Before the
US got involved in vietnam over
100,000 french soldiers were killed
fighting them? This was a losing
battle way before we got caught up
in it. What possessed us to do this?
so back to the Ken Burns documentary on Vietnam.
Clearly and without any doubt whatsoever LBJ knew
this fight in vietnam was a loser. No chance to
'win' (as though there are any winners in war)
In fact all the gove-ment Ohficials knew this was
a lost cause. Why they went the course we will
never know except for maybe saving themselves from
some serious humiliation. Should have quit before
they began. So who do i point the finger at the most?
This is NOT new news but i blame LBJ all the way.
We got fucked. And we are still fucked to this day.
Bad day for the democratic party. What the fuck happened?
And then they pass it off to tricky dick. son of a bitch.
last night was tuff to watch.
Not so easy to view the real
guts of war. Not pretty .
what were we fighting for?
### - https://consortiumnews.com/2017/09/21/the-killing-of-history/
### - https://consortiumnews.com/2017/09/21/the-killing-of-history/
so what? we know mankind is stupid.
looks like shitbird fired another missile off
in North Korean. wonder where this one is
going??? stay tuned i'm sure slider will tell me.
i got no reasons to doubt Ken Burns work.
his past record of film making speaks for itself.
the government looks pretty bad in this series.
but most hip people ALREADY knew that.
didn't you read orwells 1984?
of course.
oink! lol!
didn't you read orwells 1984?
I'm watching that Burns documentary, and the review Slider postedMind
is highly biased and seems to have its own axes to grind all along.
Burns *by no means* whitewashes the US or only gives an "official"
account. All along it points out the many mistakes that were made
with extreme thoroughness.
Slider, you always seek out some aggrieved underdog contrarian
take on everything, especially if there's any glimmer of conspiracy
in it.
Actually, the Ken Burns documentary seems damn thorough.
In spite of how I was following the Vietnam conflict on the news
myself from the time I was about 10 years old (during which time
I was actively being fed the "official" view) prior to adopting
the counter-culture protest view, which I began to pick up at
around age 13, in my eyes, this documentary really makes the US
look pretty damn *bad*. And yet Burns also makes it clear *why*
all those bad choices were made. In a way, it was understandable.
So yeah, in the end, mainly just... sad. It's a thorough depiction
of the endless folly.
Here's a fairer review, from the New York Times.
***
Review: Ken Burns’s ‘Vietnam War’ Will Break Your Heart and Win Your
By JAMES PONIEWOZIKthere’s
SEPT. 14, 2017
“The Vietnam War” begins in reverse. After a brief introduction,
a sequence of familiar footage, running backward. Napalm is sucked outwar
of the jungle. Bombs fall up. A prisoner springs to life as a bullet
shoots from his head into the chamber of a gun.
The sequence feels like a mission statement for Ken Burns and Lynn
Novick’s plangent, encyclopedic, sometimes wearying documentary. Yes, you’ve seen these images before. But to have even a chance at
understanding this mess, you have to go back. Way back.
The first episode, which airs Sunday on PBS, pedals back to 1858 and the French conquest of Indochina. Most of it is devoted to Vietnam’s
colonial history, the rise of Ho Chi Minh and France’s own doomed war.
This gives you a sense of the scope of the series, at 18 hours and 10 episodes one of Mr. Burns’s longest.
It also sets a theme: that this history had its own history, one we disastrously ignored. (“We” here and below means Americans, because
while Mr. Burns and Ms. Novick include many Vietnamese voices, they are ultimately telling U.S. history.)
“The Vietnam War” is not Mr. Burns’s most innovative film. Since the
was waged in the TV era, the filmmakers rely less exclusively on the trademark “Ken Burns effect” pans over still images. Since Vietnam was the “living-room war,” played out on the nightly news, this documentary doesn’t show us the fighting with new eyes, the way “The War” did with its unearthed archival World War II footage.Worth,”
But it is probably Mr. Burns’s saddest film. “The Civil War” was mournful, but at least the Union was preserved. “The War” ended with fascism defeated.
Marines carry a wounded man during a 1966 battle, as seen in Ken Burns
and Lynn Novick’s “The Vietnam War.” Credit Courtesy of Larry Burrows/Getty Images
The war in Vietnam offers no uplift or happy ending. It’s simply decades
of bad decision after bad decision, a wasteful vortex that devoured
lives for nothing. It was, the narrator Peter Coyote says, “begun in
good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War miscalculations.”
“The Vietnam War” is less an indictment than a lament.
This is where Mr. Burns and Ms. Novick’s primary-source interviews are
so effective. Arguably, the most important Ken Burns effect is not a
visual trick but the refocusing of history on first-person stories.
Geoffrey C. Ward’s script has a big-picture historical arc — presidents and generals, battles and negotiations, domino theory and madman theory.
The narrative wends nimbly from Washington to the battlefield (both
sides) to living rooms, TV studios, campuses and convention halls.
But the film’s power comes from the oral histories. An American veteran describes dragging insurgents’ corpses into a village square “to see who would cry over them” so there would be more people to question. A soldier’s mother remembers tensing up every time she heard the crunch of tires on her driveway. A North Vietnamese officer recalls when she was assigned to a house abandoned by a South Vietnamese counterpart, an unfinished dress that the daughter had been sewing still lying in place.
One interviewee who stands out is the soft-spoken John Musgrave, whose
arc over the course of the documentary takes him from a Marine driven by
pure hatred of the enemy, to antiwar protester. His emotion is still on
the surface as he recalls a dark time, after his discharge, when his
dogs interrupted him as he sat with his pistol to his head. “I think,”
he says — and it’s as if the immensity is hitting him at that second — “I would have k-k-killed myself.”
The emotional climax comes in the eighth episode, which culminates in
1970, when Ohio National Guard troops shot to death four student
protesters at Kent State University. The war had already killed
thousands upon thousands. But with Kent State, it feels, America had
simply broken.
You might mistake Episode 9, which ends with the American withdrawal in
1973, for the conclusion. But it wasn’t an ending for the people of Vietnam, for the remaining prisoners of war or for the United States.
Like Maya Lin’s Vietnam memorial, whose opening the finale covers, “The Vietnam War” can’t offer closure, only catharsis.
Sometimes the film echoes today’s headlines, as in the subplot of
foreign collusion in an American election. Richard M. Nixon had made a
secret deal for South Vietnamese leader Nguyen Van Thieu to stay out of
peace talks, thus enhancing Mr. Nixon’s chances in the 1968 race.
President Lyndon B. Johnson was aware of the deal through intelligence surveillance and believed it to be treason, but chose not to publicize
it.
He did, however, call Mr. Nixon, who — we hear on the audiotape of their call — coolly lied to him. And Mr. Nixon’s paranoia about being found
out drove him to the strategy of break-ins and cover-ups that eventually
led to his resignation.
It’s easy to take for granted the amount of material Mr. Burns and Ms. Novick present here, but it’s staggering. Yet “The Vietnam War” is sometimes overwhelmed by the need to be about everything the conflict connected to: the Cold War, the counterculture, Watergate.
All these are much-told stories, a fact reinforced by the many musical
cues overfamiliar from other period films and TV: “For What It’s
“All Along the Watchtower,” “White Rabbit.” (Along with the pop soundtrack is a score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, with additional
music by the Silk Road Ensemble and Yo-Yo Ma.)
But you could argue that this predictability has a purpose. Mr. Burns is willing to risk obviousness because his project is not to find
surprising twists on American history. It’s to create a historical canon
in the most broadly acceptable terms.
This might in part be public-TV centrism, but it’s also an ideology. Mr. Burns’s films assume that it’s still possible for Americans to have an agreed-on baseline — on government, war, race and culture — from which
to go forward.
In relatively peaceful times, this approach could seem banal, as if the
films are arguing for pieties that everyone already agrees on. In —
well, times like now — it can seem naïve to think that there’s any fact so unobjectionable it can’t be litigated by opposed camps. In the
divides the war rended, you can see the swellings of today’s
impenetrable political bubbles.
The saddest thing about this elegiac documentary may be the credit it
extends its audience. “The Vietnam War” still holds out hope that we might learn from history, after presenting 18 hours of evidence to the contrary.
***
I think it does a good job of showing how the conflict arose,
how the US got suckered into it, and most of all it does a good
job of detailing the "decades of bad decision after bad decision".
Burns consistently presents the Vietnamese view of the conflict,
usually in the words of actual Vietnamese people who were involved.
Do you think anyone was providing US citizens with a detailed
life story of Ho Chi Minh back in the 60's? Well they certainly
didn't, but Burns does.
One criticism I could make of the NY Times reviewer is that I did
not find the soundtrack quite as "obvious" as this reviewer makes
it out to be. I felt that Burns makes interesting choices in several
places. For example, I love this Sam Cooke song Burns chose to
close an early episode.
Mean Old World
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAV6HJXKYtw
Ken Burns makes great documentaries and this one's no exception.
We're now living with an administration that seems largely ignorant
of any in-depth history, and indeed, seems ignorant in general.
This is the main thing that makes them so damn scary.
***
He is telling the whole world, if they care to watch & listen.
### - the whole world yes, scholars no... scholars know different!
only if these scholars did the work.
reading shit on the internet is useless.
i'm thinking Burns did some real work here.
More than any armchair scholar would do.
You have never known "unbiased accuracy".
Because you never truly seek it. You only pretend to.
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