Out of Primordial Cultural Ooze

Entrapping great powers and engulfing smaller ones, the convulsive thirty-year Vietnam War disturbed the flow of history, producing turbulent consequences and lasting legacies. Two of the most significant and persisting American political legacies of the conflict are the stab-in-the-back legend and the attendant Vietnam Syndrome critique. They surfaced in the wake of U.S. policy defeat in Vietnam and the shattering of the myth of American omnipotence, and they drew upon cultural tropes and traditions embedded in previous betrayal myths and flawed lessons of U.S. history. From the post-Civil War period, these included the South's Myth of the Lost Cause; and from the Cold War era, they included the Yalta-conference-sellout myth, the appeasement-of-aggression theory, the Munich analogy, the loss-of-China accusation, and the domino theory. The stab-in-the-back legend and the Vietnam Syndrome critique, however, did not arise spontaneously. They were the fruit of human agency and intelligent design; they were the product of elites who purposefully concocted a narrative out of the amorphous conditions of defeat, bitterness, and recrimination accompanying a dirty war and its untidy denouement

Appeasement · Art history · Dictator · Legend · Mythology · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Vietnam War · American Political and Social Dynamics · Classics · History · Law · Military History and Strategy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

• War terminations as critical situations for ontological security

  Open Access•Jonny Hall•Journal of International…•2026

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