They did win. Unless you're asking Sheila Jackson Lee...
Posted on 09/17/2017 6:28:32 PM PDT by tired&retired
surprisingly, considering the source, it was fairly down the middle. Slants left, but all sides were heard. Its one of the better ones.
They did win. Unless you're asking Sheila Jackson Lee...
Democrat hawks like RFK (who worked for Joe McCarthy) supported LBJ when he ginned up the war. Maybe Beaver Boy was still smarting over his Pappy being an unapologetic English hating Nazi sympathizer.
Johnson wanted his own war so he could be like his hero FDR. After fabricating a pretext in `64 for war then getting things squarely wrapped around the axle over the next three years, he just quit—professing shock at students chanting things like “Hey, hey LBJ, How many kids did you kill today’. And it was dumped in Nixon’s lap.
But the fact was that Johnson got steamrolled in New Hampshire.
Then the stuttering Kennedy’s put on their anti-war halos and pointed fingers at Nixon. So the `rats got us into it, then bailed.
Now they’re going to give Jabba the Moore a rest and call this shill from the bullpen? So teachers have something to indoctrinate school kids with the same BS?
After reading reviews here I trust, I’ll pass on this fink’s revisionist history. Sometimes you just have to decide based on the source. Life’s too short for Jane Fonda lies put on film, passed on as fact.
“The Burns Civil War doc was really good no?”
Yes. If you like northern propaganda where a big, supreme federal government rides to the rescue to save the Republic by destroying the Republic.
It was biased. PBS at the time had no competition from any conservative media so it was a nearly straight leftist slant to it.
ANymention of Archimedes Patti and the OSS?
Miles Davis did the soundtrack for this circa 1970 documentary on Jack Johnson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWHpEUelQzs
No, we won the Vietnam war regardless of how Ken Burns choses to revise history.
He and other journalists with similar political agendas have guided two generations of young Americans to believe that America lost the Viet Nam war. Sadly, many older citizens have allowed time and a politicized ‘media’ to cloud and/or alter their memories.
The facts are certain. American troops and airmen lost not a single battle during that war. The combined military forces of America, Thailand, New Zealand, and Australia, four of the supporting nations of the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), South Viet Nam and South Korea won the war against North Viet Nam and the Viet Cong - plain and simply. SEATO was the South East Asia counterpart to European NATO. An attack against one member was considered an attack against all.
The stated military goals were precise. SEATO forces were to neutralize or push the attacking aggressor forces out of South Viet Nam. South Vietnam was to be armed and trained for its own self-defense.
In fact, after more than a dozen years of fighting the Viet Cong were effectively neutralized. North Viet Nam’s army was pushed back home. The rail bridges connecting North Viet Nam and China were severed. The Ho Chi Ming trail was rendered inoperative to vehicles. Haiphong harbor was mined, greatly restricting the flow of war materials into North Viet Nam from the Soviet Union. All of our military objectives were accomplished.
The enemy was forced to sign peace accords in Paris, ending the military conflict on SEATO’s terms. Prisoners of war were repatriated. America’s war ended in 1972. Our Congress subsequently voted not to re-engage after North Viet Nam violated the accords three years later in 1975.
So why do most Americans believe that we lost that war? Is it because of the fierce fighting at the onslaught of the 1968 Tet Offensive that was, in fact, the Viet Cong’s last hurrah? Is it because of the film footage of our embassy personnel and a few Marine guards being evacuated from Saigon in 1975, three years after our war ended? Is it because of the anti-war demonstrations and turmoil at home during the war? Is it because of anti-military sentiment still fostered by left wing politicians? Is it a classic example of a ‘Big Lie’ told often enough to establish credibility in gullible people?
How have the revisionists been so successful in creating a believable lie? It may be simplistic to imply that Americans inappropriately trusted TV journalists, political commentators and editorialists, collectively termed ‘the media’, instead of historians, but the answer may be that simple. To this day, most Americans do not understand why we became engaged in that war, the stated objectives or the true contemporary outcome.
Twelve days of intense air assault in 1972 by 700 of our aircraft in an operation named ‘Linebacker II’ converted our air superiority over Viet Nam into air supremacy wherein our bombers, including B-52’s, could fly uncontested to any target in North Viet Nam. North Viet Nam’s supply of SAM missiles was expended and its supply lines severed. The vulnerable and impotent enemy signed the peace accords in Paris. Our war ended in victory.
Our WWII victory on the island of Iwo Jima was not nullified because we returned the Island to Japanese control two decades thereafter. Similarly, our victory in Viet Nam was not nullified because three years after our departure, North Viet Nam reneged on the peace accords and overran South Viet Nam, unopposed by the departed SEATO military forces.
Military victory is not diminished by what politicians later give away. We won the Vietnam war.
“Say it! Say it!”
We need voices like you to chime in.
People who were there.
Was this accurate?
Nicely done Thank you sums it up well
For LATER!
Ken Burns needs to look up “word economy”.
There’s not a story that Ken Burns can’t tell with less that 20 hours of film.
Charlton Heston’s rebuttal to the 14-hour PBS series on Vietnam is a gold mine.
He shows how Ho was not a Vietnamese nationalist but a communist internationalist. Ho killed the true nationalist who did more to fight Japan while he cooled his heals in the USSR.
They already did a series I saw as a kid called Vietnam: A Television History
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqKi-SyRA7I
>>Johnson wanted his own war so he could be like his hero FDR. After fabricating a pretext in `64 for war
Here’s another clue for you and him, the Walrus was Jim
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Stephen_Morrison
George Stephen Morrison (January 7, 1919 – November 17, 2008) was a United States Navy rear admiral (upper half) and naval aviator. Morrison was commander of the U.S. naval forces in the Gulf of Tonkin during the Gulf of Tonkin Incident of August 1964, which sparked an escalation of American involvement in the Vietnam War. He was the father of Jim Morrison, the lead singer of the rock band The Doors.
Several things. The narrator is Peter Coyote, a hardcore leftist (but not necessarily a Marxist).
The background on Ho from France in the “teens until the founding of the Indochinese Communist Party was accurate, including Ho being a Soviet Comintern agent. However, you have to know that he was a French socialist (i.e. Marxist) by 1916, long before he approached Woodrow Wilson.
He started killing off Vietnamese nationalists who opposed the French as early as 1925 with Phan Boi Chau (See: Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, Sen. Judiciary Com. study “The Human Cost of Communism in Vietnam”, 1972 for more on this early history of Ho. I was the creator of this study and contributed a lot of the research materials in it).
Also see Prof. Robert Turner’s masterpiece “Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development” , Hoover Institution Press, 1975. Bob was one of the few people I know who was both a soldier in Vietnam and then became a diplomat, and was one of the last American’s to leave the Embassy Annex building after helping to save many So. Vietnamese.
Re the OSS and Ho. Ho claims to have fought hard against the Japanese but some histories of that era said that his forces conducted only small hit and run raids, and might have had covert agreements with local Japanese commanders about not attacking each other (Tito did this with the Germans in Yugoslavia so that he could attack the anti-Nazi Chetniks).
Also OSS officer Archimedes Patai was smitten with Ho (aka “duped) into believing his Jefferson “rights” statement and commitment to democracy.
The film did talk a little about Ho destroying the non-communist and even the powerful Trotskyite communist movement in Vietnam (during the so-called Coalition Govt period of 1945-46 - the Lien Viet government. He used Togliatti’s “Salami tactics” to take out real and potential challengers for power, one slice at a time, until the Viet Minh was the last force standing.
Re the fight against the French. They were wrong, period, to try and retake Vietnam, and paid a horrible price for it. However, they were also betrayed by the French Communist Party, an arm of the KGB (even betrayed non-communist Resistance leaders to the Gestapo - exp. Moulin).
The discussion about Ho and his murderers killing “thousands” of people in the 1950’s (the Land Reform Program and related ones), didn’t really give the viewer the extent of that slaughter. Figures from non-communist historians put the minimum losses starting at 50,000 and some internal observers and survivors put it closer to 100,000 - 300,000) out of country (N. Vietnam) with a then population of about 10-15 Million (rough guess but they had a couple million more people than did So. Vietnam.
That leads into the totally misleading comments about the so-called “elections” of 1954. South Vietnam was not allowed to attend the Geneva meeting so it never agreed/signed them, plus the U.S. didn’t either. It was signed between the Communists and the French.
Diem was a tough bastard but he actually unified So. Vietnam into a political entity, rather than a part of the Kingdom of Vietnam. He destroyed the criminals of the Ba Xuyen (or Bihn xuyen), defeated the Cao Dai political sect, and hurt the powerful Hoa Hao to the point that they reached an agreement that allowed the HH to control over 2 provinces in the Mekong Delta (I visited them in Nov. 1970) in exchange for a pledge of loyalty to Diem and the govt in Saigon (not the regime, which is a term Coyote used several times, but it is a propaganda term that the communist have used for decades to “delegitimize” their opponents. PSYOPS terms if you will.
Dien Bien Phu was a masterstroke of military strategy. The arrogant and stupid French commanders against a smarter communist enemy with more manpower than they could ever image. The French are not militarily very imaginative (such as they “imaged” that the “Maginot Line” would stop Hitler. How did that work out for them?).
Keep an eye out of the negative tones that will appear throughout this series. We made a lot of mistakes by not listening to the men who knew Vietnam and communist guerrilla warfare, including Ed Lansdale and Sir Robert Thompson, among others.
You don’t fight a guerrilla war with main force tactics.
However, we had beaten the NVA in 1968, 1969, in Cambodia in 1970 ( I was there later that year and spoke to those who fought against the communists and interviewed several NVA POWS), hurt them in Laos in Op. Lam Som, and helped the ARVN/MArines and VNAF destroy Hanoi’s “Easter Offensive” in 1972.
Great information on this in Jay Veith’s masterwork book “Black April:The Fall of South Vietnam” which showed that some ARVN units did defeat or stop the PAVN in several key battles without much air support or artillery.
Expect the ARVN to get smeared in many of the upcoming episodes, starting with the defeat of one of their companies/battalions at Ap Bac, though it was not quite what you read in the papers. We gave the ARVN M113 armored vehicles WITHOUT GUN SHIELDS which got at least 8 of the 10 machine gunners killed in combat. The M113s hit the VC hard but the lack of protective gunshields cost them their main fire-support, and extremely bad water/rice paddy conditions limited their movements to higher ground, but they fought hard.
See if this comes up in the next episode or two.
If you want to read really well researched material on the Vietnam war by those who fought/served there, go to www.vvfh.org and take a look around. I can guarantee you that what you find is not what is in most “popular” books on the subject, from Karnow to the leftist Hanoi propagandists of Porter, Prados, Appy, Longvello, Turse (the worst) and Young.
I’ll be back with more comments as the Burns series continues. Hopefully some of the guys from VVFH will chime in to. They are among the best VN experienced historians in the U.S. and one of our supporters, Rufus Phillips, was in this first episode. He actually knew Pres. Diem and dealt with him as a Provincial Advisor/diplomat, unlike almost all of the VN critics who never met Diem.
It is kinda like the saying, “If you weren’t there, everything you get is hearsay for the most part”.
At least I can say that I was there (as a journalist) and in Cambodia too. It helps to see the country from 3,000 feet down to 50 ft over a canal or river, then then walk through some of it. Puts a lot of things into perspective.
...The discussion about Ho and his murderers killing “thousands” of people in the 1950’s (the Land Reform Program and related ones), didn’t really give the viewer the extent of that slaughter....
Once again I'll drop mention of Dr. Tom Dooley's "Delivery Us From Evil", 1956, which recounted his witness as his medical mission to the torture of Vietnamese by the communists.
.... In August 1954, Dooley transferred to Task Force Ninety, a unit participating in the evacuation of over 600,000 North Vietnamese known as Operation Passage to Freedom. Here Dooley served as a French interpreter and medical officer for a Preventative Medicine Unit in Haiphong. He eventually oversaw the building and maintenance of refugee camps in Haiphong until May 1955, when the Viet Minh took over the city...."
I encountered his work in the Scholastic Book service in the third or fourth grade. One passage in particular was horrifying to me. A small village Catholic school had received a visitation by Ho's forces. The priest's tongue was cut off and all of the grade school children had both ears punctured by chop sticks, which were left in place before the commies left. An object lesson to those that would preach. Christianity and to those that would hear the witness.
Highly recommend his three books, by a humanitarian who erved to treat and heal the wounds inflicted a rural civilian population. The fact that his books reached down to elementary school level puts paid to the lies of the squishy disinformation campaign that we Americans did not know of the communist atrocities. All of the celebrity fellow travelers and apologists to this day kow tow to the Red Lie.
Keep posting brother.
I havent watched this yet but it should be interesting to see the coverage of Jane Fonda, John Kerry, and other military haters who the leftist media used to demoralize the American population. All Viet vets were denigrated and humiliated by these people.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.