03/19/2011
03/18/11 — A Reader Asks About Kilkerry And Kildare
Re: James Fulford’s St. Patrick And San Patricio: Thoughts On Immigrants Then And Now
From: An Anonymous Veteran
Very interesting St. Patrick’s Day article — I enjoy Fulford’s writing. There were no "No Irish Need Apply … " signs — how about that!
Recently, I was ticked to hear a number of leftists, including that battleaxe from the Nation — Katrina vanden Heuvel — go on about the " myth" of protesters spitting on GIs returning from the Vietnam War.
I don’t remember why it came up, but it somehow suited their political needs of the moment.
Of course, there has been a book by some lefty prof who has studied the whole thing and who has proclaimed that the poor treatment of GIs coming back from Vietnam was an urban myth. I wish I could remember why this came up. I think I first heard it when vanden Heuvel was on Morning Joe. [Vdare.com note: The book was The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam
,
the lefty prof was Professor Jerry Lembcke ]
Well, I was not in Vietnam. But I was in the Army and I did hear about such things from guys I knew.
Last year I was in Canada, and I heard a CBC production about a Canadian who joined the USMC. As part of his narrative, he claimed he was spit on coming back to California.
I guess the leftist CBC people did not yet get the word. I do know that if it suits the Left, they will turn on a dime and change the tune complete, with a number of professors signing on. Perhaps it will be only black GIs, or Hispanic GIs, who were spat on.
By James Fulford writes: Professor Lembcke’s "no spitting" thesis has been pretty thoroughly refuted by Jim Lindgren at the Volokh Conspiracy blog. (There’s a comment here by me. )It’s similar to the thesis of Professor Bellesiles — that’s former Professor Bellesiles — that there were not very many guns owned by Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — a historian trying, for PC reasons, to erase something that everyone knows.
You might also try comparing a history of the post-Civil War Reconstruction written in 1937 with one written in 2010.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.