The Cult of the Victim-Veteran

"""This eye-opening book takes us through a history of war- and postwar spectacle from World War I to the present forever war(s) and exposes intriguing parallels and interrelations in the representation of trauma and its political utilization. Jerry Lembcke shows that it was most often the media and popular culture, rather than the sciences themselves, who introduced and promoted (pseudo)scientific explanations of trauma – which, turned into postwar spectacle, would serve to legitimize new wars, not to end or prevent them."" - Paul Benedikt Glatz, independent scholar (Berlin, Germany), author of Vietnam's Prodigal Heroes (Lexington, 2021) The book presents an original argument about public memory and the Vietnam War. It points to the existence of fantasies that have emerged from that war, which conceive of U.S. military veterans as victims of their own government and that obfuscate veterans’ extensive involvement in anti-war activism. Lembcke spells out the political implications—showing how these fantasies have fuelled a revanchist call to ""Make America Great Again"" and to avenge the lost war in Vietnam through repeated military interventions whose failure perpetuates the vicious ongoing cycle he describes. No other scholars or books have looked at the history in the same way as Lembcke has, nor made the same historical connections. The material is extremely timely and important for people to understand. The book is very vital in exposing a central pathology of modern U.S. political culture which is fuelling a slide towards endless war and fascism. – Jeremy Kuzmarov, Tulsa Community College From shell shock to TBI, Jerry Lembcke reveals how the spectacle of war––in photography, film, literature, journalism––has shaped the science of combat trauma and furnished the contemporary Right with a powerful fantasy of betrayal, loss, and the promise of redemption. Lembcke, our most cleareyed critic of the cultural economy of war, challenges the unassailability of a story that has repeatedly fueled a desire to take up arms and find the next enemy. Read this book. ––Joseph Darda, author of How White Men Won the Culture Wars: A History of Veteran America"