Ken Burns' Vietnam

[Ron Bulman]

https://www.bing.com/search?q=the+doors+the+end&form=PRUSEN&mkt=en-us&httpsmsn=1&refig=f074d87ad41841128c24959b2161509f&sp=-1&pq=the+doors+the+end&sc=9-17&qs=n&sk=&cvid=f074d87ad41841128c24959b2161509f

[Dan Doyle]

Wow!   Great thread.  Gives balance to Burns' revisionism. Of course, I'm wondering how this series impacts the current political discourse around Iraq and Afghanistan, let alone Trump's mantra of Make America Great Again. 

[Douglas Caddy]

I was impressed with the opening episode but very much less so with the two episodes shown since. It is beginning to appear as constituting selective history.

 

 

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/09/19/getting-the-gulf-of-tonkin-wrong-are-ken-burns-and-lynn-novick-telling-stories-about-the-central-events-used-to-legitimize-the-us-attack-against-vietnam/

Edited September 20, 2017 by Douglas Caddy

[Kirk Gallaway]

Interesting Doug, I confess, I got a catch up watching it. I haven't been as big a Burns fan as some.So he's spouting the official U.S.  line about the Gulf of Tonkin incident?

But there was skepticism at the time.I remember I believe at the Democratic National convention in 1968, Wayne Morse compared the Gulf of Tonkin incident historically to "The Sinking of the Maine". I also remember  there was a "60 minutes" piece, I think in the early 70's that raised questions about  the official version. .

[Tom Hume]

America's Amnesia - Mekong Review:

https://mekongreview.com/americas-amnesia/

 

[James DiEugenio]

Pretty good.

My God, how can you make a ten part series about Vietnam and not mention Lansdale by name?

I would have thought that would be impossible.

The Koch brothers did help finance it.

Sounds like the accompanying book is better than the film. 

[James DiEugenio]

Let me add why it is not possible to convey what happened in Vietnam without naming Lansdale, in case some new people do not understand that.

After Eisenhower vetoed Operation Vulture, he decided to approve a massive covert operation by the CIA to do three things:

1.) Prop up a new country in the south that would be dominated by the USA.

2.) Wipe out the last vestiges of the French empire that existed there e.g. the figurehead Bao Dai.

3.) Prevent the scheduled 1956 elections that were supposed to elect nationalist leaders for the newly independent country of Vietnam.

The Dulles brothers put Lansdale in charge of this massive project.  To say he came through for them does not at all convey how successful he really was. Suffice it to say that, among other things, he created a massive psy war program against the north and scared a million Catholics into fleeing to the south; and he rigged the 1956 elections with something like an improbable 97 per cent of the vote for the Catholic Diem. 

Lansdale did all that--and much more-- with a blank check from the Dulles brothers.  To not mention him is to leave out the single most important person in the American  creation of  South Vietnam. And it was that creation that, in turn, transformed the Viet Minh into the Viet Cong.  Which started the second Vietnam  war for independence, this time against the USA.

Edited September 22, 2017 by James DiEugenio

[David Andrews]

42 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:

Let me add why it is not possible to convey what happened in Vietnam without naming Lansdale, in case some new people do not understand that.

After Eisenhower vetoed Operation Vulture, he decided to approve a massive covert operation by the CIA to do three things:

1.) Prop up a new country in the south that would be dominated by the USA.

2.) Wipe out the last vestiges of the French empire that existed there e.g. the figurehead Bao Dai.

3.) Prevent the scheduled 1956 elections that were supposed to elect nationalist leaders for the newly independent country of Vietnam.

The Dulles brothers put Lansdale in charge of this massive project.  To say he came through for them does not at all convey how successful he really was. Suffice it to say that, among other things he created a massive psy war program against the north and scared a million Catholics into fleeing to the south; and he rigged the 1956 elections with something like an improbable 97 per cent of the vote for the Catholic Diem. 

Lansdale did all that--and much more-- with a black check from the Dulles brothers.  To not mention him is to leave out the single most important person in the American  creation of  South Vietnam. And it was that creation that, in turn, transformed the Viet Minh into the Viet Cong.  Which started the second Vietnam  war for independence, this time against the USA.

An aside question, for those into other Lansdale adventures: does anyone know the approximate date (year?) of the famous photo of Lansdale at dinner with Oliver North, John Singlaub, Medardo Justiniano, and Andy Messing?  The subject was Central America.

[Ron Bulman]

"Lansdale helped design the ballots when Diem formally ran for President of South Vietnam in 1955. (?)  He used red, the Asian good luck color for Diem, and green-signifying a cuckold-for Diem's opponent."  The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, 1974, Victor Marchetti, pg. 26.  (sourced to the Pentagon Papers in it) 

Late April 1961, JFK had been in office three months.  "And sometime during the night or early the next day, someone in the Pentagon inserted a major change in the Vietnam Task Force report.  The change was slipped into a Laos Annex and attached to the report.  This Laos Annex was redrafted two times between the end of the chaotic White house meeting on April 27 and it's appearance the next day.  Consequently there were three versions.  The new ingredient, a major U. S. troop commitment to Vietnam, was not in the first version written by Gilpatric's aide, Colonel Black.  it was inserted into the second version and retained in the third and final report.  The second version, which is the first document to recommend a U.S. troop commitment to Vietnam during the Kennedy administration, was written by Edward Lansdale."  JFK and Vietnam, John Newman, pgs. 48-49.

Edited September 22, 2017 by Ron Bulman

[Douglas Caddy]

From the article: The “meaning” of the Vietnam war is no different from the meaning of the genocidal campaign against the Native Americans, the colonial massacres in the Philippines, the atomic bombings of Japan, the levelling of every city in North Korea. The aim was described by Colonel Edward Lansdale, the famous CIA man on whom Graham Greene based his central character in The Quiet American. 

Quoting Robert Taber’s The War of the Flea, Lansdale said, “There is only one means of defeating an insurgent people who will not surrender, and that is extermination. There is only one way to control a territory that harbours resistance, and that is to turn it into a desert.”

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/09/22/the-killing-of-history/

 

From the article: You don’t get privileged broadcast space there, or big filmmaking grants from Bank of America and the Koch brothers – two leading funders of Burns and Novick’s Vietnam series – by exposing the immoral, imperial, and unlawful essence of U.S. foreign policy.

Sinclair’s Dictum

Burns and Novick know this very well and will play along accordingly.  There’s no censorship required.  Smart historical documentarians know in advance what they can include and what they must delete if they want the good stuff – money, status, a sense of importance and relevance –  coming their way. It’s one small but significant part of how the nation’s unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money and empire rule.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something,” the American socialist Upton Sinclair once wrote, “when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Sinclair’s dictum applies with a vengeance to Burns and Novick.

I never got a chance to confront him about the curious role he was slated to play in defense of U.S-imperial arrogance and criminality.

“Who controls the past” Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/09/22/ken-burns-and-lynn-novicks-vietnam-war-some-predictions/

Edited September 22, 2017 by Douglas Caddy

[Douglas Caddy]

https://whowhatwhy.org/2017/09/22/can-america-learn-vietnam-war/

[James DiEugenio]

It looks like Burns is not getting a free ride this time.

It also looks like his Koch brothers association is coming back to haunt him.

Edited September 22, 2017 by James DiEugenio

[Douglas Caddy]

 

[Douglas Caddy]

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Pilger_John/Vietnam_Heroes.html

[James DiEugenio]

This series is pretty bad.  I mean I am working on a long, multi part review that will cover the whole pastiche. This first part deals with the part one of the series which covers the French colonization, DIen Bien Phu,  and up to Eisenhower's sending in advisors. 

How on earth can you talk about any of that without mentioning the following names: Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, Lansdale, Acheson and Bao Dai? Its incredible. Like sorcery. At the beginning, the narrator actually says the war was started by decent men invoked in misunderstandings.  

Allen Dulles was  a decent man?  LOL

The Dulles scheme to nuke DIen Bien Phu was a misunderstanding?    Like they did not see what happened at Nagasaki and Hiroshima?  And this was nine years later.

Here it is:

https://kennedysandking.com/reviews/ken-burns-lynn-novick-the-vietnam-war-part-one

Edited September 25, 2017 by James DiEugenio