The Cult of the Victim-Veteran explores the pool of American post- Vietnam War angst that rightists began plying in the 1980s. Ronald Reagan’s 1984 proclamation of a new "Morning in America" encoded the war as the moment of the nation’s fall from grace; it was the meme plagiarized by Donald Trump for his "Make America Great Again" (MAGA) slogan. The national funk tapped for right- wing revanchism was psychologized when George H.W. Bush appropriated post- Vietnam syndrome, the diagnostic forerunner to post- traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), to memorialize the military accomplishments in the Persian Gulf War of 1990–1991—we had "kicked the Vietnam Syndrome." America was a victim- nation, its trauma emblemized by PTSD-stricken veterans whose war mission had been lost on the home front, cast aside, even spat on, upon return home. In this book we see the long historical threads woven for MAGA: the twining of traditional and modern ways of knowing that imbues war trauma with political and cultural properties that complicate its diagnostic use; the post- World War I disclosure that many shellshock patients had never been exposed to exploding shells, and the use of wounded- veteran imagery to fan the flames of German fascism; the cultural necessity of reimaging antiwar Vietnam veterans as psychiatric casualties that calls forth a new diagnostic category, PTSD; the derivatizing of PTSD for traumatic brain injury, Agent Orange, and moral injury; and the victim- veteran figure as metaphor for a wounded America, for which MAGA is the remedy.

From Simpson’s donkey and the Emu War to Vietnam and Ben Roberts-Smith, Australian military history is full of events that didn’t happen the way most people think they did. In his inimitable style, award-winning author Mark Dapin sets the record straight. Australia has many stories and statues ‘lest we forget’ our military past. But from Simpson’s donkey to Ben Roberts-Smith, our history is full of events that didn’t happen the way most people think they did. The first Anzac Day, for example, was far from being a solemn march – it was a celebration where people dressed as cavemen and dinosaurs, among other things. And is it true that British officers callously dispatched Australian soldiers to their deaths in the Dardanelles, as we’ve been told? Did we really hate the soldiers returning from Vietnam? Were the white-feather women of the First World War fact or fiction? In his inimitable style, award-winning author and historian Mark Dapin sets the record straight, showing that the reality was often completely different from the myth – and that in celebrating the wrong people we often overlook the real heroes. ‘With Lest, Mark Dapin transforms his trademark humour into serious history … It forces us to look again at stories we think we all know – or should know – and reframe them with intellectual rectitude and rigour … Lest offers new perspectives on the past from one of Australia’s most interesting and provocative thinkers.’ Clare Wright

Military documents reveal decades of deceit about the Vietnam War and myths perpetuated by the mainstream media.

Donald Downs offers an analysis of the injustices behind the logic of battered woman syndrome, concluding that this very logic harms those it is trying to protect. This work seeks to rethink the criminal justice system.

Demonstrates how the campaign against "victim politics" and the "victim mentality" has profoundly altered Americans' understanding of victimhood, and investigates the consequences of this change in politics, law, culture, and the "war against terror."

The Victim Cult tackles the worldwide grievance culture and from ancient Rome to the White House today and on to campuses where some think themselves victims of "micro-aggressions." The book also looks at how corrosive victim thinking fuels movements as diverse as violent Antifa anarchists, Black Lives Matter protesters, and Donald Trump's "Capitol Hill" demonstrators.

An original and groundbreaking examination of the psychological devastation of war through the lens of Homer’s Iliad in this “compassionate book [that] deserves a place in the lasting literature of the Vietnam War” (The New York Times). In this moving and dazzlingly creative book, Dr. Jonathan Shay examines the psychological devastation of war by comparing the soldiers of Homer’s Iliad with Vietnam veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. A classic of war literature that has as much relevance as ever in the wake of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Achilles in Vietnam is a “transcendent literary adventure” (The New York Times) and “clearly one of the most original and most important scholarly works to have emerged from the Vietnam War” (Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried). As a Veterans Affairs psychiatrist, Shay encountered devastating stories of unhealed PTSD and uncovered the painful paradox—that fighting for one’s country can render one unfit to be a citizen. With a sensitive and compassionate examination of the battles many Vietnam veterans continue to fight, Shay offers readers a greater understanding of PTSD and how to alleviate the potential suffering of soldiers. Although the Iliad was written twenty-seven centuries ago, Shay shows how it has much to teach about combat trauma, as do the more recent, compelling voices and experiences of Vietnam vets. A groundbreaking and provocative monograph, Achilles in Vietnam takes readers on a literary journey that demonstrates how we can learn how war damages the mind and spirit, and work to change those things in our culture that so that we don’t continue repeating the same mistakes.