See No Evil Loewen Analysis

In the chapter titled ‘See No Evil: Choosing Not to Look at the War in Vietnam’, Loewen’s main point is to look into how and why the Vietnam War has been ignored in modern day education, and how this has left our young students completely in the dark about the events of the Vietnam War. In order to this point, Loewen highlights the differences in coverage in textbooks of the Vietnam War in comparison to smaller wars, as well as how these textbooks represent or gloss over events that occurred during the war.
First off, Loewen supports his main idea that American students are actually quite unaware of events in recent history, due to these events being omitted or not heavily focused upon in our textbooks. Loewen says the last students to have …show more content…
Loewen mentions how the Vietnam War continues to be our most televised and photographed war, where these images were used to shaped American opinion on the war. Loewen mentions how even just describing the images invokes an emotional response in older Americans, who were exposed to the war and the images that accompanied it, however, the young generations who have no memories of or were not alive during the war, have few opportunities to view these images unless they are provided by their textbooks. Many textbooks fail to use images because they are consider to be ‘taboo’ and violate the rules set by the textbooks, such as showing nudity or human suffering. Despite the fact that during the Vietnam War, the United States dropped three times as many explosives as it dropped during World War II, even newer textbooks who dedicated more pages to discussing and illustrating the war, still fail to properly illustrate any type of real damage done by our side during the Vietnam War. Instead, many of these textbooks choose to use images that may be considered less controversial and don’t paint the United States in a negative light, such as using images of troops greeting President Johnson at an American