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    #26
    Yes, it's a fascinating - albeit brief - period after WW2 when the USA (or at least, elements within the State Dept) saw local nationalists as legitimate voices, before the demands of the Greater Game required them to support Europeans, and therefore defend their imperialism. The subsequent shift in perspective caused any number of WW2 allies to become the 'bad guys' within months. And baddies to become allies, of course.

    The situation in Vietnam led to absurdities like defeated Japanese troops being used on the side of the French in retaking control.

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      #27
      John Pilger on Burns' Vietnam:

      "I watched the first episode in New York. It leaves you in no doubt of its intentions right from the start. The narrator says the war "was begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War misunderstandings".

      The dishonesty of this statement is not surprising. The cynical fabrication of "false flags" that led to the invasion of Vietnam is a matter of record - the Gulf of Tonkin "incident" in 1964, which Burns promotes as true, was just one. The lies litter a multitude of official documents, notably the Pentagon Papers, which the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg released in 1971.

      There was no good faith. The faith was rotten and cancerous. For me - as it must be for many Americans - it is difficult to watch the film's jumble of "red peril" maps, unexplained interviewees, ineptly cut archive and maudlin American battlefield sequences.

      In the series' press release in Britain - the BBC will show it - there is no mention of Vietnamese dead, only Americans. "We are all searching for some meaning in this terrible tragedy," Novick is quoted as saying. How very post-modern.

      All this will be familiar to those who have observed how the American media and popular culture behemoth has revised and served up the great crime of the second half of the twentieth century: from The Green Berets and The Deer Hunter to Rambo and, in so doing, has legitimised subsequent wars of aggression. The revisionism never stops and the blood never dries. The invader is pitied and purged of guilt, while "searching for some meaning in this terrible tragedy". Cue Bob Dylan: "Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?"

      I thought about the "decency" and "good faith" when recalling my own first experiences as a young reporter in Vietnam: watching hypnotically as the skin fell off Napalmed peasant children like old parchment, and the ladders of bombs that left trees petrified and festooned with human flesh. General William Westmoreland, the American commander, referred to people as "termites".

      In the early 1970s, I went to Quang Ngai province, where in the village of My Lai, between 347 and 500 men, women and infants were murdered by American troops (Burns prefers "killings"). At the time, this was presented as an aberration: an "American tragedy" (Newsweek ). In this one province, it was estimated that 50,000 people had been slaughtered during the era of American "free fire zones". Mass homicide. This was not news.

      To the north, in Quang Tri province, more bombs were dropped than in all of Germany during the Second World War. Since 1975, unexploded ordnance has caused more than 40,000 deaths in mostly "South Vietnam", the country America claimed to "save" and, with France, conceived as a singularly imperial ruse.

      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."
      "
      http://johnpilger.com/articles/the-killing-of-history

      ------------------------------------------------



      Beyond the Gulf of Tonkin incident, central elements of the Vietnam War like the Phoenix Program, a death squad mass assassination program targeting leaders of civic society in which nearly 30,000 Vietnamese were killed, thousands more tortured were barely covered if at all in Burns program. The Phoenix Program became the template for similar terror campaigns in Central America and Iraq among other places. This was the real beginning of the American "war on terror":

      "Methods of torture used in the Phoenix Program interrogation centers included: "Rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes, or hard objects, and rape followed by murder; electric shock ('the Bell Telephone Hour') rendered by attaching wires to the genitals or other sensitive parts of the body, like the tongue; the 'water treatment'; the 'airplane' in which the prisoner's arms were tied behind the back, and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling, suspending the prisoner in midair, after which he or she was beaten; beatings with rubber hoses and whips; the use of police dogs to maul prisoners."


      Abu Ghraib

      " Military intelligence officer K. Milton Osborne witnessed the following use of torture: "The use of the insertion of the 6-inch dowel into the canal of one of my detainee's ears, and the tapping through the brain until dead. The starvation to death (in a cage), of a Vietnamese woman who was suspected of being part of the local political education cadre in one of the local villages ... The use of electronic gear such as sealed telephones attached to ... both the women's vaginas and men's testicles [to] shock them into submission." +

      According to one former CIA officer few of the detainees who were interrogated survived—most of them were tortured to death, and those that survived the torture sessions were generally killed afterwards."

      http://factsanddetails.com/southeast...ntry-3358.html


      A timeline of the Phoenix Program by former CIA field agent Ralph McGehee:

      http://www.serendipity.li/cia/operation_phoenix.htm

      And one of the better books on the subject, The Phoenix Program by Douglas Valentine:

      https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Progr.../dp/1504032888
      Last edited by linus; 23-01-2018, 23:49.

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        #28
        Wow Linus. Great post, I never knew that.

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          #29
          Pilger can fuck off back to crawling up Uncle Vlad's arse and praising Trump. If you watch the series in full, you'll find it doesn't shy away from American atrocities, in fact the series does mention the Phoenix Programme. What the show doesn't do is show the American as Imperialistic pig dogs and the North Vietnamese as brave, noble resistance fighters, as Pilger would like it to.

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            #30
            Pilger can get tae fuck. Maybe 40 years ago he wasn’t a tired old hack capable of supreme bullshit. King of whataboutery. Kind of prick that allows the Right to attach “shrill” next to leftist as a matter of course.

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              #31
              Pilger is simply a barefaced liar. Even the word 'hack' is too kind for what he does.

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                #32
                Originally posted by jeanmid View Post
                Pilger can fuck off back to crawling up Uncle Vlad's arse and praising Trump. If you watch the series in full, you'll find it doesn't shy away from American atrocities, in fact the series does mention the Phoenix Programme. What the show doesn't do is show the American as Imperialistic pig dogs and the North Vietnamese as brave, noble resistance fighters, as Pilger would like it to.
                Exactly. I thought that for an American made series it was exceptionally even handed and didn't shy away from criticising both sides for atrocities, war crimes and general shithousery. It also featured a lot of first hand accounts from the Vietnamese on both sides, which I'd guess is pretty unusual for a Vietnam documentary made in the US.

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                  #33
                  Originally posted by tracteurgarçon View Post
                  Exactly. I thought that for an American made series it was exceptionally even handed and didn't shy away from criticising both sides for atrocities, war crimes and general shithousery. It also featured a lot of first hand accounts from the Vietnamese on both sides, which I'd guess is pretty unusual for a Vietnam documentary made in the US.
                  We watched a documentary series in college - so, roughly 25 years ago, and it wasn't current then - that had some interviews with Vietnamese officers and Diệm's widow, among others. It certainly wasn't at all trying to portray the US invasion as a good idea or well-executed by any stretch. It also had a lot of interviews with US vets, many of whom were homeless or otherwise traumatized.

                  I suppose it may be easier now to get candid interviews with Vietnamese as the country is easier to travel to and is opening up. But then, a lot of those people have died of natural causes by now.

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