Bruce Franklin, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies, University of Massachusetts Press, BILL NEVINS, Vietnam War, culture, history">

H. Bruce Franklin: from loyal liberal to radical dissident

Vietnam and Other American Fantasies
By H. Bruce Franklin
University of Massachusetts Press, 2001
272 pages, US$21
Available at <http://www.amazon.com>

REVIEW BY BILL NEVINS

H. Bruce Franklin knows well the cost of the Vietnam War, and of the fight against it. In 1972, California's Ivy League Stanford University fired Franklin from his tenured professorship, despite his standing as a preeminent scholar and a popular, respected teacher.

Franklin's "offence" against that great university? Exercising his right to free speech during protests against the US war in Indochina war.

Blacklisted by academia, Franklin and his life-partner, noted Cuba scholar and author Jane Franklin, struggled through years of job changes and FBI persecution. They maintained their principled resistance to injustice and state-sponsored brutality.

Many strong families shattered under the unbearable pressures of the USA's protracted internal war against political dissidents. The Franklins, to their honour, are among that war's proud survivors.

Today, Franklin is the Dana Professor of English and American Studies at Rutgers University, widely admired for his writings on prison literature and for his continuing direct engagement in struggle beside the most oppressed in the US.

Jane Franklin is a relentless champion of the Cuban people, often cited for her depth and range of historical knowledge. The Franklins' children, now savvy professionals, continue their parents' principled fight.

Vietnam and Other American Fantasies is the product of Bruce Franklin's long history of critical analysis of the United States' imperial arrogance. The book is both a scholarly cultural critique and a personal act of witness.

After three years as an US Air Force intelligence officer in the late 1950s, Franklin laboured on tug boats and in other tough jobs before starting work as a literary analyst and teacher. He is candid in relating his journey from "loyal" liberal questioning of US government policy to radical condemnation of it.

Franklin traces the evolution of US resistance to the government's Vietnam war policy:

• from hymn-singing protests to a militant movement to "bring the troops home";

• from anti-war teach-ins to ghetto and campus uprisings, with students and poor citizens shot dead by US troops and police;

• from moral outcry against the most atrocious aspects of the Vietnam war policy, (including the napalming of civilians, assassination of dissidents and the bald-faced lying by top-ranking US leaders), to reasoned political analysis of the horrific master-planning behind these awful acts (as revealed for all to see in The Pentagon Papers, the formerly secret US government history of Vietnam War planning);

• from dissent to revolutionary understanding; and

• from the defence of free speech and assembly to the prolonged and frightening anti-constitutional reaction still lying heavy upon US society (most blatantly manifested in the judicial-electoral presidential coup of 2000).

In the course of his revelations of how Americans have reacted to their country's defeat in a war against a "primitive" Asian peasant nation, Franklin deftly recounts the movies, novels, slanted histories, comic books and media campaigns that the world has been bombarded with for more than three decades.

Franklin also uncovers the suppressed history of the powerful "underground" and dissident media network which existed in the US in the 1960s and 1970s.

He reveals how widespread and dangerous opposition to the war within the US military had become by its end. Few Americans today realise how "mutiny", "fragging", "sabotage" and other acts of conscious resistance deeply hurt the US war machine. Indeed, Franklin in this book gives us back the proud, hidden story of how brave people in uniform fought back against their own commanders in defence of justice and decency.

Perhaps Franklin's most telling chapters are those on science fiction, (a genre angrily split between militarist and social-critic camps), and on the quasi-religious US mythology of the "POW/MIAs". Readers outside the US may be amazed to learn of how pervasive the POW/MIA mythology was, and still is, in US society.

Long after any US soldiers could possibly be alive in South-east Asia, the fantasy of their captivity persists, symbolised by special black flags flown over public buildings. There remains a deep-seated public notion, exploited by today's politicians, that the Vietnam War somehow can, and should, be retroactively "won" by unashamed US military exploits and "preparedness".

Thus, the periodic US air strikes and incursions abroad and the renewed "Star Wars" initiatives of the Bush II administration. All in the name of "winning back what was lost unfairly" — be that supposed "POWs" or imperial honour — in Vietnam, and in subsequent "Vietnams", like Iraq, Somalia, Cuba.

Vietnam and Other American Fantasies is an eye-opening trip through the cleverly manufactured myths and thought-manipulations which fog Americans' perceptions of themselves and of their government's role in the world.

Non-Americans, who are usually more aware of the often terrible nature of that world role, will find in this extraordinary book a deeper understanding of how deeply deceived the US public has been for far too many decades.

[Bill Nevins is a teacher and writer based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the most militarised state in the US. More of his writings are online at <http://www.hollowear.com>.]