Vietnam War Memory

1041 Words5 Pages
The Vietnam War is a blank page in the history of the U.S. foreign policy. As a matter of fact, there have been many public and congressional debates about the American intervention in Vietnam and the morality of the political decision that proved to be fatal for both countries. Undeniably, the Vietnam War belongs in the period of the Turbulent Sixties, which along with other tremendous political events such as the Civil War, divided the American society for decades. Until today the memory of the war still haunts the American conscience. Thus, the purpose of the essay is to examine the significance of the Vietnam War as a collective memory in the American society. Specifically, the main focus will be on how the remembrance of the Vietnam…show more content…
Since the late twentieth century on, cultural historians and psychologists have stressed the importance of the memory in an attempt to provide insight to the traumatic past and the process of reconciliation, both in the political as well as the cultural domain. Furthermore, memory is considered of high importance when it comes to the formation of identity either for individuals, groups or a nation as a whole. According to Marita Sturken’s statements in her book Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering, “memory is crucial to the understanding of a culture precisely because it indicates collective desires, needs, and self-definitions” (2). Additionally, memory and history are distinct from cultural memory, which is a “field of contested meanings” that interacts with American cultural elements in order “to produce concepts of the nation, particularly in events of trauma, where both the structures and fractures of a culture are exposed” (Sturken…show more content…
Ford on 23 April 1975, just a month later of the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam and few days before the fall of Saigon. President Ford delivered a speech at Tulane University in New Orleans, which was totally focused on the future of the American nation. He announced that “[d]welling on the country’s failures in Vietnam, could just sap national self-confidence” (McMahon 164). He also applied in his speech the political strategy of “forgetting” the past and advised his audience to consider the Vietnam War as an “unhappy chapter” or a “bad nightmare” (McMahon 165) that belongs in the distant past. Apart from that, he repeatedly referred to the “American suffering”, by approaching the issue with a sense of solipsism, since his rhetoric was focused only on the American nation, by excluding the Vietnamese outside of the Vietnam War narrative. What is more is that, the particular rhetoric failed to explain the Vietnam War, the reasons why the nation encountered the loss, and did not define any
Open Document