Back to Index
When a country goes to war, ideology becomes explicit. War posits enemies, which in tern defines the country as that which its enemies are not. It centres around actions that are termed 'meaningful'. In American ideology, its mythology is central. I wish to examine America's relation to its own ideology, why it collapsed during the Vietnam war, and the consequences of this in retrospect.
Ideology is a complex issue. It is argued there is nothing prior to social consciousness, therefore ideology, as socially defined, is ubiquitous. Its central issues are concerned with power discourses which relate to a social context. Problems arise in the relations between the ideal and material and concepts of truth and falsehood. Karl Marx began with no concept of ideology, consciousness was determined by an economic base, which ideas alone cannot change. Marx stresses the material, where, as Colin Sumner in Reading ideologies writes "No person or group is exempt from the rule that social relations determine the modes of social consciousness". Marx's theory of alienated labour demonstrates the materialist ethic. Labour is a manifestation of the self. In Capitalism, the owners of the means of production own the labour, thus alienating the worker from the materialisation of self. When ideology became a concept for Marx, after 1845's The German Ideology, it was seen as illusionary and supporting the ruling class. It was falsehood, but unimportant. Ideology could not change experience, as only a revolution on the economic base can liberate.
With the failure of the prophesied proletarian revolution, the Marxist model needed to be reconceptualized. Antonio Gramsci provides a model in his work on hegemony. Here, the ruling class is accepted by consent above coercion, through their hegemonic projections of kinship with the proletarian. Hegemony is manifest through the institutions of civil society, which for Gramsci are as equally influential as the economic base. As Paul Ransome writes in Antonio Gramsci: A New Introduction, "It is ideational persuasion rather than the threat of physical force which ensures the 'consent' of the proletariat". Gramsci stresses the material practise of hegemony through civil institutions, controlled by the ruling class.
Gramsci provides the Marxist model with needed evolution. Hegemony is not negative in each instance. Counter hegemony may be utilised for a group to gain power. He emphasises struggle and the need for consent. Gramsci also allows for non-economic groups, such as gender and ethnic.
Louis Althusser is influenced by Gramsci in the re-appropriation of Marx, providing a study which will be emphasised in this consideration of America at war. Marx's determinism is replaced by over-determinism, where there is always more than one factor in determining individual's entry into subjecthood. For Althusser, ideology is realised materially in ideological state apparatus. These are opposite to repressive state apparatus, which function by violence. When both methods are harmonised, the ruling class doctrine is accepted. Ideology is prior to the individual and interpolates the individual into subjection to ruling class production. Thus the class system is reproduced.
Interpolation works by ideological recognition. For Althusser, subjects "Constantly practise the rituals of ideological recognition". The outcome of such practises is a distinction between illusion and reality, as "All Ideology represents in its necessarily imaginary distortion not the existing relations of production ... but above all the (imaginary) relationship of individuals to the relations of production and the relations that derive from them". This is the outcome of ideological hailing. This functions by a mirror structure. The prime example is Christianity. Christianity interpolates the individual as subject by reflecting an image of the subject back to them through an Absolute Subject, God. In ideological structures, the centre may not be God, but that which leads the individual to an image of itself as whole. Terry Eagleton in Ideology: An Introduction writes "In the ideological sphere, similarly, the human subject transcends its true state of diffuseness or decenterment and finds a consoling coherent image of itself reflected back in the 'mirror' of a dominant ideological discourse". Ideology is centred, a closed structure. The individual is misrecognized in an image of unity.
Ideology works unconsciously for Althusser. It hides its own process, leading to economic reproduction. As ideology is omnipresent, the individual is doomed to subjecthood whereby they work 'all by themselves'. Ideology as a structure gives a false sense of semiotic closure. The problem of structure is its denial of history, of its social context. It ignores historical fragmentation and the repression and exclusion inherent to any closed system. Yet these are prerequisites for ideology. It must eternalise itself for acceptance, centre itself to be recognized, deny experience to function. It forms a structure above experience, and as in Althusser, thence governs experience. Experience as of self or of material reality, is the experience of difference, non-unity, which defies the centre, the absolute subject as unified. Structure correlates to the laws of identity, where nothing can both be and not be. As John Letche writes "Clearly these 'laws' imply the exclusion of certain features, to wit: complexity, meditation and difference".
For Jacques Derrida, the logocentric notion of centred discourse is precisely what denies experience as difference. Logocentrism is paradoxical. It functions by positing an origin which is present to itself where the origin or centre is unified. This is a requirement for the guarantee of meaning and truth. This leads to exclusion of what is other to the origin. The paradox is that there can be no primordial centre of origin without its other. Just as there is no night without day, the origin is defined by what it is not, by absence. This absence leaves a trace in the presence of the origin, the trace of other means that the centre, the Absolute Subject, is not present to itself. Difference is at the origin which negates the origin. Thus, the centre of discourse with its to claims presence as meaning, is under similar criticism. For Derrida apart from this paradox demonstrated, the centre is historically determined, a privileged signifier is turned into a transcendental signified, that to which all signification refers as the guarantor of truth and meaning. Yet for Derrida "The centre is not the centre". Its historicity denies the notion of eternalised structure. We can see ideology's attempt to achieve what Derrida deconstructs. History denies structure, as experience is difference, negating the unity of meaning in abstract form.
This is similar to the work of Theodor Adorno. For Adorno, ideology is the refusal of difference, as apparent in commodity fixation and the notion of exchange value. Exchange value is an abstraction of the use value of a product of labour to its commodity. This abstraction suppresses the difference of production. As Eagleton writes, for "Adorno, this mechanism of abstract exchange is the very secret of ideology itself". Difference in production is suppressed for identity in exchange value. Difference is reduced to unity. As David Hawks in Ideology writes "It is this illegitimate reduction which constitutes the form presently taken by 'ideology'". Non-identity is in opposition to ideology. Adorno expresses a need for negative dialectics, that which articulates difference.
For Adorno, the highest form of Negative dialectics is art. Adorno wishes for, as Martin Jay in Adorno writes "An art that exposed the palliatives of mass culture for what they were". This is an art liberated from the cultural industry of production as commodity, expressing purposelessness above purpose. For Derrida, such art form is writing in a deconstructive sense. Writing has been seen throughout the logocentric history of the West as impure, a supplement to the voice which is an expression of meaning as presence. Writing is a force which resists structure. The play of difference is creation, resisting fixation. Writing, as a sign of absence, threatens a structure centred on presence. In Force and Signification, Derrida distinguishes between an attempt to write and a will to write. The attempt to write is "Indeed the acknowledgement of pure language, the responsibility confronting the vocation of 'pure' speech which, once understood, constitutes the writer as such". Here writing is an acceptance of structure as presence, and thereby conforms to the logocentric notion of its own inferiority. In opposition "The will to write reawakens the wilful sense of the will; freedom". It would seem, then, that there is a possibility of transcending semiotic closure, through the realisation of difference. This could refer to either experience or art as deconstruction as both are articulations of the primordial difference denying structure. As Derrida continues "Preformationism, teleologism, reduction of force, value and duration - these are as one with geometrisim, creating structure". Ideology is this denial of history, experience and difference, for identity and closure. Adorno and Derrida suggest a deconstructive aesthetic.
This deconstructive aesthetic is realised in Joseph Heller's Catch-22. Throughout the text the ideology of war is deconstructed through its formal qualities as an art and its depiction of experience, reflected mainly through the anti-hero, positioned as anti in relation to ideology, Yossarian. Yossarian's observation's are an ironic presentation of American ideology: "The hot dog, the Brooklyn Dodgers. Mom's Apple pie. That's what everyone's fighting for"(16). When presented with someone who embodies this, Yossarian's aversion is apparent. "Appleby was a fair-haired boy from Iowa who believed in God, motherhood and the American way of life, without ever thinking about any of them, and everybody who knew him liked him. 'I hate that son of a bitch' Yossarian growled"(28). This extract demonstrates many of the techniques of Catch-22, in its will to write. The ironic tone and contradiction are against writing as structured, true to itself and linear. The fragmentation of the narrative resists closed structuralism.
Patriotism is either undermined or shown as paradoxical, such as the Texan who feels 'patriotically' that people of means should be given more votes. His belief demonstrates an ideology based on exclusion of otherness. Major Major's patriotism demonstrates the conflicting ideology of war "He was told that he should not kill, and he did not kill, until he got into the army. Then he was told to kill, and he killed"(112). Commentary in the narrative can also be explicitly dismissive, as in Captain Black, who "Disapproved of Adolf Hitler, who had done such a great job of combating Un-American activities in Germany"(48), and also in Nately's bewilderment and confusion in the dialogue with the old man, who states "Could you really say with so much certainty that American, with all its strength and prosperity, with its fighting man that is second to none, and with its standard of living that is the highest in the world, will last as long as ... the frog?"(310). Nately's ideology of America, the benevolent superpower, is destroyed by the old man's malicious logic. Nately's desperate responses are undermined completely. He is left utterly confused.
Yossarian's logic is also anti-ideologic. "'The enemy', retorted Yossarian with weighted precision 'is anybody who's going to get you killed no matter which side he's on'"(161). Because of this experience "It made sense to cry out in pain every night"(73). Yossarian experiences the war, where ideology gives no comfort, and thus is deconstructed. The apex of this experience is displayed in the scenes with the dying pilot Snowden, which pass in and out of the narrative as a reminder of the reality of war. "Snowden freezing to death in the rear section of the plane, holding his eternal, immutable secret concealed ... and then spilling it out suddenly all over the floor"(438). What is this secret? "Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret"(554). The emphasis here is on the material experience over the ideals of war. This serves as deconstructive evidence of ideology's fallacious nature. Ideology cannot bear very much reality.
In Catch-22 madness is the result of the decentering of ideology. The experience of empty centres of meaning leads to identification with the 'other'. The other is what the centre is not. The centre is presence, meaning and reason, as ensured by the logos. By binary definition inherent in structuralism, the sense of decentering leads to absence, non-meaning and madness. This process is explicit in the text. War ideology persuades the subject of the meaning of its actions, yet the experience demonstrates the inherent non-meaning. As Loren Baritz in God's country and American Know-How writes "The decency of the impulse ... cannot hide the bloody eagerness to kill in the name of virtue". The experience of war is the experience of non-meaning. This is in direct opposite to the ideology of the war which is of meaning. Thus ideology is realised as having an empty centre.
Yossarian is in constant contact with empty centres of meaning. The solider in white refutes the army's ideology. American soldiers are fighting machines, but this reality of incapacitation is felt strongly. In a perverse twist, the solider in white is returned after being proclaimed dead, to which Dunbar believes "'There's no one inside!' Dunbar yelled out at him unexpectedly. Yossarian felt his heart skip a beat and his legs grow weak"(462). This sign of the army is a presentation of emptiness. Catch-22 is closest the text comes to producing a transcendental signified, that which acts as centre, where all signifiers refer to for their connection with the signified, to attain meaning. Catch-22 is the centre of all the ideology. It limits by anticipating answers. It forms a closure by denying movement. Catch-22 says you do not have to present Catch-22. When the army exiles the prostitutes, they present Catch-22 as their right to do so, without presenting Catch-22. Yossarian now realises the paradoxical nature of the centre: "Cursing Catch-22 vehemently as he descended the stairs, even though he knew there was no such thing. Catch-22 did not exist"(516). The representation of Catch-22 demonstrates the violence inherent in structuring. It wills meaning through repressive structuring, but this meaning is denied by the deconstructive experience as non meaning. All these paradoxes and underminings of a centre as meaning are explicit in the American experience in Vietnam.
What perplexed campaigners against Vietnam was the reason behind America's involvement. It was not imperial, nor was it for economic gains. It is as Norman Podhuretz writes in A Moral and Necessary Intervention "The United States went into Vietnam for the sake not of its own direct interests in the ordinary sense but for the sake of an ideal". America's ideals led to Vietnam. Vietnam was subject to colonial rule for the past century, being subject to China, French imperialism, and Japan. In 1945, when Japan surrendered, the French sort to re-establish their colonial rule, but met resistance by the nationalists under Ho Chi Men. This provided America with an ideological situation. Were they to support imperialism or risk loosing Vietnam to the communist domino effect, evident in Asia? American involvement was assured by the defeat of the French in 1954 at the siege at Dien Bien Phu. America became involved to preserve Vietnam from communism and rebuild it as a free state. This is the ideology of America as the 'big brother' of freedom, the America that would 'Pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty'. America's support of the both unpopular and doomed Diem regime led to a number of disastrous military governments and more involvement for America.
Lyndon Johnson's decision to commit troops to Vietnam, though contrary to his previous pledges, is articulated in the mould of America as defenders of freedom "We fight because we must fight if we are to live in a world where every country can shape its own destiny". As David Halbersteim writes "Lyndon Johnson ... was a believer, not a cynic about the big things. Honour. Force, commitments. Who believed in the omnipotence of American power". This belief led to the Gulf of Ton-Kin resolution, whereby war was proclaimed on a vote of 98/2. The press rallied round the president and operation Rolling Thunder began.
Why the involvement is the question that leads from ideology to mythology. Freedom is at the centre of American ideology. This has implications, as Loren Baritz writes "This new world is specially favoured by the lord not only to be endured but spread". Freedom, for America, is tied to expansionism.
Michael Foely in a chapter entitled Freedom as America's first principle, writes "Liberty is habitually connected to the United States". America's history is the history of a New World, freed from the corruption of the old. This equals a new beginning, a belief in an untainted origin. From the Mayflower compact to Patrick Henry's cry 'Give me freedom or give me death', the history of America is the history of liberation. This led to a war of independence, and a constitution that solidifies inalienable rights. Freedom acts as the centre of America's ideology. In Althusserian terminology, the Free Man is the Absolute Subject. Individual's can recognise and aspire to the image of the American Adam, inherent in any pro-American discourse. But now, as in Althusser, individuals submit their true state of disunity and the experience of difference, for the ideologic construction, the Free Man of America. 'America', and all its connotations, is the centre of American ideology.
If freedom is the ideology, expansion is the practise. The proclamation act of 1763 was a cause of revolutionary fervour. The expansion Westward confirmed America as a continental power. The abundant land was rich with mythological implications. As a second Eden, freedom was thus enshrined in the Western experience. It was America's manifest destiny to bring an enlightened force, an order, to the wilderness.
The experience of expansion proved the paradox of America's concept of freedom, for all too often the freedom of some means the repression of others. The Indians were promised all the land west of the Mississippi, until gold and silver was discovered in the supposed useless land. The Daws act of 1887, where plots of land were promised to Indian 'families', is an attempt to interpolate Indians as subjects to the Absolute Subject of The Free Man. The promise of citizenship was so as to hail the other into the ideologic structure, thus denying difference. America as the history of freedom can be seen as the freedom for those who ideologically recognise their own image in the image of The Free Man. They who do not conform to the image become the unthought, the repressed and excluded of the structure. America has these groups in abundance. The process demonstrates the divide between ideals and practise, ideology and experience. As Foely writes "It is within this evident chasm between its proclaimed values and actual practice that exists a darker side to American Liberty". The denial of difference is to maintain structure. As in deconstruction, the centre is tainted by the trace of its other. American freedom is made possible by exclusion. Its status of purity and presence to itself is negated. The Vietnam experience disrupted these unconscious structures to such a degree, that the stable ideology of two hundred years was decentered.
On entry to Vietnam, John Hellmann in American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam beliefs "American's generally saw themselves entering yet another frontier, once again 'Western pilgrims' on a mission of protection and progress". Hellmann's study depicts an America escaping the social corruption they were experiencing in their own land by reliving the frontier experience in a return to a mythic landscape. This was a hope to regenerate their own mythic value away from the urban corruption and materialism inherent to civilisation, as did their pioneering ancestors. This original idealism gave way to the reality of the war. Escalation led to LBJ's bombing regime, where three years of destruction toward North Vietnam depicted an inhumane technology against a mythic landscape. Kennedy's idealism had given way to Johnson's bureaucratic and technologic denial of myth. As Hellmann writes, it was to "Provide images of cold technological aggression against an agrarian society". It is as if America destroyed its own myth through experience.
The Tet offensive also added to the disillusionment of the war. General Giap's offensive was proclaimed a defeat, but it led to dissension within the administration. Robert Kennedy's rhetoric when he claims "A Total military victory is not within sight" is similar to the issues of the study. He speaks of the illusion of an American victory, hiding a reality which will be grim and painful to bear. He believes "Our enemy, savagely striking at will across all of South Vietnam, has finally shattered the mask of official illusion with which we have concealed our true circumstances, even from ourselves". It is interesting to note he speaks of the VC as 'savage'. It is as if on a mythic return to pioneer experience, the wilderness, the otherness which American expansion originally interpolated into its ideology, has resisted such structuring. This refusal of structure was experienced to such a degree that the ideals became decentered. The reality of war has led to the defeat of American armed forces, and with them, the defeat of American ideology. Otherness, for America, is defeat, which it had never experienced. Once it admits this state of otherness, it becomes apparent that Ideals are never enough. This defeat reflects back to the centre of meaning and questions belief in it. Disillusioned, the American experience in Vietnam was of non-meaning by definition, for its ideology was meaning and that failed.
The experiences of John Kerry are a part of the decentering process. He is part of the thousand strong 'Vets against Vietnam', of which one hundred and fifty testified in Detroit to the horror of the war crimes they committed. As Kerry states "They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do". Here, America is held responsible for the experience suffered by the people, as it exposed its subjects to the otherness that must be repressed. This will reflect back onto the image of The Free Man, as that which Americans are expected to subject themselves to. The experience of the war refutes this unified image, and American ideology is deconstructed. Kerry had first hand knowledge of the corrupt regime America was supporting, of free fire zones, and that "We rationalised destroying villages in order to save them". For Kerry, the experience was decentering, the belief in what America positioned as meaningful was destroyed. This experience is examined in Frances Coppola's Apocalypse Now.
The first image of the film is the jungle, then its destruction. The first words are "This is the end". It sets up a sense opposed to ideology. The room where Willard is given his mission is as Gilbert Adair writes in Hollywood's Vietnam "The cool, civilised room, its table laid decorously with cold cuts, seems as remote from the nightmarish reality of the war as the spacious mansions of the Mafiosi 'brass'". In this scene there is a distinction between Willard, who experiences the substance of the film, and the detached directors, who proclaim "This mission does not exist. Nor will it ever exist". For them, it does not. What is evident throughout is the attempt to project American ideals and way of life onto the darkness of the jungle. In Willard's encounter with Air Mobile, after the destruction of a village, the evacuation of the refugees is infused with hypocritical ideology. A solider conducting the Vietnamese to 'safety', says "we are here to help you" amid the destruction his army has caused. A minister preaches the Lord's prayer in the shadow of a ruined chapel.
The images of Americana, surfing, rock and roll, Kilgore's beach party with the 'beers and T-bones' leads Willard to comment "The more they tried to make it just like home, the more everybody missed it". This is evident in the playboy bunnies display. Adair writes it is "The bizarre juxtaposition of American-as-apple pie razzmatazz with the horror we know to be stalking just outside the compound". This alien culture is framed by a dark jungle. The shot of the Vietnamese behind fencing is in antithesis to the glitzzy show. The silent comment in this celebration of America is its intrinsic hollowness. The outbreak of the rioting is perhaps the rage of the soldiers at an image of the country which has caused the realisation of its ideological contradictions, through the experience of the Vietnam war.
Colonel Walter E. Kurtz is the logical conclusion of such ideology. As Hellmann writes "Kurtz represents that mythic ideal and finally the horrific self-awareness of its hollowness". He is the centre of the story, a pioneer and 'bringer of light' to a 'savage' people. When this is confronted by Willard, it is a presentation of a heart of darkness, which lies behind the American structured ideology. It is a realisation of 'the horror' behind the ideal. The final message of Kurtz is "Drop the bomb, Exterminate them all". This is the centre which is revealed to be, as Adair writes "The inner sanctum of America's collective unconscious", a centre which has realised its other. Madness and evil.
In Apocalypse Now, the destruction of the landscape correlates to the destruction of the American myth. They destroy themselves. In Captain Richard Colby's letter, he writes "Forget it! I'm Never coming home back. Forget it!". Home is erased by the experience he has felt. Willard comments "I've been back there. And I knew that it just didn't exist anymore". The film suggests America must return from its experience in Vietnam without the myth of American natural virtue or sense of special mission. This seems to be a result of the deconstruction of its ideology.
The Deer Hunter demonstrates a restructuring of American ideology in its appeal to mythology. Adair comments on "Its attempt to wring from Vietnam experience a positive or, at least, tolerable statement". Michael, the hunter, has an obsessive need to dominate his unconscious, represented by the wilderness and the deer, through 'one-shot'. This control is belief in omnipotence, as in America's self image. But this results in destruction, symbolised by Nick's suicide. The acceptance of the trauma is an attempt to resolve the conflict of ideology and reality, as Michael on his second hunt does - 'Okay', which is reverberated back through the mountains. The film ends with a pilgrimesque image of breakfast, and a verse of God Bless America. Cimino seems to suggests that America can benefit from Vietnam if it rekindles the frontier character that formed America's national identity, but to also realise the limitations, and danger of its own ideals.
In the aftermath of the Vietnam war, there seemed to be a reaffirmation of American values. Nixon states "We have never fought in a more moral cause", as the genocide of the Cambodian people bears terrifying witness to. Ronald Reagan, in a speech on Veteran's day, stated "It was, after all, however imperfectly pursued, the cause of freedom". He speaks of a new dawn for the American people. Derrida believes that deconstruction will always be re-established in the old code. He states in Positions "Breaks are always and fatally re-inscribed in an old cloth that must continually, interminably be undone". Structure is always reformed. Is this what we see in America? The Vietnam trauma did must to decentre the spurious discourse of 'America', by the experience of horror behind the ideals. A horror which is the trace of the other inherent to the ideology of freedom. There is now an image of self confidence, but is the reality different? George Bush's belief that the Gulf War kicked the Vietnam hangover is insidious. Or perhaps the Vietnam experience was secluded to a generation, and did little to debunk an ideology which appears to have reaffirmed itself. There is always a desire to believe we live in reasonable conditions, and that our cause is and always has been just and meaningful, but does this self-deception justify an ideology that led to the horror of the Vietnam war.