Ken Burns' THE VIETNAM WAR documentary

imagine thinking the destruction of Vietnam was started "in good faith" whatever the fuck that means

— Adam H. Johnson (@adamjohnsonNYC) September 16, 2017

"in good faith by decent people"
"fateful misunderstandings"
"muddle through"
"tragic decisions"https://t.co/3nARKTBHDl pic.twitter.com/VNypbb8saj

— Adam H. Johnson (@adamjohnsonNYC) September 16, 2017

Citing a piece written by George Will with ghost quotes. Cutting twitter critiques, there.

I plan to watch this.

I just watched his The War about the 2nd world war or at least people from 4 towns at the time.
Is he following a similar path, though area of conflict is significantly smaller so maybe he doesn't need to narrow things down as heavily.
Anyway probably will watch this if i get a chance.

Based on the interviews I've heard with him and Lynn, they're interviewing people who've never been interviewed before, on all sides of the conflict (including Viet Cong soldiers, who've never spoken to western media about any of this). They apparently asked for assistance and recommendations from the likes of John Kerry and John McCain, but neither of them are subjects of interview and their own stories do not get covered.

Those quotes are in other reviews, they seem to be from the show's narration.

The (laudatory) NY Times review invoked "PBS centrism."

I'll watch at least the first part, but getting a rave review from George Will is a very bad sign.

I don't think it is a good time (not as if there ever was a good one) for apologist Nam nonsense with a Jon Boy Walton narration. I am being a bit flippant and reductive there maybe, but wouldn't any better than that from Burns.

*expect any better

Peter Coyote narrates.

...who had a substantial lefty-activist history in that era.

That Coyote also narrated The Roosevelts, which was quite often in the usual Burns style of lots of winsome blathering about the inherent decency of AMERICA!

I've been listening to the Trent Reznor/Atticus Finch score for this since earlier this morning, and it's quite nice, but some of it feels painfully modern to be used as underscore for events that happened 50 years ago. I guess we'll see how it's incorporated.

Also, the actual pop music soundtrack they assembled for this thing is pretty white and unremarkable, but fuck if "Gimme Shelter" doesn't do it for me every single time.

i highly recommend pbs' vietnam: a television history, from 1983. a testimonial:

The film Television's Vietnam: The Real Story (1985), aired on the PBS network as a rebuttal to the documentary. It was narrated by Charlton Heston and produced by Accuracy in Media.

now that's pbs centrism

i have to say that i love Burn's films, flawed as they are. he's a better "popular historian"than what you usually get, i think, and the subject matter this time may organically push back against his worst tendencies. anyway--i'm looking forward to this.

yeah, Burns is far from perfect, but he sneaks a lot of information into his sentimentalized documentaries that his audience of millions would never seek out or enjoy in other formats.

they're interviewing people who've never been interviewed before, on all sides of the conflict (including Viet Cong soldiers, who've never spoken to western media about any of this).

the 1983 doc (partic e5) has vc interviews-- soldiers and peasants as well as e.g. general giap

bet ken pans over the nguyen ngoc loan photo w unprecedented drama tho

A Trent Wotsit soundtrack sounds like an appalling idea, would have been better digging out some Billy Bang imo.

The music is on Spotify.

(The title - The Vietnam War: Original Score - makes me want to make dumb "Vietnam 1, USA 0" jokes)

david thomson: "It seems to me the best film I have ever seen, but in saying that I am not thinking of its aesthetic elements, its storyline or cinematic elegance."

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n18/david-thomson/merely-an-empire

wow, well, okay!

Thought it started at 9:00, so I missed the first 20 minutes--I'll catch that later tonight. Obvious (and necessary) thing to do, but I like how Kennedy, Nixon, and Johnson are worked in around the edges starting in the early '50s.

This is off to a promising start. Learned more about the 100 years leading up to US involvement than I've ever known.

That Coyote also narrated The Roosevelts, which was quite often in the usual Burns style of lots of winsome blathering about the inherent decency of AMERICA!

― calzino, Sunday, September 17, 2017 10:52 AM (ten hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

OMG I could not get through one episode of the Roosevelts. An unending blast of hot wind.

do people think civil war is bad? i found it extremely good (though watched it as a canadian who didn't learn much american history in school)

I was wondering if they'd talk about things like Dien Bien Phu and French colonialism in general. JUst d/lded this so can watch it shortly. notice just popped up that it completed as I typed this.

The Civil War documentary is outstanding imo. I binge-watched it earlier this year when it popped up on Netflix.

The Prohibition doc is my favorite.

I liked the Prohibition doc too; I learned about the WTCU, the Progressive connection to temperance, and the income the federal government made off alcohol before an income tax.

this was very good so far but my one question is why the jumps forward to 67/68; there didn't seem to be very good parallels between the two times until one of the last ones, and it seemed...arbitrary? or like...sticking it in to tell the viewer "yeah yeah we know all this old historical stuff is old and confusing, here's some war tragedy you're more familiar with, keep with it". I dunno.

The Reznor soundtrack is great, fitting. Very low key.

my one question is why the jumps forward to 67/68; there didn't seem to be very good parallels between the two times until one of the last ones, and it seemed...arbitrary?

I agree, but there was one...maybe midway through?...that really drove home the point for me that no one besides the native Vietnamese ever should have been there. No French or Americans, for sure. I guess most people who fought and saw friends and fellow soldiers die don't want to dwell on how absurd and pointless the entire war was, but that's clearer to me now than ever before.

I suppose to show circular patterns of history? French longshoreman spitting on and throwing rocks at returning troops in 1953 = anti-war protestors and cops fighting on streets of Chicago. I'm not sure it works either.

I'm amazed that my Catholic high school offered a class for seniors with the anodyne title "U.S. Foreign Policy," a class about the Vietnam War and Watergate. We learned about Ho, the Vietminh, Dien Ben Phu, the self-immolating Buddhist Monks, Madame Nhu, and the rest of it.

I was incensed by the Ho Chi Minh letters never being presented to Wilson and Truman.

that was incredible. I had no idea about that; is that well known? I admit to knowing very little about any of the build up to the war until now.

I knew about Ho approaching Truman in some fashion but not a letter.

I also didn't know about Peter Dewey, that was an interesting (and tragic) story.

I found the back-and-forth time structure odd too--that may have been to give viewers who only know the living-room-war part of the story some context, and may be limited to the first episode, I don't know.

Because I have to be somewhere tonight, I've got to choose between watching everything out of order or staying up till 1:30 each night--I don't know why, but they repeat the previous day's episode at midnight.

You can also stream it on PBS' website -- it's how I watched it a couple hours ago.

do people think civil war is bad? i found it extremely good (though watched it as a canadian who didn't learn much american history in school)

― flopson

it's the doc that made burns's reputation and still his most famous, so it gets a lot of backlash. his presentational style, particularly in that doc, proved pretty ripe for parody, or at least easy _to_ parody, and his strong association with pbs and the sort of middle-of-the-road liberalism pbs is thought to represent also inspires a lot of criticism.

i think he's a truly excellent popular historian, myself.

I remember The Civil War being good but haven't seen it in years. I'm mostly haunted by the fact the theme from the series was standard fare for my high school orchestra years and still have extreme listening fatigue as a result.

A Trent Wotsit soundtrack sounds like an appalling idea, would have been better digging out some Billy Bang imo.

― calzino, Sunday, September 17, 2017 2:37 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this, this, a million times this. Bang's Vietnam records are tremendously moving.

Trent Reznor, otoh, is the jingle writer ad agencies call on when they want a new flavor of chewing gum to come across as "extreme."

have you listened to any of his and ross's actual soundtracks? I'd argue "plaintive" or "contemplative" over extreme

afaik he hasn't really done any ad work, mostly soundtracks for fincher films

've been listening to the Trent Reznor/Atticus Finch score for this

sorry to hear Atticus has given up the law

I started the first episode and there was immediately a thank you to one of the Koch brothers.

isn't that standard on PBS? Hell, they named one of the theaters at Lincoln Center after em. Love those donations.

the Kochs contribute to a couple Boston-area public radio and tv stations, always kind of a jarring effect when I hear their names attached as donors for content culled from those stations, but I think the malevolence is when they use their influence from that to get funding pulled from other projects, not necessarily the things that get made

I guess the PBS ombudsman addressed a prior incident:
http://www.pbs.org/ombudsman/2013/05/david_koch_and_pbs_the_odd_couple.html

i like the civil war a lot, was classic insomnia viewing in college and not just because it tended to be a cure. the letters are hard to resist obv. but the show needs basically a whole other show laying the ground for it. i used to get v frustrated because i didn't understand at all the ~30 (~300) years leading up to the war and so would feel at sea watching it-- yet would know its audience wasn't expected to know that stuff either; rather just be moved or disquieted by the uncanny fantasy of americans fighting in american towns. think the limit of its focus--tho obv more than justified by the material's density--is why it's able to stay so uncontroversial and "healingly" patriotic without actually saying much wrong or dumb. (that and all the shelby foote.) maybe i'm remembering it unjustly but all this is why my first impulse would be to not personally watch ken burns' the vietnam war. however apparently it is the best movie david thomson has ever seen?

I started the first episode and there was immediately a thank you to one of the Koch brothers.

what made me lol was thanking some donor for their "support for the vietnam war"

RT this message to get reminders from @BankofAmerica before every episode of #VietnamWarPBS! pic.twitter.com/wnmlI8BnyH

— Bank of America (@BankofAmerica) September 5, 2017

yeah anyone complning about reznor and ross's soundtrck work probably hasn't actually listened to it. it's not like they have 'head like a hole' playing over the carnage scenes.

apparently I left some 'a's out of that post so here they are: a. a.

the ho chi minh thing is known if you ever read anything of much length abt ho chi minh (am assuming this doc doesn't mention that he also worked in paris and london as a pastrychef under escoffier, who is said to have told him he had a future as a great chef if he gave up this politics nonsense)

when james cameron (not that one) interview HCM at the height of the war, ho asked what the haymarket looked like these days -- he hadn't seen it for 40-odd years)

(i probably told ilx the pastrychef story before)

totally marvelous bit in the old doc where pham van dong says about fontainebleau--

When the meeting began, the chief of the French delegation, Max Andre, said to me: We only need an ordinary police operation, for eight days, to clean all of you out.

--and then literally goes heh-heh-heh

the doc did mention ho chi mihn's pastry work etc.

've been listening to the Trent Reznor/Atticus Finch score for this

sorry to hear Atticus has given up the law

― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius), Monday, September 18, 2017 10:43 AM

Ha! I just realized what I did there.

http://i43.tinypic.com/33m6bgz.jpg

Series mentions teh pastry chef bit but doesn't say under Escoffier or what he reccommended.

I was more impressed by his past as a photo tinter, tbh.

his secret best may be the one on the national parks.

a lot of new-to-me information in the first ep, and yeah some of the filmmaking was unusually clunky for Burns? and not sure having a word-dense dylan track playing (loudly) behind someone talking is a good idea.

The British leader Gracie seems to have had dodgy motivation. But I guess the Empire hadn't fallen yet.
& reestablishing European rule over the heathen probably seemed natural to a certain mindset.

I've already learned one thing: my high school Vietnam War teacher mispronounced "Giap."

I'm interested in this show, if for nothing else, than to see what the framing feels like.

I mean, titling it "The Vietnam War" and having it made by Americans is probably already an indication of sketching within the lines. I've heard a couple interviews that contextualized the last century within the long scope of Vietnamese history and it was a violent end to the western colonization and the French-installed leader of the State of Vietnam. But in the course of the region's history, which dwarfs the short scope of time Americans put on world politics, the ongoing national adversary is China.

I'm probably going to watch and be the "are they going to talk about China" guy. How deep is their take on history?

Starts pre-Big Bang actually

Don't let your prejudices about George Will prejudice you against the doc. I don't think many here would object to his concluding sentiment:

“If by Vietnam syndrome we mean the belief that the U.S. should never again engage in (a) military interventions in foreign civil wars without clear objectives and a clear exit strategy, (b) ‘nation building’ in countries about whose history and culture we are ignorant, and (c) sacrificing our children when our lives, way of life, or ‘government of, by, and for the people’ are not directly threatened, then we should never get over Vietnam syndrome. It’s not an illness; it’s a vaccination.” The Burns/Novick masterpiece is, in Marlantes’s words about Bowden’s book, “a powerful booster shot.”

Def gonna keep watching this, but this article raises some important questions

http://www.newsweek.com/vietnam-ken-burns-vietnam-war-doc-documentary-pbs-666582

The Viet Minh might well have swept to victory throughout the country, but at a 1954 peace conference in Geneva, it accepted the “temporary” partition of Vietnam into a communist-led North and U.S.-backed South, pending elections in 1956. Two years later, the dictatorial regime installed by Washington in Saigon, honeycombed with French-trained bureaucrats and landowners, cancelled the elections knowing that Ho Chi Minh would win. And now the American war was on.

Burns and Novick know all of this—indeed, they explicate the turn of events with admirable force and verve (aided by the stellar and precise writing of historian Geoffrey Ward). But then they quickly abandon the groundwork they’ve laid putting the Vietnamese struggle in an anti-colonial context. “By Episode Two...the war has been framed as a civil war, with the United States defending a freely elected democratic government in the south against Communists invading from the north,” notes Vietnam scholar Thomas Bass in a slashing essay that has been circulating for weeks as a kind of anti-establishment samizdat beneath the tide of gushing advance praise for the series. “American boys are fighting a godless enemy that Burns shows as a red tide creeping across maps of Southeast Asia and the rest of the world.” If Burns meant to make sardonic use of the Cold War-era graphic, the gesture was lost on Bass, author of a highly praised book on one of North Vietnam’s top spies in the south.

The above references this article, which I haven't yet read: https://mekongreview.com/americas-amnesia/

xxp I can't argue that

The best argument I've heard is that the american government never understood why there was a conflict in Vietnam, let alone evaluated whether it was worth interceding. The popular conception of it as a proxy war against the USSR is insanely off, because nobody in Vietnam wanted to be influenced by either the USSR or China (definitely not China), they just wanted recognition and self-governance

:"nobody in Vietnam wanted to be influenced by either the USSR" are you sure about that?

hey, it's an impression I've gotten. I'm willing to be disabused of this notion

it seemed more like the vietnamese communists and china had a mutual aid agreement, and the ussr direct involvement (and aid) didn't happen until american intervention, meaning they bought into the proxy war angle *after* the americans

yeah I don't know either way. I felt that Mihn may have courted the USSR after essentially being ignored by the US, but I don't know enough details.

Ho Chi Minh wasn't above being influenced by other nations. His Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (September 2, 1945) opens with:

All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.

The Declaration of the French Revolution made in 1791 on the Rights of Man and the Citizen also states: “All men are born free and with equal rights, and must always remain free and have equal rights.”

Those are undeniable truths.

watched first ep tonight, learned some things i didnt know. i thought the forward & back structure helped underline how long it war had been a part of vietnam...the flashfowards of what ppl know as "the war" against the war-ravaged decades prior added a sobering layer imo

the score is p effective so far

i will say though that it's still v Ken Burnsian & that in and of itself means that the series is not really going to challenge conventional wisdom about the war - nothing's going to get flipped or turned on its head

but imo getting ppl to talk about it, inspiring articles to reveal further truths Burns hadnt dealt with is not necessarily a bad thing

Burns certainly implied otherwise on Maron. Probably won't be able to watch until netflix, but looking forward to it.

it's up on Pirate Bay pretty soon after it airs.
When are Netflix going to get it? I looked there first since it's where i've been watching the other Burns documentaries.

The PBS stuff that shows up on Netflix usually does so right around a year after it airs on PBS.

You can also stream it on PBS' website -- it's how I watched it a couple hours ago.
― the Rain Man of nationalism. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

As long as you're in the States; blocked in Canada. I caught the last 20 minutes of yesterday's, so I think I'll watch them out of order tonight to catch up: part three first, then the rest of part two at midnight.

I read some of that Mekong Review article but it's so so dumb

I didn't know! post

I also caught the first 20 minutes last night, which I'd missed Sunday. As gimmicky as it may have been, I thought it was really powerful how he took all that terrible, iconic footage--the assassination in the street, the self-immolating monks, the napalmed children fleeing--and ran it backwards, the idea of erasing all that and returning to the very beginning, trying to understand what went wrong.

Peter Coyote's urbane, crisp baritone is perfect for these docs.

Why was the Mekong review article dumb xposts?

I'm grateful to Burns for giving me more reasons to dislike JFK.

xpost He starts off by setting up this imagined Wham-like "tension" between Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Then this idea that presenting the American rationale for involvement in Vietnam means that the documentary makers have forgotten all the stuff they put in the first episode is weird. Then he called the series "right wing" because Daniel Ellsburg is not an interview subject, and that's when I checked out.

xxposts yeah running the footage backwards was a nice touch

Christ! The deeper this goes, the worse it gets. I may not make it to the end.

welcome to the suck

Now imagine growing up during that war and trying to make any kind of sense out of what it meant and the fact that you could be drafted as soon as you turned 18, get sent there and have to fight there.

I literally can not.

my dad got called up & couldn't go bc he was colorblind...he was embarrassed & i think ashamed by it but secretly relieved, but god i cannot even imagine the alternative

my best friend in primary school's dad was not so lucky, he was drafted & came back an alcoholic with horrifying night terrors, divorced when i was in highschool. i only knew a very small part of their family life, i think it was way more awful than they ever let on

my dad had a draft number but was late enough/lucky enough to not get called

my uncle went to the air force academy and, I believe, was inspecting planes domestically and stayed in until he retired from the armed forces

I have friends with dads who served, although not very many

Last night's episode was harrowing, but I kept drifting off--I can't stay awake for anything during the week. I'll have to watch the whole thing again at some point.

I liked Burl Ives towards the end.

xp my dad got sent over first as an active duty member of the USAF in 1967, returned to the states and re-upped in the Army, then Hurt Locker-ed himself - he volunteered to go back three more times, twice on combat tours. And part of that was spent as part of JPRC "Bright Light" missions into Laos and Cambodia. He stayed in the Army until 1988, but spent most of the 70s and early 80s struggling with undiagnosed PTSD. By 1984 he was drinking a fifth of vodka every two days. He started getting therapy in 1985 after being interviewed by a journalist who was working with other vets. He married her in 1989 and they're still together.

my dad left the country and eventually got turned back at canada after knocking about europe for a year. a close family friend shot off one of his toes to avoid service. this series is proving helpful to explain those actions more clearly.

The title is starting to give me cognitive dissonance when placed in historical context, especially versus something like "Second World War" which is imprecise but general

For reference:

The Vietnam War (Vietnamese: Chiến tranh Việt Nam), also known as the Second Indochina War,[56] and known in Vietnam as the Resistance War Against America (Vietnamese: Kháng chiến chống Mỹ) or simply the American War

Not that it makes anything better, but this should also provide some clues to all you post-boomers about why the boomers got to be so bitter about the US government that they now tend to misguidedly vote for politicians who want to destroy it.

also explains the "like Vietnam, but done right" nation building garbage

constant redemption arc without any recognition of why or how what happened was bad

it's disturbing watching it all unfold in the first 2 episodes; these officials so evangelically hellbent on preventing another ww2 (which in its way is not wrong) slowly create a new set of conditions that is arguably worse or at least equally as terrible as what they wanted to avoid

jfk's voice memo at the end of ep2 boils down to somewhere between "my god what have we done" and "welp"

Chilling ending last night: as horrible as everything's been so far, things are about to get much, much worse.

i find myself in the same mindset that i get in when i read true crime... shaken by the information but compelled to continue because I feel like it is important to bear witness for the sake of the people who actually went through it or lost their lives etc

i am still an episode behind but yeah, at the end of every episode i am hit with this wave of impending doom like it's going to get SO much worse

John Musgrave's long monologue about his near-death experience was incredible.

I'd never seen John McCain's forced speech.

I didn't realize this is 10 parts until yesterday. I'm assuming 6-10 will again go Sunday-Thursday?

Isn't it 9 parts? It finished airing yesterday in France (3parts/evening since tuesday).

Last night I watched the two that covered 1966 & 1967. It seemed like a fair summation of those years. My primary reaction was that, as hard as it is to watch this disaster unfold retrospectively, it was far more soul-destroying to watch it unfold over the course of all my growing up years. Hard to believe that all this was happening simultaneously with a massive struggle between black Americans and entrenched institutional racism, which Burns barely brushes against in this documentary.

And they haven't even touched on yearlong torture that was 1968, or the subsequent Nixon years. Gawd. I can't begin to say how much they were even worse than the Johnson escalation years. By 1969 the whole country felt like a police state.

I'd seen the Nguyễn Văn Lém execution photo a million times, but I never knew the context--think I'd conflated it with the monks, and thought it dated to '63 or '64. Great use of this photo near the end, without mentioning Nixon by name.

http://thumbs-prod.si-cdn.com/fVqQCZ7oL71CMePNFHgk1AQT4q4=/fit-in/1072x0/https://public-media.smithsonianmag.com/filer/e2/d0/e2d03d38-0acb-48f3-8a57-1d142b87683d/10_2014-31-9-recto.jpg

wow i'd never seen that photo. that's a good photo.

camera and watch are like vermeer details or something.

that picture needs to be hung in the oval office

The 1st two episodes of this are being shown on BBC 4 tonight

thanks - just came here to ask if it was on in the uk.

halfway through last night’s episode, had to go off to a quiet corner & cry ... and then cry again towards the end

the footage from Tet... jesus...so visceral & terrifying
i’d only ever seen the excution photo, never the footage.

it also made me think of old stuff
my mum had a coworker who was a vietnam vet. she didnt like him, thought he was a drunk blowhard & always said “he goes on about how horrible the war was but it’s all hot air. he was just a driver! he didnt even do anything”
part-way through I was reminded of it & said to Mr Veg, i want to go back & tell Mum that I dont think anyone in Vietnam was “just” an anything. If you were a file clerk you prob saw horrible shit.

But then I realized something deeper the more I thought about the coworker, and mum:
mum’s father, my grandad, was a POW in WWII in Burma- he had been in Singapore when it fell, was captured & spent the entire war imprisoned. according to Mum he never spoke about it.
And I realized ~that~ was the root of Mum’s reaction to her coworker. It wouldnt have mattered what this coworker had gone through in Vietnam, the fact that he was talking about it was what pissed her off more than anything. Suffering in silence was to her more brave or noble or better somehow? idk.
Mum’s reaction is a) pretty much her in a nutshell and b) about as quintessentially Australian as you can get.
:/

Another great image tonight, LBJ watching the '68 convention in bed:

http://i.imgur.com/SSYlKvE.jpg

And the accompanying story I don't think I'd ever come across before: that he wanted to go down there that night and put his name into nomination, except the Secret Service couldn't guarantee his safety. Reminded me of Lennon and McCartney on the spur of the moment almost taking up SNL's offer to reunite in '75.

Great that "Blues Run the Game" began last night's episode, but using the Simon & Garfunkel version (which isn't terrible or anything, but it is prettified, and it does change lyrics) was a mistake.

So much of the music has been as obvious as can be--some of it works anyway; they're all great songs if you can somehow hear them anew--but I have liked the incidental score, especially this one beautiful piano interlude that usually turns up every episode. I was never the least bit interested in Nine Inch Nails, but Reznor and his partner have done a good job.

there is one scene where they just play an instrumental version of a NIN song

That would have slipped right by me--would it be that slow piano piece that keeps turning up?

I'd have to scan back through the show, but afaik it was only in one scene

Was very surprised to hear Fairport Convention, though the juxtaposition was a little jarring, and didn't entirely work.

I felt the Weather Underground were grossly mischaracterized in the last episode. They might have interviewed one of its surviving members for far more accuracy.

Whom do they include among the people who escalated the war "in good faith"? McNamara?

I think McNamara gets pretty aired out in the clip where they show the group told to audit the documentation trail ends up going through both the memos he sent to the group and the memos he sent the president, only to find he sent a second set straight to LBJ that was negative about the chances of success.

That and the interview with his own son where it's admitted he couldn't bother to send his own kid information on why the war was a good idea

I missed Fairport Convention--they tend to drop the music to very low levels after a few seconds. The convergence of last night's ending around Kent State was excellent.

Yes – the sense of accumulating dread.

Shrewd editing.

Can any of you guys recommend an outstanding book on the whole span of the war? Is halberstam too ‘best of intentions’?

Commentators consistenetly miss Halberstam's irony. He used irony to dismiss the wisdom of a foreign policy establishment whose talents (McNamara, Rusk, Rostow, Bundy) were nonetheless spectacularly ill suited for the kind of war they prosecuted.

To answer yoru quesiton, Stanley Karnow's book was for many years the essential text.

yeah i have that Karnow book

Jeet Heer has some non-US-centric recommendations

1. This is an OK list (except for Kissinger book) but also represents an insanely American-centric view of war. https://t.co/2DmQtciQI0

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) September 17, 2017

Karnow and halberstam sound solid, thanks. What about Bright Shining Lie?

I've seen so many Nixon docs and read two dozen (at least) Nixon bios and Watergate chronicles, but goddamn it, every time an Ellsberg/Pentagon Papers segment, followed by Nixon-Haldeman fulmination, gets aired, tatichardia forces me to switch the channel.

reasonable response

this is the show where I am behind and I have no qualms because if anything is a spoiler at this point....

xxpost lol Alfred I have the same reaction whenever they discuss the 68 Paris peace talks fuckery

what is tatichardia? do you mean tachychardia?

I mean Autocorrect.

xxpost lol Alfred I have the same reaction whenever they discuss the 68 Paris peace talks fuckery

Just watched that part. For some reason, I hadn't previously realized that it was based on such a blatant and obvious lie (nor had I heard the recording of Nixon just straight-up lying to LBJ before).

Later in the episode, there was the oddest and most unexpected music cue thus far.

^^"The Gift"?

Yes. It was completely baffling.

* cue John Cale *

Richard Nixon had reached his limit.

lol

yeah i had never heard the audio either...i had read about that exchange but actually ~hearing~ Nixon do his slimy obsequious fuckin two-step is enough to give me a permanent eye twitch

I somehow missed "The Gift," too--maybe I'm drifting off even more than I thought I was. (Just the work-week, not the film.)

Watching the Kim Phúc segment tonight--not just the photo, but footage of her being tended to by the photographer and some others, and later in the hospital--it's stunning; how did she remain so stoic? Was it catatonic shock, preternatural calm, blank despair, or something else?

Story out of Toronto today (Kim Phúc has been living in nearby Ajax for 25 years):

http://www.cp24.com/news/ttc-apologizes-for-naming-emergency-exercise-after-notorious-vietnam-war-bombing-campaign-1.3609115

I somehow missed "The Gift," too--maybe I'm drifting off even more than I thought I was. (Just the work-week, not the film.)

It's just the instrumental part ("The Booker T"), which is placed under the story about the two brothers and the one of whom who kept going AWOL.

I was awake for that, so I just didn't recognize it.

That clip of Agnew debating students on David Frost was amazing--had never encountered mention of that before.

The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh is a good entry point into the Vietnamese POV

Listening to Marc Maron’s interview with Burns & Novick. Learned some interesting things:

Duong Van Mai, the South Vietnamese woman who was the daughter of a govt official was not originally an interview subject. She was a consultant when they began - it wasn’t until they were editing that they decided to put her on camera because she had so many good stories.

Huy Duc was a North Vietnamese historian that they also decided to put on camera late in the process

I'm glad they did re: Duong, because she's got a great presence on camera

My favourite interviewee throughout has been John Musgrave.

me too, he’s great

last night we watched ep 7 where Musgraves talked about his return home. The moment where he says “that was the closest i came to killing myself” and stutters on “killing” Because he speaks so carefully & thoughtfully throughout the series, it stood out to me ... the pain & trauma in that one small tic broke my heart

I love Bao Ninh too, the North Vietnamese guy with the big collar & white hair.

Nick Turse is the author of “Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam,” one of the books suggested as “accompaniments to the film” on the PBS website for “The Vietnam War.”

More than 58,000 U.S. military personnel and 254,000 of their South Vietnamese allies lost their lives in the war. Their opponents, North Vietnamese soldiers and South Vietnamese guerrillas, suffered even more grievous losses.

But civilian casualties absolutely dwarf those numbers. Though no one will ever know the true figure, a 2008 study by researchers from Harvard Medical School and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington and a Vietnamese government estimate, suggest there were around two million civilian deaths, the vast majority in South Vietnam. A conservative killed-to-injured ratio yields a figure of 5.3 million civilians wounded. Add to these numbers 11 million civilians driven from their lands and made homeless at one time or another, and as many as 4.8 million sprayed with toxic defoliants like Agent Orange. “The Vietnam War” only weakly gestures at this civilian toll and what it means....

If you really want to get a sense of “what happened” in Vietnam, by all means watch “The Vietnam War.” But as you do, as you sit there admiring the “rarely seen and digitally re-mastered archival footage,” while grooving to “iconic musical recordings from [the] greatest artists of the era,” and also pondering the “haunting original music from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross,” just imagine that you’re actually crouched in your basement, that your home above is ablaze, that lethal helicopters are hovering overhead, and that heavily-armed teenagers — foreigners who don’t speak your language — are out there in your yard, screaming commands you don’t understand, rolling grenades into your neighbor’s cellar, and if you run out through the flames, into the chaos, one of them might just shoot you.

https://theintercept.com/2017/09/28/the-ken-burns-vietnam-war-documentary-glosses-over-devastating-civilian-toll/

just imagine that you’re actually crouched in your basement, that your home above is ablaze, that lethal helicopters are hovering overhead, and that heavily-armed teenagers — foreigners who don’t speak your language — are out there in your yard, screaming commands you don’t understand, rolling grenades into your neighbor’s cellar, and if you run out through the flames, into the chaos, one of them might just shoot you.

is there some VR gear I can use for this? Sounds dope.

Good read here: news article here in Sac about a local Vietnamese woman whose father was a South Vietnamese colonel & her thoughts on the series

http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/history/article175368331.html

as a stand alone experience, i found episode 6 pretty harrowing. the footage of the tet fighting was incredible. i called my mom and told her i feel like i finally have an inkling of what it was like to live through 68.

i find all these vets fascinating. their anger, their regret and trauma. their clear eyed self assessment. they know themselves intimately and in ways most of us will never know ourselves.

The Nick Turse book is devastating. Highly recommended. He's absolutely right that Burns & Novick avoiding the Vietnamese civilian experience is the main flaw of this doc (I've not yet watched episode 10 or the last 20 min of episode 9).

Thought John Musgrave was very funny talking about Jane Fonda. I've always admired Fonda's non-speech at the Klute Academy Awards, but it's obviously very difficult for a guy like Musgrave to stomach what she did (even after his years in the antiwar movement). Yet he came to terms with her, and can even joke about it.

I feel like the best thing about this thread has been it's reading list so far. I'd love to so see Burns' Great Leap Forward masterpiece, not.

His next big undertaking is about country music, which I can barely wait for.

i know lots of ppl eyeroll Ken Burns and cant think of anything they’d rather do less that watch “earnest white dude’s history 101” and have read every hot take about how the series hasnt covered x y and z of the war

but it truly is worth watching, even if just to get us talking about Vietnam in a way that hasn’t happened before.

also: they worked on this for 10 years & that it happens to come out NOW during this particular presidency is kinda mind boggling

I * want * to be convinced, but this is kinda my thoughts (much more articulately than I could share 'em)

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

remy this is not aimed at you or anyone else itt but i am truly weary of the thing where ppl post a published hot take as a substitute for engaging in a thing

it’s really depressing

“hey here’s something about that thing you are discussing at length: www.clevelandsteamer.com/poop/why the thing you like is dumb and bad.html”

they worked on this for 10 years & that it happens to come out NOW during this particular presidency is kinda mind boggling

Especially during the first 20 minutes of last night's episode, Nixon and Agnew gleefully planning their hard-right lurch after Kent State.

I found the memorial segment tonight extremely moving, and I'm usually resistant to anything so overtly emotional (or as the link above argues, so carefully crafted to be healing). Just watching all the interviewees more or less share the same experience of the memorial, no matter how resistant they were initially.

I've got a few of these episodes taped and need to find the first couple episodes to start watching it all.

Vietnam: A Television History and reading Mark Baker's Nam pretty much blew my mind as a teenager and kind of re-wrote my understanding of many things.

I found the memorial segment tonight extremely moving

Likewise. I have been to DC, but I have not been to the wall, and I feel like I need to go there at some point. The war was an atrocity, but like Vincent Okamoto said, for every one of the more than 58K names on that wall, there are names you can't see of family and friends whose lives were ripped apart and will be for generations.

I get the inclination to be cynical about this. The way Vietnam was treated by the French, then the US, then by Le Duan's government—the way we ran and abandoned the South Vietnamese people we'd made promises to—it's all fucked up and dirty and there's blood on everyone's hands. I think the only way to even begin telling the story is the way Burns did it. If you've got any better ideas, let me know.

Cambodia is the place that's really sad about the whole Vietnam war. From what I understood, they did not have an exact word for 'war' in their language and then got the Khmer Rouge and millions pounds of bombs (illegally) dropped on them. F'xing 1/4 of their population got killed for basically living in the wrong neighborhood. Hard to fathom even in reflection of today's usual atrocities.

I'd say that part of the Vietnam war and all the weird stuff that went down in the Philippines are a couple of the bigger things swept under the rug of history in the US.

It's all sad.

From what I understood, they did not have an exact word for 'war' in their language

without fact checking, i just can't believe this. southeast asia has a long history of warfare, just like everywhere else on the planet

I havent seen the final episode but when I visited the memorial I was not prepared for the experience & turned into a bucket of tears. had to sit and cry for a good while afterwards.

Imagine the size of the monument required to include all the Vietnamese names, too.

I think the reason there's not a similar monument in Vietnam, one that at least mirrors ours in concept, is that there's no clear way to acquire the name of every individual (North, South, Viet Cong, civilian) who died. The guestimate cited in the last episode was that around 3 million Vietnamese died in the years of war (with and without American presence), and how would you even begin to tackle a monument of that scale?

the pop. of vietnam was around 30-40 million people during that period, so around 8-10% of the population died. insane.

give this doc some credit it really lays out how much of a craven piece of shit jfk was

lol

earlnash - https://translate.google.com/m/translate#en/km/war

btw VG (i'll just self-identify as the poop linker) whatever the merits of the series, it deserves its share of healthy skepticism when the narration starts off with "begun in good faith."

It may reassure you to know that we're adults.

noooooooooooo

When there is a choir of universal praise in the MSM, purveying dissent is helpful. Perhaps why i've been reading here for 13 years that Steven Spielberg is "manipulative" and the worst filmmaker of his time.

Please post about the "good faith" line another 5 times in this thread. Theres light at the end of the tunnel.

not as prime dickish as yesterday's post, Prez

When there is a choir of universal praise in the MSM, purveying dissent is helpful.

― ice cream social justice (Dr Morbius), Friday, September 29, 2017

"I'm going to note my skepticism for the record despite my not having watched a single frame."

The nature of experiencing art requires skepticism, but I'm sure you didn't mean to share this insight with this group.

Also, the "good faith" line you go on about? It's about as healthy as fixating on a song lyric. Other elements complement or inject irony: scenes of French colonials abusing peasants, Ike approving CIA coups, the portrayal of JFK as a Cold War hustler with decent hair.

ok. i don't have TV.

peace out!

not as prime dickish as yesterday's post, Prez

I'm not sufficiently respectful of sanctimoniously dumped links/quotes

was that intercept article really that objectionable?

when posted by someone who hasn't watched the series the thread is about, yeah.

I'm not sure how much a out and out leftist ideological critique would really benefit this documentary, since in some ways its subject is an ideology imploding from its own false assumptions. the "facts themselves" kinda do the work for you and make it more persuasive (to the extent this doc tries to persuade you of anything) than it might otherwise be.

i went back and forth on the pop music on the soundtrack--as an aesthetic choice it felt a little forrest gumpy but the grim context gave some of those songs a new (to me) power. "Tomorrow Never Knows" during the Tet Offensive shouldn't have worked but it totally did for me. additionally, i think if you're gonna put pop music in the movie (which you probably have to) then it makes more sense to use the big ones everyone knows and associates with the era--it's a historical documentary after all. I kinda got the sense that there was some attention paid to the chronological appropriateness of when certain songs popped up.

if Burns' real secret subject is the conflict between the American idea and the reality of oppression and violence that is its history then this documentary represents the moment at which it becomes impossible to hold those two poles together any longer--you either escape into the fantasy (perhaps this is modern conservatism post-vietnam) or face what's left without it.

I've generally been okay with the music, but one thing really struck an anachronistic note last night: "All Along the Watchtower" for the fall of Saigon. That song (Hendrix's cover) is 100% attached to '68 or '69--felt altogether wrong. Not sure what a good choice for '75 would be, there was a lot of K-Tel junk cluttering up the charts, but they needed something different.

when posted by someone who hasn't watched the series the thread is about, yeah.

ok i'll farm em out, you ass

Downloaded the Karnow, thanks guys for the rec

yeah i was in two minds about the music too at first but i think ryan’s pretty otm & is pretty much where i ended up

i'm only up to episode 5 but i think the series makes it pretty clear that civilians were terrorized by the war... i could understand the argument that there is some imbalance between the time devoted to soldiers & politicians vs civilians but there are several points in the episodes i've seen so far where they step outside of that narrative to focus on the impact on civilians. and anyway a main theme of the first half at least is about why pacification didn't work incl americans like burning villages and herding south vietnamese into camps they were then attempting to protect as a manner of shielding them from the "enemy" and then winning them over. i think you would have to be pretty dumb to not make the very short extrapolation to "their lives got tragically fucked up beyond all recognition." like... the part in that intercept article that asks you to imagine what it would be like to be crouched in your house with bombs falling around you and soldiers you don't understand ordering you to do things.... ummmm you definitely think about that when watching the documentary! does the writer think i'm brain dead idgi

i think generally my problem w/ the counterfactual articles posted itt is that they seem to assume that the viewer can't pick up on any subtext or make any decisions on their own about the war based on the vast amounts of information presented by this exhaustive documentary. this is a sort of problem that pops up in discussions of "problematic" art nowadays, where people seem to think that something can only be good if it is extremely didactic.

dude who wrote that intercept article is clearly just trying to move product [and probably successfully]

its subject is an ideology imploding from its own false assumptions

otm – the theme of Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest too. I'd say the stripping of any altruistic carapace. When we get to Nixon-Kissinger, they don't hide their determination to sell out certain countries for the sake of others.

I mean, what they did to Thieu in 1972 and 1973 is the sad, grotesque denouement of a sordid experiment.

something i didn't know before starting this doc is how pro america ho chi minh was and how easily it would've been to win him over - or relatedly that the Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Viet–Nam began "All men are created equal; they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." burns doesn't go deeply into it and i'd be curious to read more on the topic but the doc also suggests that they really had v little affinity with the communists and only joined up bc they were the countries willing to give them material support.

I dunno how my private boys Catholic high school approved a teacher's proposal for a senior year Vietnam War class given the anodyne name "U.S. Foreign Policy." We learned all this shit: the French colonial period, Ho writing his own Declaration of Independence, General Giap and Le Huan, Madame Nhu, Wallace-Le May – everything. It climaxed with two weeks on Watergate. The class was only a semester but it blew me away. My parents were appalled.

yeah i know about some of this stuff inc about the french occupation but only from reading on my own so i'm sure there are huge lacunas in my knowledge. incidentally i read hell in a very small place: the siege of dien bien phu recently and it was excellent

My parents were appalled.

Decades late and for the wrong reasons, I'm guessing.

well, their hearing about Nixon's perfidy and the lies on which the war was premised from a sixteen-year-old shocked these reluctant Reagan-Bush voters.

xposts: jordan otm, booming post nicely done

in 9th grade our history teacher devoted at least a full term to Vietnam. I remember i wrote an essay on the My Lai massacre. quite a few teachers incl ours had been antiwar protesters & were basically ex hippies devoted to teaching the country bumpkins about ~the world~

The stones Esquire had way back when...

https://www.sessions.edu/wp-content/uploads/esquire_calley.jpg

Backstory: https://www.sessions.edu/notes-on-design/george-lois-a-punch-in-the-mouth/

...the point is, I did some ambiguous ones, the most ambiguous I did was Lieutenant Calley who was responsible for the My Lai Massacre and he was notorious. Here was a young officer sent into a stupid war by a stupid government and he wound up in a situation where his troops killed hundreds of women and children. But what nobody ever really understood about that situation was that… I thought it was racist. When I went to Korea [Lois was drafted in the Korean war] I was on a ship with 5000 men, all 18-20 years old, all American and raised in the American school system. When we got to Yokohama they were looking down at the dock workers, which were mostly women, and they were beautiful. And 4900 of the American soldiers were doing this [makes a squinty face and pulls his eyes and speaks in mock Japanese]. I’ve been shocked in my life but that was the most shocking thing I’ve ever seen. And I thought : What kind of country is this? Look at all these young men, all these terrible young men. And during the Vietnam war, a terrible war, racist war where we involved in a revolution that we had no part of, I showed Calley sitting there with Vietnamese children and I got to him to do this [plasters on a vacant grin] That stupid son of a bitch. I made him smile. Because I told, him: “Lieutenant, if you’re smiling when you’re sitting with these children, it shows that you’re innocent.” He wasn’t innocent, he did it!! And I was nailing him. I was saying he was a beast.
But you were manipulating him?
Oh yeah, big time!

How did you manage to do that?
I told him that I was in the Korean war and that I was involved with troops that killed civilians. And I was. I saw it. I saw guys do it. Big time. Yeah. Young men in war? Are you kidding?

What was the reaction to that cover?
Oh it was a furor. And a lot of the trouble came from liberals, people were saying: “How dare you show him on the cover with people he killed?” But Harold Hayes [Esquire’s editor] said that was the point, we were nailing the guy and at the same we were nailing the people responsible for sending him there. It was an anti-war cover. In the most horrible sense. So that kind of controversy is not the same -as far as I’m concerned- as the Al Qaeda cover with Obama, which is tame compared to what I’m talking about. Talk about a punch in the mouth!

Holy SHIT that cover.

I've got a coffee-table book with all of Lois's Esquire covers, and he had an intuitive grasp of that decade that can stand with Warhol and Godard and almost anyone.

I think my favorite use of a somewhat over-familiar song (or at least headed in that direction--it's not "Purple Haze" yet) was "Are You Experienced" to lead one of the '67 or '68 episodes. It was a perfect choice to capture that moment when, as one of the titles had it, "things fall apart."

dude who wrote that intercept article is clearly just trying to move product [and probably successfully]

tbf it was PBS who put the guy's book on their suggested reading list. Also, he's an investigative journalist who spent 10 years researching his Vietnam book, plus he writes for The Intercept all the time, so of course he's gonna write about the film

Jordan otm re: "counterfactual articles ... assum[ing] that the viewer can't pick up on any subtext or make any decisions on their own" -- I would also add that it's simply bad history to act as if the American public entered the 1960s with no inkling of the civilian costs associated with modern technologies of warfare. We had been to Korea; we had seen the photographs and the newsreels from the liberated European cities; and we had earned the dubious distinction of deploying the world's first nuclear weapons against civilian targets. We knew the toll that even conventional aerial bombardment exacted on the lives of ordinary people, but felt this to be a tolerable outcome ('collateral damage') if it occurred in pursuit of clear strategic objectives during the course of a just war.

What was new -- what would prove intolerable -- was the embrace of collateral damage for its own sake, in the free-fire zones of the 'pacification' strategy. While Manichaean Cold War rhetoric sold Vietnam as another Korea, reality on the ground found our military acting more like the violent 'colonial administrations' of the British in India or the French in Algeria. To keep a clean conscience while shedding blood in this fashion required a totally different set of ideological justifications (akin to those which the idea of 'nation building' has offered in more recent history); but these were not forthcoming and, when they did at last begin to appear, were found unconvincing by a large portion of the American people.

Am on episode 7 and holy shit this documentary. Terrifying, moving and shames me at my almost complete lack of knowledge about this atrocity. I'd rate it as essential viewing.

I knew some, but not a lot tbh. Like, "Khe Sanh" was a place mentioned in a Springsteen song, and 'Hamburger Hill' was the name of a movie I remember but never saw. In school history courses, we rarely ever made it past WWII because we ran out of time in the term, so American foreign policy and engagement from 1945-present was full of holes for me.

This really tied a lot of it together.

Fire in the Lake

just in terms of the filmmaking this is maybe Burns' best. eps 5 through 7 in particular have a sustained tension and intensity i havent seen before from him. he seems to have found a way to adapt his style to this material pretty effectively.

incidentally, the reznor/ross soundtrack is on spotify.

this is up to episode 4 in the uk - i am completely gripped by it. the story in ep 3 about the kid from saratoga springs (moogi, or whatever they called him) kinda destroyed me - dunno if i've ever seen so powerful a juxtaposition of one small story against the backdrop of such a huge event.

non-american speaking but the whole thing feels like some deeply traumatic loss of innocence on a national scale.

loss of innocence on a national scale

*takes a drink*

haha, fair enough, no points for originality there.

bummed out that PBS seems to have pulled most of the episodes from streaming. I'm not even sure what the logic is. Episodes 4 and 6 are not available, but episode 5 is?

Are you sure? I was navigating through them by going to the next episode when I finished one, but it was glitchy. Going back to the list of all episodes, I was able to watch 6 last night

I think they expire from their website today in the US - or at least in the NYC area.

It looks like they'll be re-running the whole thing for the next few Tuesdays, two episodes a night starting at 9:00 (in Buffalo, at least).

god dammit, i was on episode 8.

oh well, i'll just assume the US wins the war

Just when you think we're going to lose, that's when the dragons show up

entire Karnow series seems to be on YT

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqKi-SyRA7I

just finished the series last night

has anyone read karl marlantes - is he worth seeking out? ie Matterhorn/What It Is Like To Go To War

i am def going to seek out Bao Ninh’s Sorrow of War

sigh. i have to wait until late november to watch episodes 8 through 10, i guess.

Binge & Catch-Up (Non-Passport)

9/17: Eps. 1- 5 released @ 8:00 PM EDT

9/24: Eps. 6-10 released @ 8:00 PM EDT
(The entire film will be available at this time)

10/3: Rebroadcasts begin, each episodes streams for 2-weeks after broadcast

the easy to read* full schedule is here: http://mypbs.org/z/d/ModalContent.aspx?id=60131844281&doctype=doc

*psych!

Xpost I read Matterhorn several years ago and it's a pretty excellent read imo. I generally don't like war fiction but this one drew me in.

good to know!

I got an email that due to popular demand my local pbs channel is reupping free streaming for the whole series

:D

Finally I can watch the last three! Let’s go USA!!!

Still not streaming in Canada, so instead I started Civil War and was riveted till the end. I could listen to Shelby Foote all day. Is that who Kevin Spacey thinks he sounds like on House of Cards?

finished the final episode tonight. i think ken burns did a great job.

i'm glad he devoted a considerable amount of time to maya lin's memorial, which is an amazing example of how art can speak to things that even an 18 hour documentary can't really explain.

otm

i wish they had shown on camera what it’s like to walk from the shallow end with the names at your ankles into to the center with the names dwarfing you and then out again but i guess with the reflection it’s hard to pull that off

it's the perfect memorial. it's so jarring to walk from that to one of the others, like the WW2, which presents everyone in a very heroic manner but in doing so seems to be a total fucking lie

er, i guess i meant the korean war memorial, which now looks way creepier (and realistic) to me than it did in person. man, i suck. i don't know what i mean by "perfect memorial", either. that's so stupid and meaningless. i guess i just remember visiting the vietnam memorial and being really emotionally struck by it, and then visiting the others on the same day and feeling very little in comparison. good job maya lin, bad job me

yeah i mean got teary at the Lincoln memorial and I had been moved by other memorials before but i was in no way prepared for the experience of the Vietnan memorial at all

even more so actually seeing 2 vets in person hold each other & touch a name; seeing the boots or tags left at the foot of the wall; and the endless names & reflection & blackness ... i was a wreck by the end.

it cuts through so much & goes straight to the marrow of what people need ~from~ a memorial. there’s such a beautiful, important communication loop that happens, communication from those names on the wall & the art of the wall itself, and the people who go to give something to the wall, or who need something from it, or who go empty not knowing at all that there is anything to receive and still come away with something. it’s transcendent.

1 thing ive taken from this is that this war had the best still photographs

otm. you could do a whole series just about the photojournalism alone

"We’re in a military dynamic now in which that is one of the things up with which the military will not put, which is the loss of civilian life, and they’re struggling mightily hard to hit their targets." - @KenBurns Washington Post interview 9/22/17 https://t.co/kxcD6MCynH

— Adam H. Johnson (@adamjohnsonNYC) November 16, 2017

what a dangerous idiot and/or liar.

saying "the military" won't put with loss of civilian life is errant nonsense. of course it puts up with civilian deaths and always has.

but the military is not monolithic, even though it strives to make the chain of command into a facsimile of that. I can't help but wonder if morbs knows that the military is larded with people who are just as idealistic as he is and Ken Burns has probably met and worked with some of these straight arrows, which may tend to color his views on the generous side. I'm not sure that makes him an idiot or a liar.

he needs to broaden his eyesight

evil institutions are full of decent people

the bodies are just as cold

my lai: 50 years ago today

Also Pat Nixon's birthday, weirdly enough.

Ken Burns is "proud to call John McCain a friend"

hum. this goes along way explaining why your Vietnam doc was a pandering whitewash job that spent most of its time downplaying American war crimes and passing off a one-sided imperial incursion as a “both sides did bad things” civil war https://t.co/EmZjTHGtwu

— Adam H. Johnson (@adamjohnsonNYC) May 6, 2018

"a pandering whitewash job"

It's beyond me how anyone who watched that film could make such a statement.

maybe it's a backward projection overlaying the original memory. common as dirt.

yeah idk. i think ppl just decide to hate it for made-up reasons.

adam h johnson is one of the tedious "lol russiagate isn't even real" leftists, who gives a shit what he thinks about anything

who gives a shit about anything Ken Burns assembles when the war was "waged in good faith"? what a quisling. nauseating.

russiagate is such an obsession it should be a DNC cologne

this is the opening script to Burns’ Vietnam doc. What, one wonders, does “good faith” mean? “Decent”? What war of aggression is not “in good faith”?? Note the responsibility-laundering “both political parties” because that which is bipartisan cannot, by definition, be evil. pic.twitter.com/CX3E7j6PgC

— Adam H. Johnson (@adamjohnsonNYC) May 6, 2018

just watch the fucking doc already, jeezus

The doc is quite clear about probing the self-deceit of good intentions

no self-deceit at the top; the bloody pursuit of empire.

It's impossible to read about the history of empire without noting the shibboleths held by the colonialists, for example, "We're civilizing these people, that's why we're here." I'll wait for Adam Johnson to get past pg. 2.

The pretext for the war, the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incident, was a blatant fabrication by the Johnson administration. The decision to send troops to fight in Vietnam was implemented in bad faith. The Congress and the public were lied to. So that, if there was good faith involved on the part of the nation as a whole, it was a faith inspired by the lies promulgated by the highest echelon of government.

no one disagrees with that fact

idk in what innermost spirit it was begun, but it was prolonged not to "muddle through" but because the actual war goal-- the projection of a credible impression of american will-- dictated it be prolonged at whatever cost even after command fully understood in 1966 that the country would not be taken. how's that for russiagate

silly to argue with a blurb i guess.

i mean okay that's a kind of muddling through. whoops?

nothing in that blurb seems particularly different from the way the US has understood the war for decades, dating back to "best and the brightest." you can argue w/ it or see it as self-serving but it's a little silly to act like ken burns is coming up w/ some gross revisionist take of his own.

Yeah, that line is at the beginning of the thing iirc, and REALLY puts a bad foot forward, but if you actually watch the doc it doesn’t really seem like it’s actually backing that statement up at any point

I mean, iirc it was a little soft on Kennedy — and I certainly am not knowledgeable enough to refute it — but it certainly laid into Johnson and Nixon

There's an implicit assumption in some corners of the Left that those in power don't really believe in the "good faith" version of their actions--which strikes me as a fatal (if perhaps comforting) misunderstanding of how ideology works.

Honestly (off topic, here) I think the only thing missing from the doc is an extra chapter about 1975 to the present day: the way we process the war through the film of the seventies and eighties, how vfw halls transformed, all these guys getting back into the workforce, more on the effects of ptsd, the government not following through on taking care of these guys, etc

you had Poppy Bush in early '91 proclaiming the Vietnam War "Syndrome" (!) had been conquered

we have learned well the terrible lesson of vietnam: stay out of vietnam

DO NOT FORGET YOUR DYING KING

watched all of this as my nightly viewing over the last month or so. it does capture a lot of idk, emotional history, the way things FELT for these different people. trauma, terror, loss, confusion, these come across really powerfully. but the historical consciousness is really pathetically thin and gets worse as it goes on. never gives any sense of why the war made sense at an economic level - should have had interviews with a onetime junior aid at dupont or joe schmoe who paid for his split-level working in an airplane factory in southern california or whatever. (be nice to understand the domestic dispute as more than a longhairs vs silent majority culture war.). more to the point i was hoping to understand more of what the vietnamese saw in communism and/or the north vietnamese government, why some people would have been willing to die for this. was it like idk spain or italy before the fascists, where half the country is huge plantations to whose peasants land reform is like the earthly paradise? or was it just that the french and US were backing a repressive and extractive neocolonial regime so the independence movement ended up aligning with the USSR and the PRC? there's really no mention of economic activity or exports after a few references during the french colonial period, but idk I thought this was a big aspect of vietnam and the "domino theory" - "losing all of southeast asia" meant losing like, rubber plantations in malaysia right? or am i scrambling things up?

in the doc the north vietnamese and/or viet cong motive seems to boil down to just opposing the corrupt and brutal thieu regime, which ok fine, that's a pretty good reason, but then in the final chapter thieu is suddenly treated as a martyr --- poor guy, unable to "save his country" because the cowardly war-weary US public and congressional democrats bailed on promises they didn't know about which richard nixon would toooootally have kept. totally confusing as written. the rushed ending reminded me of "we didn't start the fire," suddenly we're just zipping through the early 70s. makes it really clear that this is about the war as it was experienced by american soldiers and responded to on the american homefront. nice of them to note that the vietnamese intervention in cambodia cost almost as many vietnamese lives as the US lost in their "vietnam war" but the fact that it's kind of a sad footnote makes clear that the early commitment to really putting the war in a larger context has evaporated. once the americans come home, we follow them.

it also fumbles in the end when dealing with my lai and other atrocities - they can go as far as saying that the coverup was due to more widespread causes in the military's culture but they can't quite say, the americans were waging a brutal colonial war, the entire thing was a war crime, so of course the culture of committing war crimes is going to become endemic. some of the talking heads come close (someone points out that if the same people had been killed by aerial bombardment no one would have singled it out as an atrocity) but the narrator demurs.

first few episodes still probably very useful for your "daddy, what's vietnam?" type audience. i don't think i really grasped the french colonial context until college. in other little ways it does a lot better than most pop documents of vietnam, like keeping vietnamese suffering/casualties in the narrative (if less frequently rendered with the same clarity and emotional punch as things that affect americans). it frustrated me but i don't regret watching it and feel like i "get" a number of things that i didn't before.

so of course the culture of committing war crimes is going to become endemic. some of the talking heads come close (someone points out that if the same people had been killed by aerial bombardment no one would have singled it out as an atrocity)

what McNamara says Curtis LeMay told him about the firebombing of Tokyo iirc

DC, did they ever really align with the PRC? I missed the last couple episodes but the main thread of Vietnam’s conflict with its neighbors and its alliances (well, North Vietnam’s at the time) was about self-determination

Vietnam’s been in conflict with China virtually forever, and my impression is that the conflict with the US is a recent footnote to centuries of conflicts, the most notable with China. Only took until 1979 for that to happen again.

i think it's telling that i watched this whole series and remain confused on this point! they definitely did refer to chinese forces supporting the NVA in the last years. i think.

this review by maurice isserman at Dissent brings up something that annoyed me but which i'd forgotten to complain about: the series is really on the side of the hoary old "returning veterans spit upon by protesters" trope, and pretty bad at dealing with the anti-war movement except when its participants are grieving family members or disillusioned soldiers. it'd be nice to see more of people who were just moved by the moral argument and forced to realize, from a position of comfort, that their government was doing something horrible. or even people who just didn't want to get drafted and go fight in a pointless stupid war. there's hints of that but it's not explored at length. or the black radical position which identified the war as an expression of the same violence, white supremacy and exploitation as domestic oppression - totally absent.

i get that you would see it as “hoary” but i don’t think that that perspective is any less valid just because it is oft-repeated.

sorry to be a stan but that bugs me

like

i realize there are viewpoints not shown in this series & blindspots

but the perspectives it *does* include are not just lazy sawhorses, they are backed up by actual people who actually experienced those things. one of the problems i have with our era of the 00’s is our eagerness to say we’ve seen something before, that we need fresh new hot takes on everything

how about this: a better, deeper take on something you think you already know.

something that annoyed me but which i'd forgotten to complain about

New Board Description.

lol

"decent people," kiss my ass Ken B also yr Baseball & Jazz docs essentially sucked

are you ever going to watch this or are you just going to haunt this thread like Jacob fkn Marley

veg, I disagree. I think the isserman article convincingly makes the case that the kind of incidents burns favors for inclusion were rare and nonrepresentative, and that the notion that they *are* representative has been a noxious right-wing canard for decades, used to stereotype and retroactively marginalize the peace movement so that anyone who organized against the war is forced to defend themselves against the charge that they spit on veterans rather than standing proudly as people who got off their asses to end an evil war. the doc could have honored these individual vets' memories (showing us the broad and varied quilt of experience) without leaving the trope later constructed from those accounts unexamined. the documentarian makes choices, and can't just say, look, these stories were true for these people who told them and stop there. given the wide audience and scope of the series, the makers could have taken the chance to cut through and complicate these loaded narratives, not just repeat them.

certainly it could have give equal time to the middle-of-the-road antiwar activists or coherent radical critique like i suggested above - not admissible here because burns doesn't want to call it a colonial, white-supremacist war). what gets the airtime are the days of rage, the protestors with VC flags, and all the sneering juxtapositions like, yknow, ~while these guys were dying overseas, look at these decadent hippies singing parodic protest songs and cavorting in the sunshine at woodstock!!! ~ as if country joe attacking the senseless deaths of his peers is more shockingly indifferent than, idk, footage of square moms and dads laughing it up at the movies or a baseball game or whatever.

i think isserman is right to be concerned that the only peace activists burns wants to put a halo on are veterans against the war and those who lost family members. if those are the only people with moral authority to question a war then it's gonna be pretty hard to stop any future wars, which is just how the right wingers who've promulgated certain vietnam narratives (see also: we could have won but the politicians didn't let us) would like it. when present-day protests are edited and soundtracked to showcase only the wild young more-radical-than-thou advocates of violence and destruction, we recognize this as a falsification with a political agenda, even though there are going to be some on-the-scene observers who will, forty-five years from now, assert that they remember vividly how such activities dominated the protest. that's not even getting into whether those wild young radicals may have been (or been manipulated by) federal agents whose job was to discredit and divide the movement by pushing for over-the-top radical steps. also not part of the story here.

I'm four episodes in and my impression is that Bill Zimmerman is the only american figure in the series who isn't either: a straight evil person or a naive imbecile who's about to go 'aw raspberries that's war?'. Not only he is the one american so far (I'll repeat I'm four episodes in) with the clearest view of the war but he seems to be the one who has the most control of his own narrative. I control+F'ed to see what Isserman was thinking about him and the role he has in the grander storytelling and he is the absent of the analysis so I don't know. Seems to me that protestors are on the right side of history in that documentary, but are also not the main subject at all.

Forgot the journalists, some of the journalists fit the description I used for Zimmerman.

that is fair - isserman may overstate the case and it would be a stronger piece if he took the time to explain how the treatment of those other figures fit into the documentary as a whole, in his reading. imo the second half of the series is worse on this front than the first, and i'm curious to see what you think later on!

I don't think I ever watched it a second time, but I thought the original baseball series was pretty great. (Didn't like the 10th-inning addendum as much.) There are a zillion ways you could try to cover the entire history of baseball, but I thought organizing it, to a certain extent, around Ruth and Robinson was smart. There was indeed too much New York through the '40s and '50s (so someone like Musial gets tacked onto a different episode), but it's also true the Yankees and Dodgers more or less dominated those decades. I thought the interviewees, music, and footage were usually excellent.

are you ever going to watch this or

Life's too short. Watch the Karnow series from the '80s.

it's cool how you don't have time to watch it yourself but do have the time to lecture us tediously about how bad it is

all i had to do was read Burns' fucking intro about the "good faith" of McNamara & Co

so piss off

If I remember correctly the good faith thing is really about american involvement during the First Indochina War and had nothing to do with the military? Someone correct me.

That tracks iirc

Morbs is even more ridic than usual in this thread.

all i had to do was read Burns' fucking intro about the "good faith" of McNamara & Co

so piss off

― the ignatius rock of ignorance (Dr Morbius)

what a relief that you judge artists by intentions, it makes reading you easier!

Burns an artist, that's my lol for the day

I generally judge critics by their intentions, which in 99% of cases is wasting everybody's time

presumably that's always your intention too

NAPALMED!

that is fair - isserman may overstate the case and it would be a stronger piece if he took the time to explain how the treatment of those other figures fit into the documentary as a whole, in his reading. imo the second half of the series is worse on this front than the first, and i'm curious to see what you think later on!

― noel gallaghah's high flying burbbhrbhbbhbburbbb (Doctor Casino), Monday, May 7, 2018 12:11 PM (three months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm watching this slowly because it's a thing I do with my friends and sometimes not all of us are available. I'm 9 episodes in and the whole thing is winding down so I think I can discuss the whole protestors thing with more insight, I'll come back once more when I'm done.

For now, I think it's hard for Burns to discuss the whole experience of the american soldier in Vietnam without mentioning the difficulty of coming back home and being criticized for doing something most of them didn't really even sign up for, which makes for good documentary. Plus, a lack of middle class to middle class solidarity is antithetical to the whole Burns philosophy he has been threading on for 30 years. Since it played into the hands of Nixon, well he discusses it. The same way he discusses the atrocities the soldiers worked on a daily basis. At no point the soldier is painted as a saintly figure either.

You say "when present-day protests are edited and soundtracked to showcase only the wild young more-radical-than-thou advocates of violence and destruction, we recognize this as a falsification with a political agenda, even though there are going to be some on-the-scene observers who will, forty-five years from now, assert that they remember vividly how such activities dominated the protest." and I just didn't see that? A few violent factions that are disavowed by the talking heads and smarter protestors, and people dying on campus greens. I saw cops beating on peaceful protestors. I saw a lot of young people lucidly being on the right side of history from day one and more and more people joining them. Perhaps more importantly, I did see the great falsification by the american right, clearer than ever before and how it related to today politics. For someone who wasn't a super aware of the peace movement, the war itself and it's impact on today's politics it was eye opening (I'm not american).

When it comes to the permanent revision of the US to see this as a nothing more than a mistake and not an extension of a colonialist mentality, the interviewed Vietnamese are quick to remind us how they saw it and how they saw is seems to have been ignored since then. After watching most of the documentary, I don't think there is any doubt where Burns stand when it comes to the nature of this war.

I didn't realize conservatives were staunchly for the War even by the '72 campaign. They really are perpetually on the wrong side of history huh.

nor did I realize a majority APPROVED of the police response during '68 Dem convention wtffffff

the only thing they were ever remotely right about was the USSR under Josef Stalin

and about hippies smelling bad

Casino, I have been rethinking about it since I last posted (merely a hour ago) and let me backtrack and explain that my grander point is that Ken Burns is at his best when you don't know a subject very well and then the documentary acts as a primer on the subject. There's probably shades of nuances that weren't there, that shouldn't be there and couldn't grasp what was missing, and you did and it frustrated you. So all in all I am not saying that your criticism isn't fair, which is how I come across earlier, just that I don't have what it takes to see it yet.

Fair! TBH I'm not fresh enough on the series anymore to really defend my own points. I just remember feeling, after the last couple episodes especially, like the selection of the 'narrators' really left out a number of reasons/arguments against the war, and left the main platform to soldiers and families-of-soldiers, as if the emergent main stream of the New Left hadn't offered coherent challenges to the war, to imperialism, and to the military-industrial complex, or that there was any kind of radical critique beyond "crazies who wanted to violently overthrow society." Of course the doc itself helps make some of the arguments by showing atrocities, and demonstrating that militarily the war was folly, but I do think it matters who gets to speak, and my memory - maybe shaky - was that Burns favors the soldiers as the locus of morality.

TBF, by the time I read critics that helped me articulate this inchoate dissatisfaction, I'd already really soured on Burns's narrative just because of the totally bizarre handling of the end of the war with its sudden pivot to "poor Thieu, all the promises to him that were broken by Ford and the Democrats in Congress, he was treated very unfairly" and "now let's wrap up the non-US-involved fate of the region in ten minutes." It felt like it really really drifted from the kind of thing it was promising to be in the first episode.

Saigon, the day of liberation, 50 years ago. 🇻🇳 pic.twitter.com/txyEyiwo8z

— Jane Nguyen 🇻🇳 (@Jane_DiepNguyen) April 21, 2025