Processing Hamas Support Through the Lens of Vietnam Protest

It's 1970-ish. I'm a bright eight year old. Carried by the moment, I choose sides, aligning with the younger generation which is touchy about being sent to distant rice paddies to murder Vietnamese strangers and likely return in a coffin (as did several neighbors). The other side, with their crewcuts and cufflinks, seem morally disconnected, so I instinctually chose my side. We had Jimi Hendrix, they had Perry Como. There was never any doubt.

I had a thumbnail notion of the Cold War and I grokked the logic of domino theory. Evil tends to expand, and the cancer must be stemmed. But Republicans seemed hyperbolic in their anti-Communist paranoia. What's worse, they kept calling people like me "Commies" - an awfully disturbing association given their stated desire to mow down Communists en masse. Maybe we were next, after they'd won the rice paddies.

Then Jane Fonda went on the radio over there to spew propaganda at conscripted troops risking their lives, and I felt my first-ever pang of Centrist moderation. Same with activists who expressed solidarity with the Viet Cong. The Left had gone too far - the Viet Cong were plainly abhorrent - but I still dearly wanted us out of Vietnam.

At my tender age, I held a rather narrow view, wired into the immediate. Local kids were dying in distant jungles. Winning the war would scarcely improve my life, but merely serve the paranoid whims of creepy shitheads like Richard Nixon. It seemed simple.

Now, with the better part of a century of experience, I better understand the view of the creepy shitheads. Isolationism had been strongly debunked only three decades prior. I still would oppose intervention in Vietnam, but now I see complexity where I previously beheld simplicity. It's not an improved me, just one with more framing options.


I'm no expert on the Middle East conflict, but I know enough to firmly conclude that there is no righteous party. Each side claims righteousness by reciting a litany of atrocities committed by the Other, and both litanies are full-to-bursting. And, as I predicted, the Israelis were cynically - and quite successfully - baited into barbarism by the Hamas attack.

But that's me, with my broad, higher framing. Younger people, more narrowly framed, behold the latest barbarism in a non-contextualized freeze frame of Right Now. And they're not entirely wrong. Barbarism is barbaric, regardless of one’s litany of atrocity. If you slap a kid in public, your statement of justification will do you little good. You're now The Child Slapper. Never mind that this was the kid’s plan all along. 

I use my Vietnam memories to better relate to the Left's Middle East take, generally. Regarding extremists who've gone as far as to embrace Hamas out of rote solidarity with the enemy of perceived bad guys, I recall the somewhat milder contempt I felt for Viet Cong boosterism. At the time, I could distantly relate to the fools who chose that route. So I revive that impression in my effort to re-associate Hamas cosplayers with civilization; to at least distantly relate to fools who went that route.