The napalm girl photograph: the myth continues
It never seems to end, does it?
I’ve written about this famous photograph several times before, at great length here for PJ Media, and also here and here on the blog.
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
It never seems to end because we’re dealing with an ideological imperative. That imperative gives the lives of its acolyte’s meaning. Which is one of the most powerful of motivations.
For such as they, the imperative is the truth and the only truth.
After all “What is truth?” P. Pilate
After all, you’re talking about the US media, and we KNOW what they think, and that they have only a fleeting (at best) link to truth.
Neo, I had read your previous postings here, and now I’ve also read your piece for PJM. Good job. :>)
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Two articles detailing the facts of the event itself, and also of subsequent mythmaking, by Major Ron Timberlake, who was a helicopter pilot in Viet Nam and won the Silver Star.
First, ©1999: “The Fraud Behind The Girl In The Photo: Hijacking the history of the Vietnam veteran” in 1999. Per the article, American news media reported the event accurately; the current myth of American responsibiliry was concocted and sold to the public much later, in the late 1990s. The article begins,
http://www.ndqsa.com/myth.html
.
There is an earlier version of the article, © 1997, presented in mythbusting sections. (I find it easier to digest, but then I Am Old, Father William, and the attic contains little but dust bunnies….).
http://www.gratitude.org/myth_of_the_girl_in_the_photo.htm
Posted in gratitude to Major Timberlake by Linh Duy Vo, a Vietnamese refugee who came to America.
Both are worth reading.
“Ut’s image won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 but evidence is scant that it did much to change “public attitude” – or “shift the understanding” – about Vietnam. As I noted in Getting It Wrong, U.S. public opinion had swung against the war long before the photograph was taken in 1972.” — MediaMythAlert
“The accident on June 8, 1972 was immediately and correctly reported by US and world news organizations.” — ndqsa
The photo shifted my understanding and attitude.
I had no older brothers in the draft pool, and so, as a high school student up to 1970 (with all of that wisdom so celebrated today!) I was only generically against the war — having never heard anything but the Cronkite version and having no way to judge the merits of it politically — but believed in ending it by fighting to WIN it (never suspecting that we were actually doing that).
My memories of seeing the photo are definitely from the 1972 publication: I was then in college, and mostly interested in the war ending before my friends and younger brother hit draft age, and I don’t know now if I saw the original reporting, or only the revised reports framing as it being strictly anti-American — I think it must have been the latter, and it happened very soon afterward, not as late as 1996, because I recall distinctly that this photo, plus the My Lai massacre (also not accurately reported at the time, IIRC the later revisions), turned my generic opposition into being firmly against any war that would cause our soldiers to do That Kind of Thing — I just didn’t think it was a mentally-healthy situation for the men tasked with making them happen, and I wanted our men OUT of that position.
I was later very much against the way the Democrats dumped the South Vietnamese without any compunction, after colluding to genuinely lose the war, but that didn’t make me like napalm any better.
(never suspecting that we were actually doing that).
Just not by corrupt Johnson and his boys.
They had to get rid of Nixon otherwise he might do even more things than ending the draft.