Posted on 10/18/2017 6:25:22 PM PDT by Jim Robinson
The only positive thing I can say about Ken Burns’ documentary on the Vietnam War is this — if it is the best the left has, we may blessedly have heard the last of them. The arguments Mr. Burns presents are weak, biased, and insulting. The documentary is scripted to evoke sorrow and moral indignation over what was presented as American error, ineptness, and lack of moral purpose.
The narrative counterposes happy and earnest winners (the communists) with sad and angst-ridden losers (America and the South Vietnamese). It deemed only such perspectives worthy of inclusion. Mr. Burns fails to find even one American or South Vietnamese veteran who wholly supported the war, was proud to have appeared in arms, and sickened by the United States’ abandonment its freedom-seeking ally.
There are literally hundreds of thousands of us.
No doubt, too, there were North Vietnamese who are critical of the brutality of the communist conduct of the war, but Mr. Burns can’t find them either. We have no way of knowing whether the happy and earnest communist veterans who did appear in the documentary participated in the war crimes — the execution of thousands of civilians — in Hue or any of the countless acts of North Vietnamese-sponsored terrorism.
The Burns documentary accepts without question five pillars of the liberal view of the war:
1. There was moral equivalency between the U.S. and Communist forces, and the goals and objectives of the respective governments.
No there wasn’t. Communist North Vietnam invaded a South Vietnam striving for democracy. The South Vietnamese posed no threat to the North other than by their example. The North had no inherent right to conquer South Vietnam, and the South Vietnamese had no obligation to “vote themselves communist” in 1955....
(Excerpt) Read more at nysun.com ...
Was there ever any doubt?
The silence from the American left was deafening.
Ken Burns is a leftist weasel. Now it should be obvious to anyone who still thought he was this “brilliant documentarian”.
“This viewpoint takes it for granted that the democratically elected Diem administration in Saigon was so evil that rule by Ho Chi Minh would have to be an improvement. “
My wife has many tales of the horrors of the Diem administration.
Her school class went from 62 to 38 and no one knew where the students went.
The family next door just ‘disappeared’ one night.
When she saw the ‘transport’ vans in the 1963 episode showing students being taken away she said she remembered seeing them in person.
Her teacher helped her and other students hide so as not to be caught up in the demonstrations.
International Communist imperialism was considered a ‘good’ thing by the Left.
Just look at how the people were treated after the war.
This is the best summary the Vietnam war and Burns film I have read. Spot on!
Did they interview the napalm girl who was kept as a propaganda tool until she fled to the West?
I quickly stopped watching because it was put together by a leftist hippy. It was so far from the real Vietnam that it appears to be under influence of marijuana. It was a colossal failure and leaves out the Democrat cutting off of funds for the South to defend itself after we won the war and left the country in great shape but the cutoff of weapons and funds resulting in the slaughter of over 1 million South Vietnamese. That is a moral failure on burn’s part of indescribable magnitude.
“Ken Burns is a leftist weasel.”
This.
Beautifully articulated, John.
I recorded all the episodes and watched the first one and part of the second, when reports started coming in on FR of left wing bias.
Who can bear watching more episodes if that was true? I was interested in the history of the people’s revolt against the president of Viet Nam and the history of the Vietnamese president and his family, but did not know of the corruption charges against him that bought on serious opposition in the form that became the Viet Cong. It was informative, but risking a Leftist version was a risk too painful to engage, so, I erased the rest of the series.
Thanks for the post.
Phillip Jennings and his comments on Burns couldn’t be more correct.
To put it politely Burns is an anal orifice for portraying the U.S. and the Vietnam war as he did, he took the side of the war protesters and people like Hanoi Jane and John effin Kerry as his heroes.
They and others were not heroes, they were anti-Americans.
bmfl
For anyone serious about the circumstances and a discussion about the real causes of the Vietnam War, there is a good on on youtube. The two talk about Burns documentary as well, and his background.
Tim Kelly and Joe Atwill on the Vietnam war, 2 weeks old:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8DtfbkaK4I&t=938s
I meant him after he was a guess speaker at Mary Washington College. He is a very nice and polite guy but you could tell he was a lefty. I got the feeling it was not so much that he was a lefty as he believed in the group hug kumbaya attitude so prevalent amongst liberals.
Several hundred US officers and men went to prison for atrocities. Atrocities happened but were not common.
For the VC and NVA atrocities against the people of South Vietnam were policy. Rapes and murders of village officials. Youths drafted into the VC under threat that theiir families would be killed. If they deserted the families were in fact killed.
Liberals love commie murderers. Always have. Always will.
Tet 1968
On May 23, 2016, Obama visited Communist Vietnam most likely to thank the Communists for making it possible for him to be elected President of the United States. For you see, without the Vietnam War and the 1968 Tet Offensive, Obama would still be a Community Organizer and hanging out in Chicago bath houses, but the “Butterfly Effect” of the 1968 Tet Offensive made it possible for Barack Hussein Obama, a homosexual Muslim Communist, to be elected to the highest office in the land.
During the Vietnam War, the 1968 Tet Offensive resulted in the annihilation of Viet Cong units throughout South Vietnam and was a disaster for the Communist insurgency; it never recovered from its loses. This Tet Offensive was a coordinated “Do or Die” attack by every Viet Cong unit in South Vietnam on the night of January 30 and the morning of January 31, 1968 that simultaneously struck every South Vietnamese City, village, and military installation in an attempt to win the war in one country wide attack; they failed and they paid the price for their failure; they died.
The war was carried on after Tet 1968 by invading North Vietnamese, and North Vietnam could never move sufficient troops down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to ever hope to defeat the United States effort in South Vietnam, so they resorted to another Communist tactic; they lied.
1968 was a Presidential Election year in the United States, and the Communist Party USA attempted to use the Tet Offensive to influence the election by claiming it was a Communist victory and the war was lost. This American Communist Party organized an anti-war movement and assembled enough strength through this movement to seize control of the Democrat Party that summer during the 1968 Democrat Convention in Chicago.
These Communists attempted to nominate a Presidential candidate who would end the war and they failed, but the Communist Party USA still retained control of the Democrat Party, and this Party managed to elect enough Leftists to Congress to cut funding for the Vietnam War and the war was then lost, so in this way the 1968 Tet Offensive was indeed a Communist victory.
After using the Tet Offensive to gain control of the Democrat Party, the Communist Party USA never lost control of the Democrat Party, and when a few decades later they managed to elect an avowed Marxist Communist, Barack Hussein Obama, to the Presidency of the United States, it made the 1968 Tet Offensive the greatest Communist victory of all times.
D.J. Taylor
a Vietnam Veteran
So, the US government wanted to destroy a large segment of our population so they had the CIA engineer a war in Vietnam so that a counter-culture would rise up in an anti_american peace movement at home and to make sure they got maximum effect, the CIA used MK Ultra and Phoenix program science to create the sex, drugs and rock & roll culture? Wow! How in the world did these guys figure all this super secret government stuff? /s
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