Warfare as a Test of Manliness
Richard A. Koenigsberg's Commentary on Myra Mendible's "The Politics of Humiliation"
Citation
One of the missions of the LSS Newsletter is to develop a form of “citation”—one scholar building upon the ideas of another. Richard Koenigsberg’s commentary seeks to crystallize and extend Myra Mendible’s theory presented in “The Politics of Humiliation” (published several months ago). The issue of the Newsletter in which Mendible’s piece appeared is reproduced directly below the commentary.
The “fusion of private and public,” according to Myra Mendible, works to “dissolve boundaries” so that “national humiliation and personal humiliation become one and the same.” The only consensus about the Vietnam War, she says, was that America had suffered a “humiliating defeat;” experienced a “national humiliation.”

Official versions of the Vietnam syndrome tell us that America had fallen victim to a debilitating “syndrome” of passivity and weakness. Humiliation had made us soft, causing us to suffer what Norman Podhoretz diagnosed as a “sickly inhibition against the use of military force.” This narrative identified Americans’ aversion to war as a sign that America had been “feminized by defeat, turned into a nation of wimps and pacifists.”

The need to avoid being “soft”—feminized—played a significant role, Mendible suggests, in LBJ’s war policies: “If you let a bully come into your front yard one day, the next day he will be up on your porch and the day after that he will rape your wife in your own bed.”

It would appear that Lyndon Johnson projected a personal fantasy into the political arena, consequently waging a desperate struggle to kill enemies who, in his mind, sought to rape America.

John McNaughton, Robert McNamara’s top aide, summarized the Johnson administration’s reason for intervening in Vietnam in a report of March 1965. The reasons for escalating the war were prioritized as follows: 70% to avoid a humiliating blow to our reputation; 20% to keep the area from China; and 10% to bring the people of South Vietnam a better, freer way of life.

According to Fredrik Logevall:

What Johnson really feared was the personal humiliation that he believed would come with his failure in Vietnam. He saw the war as a test of his own manliness. In LBJ’s world there were weak and strong men; the weak men were the skeptics, who sat around contemplating, talking, criticizing; the strong men were the doers, the activists, the ones who were tough and always refused to back down.

So this is what it came down to: the war in Vietnam continued during Johnson’s Presidency because he refused to “pull out” of Vietnam. Defeat would have constituted a catastrophic wound to his masculinity, a profound humiliation. Johnson’s personal psychic dilemmas were transformed—blown up—to fuel a gigantic national drama.


“The Politics of Humiliation”
Part I of Myra Mendible’s paper
Post-Vietnam Syndrome: National Identity, War, & the Politics of Humiliation
An excerpt of Myra Mendible’s paper appears below.
Click here for the complete paper with references.
For a complete list of Library of Social Science’s essays and papers, please click here.

The mission of Library of Social Science is to reveal the sources and meanings of collective forms of violence—by publishing writings by the world's greatest thinkers on this topic. And to provide a space of freedom for the presentation and discussion of new insights and theories.

Myra Mendible is Professor in the Languages and Literature Department at Florida Gulf Coast University in Ft. Myers.

Our identification with the nation as humiliated protagonist dissolves the boundaries between private and public spaces, stripping us of the illusion of impermeability. As a basis of national feeling, the perception of humiliation exacerbates collective feelings of vulnerability.

Official versions of the Vietnam Syndrome tell us that Americans had fallen victim
to a debilitating “syndrome” of passivity
and weakness. Humiliation had made us “soft.” The post-Vietnam generation presumably suffered from what Norman Podhoretz diagnosed as a “sickly
inhibition against the use of military force”.

The syndrome’s symptoms are widely known and accepted as common knowledge: a breakdown of national will, loss of confidence, and an unwillingness
to engage in protracted conflicts abroad. This narrative identifies Americans’
aversion to war as a sign that America had been feminized by defeat, turned into a nation of wimps and pacifists.

Book by Myra Mendible
Race 2008: Critical Reflections on an Historic Campaign

For information on ordering through Amazon, PLEASE CLICK HERE.

Author: Myra Mendible
Paperback: 230 pages
Publisher: Brown Walker Press
Published on: 2010-05-05
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1599425378

Race 2008 brings together a diverse group of scholars and activists to examine the gendered politics, images, rhetorical practices, and racial/ethnic conflicts that served as a backdrop to this momentous election.

In his victory speech following the 1991 Persian Gulf War, President George H. W. Bush proclaimed it a proud day to be American. The president’s speech officially heralded a new structure of feeling in America, one more suited to an imperial power’s spectacular reemergence on the world stage. It pronounced an official end to the “Vietnam syndrome,” a malaise that had presumably stricken the American psyche for over 16 years.

The war had been the antidote for what ailed us, Bush’s speech assured us, the means to restore the nation’s honor and reclaim its rightful status. Americans could finally trade in the sackcloth of humiliation for the mantle of pride. By God, we had “kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”

There are several problems, of course, with this version of history and with the ways that the “we” is constituted in its narrative.

This essay is concerned with the extent to which Vietnam consistently plays out in popular memory as a psychodrama of humiliation, casting America in the role of victim and producing certain alignments and associations in the citizenry. Bush’s speech capitalized on a set of assumptions that have long dominated public discourse about the war.

News pundits, filmmakers, and political leaders alike have exploited the evocative power of this humiliation tale, invoking its stock characters and compensatory themes to elicit predictable responses in target audiences. This affective logic binds subjects to cycles of compensatory violence, fueling militaristic strains in America’s political culture and setting the stage for a series of wars and interventions.

Historians, military analysts, and sundry critics have written extensively on the ideological roots of the Vietnam War (communism, nationalism); assessed various logistical and military tactics (Nixon’s “Vietnamization,” Westmoreland’s strategy of attrition); and debated why it was lost (media coverage, war protestors, civilian policymakers).

Yet there is rarely consensus about anything concerning the War. Perhaps the only conclusion that goes unchallenged is that Americans suffered a “humiliating” defeat. Thus columnist David Gelernter could make the claim that “virtually all Americans agree” that Vietnam was “a national humiliation.” This assumption forms a kind of conventional wisdom about the war’s emotional legacy.

Coined by none other than Henry Kissinger, the term Vietnam syndrome has become an integral part of our political lexicon, shaping attitudes and predispositions more than three decades later. The term aspires to a kind of quasi-psychological legitimacy, but actually reflects a semantic sleight of hand.

The term Post-Vietnam Syndrome was first used to describe the trauma experienced by soldiers who served in Vietnam. Later known as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), this condition received attention in 1970 as a result of work by a handful of psychiatrists, especially Robert Jay Lifton and Chaim Shatan, who conducted extensive interviews with Vietnam veterans suffering from flashbacks, paranoia, and other symptoms of trauma. The term “Vietnam syndrome” turns the soldier’s traumatic experience of war into a story of national humiliation.

The psychology of PTSD has been highly politicized, while a ring of scientific authenticity has masked the politics of the Vietnam syndrome.  No longer signifying a nation, “Vietnam” functions as metaphor for America’s humiliation. This trope has served US presidents from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush, each of whom has relied on its compelling themes to garner support for military interventions and “pre-emptive” strikes.

It frames America’s political rhetoric whenever leaders seek to stifle political dissent at home, “harden” national borders, or rally nationalistic strains in the American character. Recalled in this way, the legacy of Vietnam becomes a story about “our” humiliation, about the “wrong” committed against us. As Vietnam vet W.D. Ehrhart (2001) aptly remarked on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation”: “You know, the Vietnam War, we imagine it’s this thing that happened to us when, in fact, the Vietnam War is this thing we did to them.”

Stories about America’s humiliation have circulated widely through popular lore and familiar images. They often play out through Hollywood film stereotype of the Vietnam veteran, whose wounded body and psyche sign for the nation’s crisis of honor. Spat upon by ungrateful anti-war protestors, lied to by their presidents, shackled by the policies of civilian whiz kids in Washington, America’s protagonists in these tales form a sad cast of dishonored men, defeated warriors, forgotten sons and husbands.

The fusion of public and private memories works to dissolve boundaries. Our identification with the nation as humiliated protagonist dissolves the boundaries we imagine exist between private and public spaces, stripping us of the illusion of impermeability or autonomy. As a basis of national feeling, humiliation or its perception exacerbates collective feelings of vulnerability or powerlessness in the citizenry.

Official versions of the Vietnam Syndrome tell us that Americans had fallen victim to a debilitating “syndrome” of passivity and weakness. Humiliation had made us “soft,” afraid to wield our power or influence on the world stage. The post-Vietnam generation presumably suffered from what Norman Podhoretz diagnosed as a “sickly inhibition against the use of military force”.

Similarly, Ernest Lefever blamed the Vietnam syndrome on our “culture of shame, guilt and self-flagellation,” which presumably “paralyzed America from using military force abroad.” William Safire, President Nixon’s speechwriter during the War, revived this narrative in a 2001 New York Times piece, referring to the Vietnam syndrome as “that revulsion at the use of military power that afflicted our national psyche for decades after our defeat”.

The syndrome’s symptoms are widely known and accepted as common knowledge: a breakdown of national will, a loss of confidence, and an unwillingness to engage in protracted conflicts abroad. This narrative identifies Americans’ aversion to war as a sign that America had been feminized by defeat, turned into a nation of wimps and pacifists.

Americans’ refusal to exert our will through the use of military force is pathologized as a “sickly inhibition.” A collective distaste for invading other nations is interpreted—not as a symptom of the toxicity of violence—or as proof that a taste of it encourages organisms to avoid it. Instead, this national saga establishes a causality that makes violence reasonable, moral, and even inevitable. It relies on metaphors of softness, permeability, and passivity, which shape the interpretive judgments we draw from the event.

Metaphors of “softness” attributed to nations draw on gendered associations, for as Ahmed has argued, a “soft” nation is “too emotional, too easily moved by the demands of others.” This gendered metaphor invokes a need for “harder” borders, for a national body that stands ready to strike, to act—preemptively if need be—to restore or maintain dominance.

America’s status as a superpower, its founding myths of exceptionalism, its military supremacy, and the confidence with which its citizens rank theirs the “best” economic and political system on earth— all rank the nation within global power geometries. Americans’ collective self-image is deeply implicated in these power differentials, in the ways we imagine ourselves vis-à-vis other nations.

David Kaiser points out in American Tragedy (2000) that, “In the early 1960s, the government of the United States probably enjoyed more prestige than at any time during the twentieth century”. This high degree of status not only informed popular attitudes towards the enemy, but also shaped decision-making at the highest levels of our government.

Kennedy’s attempts to find out if any compromise was possible for the “dangerous mess” he inherited were immediately decried as “appeasement”. Michael Lind argues that “in the aftermath of the humiliations in Cuba and Germany, the Kennedy administration felt compelled to demonstrate U.S. resolve in the Indochina theater of the Cold War”.

This need to avoid being seen as “soft” also played a role in LBJ’s war-policies. In Johnson’s affective script, one must act aggressively or face humiliation. “If you let a bully come into you’re your front yard one day … the next day he will be up on your porch and the day after that he will rape your wife in your own bed”.

Thus in March of 1965, John McNaughton, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s top aide during the Vietnam War, summarized the Johnson administration’s reasons for intervening in Vietnam. His report shows that the dread of humiliation shaped Johnson’s decision-making more than the desire to spread democracy or even the fear of communism.

The reasons for escalating the war were prioritized as follows: 70% to avoid a humiliating blow to our reputation, 20% to keep this area from China, and 10% to bring the people of South Vietnam a better, freer way of life. After Johnson’s massive bombing campaign, Operation Rolling Thunder, failed to subdue North Vietnam, McNaughton made the administration’s primary objective clear: “The situation in Vietnam is bad and deteriorating,” he wrote. “The important aim now is to avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat”.

Publicly, LBJ would profess America’s unquestionable superiority as he deployed the first combat unit of marines to Vietnam in 1965, assuring us that “America wins the wars she undertakes, make no mistake about it”. Logevall (1999) has argued that, “What [Johnson] really feared was the personal humiliation that he believed would come with his failure in Vietnam. He saw the war as a test of his own manliness. In [LBJ’s] world there were weak and strong men; the weak men were the skeptics, who sat around contemplating, talking, criticizing; the strong men were the doers, the activists, the ones who were tough and always refused to back down”.