Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman welcome David Parsons from the podcast Nostalgia Trap to discuss his latest project Nam TV and how so many of our political issues today can be traced directly to the mistakes made during the Vietnam war.
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I'm your host Dave Sexton, here as always with my wonderful, beautiful co-host Nick Halsman.
We have a really special treat today.
We have with us for this really interesting topic of a new project that he's carrying out.
We have David Parsons, the host of Nostalgia Trap.
And the author of Dangerous Grounds, Anti-War Coffee Houses, and Military Dissent in the Vietnam Era.
But we had to get him on because we needed to talk about his new Patreon-exclusive series, NomTV.
And we got on for a little bit of time, but I assume it's not even that long of a conversation.
I assume you'll play some Creedence, you'll probably talk about some jungle battles, you know, talk about people throwing medals into reflecting pools, and call it a day.
Oh, not to mention troops getting spit on as they come home.
I'm sorry if I went ahead and spoiled all of it.
Yeah, those are the main topics we want to hit, for sure.
Well, can we also think no rain and so that it won't rain?
Right.
Yeah, Credence is going to be there, man.
You watched the first episode, and I put that in there for a reason, because I feel like there is a certain cliche soundtrack to the Vietnam War.
And I want to play with some of that, because it feels like time to shift our understanding of this era, for sure.
And that's my goal with the project.
Yeah, and you know, I actually, so I tuned in for the first episode, and again, that's NomTV over with the Nostalgia Trap podcast.
And I have to tell you, when I turned it on, an immediately fortunate sun came over my AirPods.
I laughed my ass off, because I knew immediately that you weren't going to go down that road.
But I also think that it's really fascinating.
I mean, we have come to think of this massive moment in history that has affected everything after it, this savage moment of imperialism, and now we just have like these cultural touchstones that everybody has to put in with it, all of these story points, all of these mythologies that come together.
Can you talk a little bit about what it is that you're trying to dismantle and what it is you're trying to put forth with this thing?
Sure, thank you.
I mean, the culture stuff is really important in part because we don't teach the Vietnam War in our public school system very much.
I mean, one of the most striking things that I learned while working on an exhibition at a museum in New York City, we're figuring out how to Take the material from the museum exhibition and work it into curriculum for public schools.
We ended up working with federal and state education authorities to figure out how we were going to work this Vietnam War material into their curriculum.
What we learned is that in the American public education system, Uh, students encounter the Vietnam War twice in their 12 years of public education.
So they see it once in 7th grade and they see it once in 11th grade.
And what we learn talking to teachers is that realistically most teachers don't get to it.
In part because it's too late in the American History Survey.
They only get up to maybe like the 1950s if they're lucky.
And many teachers are intimidated by the history.
They don't know how to communicate it.
So that means that all the things you mentioned, this sort of pop culture, including the Creedence Clearwater revival, is where most Americans encounter a narrative of the Vietnam War.
And that means that there's been a shorthand developed that is in movies and TV shows, but it's filtered into our politics as well.
And I think that's maybe our most dangerous place where the Vietnam War and that history is distorted because it has been a major, a major engine for politicians to, you know, enact different directions for their, for their ideologies.
But it's always a distorted narrative.
And if America, it's almost depending upon Americans not really remembering or understanding what really happened during this era.
And so, you It's an ambitious thing for me to say.
I'm trying to correct that.
I'm really just trying to start a different conversation about the Vietnam War and bring it to the public in a different way than it's been perhaps brought to them before.
Well I'm glad that you guys brought up Fortunate Son because you kind of almost addressed the elephant in the room here which is that Donald Trump used this song at every one of his rallies and I think that's sort of what you're talking about just now about politicians using it but I'm curious what your thoughts immediately with respect to Trump doing that in all of his background story and that song what it means what was your reaction to that?
Well, I mean, I think it's it's continually sort of fascinating the way that the Vietnam War keeps coming back in American life.
I mean, we're still in this generation, partly because it's a baby boomer generation is still very much in control of our politics.
So the men who are running for president are in their late or mid to late 70s, and they're they're still fighting and still kind of kind of containing that era.
But Trump, you know, he was, it was kind of interesting to see people say like, about bone spurs, you know, with him and get it like, it was like sort of like the idea that he would be someone who got out of military service.
In other words, there is a perception still, I think that people have that the draft was unfair and that there were people who got out of it through nefarious reasons, you know, basically a class thing.
I just think it's amazing that we live in an era in the 21st century in which the Vietnam War is still present like that.
And you mentioned Fortunate Son, that's the perfect example of of sort of how distorted this history is, because Fortunate Son is literally about this subject of, you know, the person who gets out of the draft because of their class position.
So Trump is that fortunate son, and so for him to invoke that music is wrong, and yet it's almost like the medium is the message.
The song is patriotic to people, even though it's I believe that they were, but I don't think it stopped them from using it.
I think they'd have to have, you know, done a cease and desist, but I believe that they were.
I don't know if you guys remember, did John Fogarty and Credence, did they say anything about that?
Were they upset that Trump used that song?
I believe that they were, but I don't think it stopped them from using it.
I think they'd have to have done a cease and desist, but I believe that they were.
But as you talk, I can confirm that.
It's just like the Bruce Springsteen born in the USA, right?
As another song.
It's just like, it's so weird because it's when you hear it, when I hear that song, I hear now some sort of like patriotic right wing sort of thing.
When you listen to the lyrics, it's like a really dark song about what?
The class and the Vietnam War.
So the fact that, you know, those two songs are maybe the most popular sort of versions of what I'm talking about, but it's everywhere in terms of how this is, this war is perceived.
I mean, but it's like homophobes who love Queen, right?
In the same kind of weird irony in some way.
Well, and I think that's like one of those contradictions, right?
And before we start actually sort of dismantling the lens, like for a second with the American sort of story, and I think it's really interesting what you said about how we don't teach it.
We don't really scrutinize it.
We have this, um, it's actually been reduced down from everything from a few scenes in a jungle with some battling, or at home you see like the family unit being torn apart as junior or little sister, then like goes off to become a hippie.
And then meanwhile, you have an entire generation that weirdly enough has started to see itself Through the lenses of the characterizations of popular culture Vietnam, you have a liberal class that still thinks of itself as hippie counterculture people, even as they became yuppies and moved further right.
You of course have Ronald Reagan, who built his entire political legacy on refashioning the Vietnam War with a conspiracy theory that we were kept from winning, right?
And if only we would have been allowed to win, we could win.
What is it that has about this war and around it and about this time period?
Why is it that America can't look at it and really understand it?
Because it seems both unintentional and drastically intentional.
Yeah.
Why can't we come to terms with American imperialism?
I mean, that's that's the question you're asking.
And the Vietnam War, you know, all this cultural work that's been done in the years since have been sort of recalibrating our vision of the war to get away from that idea and to turn it into a sort of, you know, this blank tragedy that happened.
Almost to the point where if you talk about the details of it, you're doing a disservice to the people who suffered and died in it.
I mean, the basic fact for me in a lot of ways is that you talk about like the Reagan years, but it was happening under Nixon as well.
Nixon sort of using the POWs in a very specific way to put American focus on the sort of suffering and the experience of American soldiers.
And you mentioned all that jungle fighting and movies like Platoon.
These movies are complex movies.
I think they're one part of a process, a national process, of coming to terms with the war.
But you can't get away from the fact that all of them center American soldiers as the sort of lens through which we understand everything.
And if you're on at that level, what you end up seeing is this remarkable empathy for young men caught in the machinations of things they don't understand.
And that ends up kind of like the machinations themselves get lost, right?
We end up concentrating on the experiences of young people in the jungle fighting war.
And that ends up being where we locate our empathy.
UPDATE I NOT HEARING.
What you're asking is really a bigger question, which is sort of how are we so focused on our own sort of national experience that we're unable to really feel the big impact of what we've done?
I mean, the Vietnam War killed Millions of people.
It's something that is a dark part of our history, but it's one that we don't really think about in those terms.
We think generally in terms of what Vietnam did to us.
And that's something that is almost really pathological in a lot of ways.
But at the same time, that's the nature of the distortion we're dealing with.
Sure.
Well, real fast, I just want to ask on that because I think that's the perfect end on something that you say in the first episode, which I've been chewing on for a few days.
I really have because I thought it was profound.
And I think a lot about what it is to look at a chain link fence.
You know how your eyes can only focus on one part of it and the other part is blurry.
And if you look past it, that's blurry.
You brought up a really interesting point, which is in this first episode, When we start to consider the Vietnam War, we almost go ahead and always consider the Cold War.
That it's a theater in a much larger societal crusade between America and the dangers of communism.
We can talk about domino theories all day long, but what we're actually missing is that in a lot of ways the Cold War is sort of the foreground Of imperial expansion and exploitation of resources and cultures.
And so, in a way, we actually have to sort of completely rethink the way that we look at the world and the way things have played out.
Yeah, and that's where every history of the Vietnam War starts, is, well, you got to understand the Cold War, and it's almost, you know, and I experienced this in a lot of different theaters myself, including the museum exhibition in conversations with other historians, which is, Well, you know, when you start at the Cold War, what you're what you're doing is often sort of absolving the people.
Well, this was this is what they understood.
And there's this feeling that like you mentioned the domino theory.
Well, we were all operating on the domino theory.
And how are we to know?
And that's just you know, there's this There's a constant need to use the Cold War as a way of creating passive actors of history, almost thinking like, well, they did what they had to do knowing what they thought they knew.
The domino theory is a good example.
I mean, that wasn't even really an operative theory.
It was something that Eisenhower threw out at a press conference and coined to that term.
But what we're really dealing with in the post-World War II era is the United States going to war for capitalism and going to war with the sense that it has rivals and that the Vietnam War happens in that context, yes, but the Vietnam War is also something that comes out of a much longer history of imperialism with the French that is just completely gone from the story.
And that's why, you know, my second episode, which I'm putting out this week, is about Ho Chi Minh, in part because I just want to use the life of Ho Chi Minh, who was born in 1890, to talk about this longer history and to talk about this story of a nation, Vietnam, that's been struggling for independence from foreign domination for centuries at this point, and Ho Chi Minh entering into that story.
By the time we get to The United States entering into the story in 1945.
It's been decades and decades and decades of fighting between imperialists and liberation forces in Vietnam.
So to say, like, the Cold War is the context just kind of erases that history and only gets to the part where the United States can sort of say, well, we were fighting communists.
And that really erases the story of what was happening in Vietnam.
Even when you get to, I'll just say this one last thing, even when you get to Ho Chi Minh, the question of whether or not, you know, what he was doing with communism is a big question because he was a nationalist who wanted independence for his country.
He wanted to work with America.
Well, yeah, yeah.
I mean, in 1945, just this brief fact, you know, on September 2nd, 1945, after the United States defeats Japan by dropping atomic bombs on two cities.
It's September 2nd, 1945 is when Ho Chi Minh and his group, the Viet Minh, declare Vietnam independent from French and Japanese colonial authority.
And they do so by reading a Declaration of Independence.
And Ho Chi Minh reads a Declaration of Independence that begins, "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal." I mean, he literally quotes Thomas Jefferson.
It sounds exactly like the U.S. Constitution—or sorry, Declaration of Independence.
But it's also being proofread by American agents of the Office of Strategic Services who are kind of the precursor to the CIA.
They're working with Ho.
They support his independence movement in part as a fulcrum against the Japanese.
But the American intervention in Vietnam is a really complex one.
And it isn't just about communism and capitalism.
It is about power.
And getting into those details and trying to tell that story is what I'm trying to do.
Wow.
There's so many things I want to try and touch upon.
Let me see if I can figure out which is the first to talk about.
First of all, John Fogarty did send cease and desist letters.
Nice.
And in our normal society, he just ignored them like we keep seeing all over the place.
Just ignore the laws.
It doesn't seem to matter.
So that was one thing.
Do you not underestimate John Fogarty's ability to say no and to assert himself in an argument?
That's good old John.
And he's a litigious guy as I understand it as well.
Yeah, but it didn't seem to have an effect.
They still play the song.
It really is fascinating how many parallels we have in today's society to what the mistakes we've been making for the last 60, 70, 80 years.
Domino theory might as well be replaced with a trickle-down economic theory.
All these things that are just made up on the back of the napkin and, you know, sound good.
And then kill people, right?
And the 1619 Project, the resistance to that is directly related to what you've been talking about now as we educate our high schoolers or our students about the Vietnam War, which is kind of crazy to me, that there is such a resistance to that.
I wonder though, having been around younger people now who are in college today, If there is a more receptive audience to, you know, presenting this country in a more realistic way versus the 70 and 80 year old heads who keep railing against this.
Is there more reception to that now?
That's an interesting question.
It's funny because I feel like there's this perception on the right that American colleges are just run by just wokeness among professors and students who are all just competing to see how progressive and radical they can be.
I mean, that hasn't been my experience at all.
I mean, teaching the Vietnam War specifically, I find that most students don't really know that much about it, and that they're eager to learn more about it, and they're ready to hear about it.
There's no There isn't as much of a stigma talking about communism and capitalism.
Those things don't seem like they are weighted with the same Cold War attitudes among young people.
That being said, I taught in New York City at a school that had a lot of immigrants from communist countries who did have an inborn antagonism to communism.
And so talking about the Vietnam War was always sort of tricky with that population as well.
I'm glad you mentioned the 1619 Project, because one of the things that I think emerges from, I hope emerges from the 1619 Project, is the notion that history is not just a set of facts that someone prints and there you go, there's the correct version in the is the notion that history is not just a set of facts that It's a contest, and it's a contest over versions of history.
I mean, part of what I'm doing with NOM TV is offering my version of the Vietnam War, because this is the way I see it.
And, you know, all that is supported by evidence and all the sorts of methodologies of history that we bring to it.
But the idea that history is a conversation and one that we argue about is one that should be much more, I think, much more prominent in American culture.
Because I think there is the notion that there's a set of facts that we own each other with.
Well, this is wrong.
I proved it.
that's that.
When the actual story of history is one we argue about, it's a never-ending discussion.
That's always a bummer to tell people because they want, you know, in our sort of hot take social media culture, we want, you know, a 250 character.
How many characters we get now?
It's 280, right?
It's 280, right?
280.
280 character breakdown.
And it's just, you know, I feel like that's the wrong way to go about figuring out what history is.
It's something that I think the 1619 project is a great sort of example of how to how to sort of communicate that there are different ways to tell the story and that the different ways we tell the story actually matters.
I think it's a brilliant thing to sort of take 1619, the date and say, what if what if we told it this way?
What does that change when we tell the story of America?
If we told it from the story of not when we signed the Declaration of Independence, but when the first the first African slaves arrived, how does that change our perception of what this country is?
I think it's useful and compelling, and obviously it's hit a lot of nerves.
I mean, the right is going crazy over the 1619 Project, and that tells you that they know that the stories matter.
I mean, the right understands this.
They're the ones that are, you know, they're they're the ones that want to take over school boards and control curriculum and say you can't talk about slavery.
You can't talk about critical race theory, which is the latest hysteria.
You know, I wouldn't be surprised if on that list of things that they don't want talked about, you know, the Vietnam War would be one of them or they would want it talked about in a very specific way, which would be, Jared, what you mentioned at the beginning.
Right.
Soldiers getting off the airplane and being spit upon and that sort of thing, rather than a real reckoning with what happened in Vietnam.
By the way, as a follow up to that, because we mentioned the movies and how they're portrayed.
I mean, the most accurate movie that might have been done could have very well been.
I was going to say Return of the Jedi, because the Ewoks are the VC and we're cheering for them and they're going up against this evil empire and they have to be in the woods and they have to be have ingenuity.
Like, in my mind, I don't know if George Lucas meant to do that, but that always spoke to me.
Oh, he absolutely did.
He did?
Alright, good.
I think so.
There's a book I have - On my shelf back here, Tom Englehart, I think it's called the end of victory culture.
But he does an analysis of Star Wars and Vietnam with even Yoda as a Ho Chi Minh-like character.
You know, those films are definitely doing cultural work for sure, and even our concept of empire, where the empire becomes the bad guys in the movie and the plucky Americans are the ones fighting empire.
It's really fascinating how that reversal happens.
Well, and not only that, but the Empire is stocked with British characters.
Right.
Because that's what the British do.
That's not what we do.
And I think what you were talking about in terms of history is really fascinating, because people aren't pushing for history, they're pushing for orthodoxy.
They're pushing for the mythology that helps whatever project.
And Vietnam, I think Vietnam is like a really hard thing for them to reckon with because there's multiple things that they, like incoherencies and contradictions that they have to work with, right?
Because we're supposedly the most powerful nation in the world, how did we not break an insurrection, right, around the world?
On top of that, how were we obviously capable of doing some of these awful atrocities?
Because even a cursory glance at Vietnam, you have to understand that there are atrocities.
There are these things that we committed.
And so as a result, you're exactly right.
Any actual glance at this thing has to be shut down.
It has to be shouted down.
You have to make sure that nobody talks about it in curriculums, because the moment that you actually start talking about this, you have to start talking about white supremacy.
You have to start talking about capitalism.
You have to start talking about the fact that the hegemonic military project that we're still engaging in And we were talking about this before we started recording.
I don't know if you've had a chance to see this, David, but our good friend Daniel Ellsberg has just resurfaced again!
And of course, this is the person who released the Pentagon reports, which showed that the United States had lied consistently about its operations in Vietnam.
It knew it wasn't winning, that it completely, you know, muddied the waters about this stuff.
Now we're talking about the fact in the 1950s, they were more than ready to kill millions of people in China and Russia.
And, you know, we all know how many democratic leaders and governments have been overthrown by this country.
We want to believe this was like a blotch.
This was like an aberration, right, that we need to like work with.
But I think it's the orthodoxy of it that has to be dealt with.
It has to, it has to be reinforced or else this entire thing starts falling apart.
Yeah, and what is the orthodoxy, right?
I mean, the orthodoxy is a conservative narrative of the Vietnam War, and that's what's become the standard narrative.
I mean, to me, the idea that I have students in my class who are 18 years old saying, no, that spitting thing really happened, family members of mine told me personally, I mean, everyone's, in other words, like there's been implanted memories But that orthodoxy really benefits—that narrative of the Vietnam War really benefits conservatives, because who are the bad guys?
The bad guys are liberal politicians who didn't have the balls to really unleash the American military.
Who are the bad guys?
The media.
The media who told the wrong story and made America look bad.
Who are the bad guys?
Feminists and civil rights activists and anti-war protesters and what we might call SJWs today.
I mean, the narrative that they've Constructed the Vietnam War that's been repeated in, you know, in pop culture and everywhere else is one that very much benefits a conservative point of view.
And that's kind of incredible.
But that's what we're left with is the Vietnam War is almost owned by conservatives.
Liberals don't really have a way of talking about it except sort of lamenting the tragedy.
I think that the liberal view on Vietnam is the wall, you know, the memorial wall, which is sort of let's So remember our soldiers, and that's about as far as we've gone with liberals.
If you remember John Kerry running for president in 2004, you know, and showing up and look at what it was.
Another another attack from the right on his service in Vietnam, which was incredible.
And they won that, you know, they won that that rhetorical battle.
So, yeah, it's a it's an orthodoxy that definitely benefits the right as far as I'm concerned.
Well, I would go ahead and add to that just really quickly.
And I'm so glad you brought up John Kerry, because I think he is a really good pivot point on that, which is I think that the liberal orthodoxy about Vietnam is that they did their part to end the war through the counterculture and through the antiwar demonstrations.
And yes, it definitely played a role and it definitely turned the tide in terms of public perception.
But there's also another part to it, which is that the counterculture and the anti-war culture It got bought up.
It got turned into consumerist culture.
And then you have somebody like a John Kerry, who of course comes back and starts to show, you know, this sort of remorse or reconsideration of Vietnam, but ends up becoming a politician who is right there with everybody else, talking about wars, talking about American hegemony, but we need to take out the evil part of it, the technocratic part of it.
But the project still continues.
So it's sort of a, you're right, the conservative orthodoxy seems like we were thwarted from using our power, and the liberal orthodoxy seems to be we did what we could and we ended it, and that was our generation's sort of moral victory, I guess?
Yeah, yeah.
We recognized the mistake, and that's the word that liberals have settled on with Vietnam, is that it was I mean, I would just watch the opening of the Ken Burns documentary as America got sucked into the miasma of Vietnam.
There's always this sense that we're this unwilling figure that's drawn into this dark jungle by whatever force is over there.
It's again, there's a running away from agency.
You know, in this story, it's always that Vietnam happened to us, rather than Vietnam as the logical outgrowth of, you know, a settler country and one that had risen to become the most powerful military empire in the world.
That's the story, but that's not the one we remember.
And I need to comment on the fact that it was fascinating that the John Kerry swift boat thing would be successful and W gets to end Dan Rather's career early because of his record, which was, you know, so worse than anything imaginable.
And in my memory would serve in 2004, there was still a stigma attached to somebody who would have dodged the draft or like dodged his military duty, kind of.
That must have been the moment where It paved the way for Trump to be able to just sort of shrug and say bone spurs versus it being a real negative on his campaign.
But I do want to ask this because, you know, in my conspiracy addled brain that I have about all these things and JFK assassination, it's interesting because obviously he was going to pull us out of Vietnam.
It seems compelling that information, if you want to believe those things.
And so when you were talking about how we got dragged in, It kind of feels like it was, you know, LBJ deciding, I want to, you know, enrich the industrial work complex and just, you know, get into it on our own volition.
But here's the thing they don't teach in high school and in college when you study these things, which I thought was frustrating now, knowing what I uncovered, I suppose.
Is that the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and I thought maybe let's get into something very specific about this in terms of the, you know, instead of the overall general feeling, is, you know, you're taught that, you know, there were these, you know, an attack on a ship in the Gulf of Tonkin, and that was the predicate for war.
We had to go to war just like we had, you know, with WMD evidence in Iraq and all these different things.
How compelling is that evidence to you that it turns out that that was probably all faked?
I think that it's, I think it's more or less settled upon now that an attack didn't happen.
That there were, you know, there were a few guns went off between North Vietnamese gunships and American battleships there in the Gulf, but there were no hits and there were no damage and it was, you know, the evidence was exaggerated and it's interesting that you brought that up because, you know, during the museum exhibition curriculum
We created a segment on the Gulf of Tonkin incident and the resolution that came out of it, because the resolution that came out of it was pushed through Congress very quickly.
It had very little in terms of any types of limits on American power or strategy.
It just said that Lyndon Johnson had the power to send troops and wage war in Vietnam.
So the Gulf of Tonkin incident became a sort of set of activities for middle school and high school students to argue about.
And it was exactly like, you know, it was sort of, what do you think about this?
And what do you think of this evidence?
You know, and to me, it was, it's very close to thinking about WMDs and the war in Iraq, the idea that there's always sort of like this feeling that we might be being lied to or manipulated by this evidence.
Either way, you know, by the time the American public is informed of the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, this is really the moment that Americans are hearing about Vietnam for the first time.
Which is incredible because the United States has been at this point meddling heavily in Vietnamese affairs for a very long time, but it's the Gulf of Tonkin incident that actually allows Johnson to sort of take the curtain over the policy and unveil it to the American people.
I don't believe anything happened in the Gulf of Tonkin.
I think that it's pretty I would be remiss if I didn't ask you about this.
to create a, uh, a justification for war.
Yeah.
Well, they, uh, I would, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about this.
Um, you know, you, I think over on Nostalgia Trap, uh, have, have been one of the, uh, leading voices to talk about the problems within the academy, whether or not it's funding, whether or not it's employment, the alienation of it.
I don't know if you've been paying attention to this, but there is a little bit of a rising voice of people who are coming out and they're like, I know everyone thinks that the academy is completely liberal, leftist, radical, revolutionary.
When in fact it's been more or less co-opted by the wealthy and the powerful and the right-wing, which has completely reduced it into a for-profit structure, but also, like you were saying, has been turned into a political battleground, where now all of a sudden, like, you're not even allowed to talk about race, you're not allowed to talk about privilege, you're not allowed to actually talk about real history.
And I think it's really wonderful that you're doing this NomTV project, But let's also talk about the fact that you're doing this as a public intellectual historian through a podcast.
Can you talk about what it is to have to go through these sort of avenues and what it is to actually try and talk about history in this environment that we're in?
Yeah.
The gig academy is what you're talking about.
And we had an episode last year about that notion that, you know, in the wider working economy, Americans are cobbling together a living from several different jobs, right?
And that's also true in academia as the The system of, you know, tenured full-time jobs for professors sort of falls apart.
You have this situation where hundreds of people applying for single jobs.
It gets to the point where there are so many indignities associated with pursuing that career that I don't really have any illusions about getting a full-time job.
I'm not going to get a full-time tenure-track job.
I mean, they don't exist, first of all, and when they do, They're not for people like me who are now almost a decade out of my PhD.
So, you know, it's finding alternative places to teach.
And they're becoming smaller and smaller.
And that's part of why I'm doing NomTV is sort of a place where I can share history.
Because the reality is, a lot of the teaching that I do now is not history.
I haven't taught a class I've been taught a class on the Vietnam War since 2016, I would say.
Just by virtue of the fact that history departments aren't offering classes on the Vietnam War and the history departments are getting smaller and smaller and smaller, which is...
part of a larger problem within the discipline of history and the humanities in general.
So the things you're talking about, I would call the neoliberalization of the university in which the university becomes a place just like any other job.
And that means that I'm sort of this journeyman that works at a million different schools.
It's weird because at one point I'm like, well, this sucks because I don't have a full time position.
I never know how many classes I'm going to be teaching, if at all.
Then the other part of me is like, what if I didn't have any classes?
Because that's often threatened as well.
Um, I was, I mean, just today, I just found out just before we got on the phone.
I just, I just found out I, I won't be teaching a podcast course in the fall because the school has, you know, cut it out of the budget.
Um, so that means, you know, I'm out whatever amount of money I was going to get paid for that class.
Uh, but also, you know, um, it's, it means I, I wonder like when that stuff comes back, but because the, the story of austerity seems to be like,
Well, just to put a bow on that and to bring it back to the conversation about what you're doing with NOM TV, I think it's really important for people who aren't in the academy to understand that the way that it has shifted, particularly as it's been co-opted by right-wing forces, and also neoliberal forces, let's be honest, like one and the same,
We've gotten to the point where people are being trained to be managers of the system, and the stuff that makes you question what the system is, or the way that we've arrived at this point, is being cut out.
The Vietnam War, one of the reasons that we don't look at it as much is because to actually consider, like you're doing, what it was, why it happened, and the ramifications, you have to actually consider who you are in the world and what it means to be an American and what America has been and what it's done.
And that's not exactly what people are looking for anymore, right?
It's more job training and getting pushed through.
Yeah, and what you're talking about is almost like specialized romantic experience that might be reserved only for people with a lot of money that are able to go to small liberal arts colleges and do that sort of romantic education.
I mean, I think of that as a nostalgia trap as well, as a sort of like the university as this place where people are just sort of reading and thinking and talking.
That experience has gone away.
And you're right.
I mean, it's turned into a place where you're sort of expected to think about everything in terms of its value as a job skill.
And that's part of how history has tried to survive this, and I think it's been a mistake in a lot of ways.
The idea that, well, we can pitch history classes as good for students that are trying to get jobs in finance.
Because it's going to teach them how to analyze and how to research.
In other words, our goal is not to be thinking critically about imperialism and the Vietnam War and coming to terms with our history.
That's just a very romantic notion that's totally gone from the university now.
It's sort of like, how are these units going to be tradable on a job market?
And you can really feel that from students.
I mean, maybe the It's because I was teaching at a school for a long time in New York, Baruch College, that's a business-oriented school.
My students that were in my history classes, they weren't the ones that were taken up by the Romantic ideas, the ones that were taken up and compelled by the things I was talking about and thought, wow, I never knew this about the Vietnam War.
I never knew this about the Civil Rights Movement.
I want to learn more and I want to major in history.
But I asked my dad about it and he said, no way, because a history major is going nowhere in terms of getting jobs.
At least that's the perception.
Whether the data bears that out is a totally separate conversation.
But there is the perception that education is for jobs.
That's why you get an education and all this stuff about going to school and I mean, look how you talk about like the stereotypes in pop culture.
But the stereotype of like someone who studies philosophy or studies literature, you know, that's like shit upon in our culture.
It's just like that's like you're not you're not doing anything.
You're not helping anybody.
It's actually immensely privileged to go sit and read The Great Gatsby somewhere and think about what it means.
We have that doesn't have any value to anybody.
And so when we now have a university that's entirely geared towards producing marketable skilled students into a job market, that romantic notion is gone.
Well, and then suddenly you start questioning, how did we lose the Vietnam War and how could we win another Vietnam War?
Right.
Right.
And all of a sudden it becomes about applicability.
Sure.
Yeah.
Well, that historical knowledge is gone.
I mean, it really is.
I mean, most students, I think, like I said, they don't really encounter this this stuff at all beyond the pop culture.
And I don't even know.
I mean, how many zoomers are watching Platoon?
You know what I mean?
I mean, the Vietnam War doesn't seem like.
The Vietnam War doesn't seem like it's really present in the culture, at the same time it does, if that makes sense.
It almost feels like it's soaked into us, and that orthodoxy that you're describing, you know, that certain point of view, packaged idea of what happened, soldiers were spit on, there was a tragic thing, you know, a lot of people died, there was an awful bunch of, you know, anti-war people who were very unpatriotic, that story is just Say orthodoxy, it's more than that to me.
It's just historical truth for most Americans.
That's incredibly disturbing because I feel like the same thing will happen with Iraq and everything else.
Well, I wanted to ask your opinion of, you know, there is a romanticization of the counterculture and how they changed the world and all of the rallies and all the marches had an effect.
If you look at what happened now, how Black Lives Matter is now being portrayed, and where we've come as a country and what we're still dealing with, I kind of wonder if any of it really did matter.
At the time, even, was there any appreciable influence from all the unrest that actually got anywhere closer to what they were trying to achieve at the time in the 60s, much less where we are now?
That's a really great question.
I mean, I think on the one hand, you're right.
There is a there is a tendency from, you know, the people who control pop culture and the boomer generation to sort of overstate we change the world kind of thing.
But at the same time, I think about the absence of an anti-war movement in the United States right now.
And I think about the absence of a sort of sense of internationalism on the left.
And it's pretty striking considering how much, you know, there were identifiable left leftist, not liberals, but leftist figures that would have been on TV being interviewed.
And the fact that if you read, you know, I mean, read, like, Rick Perlstein's Nixonland is a good popular history, a good example of a detailed history of Nixon's years as president.
He was scared as shit about the anti-war movement and treated it as if it were a real constituency that he had to answer to.
Um, so on the one hand, I, I'm totally sympathetic to the conversation of like, what did you guys really do?
You know, you stomped around and, and, and, and people were killed in Vietnam basically until the United States, uh, decided they were done with it and got out and the anti-war movement had no impact.
I'm, I'm, you know, I can, part of me can, can see it that way.
Um, but part of me, like, Especially comparing it to the absence of an anti-war movement today, it's sort of striking to see how much power was considering the fact that there were millions of people on the street.
The October moratorium in 1969 was a big deal, and that's the reason why Nixon created the idea of the silent majority.
A lot of people think that he that he created that term and used that term to win the presidency in 1968.
But he did not use the term silent majority until October '69.
And that speech was because the moratorium, which was the largest antiwar demonstration in American history and human history, it brought out millions of Americans that were not just scruffy hippies.
Doctors, nurses, lawyers, the middle class.
It was sort of like the mainstream of America was against the war and that made Nixon panic because he felt like He had to segregate the anti-war movement into this stereotype of an anti-American sicko weirdo when it was really the mainstream that was coming out against the war.
The silent majority was his answer.
It was his way of constructing a public that could sort of be organized and geared towards Nixon's point of view on the war.
So all that to me just means that the anti-war sentiment movement, whatever was happening, was something that was part of the way that even very powerful people were thinking about the limits and possibilities of what they could do.
If that makes sense.
Yeah.
And you know, Nick and I talk a lot about the current right wing.
And one of the dangers, of course, is that they're not even trying to conceal what they're doing anymore.
It's when the mask slips, You know, and like with the Vietnam War, again, you have like this idea of this noble fight against communism.
You can say that you're doing this and this is why you're going over there and killing all of these people.
But I actually, something I heard the other day, it was a really good interview you did with Danny Besnar, and he brought up the term, and I'm going to get him on the podcast because I want to talk about this for like an hour, which was imperial realism.
And this idea that in the past, America used to hide its hegemonic project behind this veneer of stars and stripes and liberty and equality.
But I actually think that this country is kind of rotted enough to the point where people are just like, yeah, we're doing that for the money and the profit and the power.
And the lack of the anti-war left, and you've talked about this, the lack of an anti-war left, the lack of an international left, Now that we are, I guess, on cruise control to a second Cold War with China, and by the way, like, it's not an ideological conflict.
It's the fact that China is replacing us as the main economy in the world and possibly as the superpower.
If you look at all of those sort of factors blended in together, I mean, I know the answer is bleak, but what do you see all that adding up to without even the veneer of this?
Well, I mean, It's interesting about the idea of the right taking its mask off.
You know, I think everything you're talking about is making me think about, you know, QAnon and this sort of conspiracy theories.
I wonder, where does Vietnam fit into that right wing?
The Marjorie Taylor Greene's and that sort of rabid right wing that January 6th.
I'm really curious what the attitude towards the Vietnam War is among that group of people.
What do you think?
Well, I mean, the really frightening thing there, I think, is like how quickly they weaponized the pandemic, how quickly we've been under attack.
And I think Marjorie Taylor Greene, we talk about this all the time, is she's an incredible bellwether.
Like she, her language, it's all about terrorists.
It's all about armies.
It's all about, you know, traitors, all of that.
And so I think when that mask slips, I think it's not even going to be an apology for the possible violence that they could carry out.
Like, I don't even think it's going to have the beginnings of a veneer.
Yeah, and that's why I think I brought her up.
And Q is because there's many different ways to think about QAnon and whatever right-wing fascist movement is rising in America right now.
But to me, anti-communism is an organizing principle there.
And there is a through line from You know your Barry Goldwater's of the 1960s and the libertarian especially the libertarian stream in American life all the way to To today and so like in terms of the idea that we could weaponize anti-communism
And, and move into a new Cold War with China on the same, you know, on the same terms, um, as, as the Cold War we fought before, you know, with this weird antireaganum where the counterculture came in and sort of said, Hey, you know, the world is something else.
There's something extraordinary about that.
It means that whatever tensions, whatever political tensions and social, cultural tensions were at play in the Cold War from the 1940s into the 1990s are still with us.
And they're soaked in in really distorted ways.
The language that is now being used, the rhetoric from the right, Ted Cruz yesterday on Twitter talking about communism, talking about the Soviet Union, talking about how much I hate communism and I want them all to die.
I mean, to me, it's like, whoa, like, take I mean, you call that taking the mask off, you call that, like, revealing your psychology.
But either way, it means that the word communism and socialism, those words still are very, very meaningful words for reactionaries.
And to me, that means that that world is still operative.
And that puts NomTV, I guess, in the context of trying to intervene on that part of the politics, because The distortion of the Vietnam War is a big engine of that picture of communism.
But it's funny because I would have thought that the right would have had a much stronger reaction to the notion of Russia interfering with our elections in 2016.
Because of that, you know, deep-seated in their amygdala, whatever, you know, brain about Russia and the Soviet Union did not have an effect at all.
Like, they didn't want to acknowledge it or even consider that.
That was always very striking.
Yeah, but they're not communists, Nick.
They're not communists at all.
They're Russians.
They're white identity Russians.
That's okay.
I also wonder if you know like the other thing we would see in the movies and in the pop culture when we referenced hippies or people who from the 60s it was like a badge of honor that they got arrested when they were protesting right it wasn't necessarily a bad thing whatever but they they they were that they were they were in the fight and they got arrested and I wonder if the January 6th insurrectionists We're tapping into that as well.
We are just continuing this line of people from the 60s who were protesting and we were just like, you know, every day in front of the White House, right?
I think that was almost every day for the entire 60s or from 66 on, right?
They had a protest in front of the White House, right?
So they were probably, you know, I think that they were trying to channel that and that was sort of what they thought they were doing.
Yeah, I think the right has for a long time taken a lot of the tools of the left and the civil rights movement and the outrage and the demonstrations and the boycotts.
I mean, it's interesting because they lament and they sort of hate, actively hate, the fact that there was such activism in the 60s.
And yet, The conservatives have had a lot of success because they've been activists.
Arguably much more success than the left in the last several decades because they've become active.
And you talk about like Marjorie Taylor Greene.
I mean, she's sort of emblematic of the sort of white woman, active conservative There is an archetype of that suburban conservative woman who's gained a lot of power through being an activist.
So when you talk about the Capitol being like, you know, looking like some sort of Woodstock, you know, 60s style demonstration, it is interesting because it did look like, I mean, you see the Q Shaman, So part of you could be like, well, is this the 60s?
Is this the counterculture?
These look like hippies.
And the counterculture having tentacles in the right wing is, I think, something we're coming to terms with as well, which is that the counterculture isn't necessarily something we should associate with the left.
That, you know, a lot of people are into sex, drugs and rock and roll that are fascists.
And that part of it is something we've got to unpack as well.
Well not to mention that a large swath of the counterculture then became Silicon Valley, creating not just internet spaces where people could go but also then
Marketing to them, giving them their own realities, like, untethered from everything that is real, and then on top of it, radicalizing them through algorithms and, like, continually feeding them whatever ideology that they wanted to look at and they wanted to buy.
But not anti-capitalist ideology, right?
I mean, it's interesting because we get to the point where we're now talking about algorithms, you know, on Facebook and YouTube and things like that, and it's just like, why is it all fascist stuff?
Why is it that, like, I look at a beard-grooming video, and the next video I'm suggested is all about how the Holocaust was fake, you know?
Why should that be?
You know, the Silicon Valley came to power in part Based entirely on the those utopian ideas that that the computers were going to somehow embody Connection and community and progressive values and even I mean Apple when I was a kid The the vision of Apple was that a bunch of hippies made computers and and these computers are gonna change the world and make it better and No one makes that argument anymore.
I don't know.
The technology element is really, really important because the technology became the language through which a lot of the values of the 60s played out into capitalism.
And what you're really talking about is, is, is, is those values becoming the way that capitalism refreshed itself in the, in the sixties era.
I mean, this is like the Thomas Frank conquest of cool, but also, uh, you know, mad men, the counterculture gave capitalism, a new language to, to sell its products and to develop a, uh, a way of interacting with the public, but it certainly didn't, um, bring left wing values out, but it certainly didn't, um, bring left wing values out, uh, Uh, it seems like that those, those things aren't, aren't part of what Silicon Valley is about at all.
I mean, it's capitalism.
And by the way, I have to point out that the brightest young men like McNamara, they would go from, you know, the automobile companies and then figure out how many bombs it was needed to break a people's spirit.
I mean, it's the same through line of the technocrats all the time.
Well, I think we need to face it.
Capitalism turns everything into shit.
Right?
That's what it does.
That's one way of putting it, yeah.
Now, I'm so glad you brought up McNamara, who was the Defense Secretary at the time, and was in charge of a lot of the strategy, I would imagine, of the Vietnam War, to some degree, along with our friends like Westmoreland.
So I'm kind of curious, just to take a little bit of a left turn, do you have a take on, strategically and tactically, why we ended up losing Vietnam?
Oh, that's a great question.
In fact, I was just reading a piece from one of the military leaders in Vietnam, one of the most famous military leaders of the 20th century.
His name is Giap, Ho's right hand man.
And he was asked in Christian Appy's book, it's right here, Patriots.
I was just reading an interview with him in the 2000s.
I mean, he lived to be, I think, nearly 100 years old.
He says, people always ask me, how did the Vietnamese defeat the United States?
How did this happen?
And they always think about it in terms of like, well, we had a smarter strategy, you know, we knew the politics and things like that.
He said, and what he says is, but the real answer is a lot simpler.
The real answer of why Vietnam defeated the United States is that we would rather die than live in slavery.
And that you could have killed generations of us, and in fact,
Colin colonizers did and we were all in the United States never understood that the United States felt that they could keep killing Vietnamese and at a certain point the body count would add up and and and the Vietnamese would give in but there was no way that was ever going to happen so there's that part of it but in terms of the strategic part I mean that's something I can't wait to get into on nom TV in terms of you know how did these How did these battles happen?
What was the US policy?
How did they fight this war?
Because it is really compelling, exciting, incredible stuff.
Dien Bien Phu, which is maybe a shorter answer to your question, how did the Vietnamese defeat the French?
You know, they drew them into a battle at one location, Dien Bien Phu, a military installation in which all the French sort of got led there to station there.
And while the French are sort of collecting their forces in Vietnam at Dien Bien Phu, the Vietnamese have been doing this for years.
They've been stealing pieces of weaponry, and they've been moving it under cover of darkness in the middle of the night with ropes through mountains over hundreds of miles, reassembling these weapons and covering them in the jungle for years, so that when the Battle of Dien Bien Phu finally, the first shots are fired,
Those tarps are unleashed and the Vietnamese have anti-aircraft guns and they're shooting down French bombers from the sky.
The French had no conception that these weapons existed, that this was their capabilities.
The French commander committed suicide within the first six hours of the battle because of the massive failure that this was.
But part of that failure has always been understood to be in part That failure was created by the assumptions of white supremacy, that Asian people would never be able to take down a massive Western imperial army.
And they did so in a matter of days.
And it's one of the most stunning events of the 20th century.
It's like the ultimate underdog story.
I actually start the new episode of NomTV with the Eminem Lose Yourself song.
Just because I wanted to get people amped up to understand how fucking crazy it is that rural, colonized people were able to take the initiative in this way and figure out a way to kick the French out Um, when they were massively outgunned.
I mean, it seemed like there would be no possibility.
So it's in 1954 that Dien Bien Phu happens.
That's when the United States comes in.
And the Vietnamese are going to continue that style.
And it's that style that wins them the war.
But it's a massive price.
I mean, the Vietnamese paid a price in millions of lives to gain the liberation of their country.
So, I mean, it's an ugly story, but it's a really intense one.
And when you look at it from the Vietnamese side, you sort of get why it's so insane and so incredible.
But like we always say, I mean, we're always looking at it from the American side, which is a very, very distorted and almost like impossible to understand story.
All right.
David Parsons, host of Nostalgia Trap, one of the best podcasts in the world, dare I say.
Oh, thank you.
And the host of the wonderful new series, NomTV.
How many episodes are we doing?
What are we thinking?
I'm going to do it all summer.
I want to see where I can get.
My goal is to sort of tell the outlines of the story and get through 1975, get through the whole story of American involvement of the war, and then maybe take a break and do another season at the end of the year.
So you can expect at least 12 episodes of this first run.
But like I said, I feel like there are infinite different sort of paths that we can go down, but I want to make sure that I get a clear narrative in the beginning.
So that's what we're going to do this summer.
Well, for one, I'm incredibly excited to have this to listen to all summer.
And again, that is NomTV with David Parsons of Nostalgia Trap.
David, where can the good people find you?
NostalgiaTrap.com.
Pretty easy.
There you go.
All right.
Well, thank you so much for your time and for the work, man.
Thanks, man.
I appreciate it.
All right, everybody.
That was our exclusive interview with David Parsons of Nostalgia Trap and now NOM TV.
Nick, I don't know about you, but I find it really fascinating to start with Vietnam and be able to work your way out to the edges, understand American history, and really reconsider even modern politics because of this war that took place, what, 50 years ago now?
Oh, you know what it's like?
Remember the old switchboards where they had all the different plugs and you would have to connect?
That's almost what I'm picturing because there's so many parallels and we might have to do a special, you know, 30-minute like what we did for Carter on that.
On like the parallels between like Vietnam and the Gulf War or Vietnam and now something because we haven't learned.
We're not learning any of these lessons and for anybody to stand there credibly and tell us about You know, for a moment when we were talking with David, I almost asked, like, what if we hadn't gone to Vietnam?
Domino theory was the fallacy of that.
Like it's just the fact that people are still credible in this day and age with that kind of shit.
It just boggles my mind.
You know, for a moment when we were talking with David, I almost asked, like, what if we hadn't gone to Vietnam?
But we were we were going to go to Vietnam like that.
That's the honest to God truth.
And listen, you love the JFK angle.
You can say that there were extraordinary measures that got us in Vietnam.
That's totally fine.
But it is almost one of those things where it's like water going downhill.
It was always going to happen because of how America is, how the capitalistic system works, how the American hegemonic project was taking place.
We were always going to end up in this technocratic Neocolonial place of pulling out this sort of violence.
It was just really really disgustingly inevitable right and it's almost as if you know We just didn't really know our true history Yeah, it's almost like that It's it's it's it's almost like that and almost like you're doomed to repeat it over and over again no matter what if you don't learn from it Almost.
It's almost like that.
All right, everybody.
That is going to be our show for the day.
I really enjoyed it.
I hope you did as well.
We're going to come back again at the end of the week with our regular Weekender, which is our Patreon-exclusive show.
I've been seeing people listening to the preview.
I assume you're enjoying it.
You should join our Patreon over at patreon.com.
Not only are you going to get access to the full Weekender episode, which, by the way, spoiler, I think our Weekenders are some of our best episodes.
For sure.
I mean, last time we argued about when you're supposed to take a shower.
And it turns out this is something that people like to argue about.
Oh, it sparked a Discord discussion, for sure.
It sparked a Discord discussion.
You become part of the community where you can interact with other listeners.
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So yeah, we'll be back later this week with our regular Weekender episode.
That'll come out on Friday.
In the meantime, if you need Nick, you can find me at CanYouHearMeSMH.
