ABSTRACT

The antiwar movement spawned by America’s colonial war of aggression against the people of Vietnam placed new limitations on the government’s ability to initiate direct military interventions against any nation or people who may have had the audacity to refuse their assigned role within the global economy. Prior to Vietnam, such interventions could be conducted in plain sight, because a majority of the public could be counted on to support the government’s actions as part of a “just war.” Vietnam changed all of that. It created a groundswell of widespread public dissent against the use of military force for anything other than obvious defensive purposes. This strong antiwar sentiment even surfaced in debates over military spending, posing a serious threat to the state’s Pentagon welfare system of economic planning. Since the end of World War II, the state relied on the fear mongering and anticommunism of Cold War propaganda to rationalize the expenditure of massive public subsidies for high tech research and development. In the wake of Vietnam, however, even the fear of “godless commies” could not abate the rising tide of public distrust concerning the role of the U.S. government and its military in world affairs. Such public opposition to overt militarism came to be known as the Vietnam syndrome. Because such “sickly inhibitions against the use of military force”1 can greatly interfere with the ability of the state to defend and advance corporate interests abroad, there have been tremendous efforts made to remedy the public of this condition or, at least, to aid the government in working around it.