Another important theme in the mainstream media for many years has been the notion that the United States was the victim in the Vietnam war, the Vietnamese the cruel villains. This remarkable inversion of reality has been accomplished by two processes: first, by a massive suppression of evidence on the consequences of the war for the Vietnamese; and second, by demonizing the victims, based in large measure on “the national beatification of POWs [prisoners of war] and the myth of POWs as martyrs still being tortured by Vietnam.”
