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Recycled Propaganda In The Vietnam War

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The Vietnam War can be a sensitive topic for almost everybody that you have a conversation with, but why is this subject so sensitive? This is a sensitive topic because there was always mixed feeling about the war. In the beginning of the war there was a majority of support, but during the war the mindset of the people of the United States drastically changed. People that supported the war were suddenly protesting why we were in Vietnam. Music played a huge impact on the way people thought about the war. In the beginning, when there was mostly support, the music supported the war and then when the feeling changed so did the music. There is an outstanding correlation between the music and the people’s moral not just in Vietnam, but in …show more content…

In 1954, about eleven years before we sent troops to Vietnam, President Eisenhower coined the “domino theory” to show the importance that if Vietnam fell to communism then a majority of south Asia would fall as well (U.S. Propaganda in the Vietnam War). This was the first use of propaganda for the Vietnam War and we can see that it was applied many years before the war even started. The importance of starting this early was to try to get the views of the public on the side of the government and have a fear of the spread of communism.in the article “Recycled Propaganda” the author says “the U.S. government stumbled on what seemed a magic formula--total immersion of the entire population in a war against a clearly defined and clearly evil enemy” (Smetak). This is exactly what the government was doing during the Vietnam War, they made the public opinion of communism and the fear of the spread of communism a major concern for the public. By doing this, the public was certainly concerned …show more content…

As Bica Cammilo said “We are admonished that this crisis is real and grave. In response, we must unite and rally around the beliefs and values we hold most sacred” (Cammilo 453). We had to stick together in Vietnam because of the death totals and the decaying support for the war. The Vietnamese had an advantage in the jungle, but our planes gave us an advantage as well. Air support was a major advantage that we had in Vietnam but it was tough making the air support effective. John W. Dix explains “During the Vietnam War, close air support (CAS) required having an aircraft close to a target and often exposed to hostile fire.1 Aircrews needed visual contact with the target or an offset reference point—ground forces could usually hear and see the aircraft involved”(LEADS, 53). Aircrafts gave us an outstanding advantage against the Vietnamese and was used as much as possible during the war. There were many types of weapons in the war but, there was one that people normally would not think of as a weapon, music. During Vietnam there was a non-conventional way of psychological warfare, prisoners could have been a part of a new system of torture that used music. “The prisoner becomes psychologically powerless before the authority of interrogators, both dependent and unable to resist” (TRANS). This new

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Music and War: The Effect of Music During the Vietnam War In the book called Battle Notes: Music of the Vietnam War, author Lee Andresen discussed the various viewpoints of songwriters in their music, pertaining to the American involvement in the Vietnam War. His thesis was that “All American wars had their music, but Vietnam was a conflict in which music played an especially significant role. Beyond simply entertaining, it also shaped and articulated public opinion in unprecedented fashion.” Andresen showed this in his work, by showing how different forms of both anti-war and pro-war songs had an effect on the American public.

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