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    The Vietnam War

    I'm halfway through this 10 hour documentary and it really is a total education. My main understanding about the conflict was basically informed by Hollywood movies; America was trying to halt the spread of communism in South East Asia. But as I've now learnt, the whole thing was just built on a fear of lost pride for American Generals and The White House. Over and over again, you hear taped recordings of Kennedy, then Johnson stating the obvious; that this is a war that cannot be won, that the side they've chosen may not even be the right side, that to pull out would lead to a loss of face and possible loss of election, revealing possibly the greatest flaw in democracy.

    Nothing is glamorised, it can't be. The war effort was measured in dead bodies rather than territory because no land could be gained. The more Americans became involved, the more they became the foreign presence the Vietnamese despised during French colonisation. The Vietnamese fought back in close contact, and the Americans basically slaughtered millions of people who just wanted to rule their own country.

    I think the first 2 episodes leave BBC iPlayer today, so if you haven't watched them, make sure you do.

    #2
    The museum of the war ("the American War") in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) is utterly fascinating and brutal and horrifying and obviously not entirely balanced, but if anyone is in Vietnam it is absolutely worth going to see. [And by the way, by no means anti-American, indeed there is one section of the exhibits given over to the protests against the war that were going on in the US, to demonstrate that the US as a whole was not some kind of malevolent force.] Having said that though there is no way that anyone can look on the effects of agent orange and conclude that it was anything other than an absolutely appalling genocidal war crime.

    I am hoping to get hold of the Ken Burns documentary somehow (iPlayer is not available to me) as people have said it is so incredibly good. Isn't the full version actually closer to 17 hours?

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      #3
      I'd add my backing to the above - very well made, and fills in some quite alarming gaps in my knowledge. As with Steveeee, I knew about the drugs, picking your nails with a bowie knife, and the average age of the combat soldier, but never really knew what happened and why. This goes at exactly the right pace, isn't judgmental, and I keep to talking incessantly about it on Tuesday mornings (admittedly, to someone who doesn't care at all).

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        #4
        Oh, Ken Burns is such a great documentary film-maker. He's forensic but almost never dull about it. His multi-part docu on the life of Mark Twain is among the finest things I've ever watched.

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          #5
          Originally posted by steveeeeeeeee View Post
          I'm halfway through this 10 hour documentary and it really is a total education. My main understanding about the conflict was basically informed by Hollywood movies; America was trying to halt the spread of communism in South East Asia. But as I've now learnt, the whole thing was just built on a fear of lost pride for American Generals and The White House. Over and over again, you hear taped recordings of Kennedy, then Johnson stating the obvious; that this is a war that cannot be won, that the side they've chosen may not even be the right side, that to pull out would lead to a loss of face and possible loss of election, revealing possibly the greatest flaw in democracy.

          Nothing is glamorised, it can't be. The war effort was measured in dead bodies rather than territory because no land could be gained. The more Americans became involved, the more they became the foreign presence the Vietnamese despised during French colonisation. The Vietnamese fought back in close contact, and the Americans basically slaughtered millions of people who just wanted to rule their own country.

          I think the first 2 episodes leave BBC iPlayer today, so if you haven't watched them, make sure you do.
          Yeah, that’s it.

          Just colossally stupid, at best, and monstrously evil at worst. Not that the other side was great either. They massacred civilians and what not, too. And their regime was pretty nasty in its own ways.

          Just an unimaginable tragedy all the way around.

          And the North Vietnamese didn’t even really win. Their victory was a Pyrrhic victory. Vietnam remained devestated, very poor, and isolated for a few decades until it instituted pro-capital economic reforms that haven’t been a picnic either. It’s not so isolated, but still pretty poor.

          When will we ever learn?

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            #6
            These were the two "books of the TV series" that whetted my appetite back in the day: Stanley Karnow's Vietnam:_A_Television_History (PBS, USA) and Michael Maclear's Ten Thousand Day War (Canadian).

            Both very readable/watchable, though compared with more recent work you had the pros and cons of early drafts of history: less access to the Vietnamese side, but the characters involved were still alive to be interviewed (or dissemble).

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              #7
              I've been on a bit of a Madame Nhu Google trip since episode 3. Christ, she was the mouth-piece of pure f*cking evil, wasn't she? By the sounds of things, completely unrepentant until her death 6 years ago. Her family wasn't much better, with her brother strangling her parents to death in the 80s to try a get hold of the inheritance money.



              I find President Kennedy a weird figure in history. I'm repeatedly told he was a great man, and sure, he looked the part. But the more I read about his brief time in the spotlight, the more his naive errors in world politics are exposed. Bay of Pigs and okaying the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem were cock-ups which would cause the deaths of millions. Would Kennedy's moments of glory be holding his nerve in the Cuban missile crisis and attempting to ban segregation? The actual nation-wide banning didn't happen until years after his death, did it?

              Comment


                #8
                Originally posted by Hot Pepsi View Post
                And the North Vietnamese didn’t even really win. Their victory was a Pyrrhic victory. Vietnam remained devestated, very poor, and isolated for a few decades until it instituted pro-capital economic reforms that haven’t been a picnic either. It’s not so isolated, but still pretty poor.
                Absolutely the Vietnamese didn;t win, since they had their entire country destroyed and got effectively bombed back to the middle ages. They managed to kick out the invading army, but that was, as you say, a pyrrhic victory. The only side that can be said to have "won" would be the US as their primary aim was to stop what they saw as a dangerous new strain of nationalism/communism taking root elsewhere, and by forcing Vietnam into the arms of Moscow they made sure it would never do so. However they "won" at the expense of a loss of face (and soldiers) which meant that for year afterwards they continued to punish Vietnam - even when the Vietnamese saved Cambodia from the absolute horror of the Khmer Rouge, the US found ways to turn that into some kind of anti-Vietnamese sanctions.

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                  #9
                  JFK's popular reputation is almost entirely down to the hagiographic reaction to his "martyrdom", which was itself built upon the "Camelot" image that had been constructed during the campaign and first three years of his administration.

                  Professional historians have been chipping away at that false idol for a while, but it still hasn't made much impact on the broader public.

                  And yes, the Civil Rights Act was only passed in 1964. It needed all of LBJ's parliamentary mastery to get over the line. The Voting Rights Act was more than a year later.
                  Last edited by ursus arctos; 25-10-2017, 12:07.

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                    #10
                    Originally posted by ad hoc View Post
                    I am hoping to get hold of the Ken Burns documentary somehow (iPlayer is not available to me) as people have said it is so incredibly good. Isn't the full version actually closer to 17 hours?
                    It appears there's a broadcast version which is ten x 55min episodes, plus the full version which comes in at just under 17 hours in total (I've just downloaded this from "the other channel" - ten episodes varying from 1hr 22min to 1hr 54min).

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                      #11
                      The film may have enhanced the saintly image for a more recent generation, but it was very well established before Stone left university.

                      Every Irish Catholic household I visited as a kid featured an icon-like image of JFK on the wall of the parlour or dining room, often paired with a devotional Sacred Heart of Jesus.

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                        #12
                        One of my wife's relatives was one of the interview subjects in the Ken Burns movie. He's the most highly-decorated Japanese American soldier from the Vietnam war. He was born in one of the Japanese American internment camps in World War II.

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                          #13
                          Quote Originally Posted by ursus arctos View Post
                          And yes, the Civil Rights Act was only passed in 1964. It needed all of LBJ's parliamentary mastery to get over the line. The Voting Rights Act was more than a year later.


                          Yes, I guess the depiction of LBJ and his meetings with Martin Luther King in "Selma" are quite accurate. The horrible thing about LBJ is that in every tape of him, you can clearly tell he knows the deep hole he's throwing his country and Vietnam into, yet the end of every tape usually has him saying "keep bombing North Korea" or "we need more troops on the ground". But by the time he dispenses with Robert McNamara, he seems to have lost all perspective whatsoever.

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                            #14
                            He's almost Lear-like at that point.

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                              #15
                              Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
                              The film may have enhanced the saintly image for a more recent generation, but it was very well established before Stone left university.

                              Every Irish Catholic household I visited as a kid featured an icon-like image of JFK on the wall of the parlour or dining room, often paired with a devotional Sacred Heart of Jesus.
                              Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
                              JFK's popular reputation is almost entirely down to the hagiographic reaction to his "martyrdom", which was itself built upon the "Camelot" image that had been constructed during the campaign and first three years of his administration.

                              Professional historians have been chipping away at that false idol for a while, but it still hasn't made much impact on the broader public.

                              And yes, the Civil Rights Act was only passed in 1964. It needed all of LBJ's parliamentary mastery to get over the line. The Voting Rights Act was more than a year later.
                              I'm a physical embodiment of the irish attitude to JFK at the time, my second name is John because Kennedy and pope John xxiii died while my mam was pregnant with me

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                                #16
                                I was going to ask Reginald as to which Pope's image was part of the trinity.

                                Did it extend to Paul VI? The reverence for John XXIII certainly didn't translate to his successor chez nous.

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                                  #17
                                  I've not watched any of this yet, but I want to add that Ken Burns is about as close to a national treasure as the US has.

                                  Also, the documentary has brought up all kinds of unwanted memories for my wife's relatives who were in Vietnam (or in the service but not Vietnam in the 60s). A lot of people feel like it's time that a proper documentary like this was made.

                                  Meanwhile, with all the fluff about the JFK assassination conspiracy papers being released, I was coming to a similar conclusion to Ursus - that JFK's assassination is the only reason he's held in such high regard, and that in some ways his death was actually a good thing for the country. He was actually pretty useless, or genuinely rotten, apart from a handful of pretty speeches (which makes him rather Churchill like). Meanwhile, the political goodwill that LBJ acquired as a result of the assassination is the only thing that got the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts over the line. They would never have happened if JFK had stayed in power, or there was a clean transition..

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                                    #18
                                    The museum of the war ("the American War") in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) is utterly fascinating and brutal and horrifying and obviously not entirely balanced, but if anyone is in Vietnam it is absolutely worth going to see.
                                    Yes, it's as gobsmacking a museum as I've visited.

                                    Comment


                                      #19
                                      Originally posted by steveeeeeeeee View Post
                                      Quote Originally Posted by ursus arctos View Post
                                      And yes, the Civil Rights Act was only passed in 1964. It needed all of LBJ's parliamentary mastery to get over the line. The Voting Rights Act was more than a year later.


                                      Yes, I guess the depiction of LBJ and his meetings with Martin Luther King in "Selma" are quite accurate. The horrible thing about LBJ is that in every tape of him, you can clearly tell he knows the deep hole he's throwing his country and Vietnam into, yet the end of every tape usually has him saying "keep bombing North Korea" or "we need more troops on the ground". But by the time he dispenses with Robert McNamara, he seems to have lost all perspective whatsoever.
                                      I haven’t seen Selma, but I know there was a lot of controversy over the portrayal of LBJ, probably to give the movie the villain in authority figure. He was a sonofabitch, but not a racist one seems the consensus. Far more than the fuckin Kennedys, he actually believed in Civil Rights and the Great Society. All that legacy overshadowed by Ike/JFK’s military adventurism, and his refusal to countenance withdrawal or de escalation till the 68 peace talks Bastard Nixon scuppered.
                                      Last edited by Lang Spoon; 25-10-2017, 17:51.

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                                        #20
                                        One more episode to go. I honestly never knew John Kerry was one of the leaders of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. My god, that speech he delivered in Washington was something else, the way the documentary flashed back to previous scenes whilst the speech was read was inctedible. Burns must have had that in his mind from the moment he began making it.

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                                          #21
                                          Originally posted by Lang Spoon View Post
                                          I haven’t seen Selma, but I know there was a lot of controversy over the portrayal of LBJ, probably to give the movie the villain in authority figure. He was a sonofabitch, but not a racist one seems the consensus. Far more than the fuckin Kennedys, he actually believed in Civil Rights and the Great Society. All that legacy overshadowed by Ike/JFK’s military adventurism, and his refusal to countenance withdrawal or de escalation till the 68 peace talks Bastard Nixon scuppered.
                                          I think JFK and Johnson were both pretty sound on domestic issues, and both mostly (or at least very frequently) wrong on foreign ones. Johnson was a lot more effective and definitely the right man at the right time to take on segregation.

                                          My professor in college, who was actually a Marxist I'm told but he never said so, rejected Oliver Stone's basic premise that JFK was going to pull the US out of the war and that's why the MIC killed him. He argued, convincingly as I recall, that JFK believed that the war could be wrapped up relatively soon. That stands to reason, unless one believes JFK was just waiting for the 1964 election to escalate the US involvement the way Johnson ended up doing. There was already plenty of evidence that Diem was not the man for the job, but he hadn't been pushed out (and killed) yet.

                                          Like fetch in Mean Girls, we just couldn't make South Vietnam happen. It was a "regime," and had supporters, especially among the Catholic population, and it had a flag, but it wasn't ever really a country. Yet to this day there are conservatives who seem to really believe that the Vietnam war was about the country of North Vietnam trying to conquer the peace-loving free country of South Vietnam.

                                          Part of that is because, until relatively recently, the only Southeast Asian voices we heard over here were Vietnamese and Laotian immigrants who fled because they'd been on the US side during the war and are pretty damn bitter about what Ho Chi Minh did. And who can blame them. He was a real dick.* But we were the invaders.

                                          even when the Vietnamese saved Cambodia from the absolute horror of the Khmer Rouge, the US found ways to turn that into some kind of anti-Vietnamese sanctions.
                                          This is way outside anything I know much about but my understanding was that Vietnam took out the KR for their own reasons, not because the KR were fucking evil. Is that right? I mean, it was still a service to humanity, but had the KR stayed in their lane and not messed with the border, they would have hung on for a long time. I could be wrong.


                                          As much as our involvement in Vietnam turned out to be one of the great crimes of history, I don't have time for people who want to say that Ho Chi Minh is some kind of fucking hero. Even one of my heroes, Pete Seeger, said that, I think. But I think that was early in the war. And of course, Jane Fonda, etc, but she's not that important. Of course, lots of Veterans and conservatives still hate her.

                                          War isn't about good guys and bad guys. It's just awful all the way around. It's just about the failure of humanity. Even in WWII, where we were definitely the good guys (or at least, the not bad guys), you can see lots of examples of how the Allied country's actions contributed to the rise of the Axis and the holocaust, and then, of course, we did some really bad things during the war that may or may not have been necessary, but still really awful.

                                          It's just awful and all the "thank you for your service" and fly overs at NFL games and camo Padres uniforms and monuments can't fix it.

                                          I went for a walk with Tonka around the grounds of the Pennsylvania Military Museum in Boalsburg, which is near me. It has a bunch of monuments to fallen soldiers from the area and those connected to a unit that was founded during WWI in Boalsburg by Mr. Boal himself. (Military units were raised like that back then. I don't get that. When did that end? My GGGrandfather started a calvalry division in the Civil War that way.) Anyway, it's a good place to go for a walk on a gray afternoon. You can look at old tanks. But just looking at all the names - especially the WWI dead and the Vietnam dead - is just so disheartening. And then I got to the newer monument of guys from the recent wars who died (and were part of whatever that unit has turned into. It's not the Pennsylvania 28th or whatever). I almost wanted to just fall over in the grass and cry. It's just so insane - both in the clinical sense and in the cliche movie sense of doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

                                          And that's just us!! When I think about the MILLIONS of people overseas that our stupid adventures have killed, I lock up. I can't get my brain around that at all. With local soldiers, I can at least imagine their lives and families and be really sad about it, but with the enormity of sadness and evil in the world, I can't even, as the kids don't actually say.

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                                            #22
                                            The initial invasion of Cambodia was motivated by self interest, but after they had uncovered the horror of the killing fields, the UN at the instigation of the US continued to recognise the Khmer Rouge as the legitimate government of Cambodia for TEN FUCKING YEARS. It would be like recognising the nazis as the legitimate government of Germany after liberation until 1955

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                                              #23
                                              Watched the last episode before going to bed. So many things I was visually familiar with, but had no idea of the full context. Main one was the pushing of helicopters off the war ships, i never realised South Vietnamese generals were comamdeering them and flying their families to the warships uninvited.

                                              And Kissinger telling the world all US soldiers had left South Vietnam, only to be told 136 were still left there. What a complete twat. How do these fools attain so much power?

                                              Comment


                                                #24
                                                Originally posted by tee rex View Post
                                                These were the two "books of the TV series" that whetted my appetite back in the day: Stanley Karnow's Vietnam:_A_Television_History (PBS, USA) and Michael Maclear's Ten Thousand Day War (Canadian).

                                                Both very readable/watchable, though compared with more recent work you had the pros and cons of early drafts of history: less access to the Vietnamese side, but the characters involved were still alive to be interviewed (or dissemble).
                                                Both those series had a big impact on me. I was struck by how the US knew Ho Chi Minh quite well as an ally from World War 2 so their subsequent fucking him over TWICE (in 1945 and 1954) despite their promises to respect national self-determination was a particularly egregious piece of statecraft that was responsible for all the subsequent deaths.

                                                The North Vietnamese OTOH also make me queasy due to their willingness to send huge numbers of troops into suicide missions where they were hopelessly outgunned but would provide useful propaganda by taking a village or town for a day or so. An asymmetry between military goals (which were often hopeless) and the political one of demoralizing the Americans. Classic case: Tet.

                                                I also recall that there is a mass grave near Hue where political enemies were dealt with ruthlessly.

                                                In the 1983 series, Giap is an impressive but menacing figure. Admired by many but just about as ruthless regarding deaths on his own side as anyone you could imagine.
                                                Last edited by Satchmo Distel; 28-10-2017, 10:27.

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                                                  #25
                                                  As I recall, the US decided to cut HCM loose in order to support France's colonial interests in the area, as part of the whole early Cold War/Marshall Plan thing. Something to do with rubber in Malaysia too. I can't recall the details, but I read a book about it in college for my class on America in Vietnam. I distinctly recall reading about it in the John of the dorm I lived in senior year.

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