Strauss floated with McCain, and not only is it not fair to the former, it gives the latter way too much credit.

Otherwise, I look forward to reading you every day.

I think you are thinking about the famous mutiny of Les Poilu in WWI when it finally became evident that there generals were incompetent and did not care how many soldiers died. Some how the French Army crushed the rebellion.

Sir,
I am blown away.
Not only a lengthy, thought out, informed comment but seven paragraphs without one scatological term.

If you are going to have soldiers, you have to motivate them. Soldiers fight for their buddies, those in the smallest unit in which they serve (or the next largest), not for grand concepts but they still need to know that they are fighting for something larger than themselves. As long as you have wars and soldiers, someone has to tell them why they fight, even if it is part lie. It is always part lie, and often all lie.

So, McCain & Bush ensure a test of this theory by running this illegal war in Iraq and blaming the failure on the anti-war protests at home and then calling for brain-washing, er education of the troops for future illegal wars.

All McCain is saying is that he hates anti-military and anti-war efforts. He loves the military.

But, maybe their plan is to show a regular military can’t be trusted to win again, so maybe we need to toss ‘em and just hire mercenaries like Blackwater — people who need no ‘just cause’ to kill.

The only member of the US military actually convicted in a court marshal was one Pfc Robert Garwood, USMC, who was captured in 1962 by the Viet Cong. He subsequently “crossed over” to the Vietnamese, and by some accounts was even commissioned an officer in the Viet Cong army.

So much for McCain’s theory that “Americans captured after 1968 had proven to be more susceptible to North Vietnamese pressure, he argued, because they “had been exposed to the divisive forces which had come into focus as a result of the antiwar movement in the United States”.

I keep waiting for SOMEONE to mention this key fact which pretty much invalidates everything McCain wrote in his thesis. McCain, as a US Senator, does know about Garwood and from all accounts hates the man with a passion.

Thank You, good Sir! I like to think I learned my netiquette from the fine contributers here at firedoglake.