I’ve heard a lot of good things about this series. Almost entirely from Liberals.
There is a very good website, Vietnam Veterans for Truth, from which I’ve shared articles there that take the Ken Burns documentary and identify and discuss the various misrepresentations portrayed in each episode.
Yes, I agree.
It highlighted our atrocities and left out the North Vietnamese atrocities.
From what I have heard he didn't spend much time with the wives of the men who fought, were captured or were killed.
Then he woulda had something.
I quit watching the globalists propaganda years ago.
I absolutely hate how the Left gets away with rewriting history in a false narrative that always puts them in a good light. Basically, this was a fictional account written by the 60's hippies.
This was confirmed throughout the series but especially when it came to Nixon. All the same left-wing crap. Johnson? Whitewashed. Kennedy? Just a walk through the hagiographic park.
You got 2 and a half more episodes into it than I did. I have read some reviews that it got more even handed as it went on but I’d had enough already. Everybody that served (in country or not) had a different experience during that time frame so the whole thing is apples vs pine cones.
Did they say anything about the traitorous john kerry and how he lost the war for us or his plaque of thanks that is in the Vietnam war museum?
#1 shibboleths and agitoprop
I do not want to look up meaning of words so early in the morning : )
1) I was there. In Nha Trang, a relatively quiet “rear” area, to be sure, but I was there Sept ‘67 to Sept ‘68.
2) Yeah, the left a lot out. He (they) also left a lot in.
3) Speaking as a former professional film and video editor, to edit is to make choices — and every edit leaves something out, and emphasizes something else. It’s the nature of editing.
4) Coming from his liberal bias, he did pretty good. It could have been a lot more lopsided. Maybe that’s all we get.
5) I thought, on balance, he did a pretty good job. He did catch the deeply essential insanity of many decisions of the commanders. Those feckless calls are simple facts and simple history.
6) Here’s the Killer Question, however:
After all that time, after all that blood, after all that expense... ...what was ultimately gained?
7) It was America’s Obsessive-Compulsive Psychotic War.
8) I honor all who served there.
9) The Vietnamese are clever, intelligent, and very resourceful. Give them a few years, and they will become an economic and manufacturing powerhouse that will give other Asian economies a good race for their money. The essentials of Liberty and Free Market will do what the idiot commanders of the military of the times could not:
make it a free country. Give it time. Liberty is a good hunger of the individual, and it will seek to find ways.
(P.S. — I was a guest for a day on an oil exploration vessel operated by Chevron. I have always known from that day that there was a nice amount of oil there on the conshelf.)
The series was a PBS repeat of the hack job done by public TV back in the 80s.
Anything by Ken Burns is pure liberal garbage.
One thing that struck me - in one episode we were treated to Jane Fonda, in North Vietnam, stating that US POWs should be executed!...and the very next day Hanoi Jane was in the news having been in Megan Kelly's show. How on Earth is she not a pariah?!? How on Earth could Kelly (who for a short while was the darling of some conservatives) sit next to her, without slapping her?
I said the “vets” on the show are probably REMFs or not veterans at all. I got sick of all of their whining. And when they talked about getting spit on and called “baby killers”, I knew they were frauds. They always throw that in as proof when all they did was hear about it. If there’s one freeper this happened to, please, let me know. I saw an article a few years back where the author said he could not find one vet to swear they were spit on.
But, what really did it for me was making McCain and Kerry heroes. Those few minutes added nothing to the story. I turned it off.
I was very disappointed because I had looked forward to seeing it.
It took that war 20 years to kill 58,000 Americans. Meanwhile it only takes our highways about 16 months to kill that many people and you hardly hear a peep. No one's political objectives can be achieved by politicizing highway deaths.
First of all, Thank you for your Service.
Unlike Burns’ documentaries on The Civil War, the birth of jazz, or the Negro Leagues, there are STILL people alive who REMEMBER the Vietnam War.
Our Memories are our “Fact Check”.
Burns is deeply in error for choosing a subject that has SURVIVORS who Remember the Truth.
From what I saw they made it clear that self-interest was a major motivator for the anti-war movement, that the North's seeking unification through war was a waste. The purity of the anti-war movement and Ho's team were two "shibboleths of the Left" that weren't reinforced.
He even has Peter Coyote say that the war was “begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War miscalculations.” Plenty of leftists in the 60s and 70s would have disagreed with the "in good faith by decent people" part.
If you compare the series to what it could have been rather than to what you or I might have made, it may not look quite as bad as the critics say.
if you did not watch the show, you really cannot make generalizations like that.
I did not think they made anyone look particularly good. I understand if you take it personally. Unfortunately it is impossible to tell every person’s story.
I dont think they glorified the hippies or the grunts. Everyone is shown having done good and bad.
As soon as I heard about the series I stated that it would be a hit piece on America. Was I right, or was I right?