Yankees, Jews, Vietnam, & Napalm

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Arabic version here

David Maraniss
They Marched Into Sunlight: War & Peace Vietnam & America, 1967
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003

The Vietnam War was fought in two theaters. The first was between the Americans and the Communists in Vietnam, and the second was between pro- and anti-war factions on college campuses and other places across the United States. The 2003 book They Marched Into Sunlight by David Maraniss tells the story of these conflicts by describing battles both in Vietnam and at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, battles which respectively took place on 17 and 18 October, 1967. These two battles changed the course of the war.

The battle that occurred in Vietnam was fought by the 2nd Battalion 28th US Infantry, the “Black Lions,” which is part of the US Army’s 1st Infantry Division – otherwise known as “The Big Red One.” The Black Lions were commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Terry de la Mesa Allen, Jr. Its Command Sergeant Major was Francis Dowling. LTC Allen was the son[1] of the famous Big Red One commander who led the division in North Africa during the Second World War.

On October 17, 1967, the Black Lions conducted a frontal attack on prepared Viet Cong positions. The battle was hard-fought, but the Viet Cong won. American casualties were terrible. LTC Allen was killed in action, as was CSM Dowling. Delta Company’s forward observer 2LT Harold B. Durham, Jr. was also killed and was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. Survivors said the event was more an ambush than a battle. When news arrived in Washington, DC that LTC Allen had fallen along with so many of his men, a pallor of gloom and despair fell upon the Johnson administration. Today, half a century later, military historians can argue over the details of the problems faced by the Black Lions and the correctness of the US Army’s tactics in Vietnam. However, from an Alt Right perspective, this battle in distant Vietnam was secondary to what happened in Madison, Wisconsin.

At the University of Wisconsin at Madison on October 18, representatives from Dow Chemical, a firm that was manufacturing napalm for the US military, went to recruit on the campus. The event was disrupted by anti-napalm protestors staging a sit-in. The situation quickly got out of hand. The University’s Chancellor called in the City of Madison Police in addition to the University’s own police force to suppress it. The Madison Police had long been frustrated by the radicalism of the students and were very aggressive. Many students and police were injured in the fight. Students hitherto unconcerned with the Vietnam War became radicalized anti-war activists. The protest was led and organized by Jews.

The riot in Madison showed that the coalition within the Democratic Party between working-class whites (such as policemen), blacks and other minorities, and anti-war activists, was hopelessly splintered. In 1968, the Democratic National Convention became a battleground with the same fault lines as in Madison. Jewish-inspired, New Left-style political violence continued in Madison for years, and indeed, the fatal 1970 Sterling Hall Bombing was masterminded by a student named Karleton Armstrong, who participated in the riot of October 18, 1967.

As a side note, the environment that the students at Madison lived in in the late 1960s was remarkable for the opportunities it offered: a middle-class American civilization that is today gone with the wind. At that time, the upper Midwest was a working man’s paradise. Progressives like Gaylord Nelson were turning Wisconsin into a welfare state not unlike those in Scandinavia. Employment was high, and the young adults headed to college had never felt the sting of serious economic displacement. Working-class carpenters could easily afford to send their children to the University of Wisconsin. Young adults could even look forward to lucrative employment upon graduation. Perhaps the thing most different from today is that companies offering high-paying jobs actually went to the universities to recruit students.

The Vietnam War occurred at the intersection of the Cold War with the decolonialization struggles sweeping across the world. As a result, Americans were unsure if they needed to protect South Vietnam, which was independent but part of the loosely-organized “American Empire” in the Pacific, from Communist expansion, or if they should keep out of the far-off civil war. However, when reading They Marched Into Sunlight, one can see that the situation was actually much more complex, as will be explored below.

The Vietnam War Took Place Simultaneously with a Multi-Faceted Social Disaster Affecting the Anglo-American Political Elite

In 1967, America’s old-stock “WASP” elite, centered in the north, and their assimilated European immigrant cousins, i.e. the “Yankees,” could look back on a culture that had only known progress and victory since the mid-eighteenth century days of the French and Indian War. However, this hegemony was coming apart. None who were in power at the time saw it coming, and none was able to avert the tragedy. The Vietnam War occurred just as Yankee hegemony was beginning to fray, and by the end of that conflict, the WASP elite was being displaced as well.

The first symptom of this displacement was the divorce revolution. This disaster happened to the upper-class Allen family. When LTC Allen shipped off to Vietnam, he left behind a wife and three young girls. His wife, Jean Ponder Allen, was also of the elite, Anglo stock of El Paso. Like her husband, Jean was descended from one of the mayors of El Paso, and she had her own show at the local TV station. Several months into LTC Allen’s Vietnam tour, Jean nuked the family. She began an open affair with a rodeo clown and sent a “Dear John” letter to her husband. When LTC Allen returned home on emergency leave to try and save his marriage, she called him a “baby killer.” LTC Allen returned to Vietnam with his family crisis very much on his mind.[2]

The next symptom was the fact that the progressive Yankee elite had effectively lost control of their institutions to Jews. This situation was already fully developed at the University of Wisconsin in 1967. Jewish aggression against and control of Wisconsin’s premier academy was a microcosm of similar situations across America. The University’s Yankee Chancellor at the time of the anti-napalm riot, William Hamilton Sewell, probably went to his grave never realizing the scale of the problem.

This situation deserves further explanation. Michigan-born Chancellor Sewell was every bit a Yankee progressive. He collected “cool” jazz records. He worshiped at the Unitarian Church,[3] whose building had been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. He was a sociologist with a background in statistics and had studied the ideas of Sigmund Freud, finding that “considerable doubt is cast upon the general validity of the Freudian claims and the efficacy of the prescriptions based on them.”[4]

Despite proving that Sigmund Freud was a quack (whose theories were probably developed to advance Jewish aims),[5] Chancellor Sewell hadn’t recognized the danger presented by the hardcore cadre of radical Jewish activists which had formed under his nose. At the University of Wisconsin, the native Yankees had lost control. The Dean of Students was Joseph F. Kauffman, a Jew (but not, it seems, a radical New Left activist). However, there were radical Jewish activists scattered in key places throughout the school. One was George L. Mosse. University of Wisconsin alumnus Kevin B. MacDonald writes that “Mosse’s Jewish interests and identification were quite overt. His lectures, like his books, showed a strong interest in Jewish issues, particularly the Holocaust . . .”

Another prominent radical Jewish professor was Harvey Goldberg.[6] Of Goldberg, Kevin B. MacDonald writes, “In my experience at Madison during the 1960s, there was also a strong desire for bloody, apocalyptic revenge against the entire social structure – perceived by them to be the goyish, fascist, capitalist, racist, anti-Semitic social structure. (Harvey Goldberg, whose lectures often celebrated bloody uprisings against the forces of oppression, probably fed into this.)”

One of the Jewish student leaders of the protest was Paul Soglin. In 1967, Soglin was a sort of “professional student” who had nearly failed several classes. He was very clever at causing trouble on campus and had the solid instincts of a politician. For example, “Soglin ‘picked up a girl’ one night during [a protest] and faced a conflict that only a budding politician, not a true beatnik, could fall into – and solve. He wanted to take her back to his apartment on Dayton Street, only five blocks away, but worried that it would be embarrassing if anything dramatic happened while he was gone. If authorities came in and cleared the place out, it was important for him to be able to say that he was there. So he found Ralph Hanson, the campus police chief, a friendly adversary, and quietly got reassurance that there was nothing in the works. Sometime after midnight, Soglin and his newfound friend ‘slinked out a back alley.’”[7] He was one of the main organizers of the anti-napalm protest, and later became the Mayor of Madison. Other Jews, such as Robert Cohen and Evan Stark, were also key in the activism.

However, the rank-and-file protesters were not Jews. One protestor, Jonathan Stielstra, was of a Dutch-Calvinist background. He was photographed pulling down the American flag at Bascom Hall during the protest. Kevin MacDonald writes, “The protest against the war – and to a great extent the values of the radical counterculture as a whole – had become mainstream.”

What drove Americans like Jonathan Stielstra, whose ethnic culture had deep roots in the Anglo culture of the North, was the final symptom of the decline of the Anglo political elite. By losing control of their institutions, Yankees lost control of the cultural high ground and thus failed to effectively provide a narrative that could reconcile their power with the morality of the hard responsibilities that came with such power. For better or worse, in the Pacific, America had an empire that stretched from Hawaii to Asia’s Pacific Rim. Empires are often just, and yet they must be maintained by force, or at least by the fear of force. This includes using weapons like napalm. Without having control over their culture, Americans WASPS couldn’t form a moral narrative to justify the use of force. Using their own clever narratives, radical Jews were able to push their own message. Hearing this new call, which was alien and yet appeared moral, Yankee gentiles like Jonathan Stielstra fell into line.

As the Vietnam War wound down, Jews furthered the process of replacing the Yankee political elite. Paul Soglin replaced Madison’s native Midwestern mayor of Scandinavian origins, Bill Dyke, in 1973. The political Left went on to remove President Nixon from office. Saigon fell in 1975. What saved America’s whites from Communism was the fortunate fact that applied Marxism was nothing more than malarkey, so the Soviet Union fell apart on its own. Nevertheless, the Yankees remain displaced, and currently, much of America’s foreign policy serves the interest of Israel.

The Foreign Policy of the United States is An Extension of Domestic Politics . . . and That Matters a Great Deal to those in the Path of American Power

The United States has carried out imperialist projects in the Far East and the Middle East, but these projects are supported by different people, and the results have been wildly different. In the Far East, the Americans who were pushing to bring the Eagle across the Pacific were mostly New England Yankee Christians. Congregationalist and Presbyterian missionaries went to Hawaii, and for better or worse, made it a US state. In the Philippines, Governor General William Howard Taft, who could trace his ancestors back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1600s, implemented an early version of “win hearts and minds.” It worked.

General Douglas MacArthur, who also had deep Yankee roots, won the Pacific War and then justly ruled and rebuilt Japan. MacArthur found Japan a ruin and left it an industrial powerhouse. In the spirit of Christian forgiveness, he didn’t hunt down Japanese “war criminals” like the decades-long, Jewish-inspired search for their German equivalents. In Korea, American policy likewise made the South an economic triumph. The two American ambassadors to South Korea during the Korean War were both whites of Christian background who were raised in New England.[8]

American policy in Vietnam fell into the pattern of New England Christians endorsing American expansion in the Pacific. President Kennedy, although Catholic,[9] was entirely assimilated into the native Yankee culture of Massachusetts. His counterpart in South Vietnam was a fellow Catholic, President Ngo Dinh Diem. This matched the earlier pattern of Yankees supporting Christian Asians in the Far East. President Kennedy’s ambassador to South Vietnam was the deeply Yankee Massachusetts man, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.

There have been costs from America’s Pacific expansion, and indeed, it may be time for Americans to withdraw. Additionally, it is true that America’s wars in the region have been ugly. The anti-napalm protestors weren’t lying about napalm’s cruelty. All wars are ugly and cruel. However, when the shooting stops, it is nonetheless the case that there was stability and prosperity in all the areas in Asia that had American influence. Had Americans won the Vietnam War, there certainly wouldn’t have been Pol Pot in Cambodia, and South Vietnam would likely have become an economically prosperous “Asian Tiger.”

The Yankee feel of American involvement in the Far East must be contrasted with America’s Middle Eastern policy, which is driven by Jewish ethnic aims and using Jewish cultural traits. Jews in high positions of the American government, such as Louis Brandeis, Abe Fortas, and Paul Wolfowitz, were all committed Zionists. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt  write, “. . . [T]he thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby’.”

While the Far East is stable, the Middle East is wracked with biblical-style conflict from one end to the other. American policy there, largely inspired and directed by Jews, has made the Syrian Civil War far worse than it would otherwise have been by supporting “moderate” rebel terrorists, and turned Libya and Iraq into basket-case polities. American support for Israel created a nightmare for the Palestinians. As a result, the Palestinians went on to kick-start the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) and caused a great deal of problems for the King of Jordan, and Israeli policy towards the Palestinians is nothing short of brutal.

Conclusion: The Premier Ethnic Struggle in America

After pondering the effects of the anti-napalm protest at the University of Madison, one can easily conclude that the main domestic struggle in America is not north versus south or black versus white. It is the ethnic conflict of Yankees versus Jews. As mentioned above, “Yankees” are those white Americans whose origins are in Colonial New England, or else those descendants of European whites who immigrated and then assimilated to Yankee regional norms in the northern United States. Now that the Vietnam War is over, the Yankee-Jew conflict can be examined without the burden of an ongoing war. There are several aspects to this struggle.

The first is religious. In the United States, the non-fundamentalist Protestantism common in the North is the most fair regarding the Israel-Palestinian situation. One example of this is Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick, a non-fundamentalist Presbyterian. He worked with other Anglo-elite Yankees like Kermit Roosevelt, Jr. as an active “anti-Zionist.” Naturally, he was called an “anti-Semite.” Fosdick’s liberal Christian denomination, the American Presbyterian Church released a pamphlet entitled Zionism Unsettled, which sought to counter the Christian Zionism within fundamentalist American Christianity. “Inter-faith” groups successfully worked to stop the Presbyterians from selling the document. Other denominations found in the north of the United States, such as the United Church of Christ and the Quakers, are also circumspect about Israel. Ultimately, they will be forced into a wider conflict with Jews should they continue to follow the logic of their convictions.

The second stage of the conflict is political. In the early 1950s, Douglas MacArthur was on the short list to run for President. However, his entry into politics was blocked by organized Jewish pressure groups. When he discovered this, George Lincoln Rockwell (himself a Yankee) launched his own political career. Douglas MacArthur was descended from the Belcher family. The Belchers were Puritan pioneers from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In a more recent example of Jewish attacks on a Yankee President, Rod J. Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General in the Trump administration, ordered a special prosecutor to investigate the dubious claims of “Russian Interference” in the 2016 presidential election. There have been no probes in relation to other well-known foreign manipulators of American politics, such as Israel or Saudi Arabia.

Another political contest centered on a non-Jewish northerner occurred in the US Senate. Like the Kennedy family, Wisconsin’s Republican Senator, Joseph McCarthy, was an assimilated Yankee with (mostly) Irish Catholic roots. As a Senator during the Korean War, McCarthy searched for Communists in the US government, many of whom were Jews. The usual accusations of anti-Semitism were thrown against McCarthy. He was ultimately undone by the shenanigans of a Jew on his staff, Roy Cohn. After the Cold War ended, the cables in the declassified Venona Project showed that McCarthy was correct about the scope and scale of Communist subversion.

War itself is also a domestic political struggle. One of the key problems in waging the Vietnam War was that it was so much more difficult for those in power to come up with a workable strategy for winning. The battle calculus was nearly impossible to compute. Should the US Army search and destroy, or clear and hold? Should the US Air Force bomb Hanoi? Would China enter the war, as they did in Korea a decade earlier? Everyone had an opinion, nobody had an answer.

While it is the duty of citizens of ability to be involved in finding solutions to problems, one should look at the Jewish-led, anti-napalm demonstrations in late 1967 as a politically savvy act of domestic warfare against Yankee gentiles rather than as any genuine demonstration of concern for burn victims or good faith protesting against America’s strategy. In 1967, the Israeli military also used napalm against the Arabs – and American sailors – and yet there was no outcry from American Jews. Throughout the Cold War and Vietnam War, Jews subverted American aims, such as when the Pentagon Papers were leaked to The New York Times by the Jew, Daniel Ellsberg.

The third stage of this contest is cultural. On that front, Yankees, both the descendants of Winthrop Fleet Puritans and those assimilated descendants of later European Immigrants, have tangled with organized Jewish interests and/or been called “anti-Semites.” Several examples are:

Charles A. Lindbergh of Minnesota

Ernest Hemingway of Michigan

Ezra Pound, born in Idaho, and descended from Puritan William Wadsworth of Connecticut

Howard Phillips Lovecraft of Rhode Island.

Ellsworth F. Bunker, Ambassador to South Vietnam, descended from George Bunker who arrived in Boston in 1634. Jewish poet Allen Ginsberg specifically lampoons Bunker in one of his works.

Yankees and Jews appear to be in the same “liberal” place, but this is a mirage. These different peoples are like ships moving in the opposite direction, but appearing as one to an observer on shore when they cross paths. In the short term, the conflict at Madison in 1967 was a Jewish victory, although at the time, it would have been parsed as “youth” versus the “establishment,” or in some other way. However, the conflict continues.

On the theme that the main conflict in the United States is between the Yankees and the Jews, see Kevin MacDonald’s work, whose book, The Culture of Critique, launched a counterattack on Jewish influence over American culture. He wrote, “History also suggests that anti-Jewish reactions develop as Jews increase their control over other peoples. As always, it will be fascinating to observe the dénouement.”[10]

Notes

1. LTC Allen was of a valorous line of soldiers and public servants besides his father. He was descended from the Civil War-era Union Army Captain Carlos A. de la Mesa of the 39th New York Infantry. His mother, Mary Fran Robinson, was the daughter of El Paso, Texas Mayor William F. Robinson, who was killed along with a fireman in 1910 when the wall of a burning building collapsed on them.

2. One can’t help but think of the “what ifs” had things gone differently for LTC Allen. Had he survived his tour in Vietnam and had his wife remained faithful, the Allens would have become a West Texas power couple. They could have had a great deal of influence over the political scene.

3. The Unitarian Church formed in New England following a split within the Congregationalist Church. The Congregationalist denomination, also called the United Church of Christ, is a daughter religion of the Puritans. The Unitarian-Universalist denomination is thus a granddaughter of Puritan theological ideas.

4. Maraniss, They Marched Into Sunlight, Kindle Loc 2279.

5. University of Wisconsin Class of 1966 alumnus, Professor Kevin B. MacDonald, writes, “We have seen that a common component of Jewish intellectual activity since the Enlightenment has been to criticize gentile culture. Freud’s ideas have often been labeled as subversive. Indeed, [Freud] was convinced that it was in the very nature of psychoanalytic doctrine to appear shocking and subversive. On board ship to America he did not feel that he was bringing that country a new panacea. With his typically dry wit he told his traveling companions, ‘We are bringing them the plague’. . .” Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Bloomington, In.: 1stBooks, 2013), pp. 654-655.

6. Since the collapse of Communism and the fall of the Soviet Union, listening to Harvey Goldberg’s recorded lectures is an exercise in tedium. Here is a sample: “We are acutely aware that the October Revolution was a product of a particular set of circumstances. Or to put that in more precise Marxist terminology, that were the objective conditions that prevailed in Russia . . . social decomposition . . . plummeting towards chaos . . .” After listening to Goldberg, one can better appreciate that George Lincoln Rockwell is far more accurate when describing Marxism as a Jewish scam, “. . . the end results of their revolutions are always that they set up crazy, non-productive, Marxist states which cannot survive without enormous transfusions of money and goods from non-Communist (productive) states and peoples. (As witness Israel, which exists largely on German ‘reparations’ and American largesse and Soviet Russia, which is always rescued by U. S. wheat, money and ‘AID’.)”

7. Maraniss, They Marched Into Sunlight, Kindle Loc. 1899.

8. The first US Ambassador to the Republic of Korea was John J. Muccio (1900-1989). He was born in Italy but raised in Rhode Island. The second was Massachusetts-born Ellis O. Briggs (1899-1979).

9. The anti-Catholic Jew Avro Manhattan (1914–1990) wrote a book on the theme that involvement in Vietnam grew from JFK’s ethnic and regional origins. He doesn’t say that American involvement in the Far East is an outgrowth of Yankee missionary activity, but does state that JFK’s Catholic faith was a factor.

10. MacDonald, The Culture of Critique, p. 1139.