The stab-in-the-back myth was an antisemitic and anti-communist conspiracy theory that was widely believed and promulgated in Germany after 1918. It maintained that the Imperial German Army did not lose World War I on the battlefield, but was instead betrayed by certain citizens on the home front – especially Jews, revolutionary socialists who fomented strikes and labour unrest, and republican politicians who had overthrown the House of Hohenzollern in the German Revolution of 1918–1919. Advocates of the myth denounced the German government leaders who had signed the Armistice of 11 November 1918 as the "November criminals".
The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam is a 1998 book by Vietnam veteran and sociology professor Jerry Lembcke. The book is an analysis of the widely believed narrative that American soldiers were spat upon and insulted by anti-war protesters upon returning home from the Vietnam War. The book examines the origin of the earliest stories; the popularization of the "spat-upon image" through Hollywood films and other media, and the role of print news media in perpetuating the now iconic image through which the history of the war and anti-war movement has come to be represented.
Vietnam syndrome is a term in U.S. politics that refers to public aversion to American overseas military involvements after the domestic controversy over the Vietnam War. In 1973, the U.S. ended combat operations in Vietnam. Since the early 1980s, some possible effects of Vietnam syndrome include public opinion against war, ending the active use of military conscription, a relative reluctance to deploy ground troops, and "Vietnam paralysis".
The Armistice of 11 November 1918 was the armistice signed at Le Francport near Compiègne that ended fighting on land, at sea, and in the air in World War I between the Entente and their last remaining opponent, Germany. Previous armistices had been agreed with Bulgaria, the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary. It was concluded after the German government sent a message to American president Woodrow Wilson to negotiate terms on the basis of a recent speech of his and the earlier declared "Fourteen Points", which later became the basis of the German surrender at the Paris Peace Conference, which took place the following year.
Opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War began in 1965 with demonstrations against the escalating role of the United States in the war. Over the next several years, these demonstrations grew into a social movement which was incorporated into the broader counterculture of the 1960s.
Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) is an American tax-exempt non-profit organization and corporation founded in 1967 to oppose the United States policy and participation in the Vietnam War. VVAW is a national veterans' organization that campaigns for peace, justice, and the rights of all United States military veterans. It publishes a twice-yearly newsletter, The Veteran; this was earlier published more frequently as 1st Casualty (1971–1972) and then as Winter Soldier (1973–1975).
Sir! No Sir! is a 2005 documentary by Displaced Films about the anti-war movement within the ranks of the United States Armed Forces during the Vietnam War. The film was produced, directed, and written by David Zeiger. The film had a theatrical run in 80 cities throughout the U.S. and Canada in 2006, and was broadcast worldwide on Sundance Channel, Discovery Channel, BBC, ARTE France, ABC Australia, SBC Spain, ZDF Germany, YLE Finland, RT, and several others.
National trauma is a concept in psychology and social psychology. A national trauma is one in which the effects of a trauma apply generally to the members of a collective group such as a country or other well-defined group of people. Trauma is an injury that has the potential to severely negatively affect an individual, whether physically or psychologically. Psychological trauma is a shattering of the fundamental assumptions that a person has about themselves and the world. An adverse experience that is unexpected, painful, extraordinary, and shocking results in interruptions in ongoing processes or relationships and may also create maladaptive responses. Such experiences can affect not only an individual but can also be collectively experienced by an entire group of people. Tragic experiences can collectively wound or threaten the national identity, that sense of belonging shared by a nation as a whole represented by tradition culture, language, and politics.
The Fort Hood Three were three United States Army soldiers – Private First Class James Johnson, Private David A. Samas, and Private Dennis Mora – who refused to be deployed to fight in the Vietnam War on June 30, 1966. This was the first public refusal of orders to Vietnam, and one of the earliest acts of resistance to the war from within the U.S. military. Their refusal was widely publicized and became a cause célèbre within the growing antiwar movement. They filed a federal suit against Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and Secretary of the Army Stanley Resor to prevent their shipment to Southeast Asia and were court-martialed by the Army for insubordination.
Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned From Vietnam is a book of selected correspondence published in 1989. Its genesis was a controversial newspaper column of 20 July 1987 in which Chicago Tribune syndicated columnist Bob Greene asked whether there was any truth to the folklore that Vietnam veterans had been spat upon when they returned from the war zone. Greene believed the tale was an urban legend. The overwhelming response to his original column led to four more columns, then to a book collection of the most notable responses.
GI coffeehouses were coffeehouses set up as part of the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War era as a method of fostering antiwar and anti-military sentiment within the U.S. military. They were mainly organized by civilian antiwar activists, though many GIs participated in establishing them as well. They were created in numerous cities and towns near U.S. military bases throughout the U.S as well as Germany and Japan. Due to the normal high turnover rate of GIs at military bases plus the military's response which often involved transfer, discharge and demotion, not to mention the hostility of the pro-military towns where many coffeehouses were located, most of them were short-lived, but a few survived for several years and "contributed to some of the GI movement's most significant actions". The first GI coffeehouse of the Vietnam era was set up in January 1968 and the last closed in 1974.
A stab in the back may refer to:
The Stop Our Ship (SOS) movement, a component of the overall civilian and GI movements against the Vietnam War, was directed towards and developed on board U.S. Navy ships, particularly aircraft carriers heading to Southeast Asia. It was concentrated on and around major U.S. Naval stations and ships on the West Coast from mid-1970 to the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, and at its height involved tens of thousands of antiwar civilians, military personnel and veterans. It was sparked by the tactical shift of U.S. combat operations in Southeast Asia from the ground to the air. As the ground war stalemated and Army grunts increasingly refused to fight or resisted the war in various other ways, the U.S. “turned increasingly to air bombardment”. By 1972 there were twice as many Seventh Fleet aircraft carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin as previously and the antiwar movement, which was at its height in the U.S. and worldwide, became a significant factor in the Navy. While no ships were actually prevented from returning to war, the campaigns, combined with the broad antiwar and rebellious sentiment of the times, stirred up substantial difficulties for the Navy, including active duty sailors refusing to sail with their ships, circulating petitions and antiwar propaganda on board, disobeying orders, and committing sabotage, as well as persistent civilian antiwar activity in support of dissident sailors. Several ship combat missions were postponed or altered and one ship was delayed by a combination of a civilian blockade and crewmen jumping overboard.
The Intrepid Four were a group of United States Navy sailors who grew to oppose what they called "the American aggression in Vietnam" and publicly deserted from the USS Intrepid in October 1967 as it docked in Japan during the Vietnam War. They were among the first American troops whose desertion was publicly announced during the war and the first within the U.S. Navy. The fact that it was a group, and not just an individual, made it more newsworthy.
The claim that there was a Jewish war against Nazi Germany is an antisemitic conspiracy theory promoted in Nazi propaganda which asserts that the Jews, framed within the theory as a single historical actor, started World War II and sought the destruction of Germany. Alleging that war was declared in 1939 by Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization, Nazis used this false notion to justify the persecution of Jews under German control on the grounds that the Holocaust was justified self-defense. Since the end of World War II, the conspiracy theory has been popular among neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers.
Jeffrey P. Kimball is an American historian and emeritus professor at Miami University. Among the ideas that Kimball developed was the idea of a Vietnam stab-in-the-back myth. He also argued that threats to use nuclear weapons had not been effective at advancing the United States' foreign policy goals either in the Korean War, Vietnam War, or the First Taiwan Strait Crisis. Historian Luke Nichter wrote that Kimball's books "shaped future works, and these volumes on my shelves stand as a reminder that my own work on the Nixon tapes would not have happened without them". According to historian Ken Hughes, Kimball is "the leading scholar of the 'decent interval'": the idea that Nixon eventually settled for securing a "decent interval" before South Vietnamese defeat. Hughes regrets that Kimball's work is "virtually unknown" outside academia.
Decent interval is a theory regarding the end of the Vietnam War which argues that from 1971 or 1972, the Nixon Administration abandoned the goal of preserving South Vietnam and instead aimed to save face by preserving a "decent interval" between withdrawal and South Vietnamese collapse. Therefore, Nixon could avoid becoming the first United States president to lose a war.
According to the American sniper Carlos Hathcock, Apache was a female sniper and interrogator for the Viet Cong during the War in Vietnam. While no real name is given by Hathcock, he states she was known by the US military as "Apache", because of her methods of torturing US Marines and ARVN troops for information and then letting them bleed to death.
The United States Servicemen's Fund (USSF) was a support organization for soldier and sailor resistance to the Vietnam War and the U.S. military that was founded in late 1968 and continued through 1973. It was an "umbrella agency" that funded GI underground newspapers and GI Coffeehouses, as well as providing logistical support for the GI antiwar movement ranging from antiwar films and speakers to legal assistance and staff. USSF described itself as supporting a GI defined movement "to work for an end to the Viet Nam war" and "to eradicate the indoctrination and oppression that they see so clearly every day."
There is a persistent myth or misconception that many Vietnam War veterans were spat on and vilified by antiwar protesters during the late 1960s and early 1970s. These stories, which overwhelmingly surfaced many years after the war, usually involve an antiwar female spitting on a veteran, often yelling "baby killer". Most occur in U.S. civilian airports, usually San Francisco International, as GIs returned from the war zone in their uniforms.
