“An essay published in Newsweek, The Washington Spectator and at least one other website argues that a flag honoring U.S. troops who have been captured or gone missing is actually ‘racist’ and deserves to be treated with the same hostility as the Confederate flag.
‘You know that racist flag?’ writes Rick Perlstein. ‘The one that supposedly honors history but actually spreads a pernicious myth? And is useful only to venal right-wing politicians who wish to exploit hatred by calling it heritage? It’s past time to pull it down.’
No, Perlstein isn’t talking about the Confederate flag, but actually the POW/MIA flag, which can be seen at countless veterans’ events and outside the offices of many congressmen.
The problem lies with the flag’s origins. ‘Missing in action’ soldiers, Perlstein says, were simply invented out of thin air by Richard Nixon in an effort to ‘justify the carnage in Vietnam in a way that rendered the United States as its sole victim.’
Perlstein expresses outrage at Nixon’s administration for inaugurating a ‘newly invented’ missing-in-action category to describe pilots who were shot down and never had their bodies recovered. Perlstein seems to imply that Nixon invented the idea of ‘missing’ soldiers out of whole cloth, though this is quite untrue. Soldiers have been going missing for as long as wars have been fought, and official ‘missing’ classifications were famously applied to thousands of soldiers in both world wars whose fates were impossible to determine.
Whatever the origins of the term itself, Perlstein says the flag is obviously racist, because, well, it implies that being a POW under the North Vietnamese was bad:
‘The moral confusion was abetted by the flag: the barbed-wire misery of...
(Excerpt) Read more at coachisright.com ...
