[Peace-discuss] Vietnam War & War on Drugs

[David Green]

http://www.zcommunications.org/government-involvement-with-science-and-art-by-noam-chomsky
 
In 1971—there have been studies of this—not only the government, but the whole elite sector from right to left had two big problems. One was that young people were getting out of control; they weren't disciplined. There were studies from the liberal sector saying we have to do something about these institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the young. They're not doing their job. Kids are thinking too much, they're too free, they're out of control, so there was a "law and order" campaign. There was another problem. By around 1970, criticism of the Vietnam War was getting beyond legitimate bounds.
 
For liberal educated America, you cannot say the United States did anything wrong. Maybe some individuals did, but they can't do anything wrong by definition. The U.S. can make mistakes, but they can't be criminals. That's a deep element of the intellectual culture across the spectrum. In 1971, a lot of people were saying the war was criminal. A majority of the American population was saying the war was fundamentally wrong and immoral, not a mistake, and that's dangerous. So you have to do something about that. They had to turn us into the victims and that was done by concocting the myth of an addicted army.
 
If you listened to Walter Cronkite, he would say that the "commies" are not only attacking our boys with rifles, they're attacking them with drugs. They're going to come back and start a criminal rampage in the country and they're going to destroy us. That was across the spectrum. Actually, there are studies and it turns out that drug addiction among soldiers was kind of at the level of the youth culture—pretty much what you'd expect. There was addiction, it was alcohol, but that's not considered addiction.
 
So what you have is this mythology that was used by the law and order side as the reason the youth were going crazy, and they won't listen to us because they're all high on pot. So you declare a war on drugs. And it worked.


      
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