A Reader Comments On Irish Myth, Exposes Vietnam One
03/19/2011
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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 [Email him]

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 NationKatrina 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 (email him)]

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.

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.

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