Cultural Battles: the meaning of the Viet Nam-USA war
By Peter McGregor
Scam Publications — 1998, 214 pp., $16.95 (pb)
Review by Brendan Doyle
As a contemporary of Peter McGregor who, like him, was first politicised by the Vietnam War, I welcome this collection of essays from a committed internationalist who has always sought the truth and shunned ideological straitjackets.
These essays, spanning the years 1976 to 1997, were first published as pamphlets, articles and reviews in the left press and media journals.
The wide-ranging pieces include reflections on the antiwar movement in the '70s, analyses of film and TV accounts of the war and commentary on the role of the media in selling the war to the public.
In the best of them, McGregor writes with uncommon clarity and even-handedness, while retaining the passion of personal commitment. Johanna Trainor's photographs of Vietnam's people and landscape add visual impact to the collection.
Why "Cultural Battles"? McGregor explains in his introduction: "Because the war became so controversial, and because it seemed the West was defeated, battles for the war's ideological meaning and status have continued long after the fighting ended in 1975."
Already in 1976, McGregor was questioning the propaganda from both sides about what was actually going on in Vietnam. This is revealed by the first piece, a May Day leaflet. Not satisfied with representations of the fall of Saigon as "national liberation" or "people's revolution", McGregor asks whether such theories were more attempts to maintain the purity of a party line than to grapple with the complex reality. Recent writings by former North Vietnamese soldiers such as Duong Thu Huong and Bao Ninh have justified those questions.
"Reconciliation or Retribution" is an account of a visit McGregor made to Vietnam in 1988 at the invitation of the Vietnamese government. He describes an official ceremony at which prisoners were released after 13 years of re-education. He goes on to question the meaning of the "liberation" of South Vietnam, and discusses the extent and nature of retribution against supporters of the Saigon regime. He also presents evidence that, contrary to US propaganda, the vast majority of former opponents were eventually released.
A lecturer in media studies at the University of Western Sydney, McGregor has included several lively reviews and critiques of film and TV representations of the war. These include Kennedy-Miller's Vietnam mini-series, which, says McGregor, provides useful information about the way the war affected ordinary Australians, and Tran Van Thuy's controversial documentary Chuyen Tu Te (The Story of Kindness), which deals with the civil war's damage to traditional Vietnamese cultural and moral values.
"The Military and the Media" is a fascinating account of an international conference in Brisbane in 1991 at which the media were said to be responsible for "losing the war". On the contrary, McGregor convincingly argues, "the mainstream news media during the Viet Nam war (as during the recent Gulf War), were overwhelmingly and consistently supportive of Western intervention".
In "Rambo Rules", first published in Green Left Weekly in 1993, McGregor argues that, given the devastating effects of the war, the subsequent US embargo and the US's reneging on promised reconstruction funds, Vietnam lost the war despite winning the military battle.
He then analyses the MIA scam, used by successive US regimes to continue the war by other means, portraying US forces as heroes and the Vietnamese resistance as the villains. "The POW/MIA myth", he concludes, "has become a primary symptom and cause of a dangerous national pathology in the US".
As organiser of the Vietnam Voices Exhibition in 1997, McGregor wrote several in-depth pieces on the Australian media coverage of the war, showing that it was thoroughly permeated by US propaganda. Sydney Morning Herald editorials were sometimes no more than rehashes of US State Department white papers!
In the concluding piece, "War Crimes and Reconciliation", he calls for adequate punishment for those who still proudly claim to have been part of the Phoenix program of assassination of suspected Vietcong. But he also makes a passionate plea for reconciliation to go beyond blame and apology to embrace Albert Camus' conviction after Nuremberg that "the sanctioning of violence and murder as an instrument/policy of the state has to be rejected".
Like all good essayists, McGregor grapples with complex truths in this collection, and doesn't find easy answers. The book is well researched and contains plenty of useful references. This is recommended reading for all those who want to continue the struggle against forgetting.