Word: vietnam
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...public opinion would likewise accept such a result. Unlike Vietnam, where "the American people instinctively felt that the national interest was not at stake" (Miles Ignotus), the national gain here would be clear. A surgically-neat military operation would avoid the quagmire syndrome which bogged down the US debacle in Indochina. Thus the world will be saved from economic and political chaos, and US hegemony will be re-established, dissolving once and for all the bitter aftertaste of the defeat in Vietnam...
Sociobiology's most prominent critics earned my respect during the late sixties for their rejection of an ideology that saw Vietnam as a moral war and Harvard as an Ivory Tower. Harvard is no more an Ivory Tower today, but in attacking E.O. Wilson, the critics now seem to be fabricating a reactionary, not fighting a real...
...years full of political change very close to what students were fighting for before I came here, but as victories they didn't have much impact on me. When I came here, Richard Nixon was being overwhelmingly reelected president; the United States was dropping countless tons of bombs on Vietnam and Cambodia and systematically killing people there; the Harvard faculty was over 95 per cent white and male; the University's tenants were trying to become a force to be recognized. It's striking how much of that is different now, and how little it all meant to students here...
...NIGHT NIXON resigned, a couple of hundred people converged on Harvard Square and shouted a little and climbed on top of the subway kiosk. When the National Liberation Front finally drove the last vestiges of an American-supported and -armed government out of Vietnam, perhaps twenty people held an impromptu March past the Houses while students inside their rooms yelled at them to be quiet. When Harvard finally wrote an affirmative action plan and included some tenants in drawing its plans for expansion, nobody noticed. It makes a lot of sense, really, that students didn't regard all these things...
...whether or not you believe that World War I has a unique and monolithic legacy for our way of seeing things, it has certainly reinforced certain modes of perception. War is one of the few experiences that whole cultures can share. In the past ten years, we all shared Vietnam by watching it on television. We saw it in a heap of bodies at Mylai, in the naked girl running down a road crying as napalm burned through her skin. But, as Fussell says, our culture began to learn how to accept this long ago through a perception that...