No, not in Vietnam where the restless population is now pacified and distracted by cheap electronic gadgetry. Americans, however, haven’t moved far beyond the cultural upheaval of the 1960s, when the nascent broadcast media set out to transform US society.
First on the New Left agenda was the war in Vietnam. Pliable youth and minorities provided a ready-made revolutionary army. Taking over the universities was an essential first step. The tool of choice was the student evaluation of faculty, reversing the traditional authority of professors, putting the students in charge. Conservative faculty were cleansed or driven into silence. Higher education was turned into a conduit for antiwar propaganda.
The takeover of US education guaranteed that liberal values and ideas would be forever after installed in the minds of a generation. The new television media completed the cultural dominance. Look around today, and you’ll see the fruits of this social engineering. Not much has changed.
The antiwar movement in our world has the same agenda as it did back in the 1960s: make veterans look bad. Missing these days is the image of the strong, heroic warrior that we find in military basic training and bootcamp. Absent as well in the media are the virtues associated with discipline, patriotism, technological prowess, respect for authority and the fighting spirit–observable on any military base—marketable qualities that should easily put veterans at the top of the employment ladder.
It’s almost comical to see how print and broadcast journalism exclusively portrays veterans as Third World refugees: now broken and suffering universally from PTSD and mental illness, now homeless and suicidal, now in constant need of crisis centers and welfare-type assistance of every kind, including free meals and discounts once reserved for society’s lowest stratum.
