Officials’ generalization of the NLF to a category obscured its reality

Evidence

To Walt Rostow the National Liberation Front was but one instance of the ”disease of Communism.” … To Robert McNamara it was a test case for the ”new” Communist strategy of promoting ”wars of national liberation” around the world. To many American military men it was but an example of the threat that guerrillas in general provided to the established governments of the earth. By this attempt at generalization … the officials reduced the nlf to the status of a symbol and, again, obscured its achievement. For the Vietnamese revolution in the south was in many ways unique. If it belonged to a category, then that category was extremely small. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 711

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: This is the epistemic core of the chapter: abstract categorical thinking as a mode of war-making that renders its object invisible, and the claim that nominalist particularity is the truth that abstraction destroys.
• XREF: connects to: FitzGerald’s antiwar case was built on postmodern critique of abstraction — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 710; FitzGerald constructed Vietnamese culture as postmodern in her very mode of describing it — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 747; Politicizing the Semite category caused the concept to unravel — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in…, 705 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Operational concepts miss the determining facts and thereby sustain ideology #corroborates (0.82) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 460
• Distrust of government arises from generalization over humans and fiction #exemplifies (0.80) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 756
• Politicizing the Semite category caused the concept to unravel #corroborates (0.78) — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 705
• Totalizing critical categories covertly become admission criteria that police inclusion #corroborates (0.78) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 412
• Social generalization, though distorting, is what makes social relations possible #qualifies (0.74) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 177
• Racial categories were administratively imposed rather than biologically fixed #corroborates (0.72) — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 216