Who Supports the Troops? Vietnam, the Gulf War, and the Making of Collective Memory

Abstract

During the Gulf War, U.S. media portrayed Vietnam-era protesters as having treated American soldiers shamefully during the Vietnam War. Even Gulf War protesters lent credence to this historical interpretation. By "supporting the troops," dissenters distanced themselves from their counterparts during the Vietnam era and its "remembered" anti-troop sentiments. But after analysis of Vietnam era media, we find that the media of the time-consistent with most subsequent published accounts-did not report the movement as "anti-troop." Although policymakers frequently attempted to imply that protesters were anti-troop, we find virtually no instances of protesters themselves being reported as targeting the troops. Our findings show that the memory of protester-troop antagonism is not so much the product of conflict between these two groups, but rather of a selectively remembered and edited past. Just as it hamstrung the anti-war movement during the Gulf War, the current recollection may endure as part of the conditions facing opponents of future military actions.

Privileged Access, Privileged Accounts: Toward a Socially Structured Theory of Resources and Discourses

“…Building on recent analyses of the "framing" of discourse in social movements and other contexts (Snow et al 1986;Beamish et al 1995), this second example may actually represent the pattern that most deserves increased attention in the future. To be sure, some early contributions to environmental sociology (Dunlap 1976;Cotgrove 1982) did draw attention to the importance of what Pirages and Ehrlich (1974) had called a "dominant social paradigm."…”

“…Yet even in cases involving more tightly focused concerns, and even when protestors do put forth a more focused and consistent message -as for example when anti-war protestors have expressed opposition to specific forms of military involvement -political leaders with the necessary skills of reframing and blaming can exert powerful influences over the course of debate simply by changing the subject in the process of responding. As noted perhaps most clearly by Beamish et al (1995), political leaders are often relatively facile in responding to virtually all such complaints by noting with the appropriate gravity that like all other "reasonable" citizens -but by implication, not like the critics -they "support our troops." Such patterns suggest that uses of the tactic of reframing to undercut the legitimacy of critics -in a pattern having clear parallels to the technique of describing the critics of specific facilities as being "opposed to science and technology" in general (e.g., the discussion in Freudenburg and Alario 2004) -may deserve much greater attention in future research.…”

Social Changes and the Generational Differences in the Formation of Collective Memories (Dissertation, 2012)

“…Further, despite suspicion of the media bias by specific audiences (see, for example, Cramer Walsh 2004), journalists are often seen as credible commentators, since democratic journalistic conventions require neutrality and objectivity (Zelizer 1992;Edy 1999). However, many news scholars note that journalists often adopt official versions (Gamson and Modigliani 1989;Beamish, Molotch, and Flacks 1995;Schudson 1989b;Edy 2006), or that they prefer official sources to other stakeholders (Gamson and Stuart 1992).…”

Gender, Dissenting Subjectivity and the Contemporary Military Peace Movement inBody of War

“…See also Salih 2002, 11 andMahmood 2004, 162). The authority of the US military peace movement rests upon a military masculine authenticity of experience expressed in the trope of the "boots on the ground" perspective (Anden-Popadopoulos 2009;Kennedy 2009;Christensen 2008) and the associated access to "ground truth" (Leitz 2011, 249), along with the mantra "support the troops -oppose the war" (Beamish, Molotch, and Flacks 1995;Managhan 2011, 441;Coy, Woehrle, and Maney 2008). The phrase "ground truth" expresses "a belief that the firsthand knowledge of military individuals is the real truth" (Leitz 2011, 249).…”