Ken Burns' Vietnam
Here's my review so far.
After Episode 1...
Excellent technical achievement, as is typical for Burns. The people of this country continue to be remarkably ignorant of the actual history and events. Americans don't know who the fucking vice president is, who their Senators are, who their US House rep is. I would be astonished if more than 5% of lazy-ass Americans know what the Gulf of Tonkin Incident is. Even fewer what the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution meant to draft age Americans in 1964. What percentage of them, including the current oval office occupant, will declare that this whole piece of work is fake news? I'm going with around 40% of those who take the time to watch it. Stupid fucking country.
That said...I'm always somewhat cautious with Ken Burns. IMO he was hideously forgiving of the people of the South in his "masterpiece." Comments by historian Barbara J. Fields were the primary moments in the piece where it dug really deep into some of the realities of the history. Far too few of those.
After Episode 2...
After sitting through episode 2...I don't know if I can watch this anymore. I'm not learning anything I didnt already know...and I don't need the distress.
And my fears of Burns' "balanced" approach are showing up already. What's required is a no bullshit evaluation of the whole fucking dishonorable endeavour...and the utter waste of who knows how any millions of lives. And I don't see it coming out of Burns.
Maybe by the end of it we will see something from Burns about the basic question of why the fuck we got involved in the first place, and who were the people in control of this country who thought it was necessary, much less a good idea.
Maybe...maybe not. I suspect Ken Burns was trying to avoid the negative feedback from the American right that was directed at "Vietnam - A Television History." The excellent 13 part 1983 PBS series based on war correspondent Stanley Karnow's equally excellent book, which pulled few punches when it came to the anti-communist nonsense behind this country's involvement.
I watched part of Episode 3...
Long before the Gulf of Tonkin incident which was the lying-ass excuse LBJ used for escalation...Truman made a choice. The choice was for the French and not for some pack of commie zipperhead guerillas. Ho Chi Mihn had been almost pleading with US officials not to let the French just walk back in and take over what the Vichy French had abandoned to the Japanese in 1940. What Truman could have done is go retrieve his balls from his other pants and tell de Gaulle to stuff his implied threat of allowing France to "come under the influence of the Soviet Union" if the US supported Vietnamese independence. But no...Ho Chi Mihn was a Marxist and McCarthy was already on the road.
We have nobody to blame but ourselves for this. And at the beginning of episode 1, Ken Burns has already decided for us that the war was started by "decent people with good intentions acting in good faith." WTF, Ken...really?
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