The Cult of the Victim Veteran: MAGA Fantasies in Lost-war America

ISBN-13: 9781032490267 / Angielski / Twarda / 2023 / 136 str.

Jerry Lembcke

Opis

The Cult of the Victim Veteran explores the pool of American post-Vietnam War angst that rightists began plying in the 1980s. Ronald Reagan’s 1984 proclamation of a new "Morning in America" encoded the war as the moment of the nation’s fall from grace; it was the meme plagiarized by Donald Trump for his "Make America Great Again" slogan.

Trauma. Fiction writers love it. Filmmakers can’t resist it. "The notion of trauma," wrote Parul Sehgal for New Yorker Magazine, "has become all-engulfing."

In this book, Jerry Lembcke argues that trauma now provides the animating imagery for a victim-nation narrative that drives the American political culture and foreign policy, as well. The spectacles of traumatized veterans is used metaphorically to stir the resentments, and anxieties left by a half-century of lost wars. They are the same sentiments that demanded retribution in Europe between World Wars I and II—an unsettling thought.

Lembcke drills into the long durée of failed boundary-constructions between spectacle and science, emotion and rationality, tradition and modern in mental health studies. Shell shock’s diagnostic properties were overshadowed by its cultural and political utility; PTSD medicalized veterans’ dissent; TBI has yet to reveal the AWOL biomarkers promised by its champions. The cultural influence of agent orange and moral injury outweigh their clinical significance.

The MAGA movement birthed in America’s lost-war culture trolls the boundaries of modernism and traditional beliefs. Its skepticism of science is palpable; its lean to tribalism unmistakable; its attraction to conspiracist explanations for national setbacks is evident. This book connects the dots.

Recenzje

"This eye-opening book takes us through a history of war- and postwar spectacle from World War I to the present forever war(s) and exposes intriguing parallels and interrelations in the representation of trauma and its political utilization. Jerry Lembcke shows that it was most often the media and popular culture, rather than the sciences themselves, who introduced and promoted (pseudo)scientific explanations of trauma – which, turned into postwar spectacle, would serve to legitimize new wars, not to end or prevent them."
- Paul Benedikt Glatz, independent scholar (Berlin, Germany), author of Vietnam's Prodigal Heroes (Lexington, 2021)

The book presents an original argument about public memory and the Vietnam War. It points to the existence of fantasies that have emerged from that war, which conceive of U.S. military veterans as victims of their own government and that obfuscate veterans’ extensive involvement in anti-war activism. Lembcke spells out the political implications—showing how these fantasies have fuelled a revanchist call to "Make America Great Again" and to avenge the lost war in Vietnam through repeated military interventions whose failure perpetuates the vicious ongoing cycle he describes. No other scholars or books have looked at the history in the same way as Lembcke has, nor made the same historical connections. The material is extremely timely and important for people to understand. The book is very vital in exposing a central pathology of modern U.S. political culture which is fuelling a slide towards endless war and fascism.

– Jeremy Kuzmarov, Managing Editor, Covert Action Magazine

From shell shock to TBI, Jerry Lembcke reveals how the spectacle of war––in photography, film, literature, journalism––has shaped the science of combat trauma and furnished the contemporary Right with a powerful fantasy of betrayal, loss, and the promise of redemption. Lembcke, our most cleareyed critic of the cultural economy of war, challenges the unassailability of a story that has repeatedly fueled a desire to take up arms and find the next enemy. Read this book.

––Joseph Darda, author of How White Men Won the Culture Wars: A History of Veteran America

Spis treści

Introduction.  1. Spectacle, Science, and War Trauma: MAGA's Tangled Back Stories  2. Shellshock: Political Cultural, Medical Minds, and Moving Pictures.  3. The Spectacle of Antiwar Warriors: Political Dissent Is Made a Medical Disorder.  4. Agent Orange: As Spectacle and Trope.  5. Traumatic Brain Injury: From News to Nomenclature.  6.“Moral Injury”: Its Own Spectacle.  7. Trauma in a Post-truth Era: Back to Charcot’s Salon? 

O autorze

Jerry Lembcke is the author of eight books including The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (NYU Press, 1998) and Hanoi Jane: War, Sex, and Fantasies of Betrayal (UMass Press, 2010). He is presently Associate Professor of Sociology Emeritus at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.