Arguing with facts against polemics and false claims

There is a lot of public discussion these days over pseudoscience, political conspiracy theories, crackpot history, malicious propgaganda and what the best ways to combat them may be.

One of the surprising findings of some studies is that in some fashion, provide correct information to debunk the false claims can have the effect of reinforcing belief in the false claim.

That has always struck me as intuitively wrong. I even suspect it's sometimes offered in politics in the US as a way to get Democrats to not bother to debunk the constant stream of misinformation and falsehood against Democrats from FOX News, Breitbart, Infowars, and various other rightwing media, including alt-right sources and foreign nations' propaganda operations.

Four scholars from the University of Illinois and the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania published their results on their own study of that problem, Debunking: A Meta-Analysis of the Psychological Efficacy of Messages Countering Misinformation Psychological Science 28:11 (2017).

They found that in some cases, the reverse-debunking effect occurs, in which hearing the correct information can indeed reinforce the false belief. But it doesn't have to.

They offer the following suggestions for avoiding that result in the sense of a communication or linguistic strategy:

Recommendation 1: reduce the generation of arguments in line with the misinformation.

Recommendation 2: create conditions that facilitate scrutiny and counterarguing of misinformation.

Recommendation 3: correct misinformation with new detailed information but keep expectations low.

The first of the recommendations is the most troubling one. Because it suggests that the more detailed the argument against a set of misinformation is, the more likely the exchange is to strengthen the false belief. But this doesn't apply to casually held beliefs. As they explain, "The false beliefs on which we focus here occur when the audience initially believes misinformation and that misinformation persists or continues to exert psychological influence after it has been rebutted." If people hold a belief strongly and have thought and talked about the false enough have adduced multiple reasons for believing it, giving them a lot of arguments against it can kick off this proces: "when the elaboration process organizes, updates, and integrates elements of information, generating explanations in line with the initial misinformation, this process may create a network of confirming causal accounts about the misinformation in memory."

In other words, the harder people think about beliefs with which they had established an identification, the harder it may be for them to change their minds.

The second recommendations gets to the issue of framing, which has been much discussed in American politics, particularly i response to the work and recommendations of George Lakoff. Aside from providing an appropriate context for discussion, it also means providing not just facts rebutting the bad information but a new framework for understanding the matter, a different perspective.

Following from that, the third recommendation emphasizes providing the correct information as distinct from just refuting the bad. With a reminder that it won't always work! But other times it will.

The Annenberg Center provides a summary of the article here, "Debunking study suggests ways to counter misinformation and correct 'fake news'." ScienceDaily09/09/2017.

In the context of the immigration issue which is roiling the politics of the United States and the European Union, another implication of the first recommendation is important.

Speaking of this persistence-of-mistinformation effect, Stephan Lewandowsky notes, "one of the ways to get around that is to tell people not just that something is false, but tell them what's true. Alternative information makes it much easier to update your memory." (Susannah Locke interview, How to debunk false beliefs without having it backfire Vox 04/25/2018)

Lewandowsky also notes that the setting of a classroom-type situation is different from that in which political information and disinformation is often conveyed:

If you have a situation like a classroom where people are forced to sit down and pay attention, that's when more information is helpful. There's a lot of evidence of this in educational psychology.

Now the problem is in a sort of casual situation, people listening to the radio or having a superficial conversation — that's where the information deficit model doesn't apply. And superficially just throwing information at people probably will make them tune out. So you've got to be careful when you're talking about public discourse, TV, radio, media.

I've been thinking I should devote more posts to factual information on the immgration issue. Hearing the reality behind a strongly held belief that is associated with a person's political or cultural identity won't necessarily change their mind. But reality does matter!

The Austrian broadcaster ORF 2 program Im Zentrum carried a report last night (30.09.2018) on Politik und Pressefreiheit - Der Kampf um Macht und Wahrheit (video available at the link through October 7) on the status of press freedom in Austria today. It included Walter Rosenkranz, the head of the parliamentary club for the far-right FPÖ, which is the junior partner in the current national government; Beate Meinl-Reisinger, head of the NEOS party which holds seats in Parliament; Georg Wailand, the deputy chief editor of Austria's most widely circulated paper Kronen Zeitung; Armin Thurnher, publisher of the influential Vienna weekly Falter; and, Reinhard Kreissl, a sociologist of crime.

Rosenkranz defended efforts by the FPÖ-led Interior Ministry to encourage police to publicize details about the backgrounds of people suspected in violent crimes. Which is consistent with anti-immigrant propaganda efforts to stigmatize immigrants as more likely to commit crimes than native Austrians, which the crime statistics consistently show is not the case. There was some discussion about crime statistics and how to interpret them, including discussion about how the crime rate has been declining in Austria. Rosenkranz used the discussion to try to associate rape in particular with immigrants. Meinl-Reisinge challenged him into admitting that the most common national origin of the foreign rapists is Germany. The xenophobes preferred image of foreign rapists is that of an Afghan, Arab, or African perpetrator. This is similar to Donald Trump's anti-Latino propaganda.

My impression was that the discussion got the point across to anyone in the audience actually paying attention that the impression left by xenophobic agitators that Austrians are increasingly in danger of violent crime and it is the fault of immigrants, both of which ideas are false. On the other hand, Rosenkranz did what he could to highlight the image of foreign rapists, which presumably also reinforced that narrative in some viewers' minds. Debunking is complicated.

Walter Hämmerle reports in Die Schwarzmaler Wiener Zeitung 29.09.2018 that according to the FPÖ-led Interior Ministry's information, there were 510 thousand criminal complaints in Austria in 2017, which "is the lowest number in ten years." He observes that the numbers that are there include some serious concerns, "but taken in themselves provide no rational justification for the general pessimism" and general security in Austria.

Rummy's propaganda and the stab-in-the-back legend

Stab-in-the-back illustrated on a 1924 rightwing German nationalist election poster (this stab-in-the-back legend was related to the First World War and is called the Dolchstosslegende in German)

This important article from this weekend, Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon's Hidden Hand by David Barstow New York Times 04/20/08, has received justifiable attention in the liberal blogosphere, though the poobahs of the Sunday morning talks shows didn't see anything in it worth mentioning. Barstow's article describes what was in fact (and probably in law as well) a propaganda operation aimed specifically at the American public, run by the Pentagon, using retired generals, many of whom were defense industry lobbyists, and relying on at least a tacit quid-pro-quo arrangement in which the lobbyists would spout the Rummy line of the day in exchange for "access" to Pentagon officials with decision-making power over contracts.

This story gives a grimly dramatic picture of how deeply corrupt the American news media have become, particularly TV news. As Barstow rights, the cases he discusses describe "a symbiotic relationship where the usual dividing lines between government and journalism have been obliterated".

Historian Gareth Porter (The Pentagon's Corrupt Sock Puppet "Military Analysts" Exposed Huffington Post 04/20/08) and The Nation's Katrina Vanden Heuvel (NYT Investigation Exposes Pentagon Pimps & Propaganda Operation 04/20/08) have both made impassioned calls for public follow-up on the problems described in Barstow's article.

Others have put this story into some historical perspective of the massive dysfunction of our national political press, including Bob Somerby in his Daily Howler post 04/21/08 and Glenn Greenwald in Major revelation: U.S. media deceitfully disseminates government propagandaSalon 04/20/08).

One of the things that particularly caught my attention is how the stab-in-the-back theory of the loss of the Vietnam War played a significant role in this operation. Barstow writes:

Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation. "This was a coherent, active policy," he said. ...

In interviews, participants described a powerfully seductive environment — the uniformed escorts to Mr. Rumsfeld’s private conference room, the best government china laid out, the embossed name cards, the blizzard of PowerPoints, the solicitations of advice and counsel, the appeals to duty and country, the warm thank you notes from the secretary himself.

"Oh, you have no idea," Mr. Allard said, describing the effect. "You're back. They listen to you. They listen to what you say on TV." It was, he said, "psyops on steroids" — a nuanced exercise in influence through flattery and proximity. "It’s not like it's, 'We'll pay you $500 to get our story out,' " he said. "It's more subtle."

The access came with a condition. Participants were instructed not to quote their briefers directly or otherwise describe their contacts with the Pentagon. (my emphasis)

It's important to understand what "psyops" means in this connection, in which Allard's application of the term seems to be unfortunately correct.

Psyops, also known as "information operations", is propaganda aimed at the enemy, pursued as part of a military effort. Leaflets dropped from planes or balloons are a familiar, if fairly primitive and probably low-impact form of psyops.

But in this case, the psyops were directed by the Pentagon and were aimed at Congress and American public opinion. It's not clear if this operation technically violates US laws against propagandizing the US public, although if such operations like this one aren't illegal, they should be.

Because "the enemy" at which this secret psyops operation was aimed was Congress and the American public. How much more explicit does it get than this?

[On Aug. 4, 2005] James T. Conway, then director of operations for the Joint Chiefs, presided over another conference call with analysts. He urged them, a transcript shows, not to let the marines' [14] deaths [the previous day] further erode support for the war.

"The strategic target remains our population," General Conway said. "We can lose people day in and day out, but they’re never going to beat our military. What they can and will do if they can is strip away our support. And you guys can help us not let that happen." (my emphasis)

And the stab-in-the-back notion is a key part of the mindset that regards the democratic public of the country as the enemy of the Pentagon and its wars:

Many [of the analysts in question] also shared with Mr. Bush's national security team a belief that pessimistic war coverage broke the nation's will to win in Vietnam, and there was a mutual resolve not to let that happen with this war.

This was a major theme, for example, with Paul E. Vallely, a Fox News analyst from 2001 to 2007. A retired Army general who had specialized in psychological warfare, Mr. Vallely co-authored a paper in 1980 that accused American news organizations of failing to defend the nation from "enemy" propaganda during Vietnam.

"We lost the war — not because we were outfought, but because we were out Psyoped," he wrote. He urged a radically new approach to psychological operations in future wars — taking aim at not just foreign adversaries but domestic audiences, too. He called his approach "MindWar" — using network TV and radio to "strengthen our national will to victory."

This lazy excuse is unfortunately very popular in the officer corps and is practically a religious dogma for Republican conservatives.

But the notion is false. And its widespread popularity, particularly among the officer corps, is a very serious democratic deficit in the US. As we see in Barstow's story, it also has a toxic interaction with what is probably the most serious democratic deficit of all, the "train wreck" state of our Establishment political news media.

As long as military leaders and civilian officials define the manipulation of American public opinion as a military goal for which the Pentagon can and should be responsible, this kind of thing will happen. The military's emphasis is on achieving results and on protecting operational security. Given a choice, most military officers will play it safe and opt for more manipulation of information and less transparency to Congress and the public.

The separation between "political" and "military" functions may be somewhat fluid in a political theory sense. But in the practice of a Constitutional democracy, those boundaries have to be defined and respected. You could argue that Rummy's bullying, arrogant management style represented a strengthening of civilian control over the military. But, as we see here, Rummy's goal was actually to erase boundaries between what were properly military roles and civilian roles.

We've got the military running an elaborate psyops operation against the American public, mixed with the banana-republic style crony capitalism that is one of the defining characteristics of the Cheney era. And we have Bush publicly hiding behind the skirts of Savior-General Petraeus, pretending that he's just doing what the military tells him to, while Petraeus cooperates with the charade. We have a serious breakdown in the proper distinctions between military and civilian spheres. And it's the job of Congress first of all to recognize and correct the problem. It's also - don't laugh - the job of the mainstream media to expose and criticize this, though it's hard to see how that can happen on the necessary scale without new legislation restricting corporate control of the news media.

But military theorists themselves also have a responsibility to distinguish between democratic and undemocratic ideas in this regard. The notion that the military can or should regard the American public as the enemy in a foreign war is fundamentally incompatible with democratic governance.

They also embrace the stab-in-the-back lie

Military theorists and historians both military and civilian can also address this with honest work on the Vietnam War, as many have, and specific debunking aimed at the dishonest and phony notion that the military won the Vietnam War but the gutless civilians in Congress and the public which was unworthy of its glorious victories generals threw it all away. It's a deeply false version of history. And the ideological conclusions being drawn from it are deeply destructive to democracy. As well as being a lazy excuse for the officer corps to avoid dealing with the very real failings of their own processes and assumptions.

As one of many sound historical treatments of the war that do not indulge this false, ideologically-generated pseudohistory, I would mention here George Herring's America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975 (1986 edition) and Jeffrey Record's The Wrong War: Why We Lost in Vietnam (1998).

It's also up to all of us to do what we can to ensure that the already-emerging stab-in-the-back version of the Iraq War doesn't gain the kind of traction that the Vietnam War stab-in-the-back lie has achieved.

That false claim doesn't have only anti-democratic implications at home. It's also at the foundation of the great Maverick McCain's strategy of opened-ended war in Iraq.

Tags: authoritarianism, stab-in-the-back, propaganda, vietnam war

The Patriotic Correctness of propaganda strategic communication

The Autumn 2007 number of Parameters also includes an article by military writer Richard Halloran on Strategic Communication. He opens with a famous story from Harry Summers, one of the chief architects of the stab-in-the-back theory of the Vietnam War:

The late Colonel Harry Summers liked to tell a tale familiar to many who served in Vietnam. In April 1975, after the war was over, the colonel was in a delegation dispatched to Hanoi. In the airport, he got into a conversation with a North Vietnamese colonel named Tu who spoke some English and, as soldiers do, they began to talk shop. After a while, Colonel Summers said: "You know, you never defeated us on the battlefield." Colonel Tu thought about that for a minute, then replied: "That may be so. But it is also irrelevant."

As a reality-check, we need to remember that in 1968 when Ernest Medina and William Calley led their troops into the Vietnamese hamlet known to the Americans as My Lai 4 and murdered dozens of civilians of all ages in cold blood, they officially reported that they had killed a bunch of Vietcong. Some of the intelligence officers back at base were mildly worried that they found so few reported weapons in comparison to the kills they had reported, but that was not unusual.

When you measure "battle victories" by body counts of people killed in air strikes or direct attacks on villages and just count every body on the ground as a dead enemy, you have to question whether the common claim that the military "never lost a battle" in Vietnam is meaningful at all. Although the My Lai massacre was an extreme case, deliberate killing of civilians was far more widespread than it should have been due to breakdowns in command discipline, which even Harry Summers would have had difficulty blaming on the proverbial protesting hippies back home. But even when civilian deaths in villages were "collateral damage" of legitimate military actions, it didn't benefit the American and South Vietnamese cause. If you were to mark every military action in which a civilian was killed as "collateral damage" as a negative, and marked down every instance of a civilian being deliberately killed as a loss, the balance of battles "won" versus those "lost" in Vietnam would look considerably different.

When Blackwater gunned down a bunch of Iraqi civilians on September 16, they initially reported it as attackers killed and another battle won. Whatever the details are finally confirmed to be, this is the same procedure that the Army, the Marines and the Air Force seem to be following in Iraq and Afghanistan. Anytime there's a battle and they count the bodies afterward, it's reported as dead insurgents. Excuse me, these days it's dead Al Qa'ida terrorists. And any day now, it's going to start being "suspected Iranian Al Quds operatives". If you can believe Blackwater's excuses for their careless shooting and even outright murders, then you can also believe that are glorious military and infallible generals have never, ever, "lost a battle" in Iraq, too.

You can see the same pretty much every day at the Air Force's happy-face News Web site. For instance, in their report on the air war for October 4, they report:

In Iraq, an Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcon used a GBU-38 to strike an explosive laden house in Baghdad. The strike was reported as successful and the target was destroyed. ...

In Baqubah, F-16s conducted shows of force to deter suspicious individuals from violent activities in the vicinity of a suspected enemy vehicle.

The GBU-38 is a 500-lb. bomb. After 4 1/2 years of unending success, the Air Force is still dropping 500- and 2000-lb. bombs in populated areas of Iraqi cities, including Baghdad. If any police department in any city in America dropped a 500-lb. bomb on an allegedly "explosive laden house", it would be front-page news all across the country. And the official investigation that would ensue, plus all the deaths and injuries of innocent civilians it caused, and all the bonehead blunders that may have led up to that occurrence, would also be widely publicized and discussed and debated for weeks.

This is happening every day in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not surprisingly, the Air Force happy-face Web page doesn't report details of every single action. I'm guessing the reason they report as much as they do is the determination of our infallible Air Force generals to make sure they get credit for their invaluable assistance to current counterinsurgency operations. But the report for Oct. 4 says the Air Force flew "49 close-air-support missions". Four dozen in one day. We don't know how many of them involved dropping bombs in populated urban neighborhoods. And since there is virtually no independent reporting on the air war in either Iraq or Afghanistan, we'll never know how many of these brilliant contributions of "close-air support" killed 2, 10, 20, civilian noncombatants, all of whose siblings and cousins then feel honor-bound to kill Americans in retaliation.

Halloran then projects the same whining stab-in-the-back alibi onto the Iraq War:

If that conversation were to be held in today’s vocabulary, it would go something like this. Colonel Summers: "You know, you never defeated us in a kinetic engagement on the battlefield." Colonel Tu: "That may be so. It is also irrelevant because we won the battle of strategic communication - and therefore the war."

On a contemporary note, a US officer returning from Iraq said privately: "We plan kinetic campaigns and maybe consider adding a public affairs annex. Our adversaries plan information campaigns that exploit kinetic events, especially spectacular attacks and martyrdom operations. We aren't even on the playing field, but al Qaeda seeks to dominate it because they know their war will be won by ideas."

When officers and military theorists make arguments like this, they aren't advocating calling a massive truce in Iraq to debate the merits of various schools of Islamic theology or the history of colonialism with the Sunni militias.

More often than not, particularly in relation to the Iraq War (and once the public and Congress really start to focus on how far gone Afghanistan is, it will be expanded to that war, as well), this argument means that our invincible armed forces and our incomparable officer corps and our glorious divine commanders like Saviour-General Petraeus did everything fine and won every battle. But we lost the "information war" because the gutless civilians and cowardly Congressional Democrats and dirty filthy hippies were so perverse and unpatriotic that they refused to take the happy-face military press releases and the endless declarations of endless success from Saviour-General Petraeus and his predecessors and those honest Republican Party and FOX News spokespeople as being the whole story about the Iraq War. (I like to attempt a Faulknerian sentence every now and then.)

Halloran's article is a little behind the times. He treats the war in Iraq as being an obvious part of the GWOT (global war against terrorism, or is it "glorious" war against terrorism now?). But he seems to regard Osama bin Laden as the commander of the Iraqi Sunni and Shi'a militias. He obviously isn't up to the moment with the news that Ahmadinejad Hitler is commanding all they bad guys in Iraq.

Along with the requisite out-of-context quotations from Communist military theorists, Halloran presents the high-brown version of the stab-in-the-back myth of the Iraq War this way:

Vitally important, strategic communication means persuading the nation’s citizens to support the policies of their leaders so that a national will is forged to accomplish national objectives. In this context, strategic communication is an essential element of national leadership. As a former Chief of Staff of the Army, General Edward C. "Shy" Meyer, once said, "Armies don’t fight wars, nations fight wars."

Translated into the Rush-Limbaugh level grunting in which most Republicans seem to communicate these days, that means, "The dang hippies and treasonous Democrats who love The Terrorists didn't support Bush and our Saviour-General Petraeus faithfully enough and that why The Terrorists won." (Check out one of the Republican tracts one day in the bookstore that tries to explain how free-love hippies and liberal Democrats supposedly supported Islamic fundamentalists whose social and political ideas make Cotton Mather look like an uninhibited libertine and raving atheist.)

By the way, if you're wondering if "strategic communication" is some kind of new term for something else, you're right. Halloran writes:

In any case, the word "propaganda" has been tainted and compromised beyond repair as it has become a synonym for untruth or deception. "Strategic communication" is a worthwhile replacement.

Bald-faced lying to the public is bad, you see, if we call it "propaganda". Propaganda is what the Other Side does. But bald-faced lying to the public is good and Patriotically Correct if we call it "strategic communication".

And military leaders are perplexed that they seem to have less credibility with the public than they think they deserve! A deep, dark mystery. Why, why, why might they have such problems?

Who does Halloran say should be the targets for military propaganda strategic communication?

Successful strategic communication assumes a defensible policy, a respectable identity, a core value. In commercial marketing, the product for sale must be well-made and desirable. The strategic communication stratagem hasn’t been built that can pull a poor policy decision out of trouble. Strategic communication begins with identifying audiences. In military terms, what are the targets? In most cases, that should be fairly easy - the government and public of an ally, the pro-American leaders in a neutral nation, the dissidents in a potential adversary, American citizens regardless of political party or geographic region whose support is essential. Some may be immediate believers, others may be dubious. All need to be addressed. (my emphasis)

Actually, since we don't need allies and our military is invincible and our generals infallible, the only only one of those that count in this view of the world are the "American citizens regardless of political party or geographic region".

Don't kid yourself. As kooky as some of this sounds, it's hard dogma for a lot of the officer corps, many military theorists and virtually every Republican member of Congress that the American military can't possibly lose a war. The only thing, the only thing, that can cause a lost war is the traitorous hippies and Defeatocrats who criticize Republican war policies. Including any former generals who now dissent from the Party line, which makes them as bad as any other dirty hippie. Yes, the "culture war" kookiness is that strong in today's Republican Party. And 90% of military officers right now are Republicans.

This stuff makes sense only within the dishonest internal logic of the stab-in-the-back mentality. For foreign audiences, you can put out any dang propaganda strategic communications messages you want. As long as the Air Force is dropping 2000-lb. bombs in residential neighborhoods of Baghdad and Baquba on a daily bases, that's the only message that's going to matter.

And despite the shockingly dysfunctional nature of the American mainstream media, and the public's susceptibility to war fever, we've seen the very same thing these last four years with the Iraq War that we had during the Vietnam War. When generals and military spokespeople and prowar politicians come out month after month and year after year and tell the public that we're winning every battle and there are turning points and tipping points all over the place and that's not what's happening in the real existing war in progress, they're going to lose their credibility.

And they should lose their credibility. If citizenship means anything at all, it has to mean that citizens and voters need to recognize when they're being played for total suckers. That's why the appearance of Saviour-General Petraeus in Washington a few weeks ago that provoked invocations of divinity from Congress and goo-goo-eyed awe from the punditocracy hardly moved public opinion on the Iraq War at all.

Ah, but Halloran also recognizes the value of what nineteenth century European anarchists called the "propaganda strategic communication of the deed":

Actions are among the better purveyors of strategic communication. Army engineers dispatched to Honduras in the 1980s built ramps over the beach in case heavy weapons and equipment needed to be landed to fight the forces of Daniel Ortega in next-door Nicaragua. The engineers also built a road that allowed farmers to get their produce to market more easily and economically, dug wells in a village so that women need not walk five miles with large tins balanced on sticks over their shoulders to get water for their families, and erected a tropical hut that was the best building in the village. The Hondurans turned half of it into a village hall, the other half into a school.

Of course, everyone remembers Ollie North and his co-conspirators building village halls for the friendly natives in Honduras. (NOT!) Halloran's article really starts to read like self-parody after a while.

At least the stab-in-the-back theorizing has some comedic relief. For instance, he gives some bullet-point advice to military propagandists strategic communicators, including:

Lying to the press is never permissible. Idealistically, it would be an ethical violation. Realistically, the liar will probably get caught and his credibility will be destroyed. A time may well come when you need the press to believe you, and they won’t. Lastly, the truth is easier to remember the next time around.

On Nixon's White House tapes, when discussing how to arrange bribes to keep a witness quiet, Nixon famously said that we could do, "but it would be wrong". In the context of this article, that bullet-point is just a laugh line: "We could lie to the public. But it would be wrong."

You can see at the CENTCOM or Air Force News sites the fundamental problem in anyone thinking the military can run a successful public propaganda strategic communications campaign for a war. Pork barrel appropriations for an epic boondoggle like the Star Wars program is another story. Because in the end, the military is going to decide that anything that shows less than total optimism or promises the remotest possibility of embarrassing our glorious generals in any way, much less possibly being exploited by enemy strategic communication propaganda has to be concealed.

As a result, what they come up with as propaganda strategic communication for the folks back home is at the same level as a corporate newsletter. I suppose anyone who's every worked for a company of any size has received the company newsletter. Everyone knows that they may have useful information about changes to benefits programs or things like that. And they will showcase the current company advertising line, which everyone then knows they are expected to pretend to believe in wholeheartedly when it's discussed in business meetings.

But you would need a lobotomy to imagine that an internal company newsletter is real news or that it's going to even hint at some company problem that hasn't already become public knowledge. But then again, some people actually seem to imagine that FOX News is real news...

Tags: harry summers, information war, iraq war, propaganda, stab-in-the-back, vietnam war