"Nixon and the prisoners of war", 7th January 1971, New York Review of Books, by Jon M. Van Dyke

Résumé du document

This is an article published in 1971, on January the 7th, in The New York Review of Books. Written by Jon M. Van Dyke, this article deals with the Nixon administration policies about the prisoners of war during the time of Vietnam War. According to Jon M. Van Dyke, the US government uses the prisoners of war problem to justify the war and "divert attention of [the American public opinion] from the fighting […] that are still continuing in Southeast Asia".
In order to show us how the US government manipulates the public opinion, Van Dyke insists on several points. So, in the first part, we will study how J M. Van Dyke sees the arguments used by the Nixon administration to change the mind of the American public opinion, and what he thinks about that.

Extraits

[...] At the end of the year soldiers were still present in South Vietnam although the removal of the troops has started in 1969. In 1970, in October the 7th, Nixon proposes a "standstill ceasefire" in order to calm American public opinion which is more and more against the war and against the way it is led by the president Nixon. Indeed, in 1971, only 50% of the American population is for the president policy concerning Vietnam. In this war, the public opinion is considered as one of the most important thing to take on account. [...]

[...] Among the points not respected by the Vietnamese, Van dyke quotes the lack of correspondence "between the prisoners and their relatives", or the fact that no list of the prisoners had been published, etc. But, Van Dyke also underlines that Vietnamese made efforts to respect the Geneva Convention, and this before that US troops attacked the Sontay prisoners-of-war camp, saying that as the time passed and not because of the menaces from the US government, North Vietnamese already showed their will to cooperate. [...]

[...] In fact, Americans engaged in this war only because they were afraid of the Communists power which could gain in growth and so become a danger for the US capitalism. According to Jon M. Van Dyke, in order to gain the support of the Americans, they had to manipulate the public opinion, using diverse means to do this (excuses like freeing South Vietnamese, freeing prisoners of war, describing the enemy as sadistic torturer, etc). But the most frightening is the fact that those methods are still used nowadays, and the best example is the war of Iraq, which was the symbol of the war against terrorism, and which is now a sort of bad replica of the war in Vietnam, involving the same questioning from the government, that is to say: How to put an end to this situation? [...]

[...] And this strategy of Nixon to get the support of the Americans by "evoking a simplistic emotional response to what is inevitably a complex problem" is highly criticized by Jon M. Van Dyke. According to him, it's a mean "to turn [their] attention away from the deep problems which the President will not or cannot solve" that is to say that, according to Van Dyke, the government is unable, or incapable to solve the different problems brought by the war, and maybe, the war itself. [...]

[...] "Nixon and the prisoners of war" , 7th January 1971, New York Review of Books , by Jon M. Van Dyke This is an article published in 1971, in January the 7th, in The New York Review of Books. Written by Jon M. Van Dyke, this article deals with the Nixon administration policies about the prisoners of war problem, during the Vietnam war. According to Jon M. Van Dyke, the US government uses the prisoners of war problem to justify the war and "divert attention of [the American public opinion] from the fighting [ ] that are still continuing in Southeast Asia". [...]