[Orson]

(08-29-2018 06:56 AM)frozen-ace Wrote:  

The total involvement in Vietnam was actually much longer- 30 years- 1945-1975. The French Indochina colonies were occupied by the Japanese in WWII and US troops were involved in the clean up / repatriation. We never really left. We were heavily involved in the 1950s. In the 1960s it turned into a major conflict and by 1973 we brokered a cease fire. In 1975 North Vietnam broke the cease fire and that was the end of the Vietnam saga for us.

That may sound like a long time, but have you ever stopped to consider the modern day version of Vietnam? We’ve been in Afghanistan nearly 17 years with no end in sight.

During the conflict president Johnson was afraid of provoking the Chinese. He was deathly afraid of having a re-run of the Korean War where the Chinese invaded when we got too close to the border. This would be the case throughout the war as we never really put ground troops in the north. There were actually a few cases of Chinese troops and officers being found on the battlefields in the 1950s. It’s not clear if any Chinese served in combat against the US in the 60s and 70s, but I think you can assume there were probably a few. After the Tet Offensive in 1968 the US could have landed an army in the north and marched the few miles to Hanoi with very little resistance- but we were scared of the Chinese. We also never attacked the Ho Chi Minh trail with ground troops- we were scared of aggravating the neighboring countries and had to respect their borders (sounds crazy but even when the Russians were fighting in Afghanistan, all the weapons that were bleeding then dry cane from Pakistan. They could have shut that down in a day. They took no action and never violated the Pak border).

In 1968 the war is pretty much over. The north was exhausted and they are ready to give up and reach a peace treaty. Nixon is running for president and knows that if a peace treaty is reached then he will lose the election. President Johnson is illegally monitoring and wire tapping Nixon. Nixon meets with the south Vietnamese and engages in treason against the United States. He convinces them to pull out of peace talks and continue the war so he can get elected. He tells the South Vietnamese he will give them a better deal. All the deaths after 1968 were due to Nixon.

_ . _ . _

Huh? Can you cite a source for this [in bold], because I've never heard this calumny?

I hold few briefs for Nixon - but seriously! And I've heard and read many smears of the man. But I've not heard this claim before and I seriously doubt that it has any truth.

I was active in the resistance to re-instituting the military draft registration, an act by President Carter in "response' to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Because of this political agitation, a friend of mine served 18 months in federal prison for refusing to register (Reagan kept the policy, despite advice against it - but then again, he was also bent on ending the Cold War, which was still on...ergo...keep it on the books even though it does not matter, right).

I got to know several protest players from the 1960s and my organization's efforts were rendered to the Archives in the State of Wisconsin, where much of that era's domestic protest legacies remain on record.

The Constitutional argument is that the military draft is clearly an instance of "involuntary servitude" outlawed by the post-Civil War Amendment to the Constitution. Clearly it is, and it was (but that's a concluding point for a different post).

Thus, I saw several familiar tropes in Ken Burn's "authorized" version of the Vietnam War history. It is completely familiar, yet wrong in the most important respects.

Why? Because it's largely stripped of the Cold War context. As the now college-aged daughter of a law-prof friend says, "Slavery ended yesterday, but the Cold War ended a million years ago." And that's what she learned about Vietnam War era; and how distorted is the "history" being taught today."

This HS-grad's hyperbole is intended as the indoctrinated "Truth" intended for Moronielles by socialist teachers. Why? Because if the young remain ignorant of the Cold War and world-wide communism, then they are easily manipulated by today's propaganda. (Cf, "thepeoplescube.com" by a group of ex-Soviet agit-prop artists, dismayed and outraged to move to the US, seeing how Marxist ideas, policies and values are being rooted within the popular culture in the US. If you don't know anything about Soviet communism and the Cold War, you won't get the satire there. SEE the all red "peoplescube" version of the cube once a popular game during the 1980s and 1990s by Hungarian Erno Rubic, who also approved the parody... I'll post it at the end.)

But back to Burns "documentary" Vietnam film - where was the Cold War? .Conventionalism says it was all a clusterfuck, a tragedy, and an evil war by the US against anti-colonials, namely against the French. Similar arguments were made against the British getting control of Greece after the Baltics were ceded to the Soviets after WWII.

But on Roosevelt's deathbed, he regretted giving away so much to Stalin's odious reach, such as the 10s of millions in Poland - which is what Churchill had warned him against at the post-war planning conference in Yalta.

By 1946, Churchill - in a speech in Fulton Missouri - warned of the rise of an "Iron Curtain" of Soviet led isolation of Eastern Europe from the West. Thereafte, a foreign service officer in Moscow, George Kennan, warned of the spreading menace of communism after WWI by Stalin. He argues that only a policy of firm and persistent pressure against the Soviet Union he dubbed as "Containment" could counter the threatening power of the newly nuclear communist state from expansion. (SEE https://www.history.com/this-day-in-hist...department)

And expand it did, to encompass roughly half the world, 60% at its height, through direct support and Soviet "allies."

During the 1950s, the US helped pockets of resistance - the Berlin Air Lift, the War in Korea, as well as negotiating an end to post-war occupation of Vienna (which was ruled jointly like Berlin after WWII by Western allies and the Soviets).

Now let's get back to Burn's mythography "The Vietnam War" by an American who was in Saigon during the early 1970s before it fell to the communist North.

Quote:

[Burns]’s narrative begins with nineteenth-century French colonial rule of Indochina, allegedly a “mission civilisatrice” but actually a system of resource exploitation, racial oppression, cultural imperialism, and slave labor, all in collaboration with sinister “Mandarin” puppet emperors. [Burns] point out that French colonial rule was displaced in World War II by Imperial Japan’s colonial rule, and then by the restoration of French colonialism, which in turn was supported by the United States until, after the French defeat in 1954, the Americans themselves became the world’s leading imperial power.

This storyline is essential to the [Burns] line of argument. In their view, the Cold War plays no role in the Vietnam story. The sole international issue of the twentieth century, they believe, was decolonization, the Third World’s struggle to cast off the colonialist powers of the West, the latest of which would become the United States.

Thus the Cold War, the great global contest between international Communism and the U.S.-led free world, has no comfortable place in the Burns-Novick story where it is a vague, evanescent apparition at best. The Greek Chorus in the person of the distinguished American ambassador Donald Gregg intervenes to explain that we saw the Vietnam War as a defeat for the Free World—“a misreading of the end of the colonial era.”[b]

And this is the central trope of the New Left's version of history - the US was the villain in this story, and there's no room for valor or honor in it. (Let the anti-American New Left's most prolific writer and thinker (through a half-dozen award-winning books, and editor of the New Left's most important magazine called "Ramparts") - David Horowitz - who turned against them by the 1980s, set you straight on this; he himself contributed to some of this confusion, as he will admit. SEE him on Youtube, his March 2017 interview with David Rubin is most current and relevant introduction: "Communism, Trump, and Leaving the Left" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DD_8SJKAjc)

Quote:

In the early post World War II years, Communism was emerging as a world force following the victory of the Soviet Union in Europe and Mao’s victorious takeover of China. In Indochina, Ho Chi Minh, who had joined the Communist Party in 1920 and thereafter served as a Comintern operative in Russia and China—a career unmentioned in the series—set up a coalition of nationalists, the Viet Minh, and brought it under Communist control.

Having just led the Allies through a brutal world war to defeat the Third Reich in Europe and Imperial Japan in Asia, the United States suddenly awakened to the advance of Communism—a violent ideology designed for world domination—on several continents. By the early 1950s, the American hope to “contain” the Communist advance had been powerfully tested in Germany, Korea, and China. In each case the Communist side had militarily pushed into a nation divided between the Communist “East” and the American-backed “West,” and in each case the United States had to act to maintain the divided line and defend the doctrine of containment. When the Soviets moved to take full control of four-power-occupied Berlin in 1948, the United States responded with the“Berlin Airlift. When the Korean War was launched by the Communist North’s invasion across the 38th parallel in an attempt to conquer the South, a U.S.-led coalition restored the partition of the country. When Mao’s Communist forces took mainland China, the Nationalist Republic of China, backed by the United States, held on to Taiwan.

Vietnam would be the next divided nation challenge—one that no American president could turn away from. If Communism took Southeast Asia, then Japan, which had deep economic ties to the region, would accommodate itself to the international Communist bloc. France, profoundly weakened by the Nazi occupation and on the brink of succumbing to “Eurocommunism,” was in Vietnam endeavoring to stop the Viet Minh advance.

In fact, while France asserted neo-colonial claims om Vietnam, the US resisted, just as Roosevelt resisted Churchill's wish to do the same after World War II ended. Reluctantly, in Vietnam, the US reversed itself. Why?

Quote:

The Cold War was in fact World War III, a gigantic contest over which form of world order—ideological Communism or pluralistic liberalism—would shape the future. It was “cold” in the sense that dangerous maneuvers maintained a central strategic balance that deterred a nuclear conflagration. But the Cold War was “hot” on the regional front. North Vietnam’s war to conquer the South demanded American opposition. Independently and in collusion with Communist China and the Soviet Union, the North aimed to destroy, first by subversion and insurrection and ultimately by direct invasion, any future possibility for maintaining a power balance among the states of one of the world’s most geo- and economically strategic regions.

The Burns['s...] version of the Vietnam War’s beginnings revives the left-leaning interpretation that Mao’s fighters in China really were nothing more than “agrarian reformers,” and that Ho’s cadres in North Vietnam were themselves innocuously busy with land reform. There is no doubt that giving land to the peasants was an objective of both men, but it would be done to obliterate the class enemies of the Revolution as the keystone of Marxist ideology for international transformation.

[Burns] erasure of the Cold War is the hinge in the next phase in their story. The Cold War was a mirage—decolonization was the reality, and the United States, deluded, had it all backward.

So, that is in essence, the argument that Ken Burns advances in his recent documentary. But what else does he leave out?

Again, let's hear it from my source, Charles Hill at the Hoover Institution on War and Peace at Stanford University, who was on the ground in South Vietnam in the few early years before Saigon government fell:

Quote:

The vast Communist uprising that was Tet Offensive of 1968 may be briefly summarized as a devastating defeat for the Viet Cong but a political-psychological victory for Hanoi, owing to its immediate portrayal by the American media as proof that prior U.S. claims of the war going well had been lies.

[b]The documentary asserts that the war should have been ended then by negotiations, an absurd idea in view of what actually happened at Tet and what would be the North’s demonstrated contempt for serious negotiations in the years ahead. The Viet Cong were virtually obliterated by the Hanoi-ordered offensive; it would take some years before the North could recast its strategy and strike again. The North would never have negotiated under such conditions of weakness.

At this point in the film’s arrangement of its story, significance is given to the charge that after the Tet Offensive, then presidential candidate Richard Nixon signaled to President Thieu of South Vietnam that better terms could be had if Thieu rejected negotiations until after Nixon was elected. This calumny was not invented until a generation later, by a professional polemicist aiming to blame Nixon for continuing the war when it could have come to an end in the Sixties. The film’s producers leave its viewers assuming it was true.

And here's where we get to expose the lie from ABOVE:"Nixon meets with the South Vietnamese and engages in treason against the United States. He convinces them to pull out of peace talks and continue the war so he can get elected. He tells the South Vietnamese he will give them a better deal. All the deaths after 1968 were due to Nixon." A sheer defamatory invention from a generation later! Not based in fact.

Quote:

Like American journalism in general between 1969 and 1975, the 2017 film also studiously avoids reporting on what actually happened on the South Vietnamese battlefield in the war’s final years as that reality did not and does not fit their preferred rendition.

Books, articles, films, documentaries, and wartime journalism produced after 1968 have conveyed little or nothing about what actually happened on the ground. The Viet Cong were devastated; Hanoi needed time to regroup and prepare a new phase. On the U.S.–South Vietnam side, a “one-war” strategy was put into effect militarily by General Creighton (Abe) Abrams and diplomatically by Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker.

The growing capabilities of The Army of the Republic of Vietnam, the ARVN, went unchronicled as reporters wrote only about their desertions and corruption. The South was pacified through tactics that would later be called “clear, hold, and build,” providing security under the protective cover of artillery pieces and helicopter pads in “firebases” that began to dot the land like leopard spots. Into these securely defended territories, Vietnamese people came to settle, away from the Communist threat. The film covers none of this; its later episodes reiterate the condemnations of earlier segments; the Greek chorus [of tragic evils] is called on again and again.

I arrived in Vietnam at the start of the 1970s after turning against the war when I was a Visiting Fellow at Harvard’s East Asia Center in 1970. When the U.S. bombing and incursion of Cambodia took place to deny the North Vietnamese the sanctuary of that border area, I witnessed the Harvard student uprising which entirely shut down the university while humiliating the school’s administration and eminent professors.

When I arrived in Saigon on assignment to the Mission Coordinator’s office as a U.S. foreign service officer, I was stunned at the city scenes I saw: a mailman on his rounds, laughing schoolgirls on their way to class, shopkeepers going about the day’s work, a population that felt protected from the Communists they wanted nothing to do with. A few weeks later, two colleagues and I drove a civilian car from Saigon to Da Nang and back, unarmed, with no sign of checkpoints or danger. This was nothing remotely like the pictures of horror and devastation I had viewed on Boston television evening news. Before long, I petitioned to bring my family to Vietnam and soon my two little daughters were going to a Saigon pre-school and telling me in the evening that they had seen a “Hippa-Hoppa” (a UH-1 “Huey” helicopter) overhead that day.

The major battle of the post-Tet ’68 years would come when Hanoi launched its multipronged invasion of the South in April 1972; we called it “The Easter Offensive.” It is important to understand what [Burns] do not tell their audience about what kind of assault this was.

Burns (and Lynn Novick) make the peculiar, indeed ridiculous, claim that Nixon’s February 1972 visit to China and contacts with the Soviet Union so alarmed Hanoi that the North felt it had to invade the South to attract Beijing’s and Moscow’s attention and continued support. The Easter offensive had been years in preparation and of enormous military significance; Hanoi had lost its Viet Cong insurgency strategy and as a result was compelled to launch a full-scale conventional war to conquer the South. North Vietnamese Army (NVA) division-strength troops invaded the republic of Vietnam across three international boundaries: the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in the north, the Laos border in the Central Highlands, and the Cambodian border in the South where three NVA divisions drove toward An Loc, the provincial capital sixty five miles from Saigon. There were no U.S. combat troops left in Vietnam; all had been withdrawn long before; there was still American air support however and plenty of it. If An Loc fell, an entire province would be under Hanoi’s control and the South would be done for.

The invading Communist army far out-powered the ARVN. The NVA came in with T-54 tanks and with 130 mm long-range artillery. Fierce fighting raged for weeks. North Vietnam, General Abrams said, was “holding nothing back.” On the DMZ front, President Thieu installed Lieutenant General Ngo Quang Truong, South Vietnam’s best field commander, and the enemy drive was stopped.

SOURCE "On 'The Vietnam War' [Burns and Lynn] by Charles Hill, Nov 2, 2017
https://www.hoover.org/research/vietnam-war

By then the cumulative exhaustion of the home front in the US, combined with Nixon's resignation, and the consequent Democrat control of Congress meant that millions of people in Vietnam and Southeast Asia were going to soon die because American arms would not come to the anti-communists ally's defence, unlike in South Korea, or Berlin and Vienna and Greece, and Taiwan.

In other words, millions of people were killed because of the Democrat's perfidy and betrayal of a US treaty.

And thus the claims you see in the Prager University videos are supported by many facts. (I believe Dennis Prager himself was an MA student in a Columbia University graduate program in Russian and Arabic studies, and he gained fluency in those languages but did not complete his degree.)

Far from a tragic failure - and there were many of those in the course of the long Vietnam War - the war was actually won after the 1968 tet offensive. But a hard-won security for the South was pissed away by US domestic perfidy as well as the perfidy of irresolute Democrats.

Like today and Bernie Sanders versus Trump, Democrats had embraced a socialist for US President in 1972's Senator from South Dakota McGovern, who won only two states (Massachusettes and Minnesota), as Nixon romped to re-election. Only later in life when he went into business did McGovern learn that Reagan was right! Too much damn government regulations made it impossible to succeed.

And therefore the claims that Burn's documentary makes - that the Vietnam War was a Greek Tragedy and irrelevant to the Cold War - is false.

I read online a comment - one posted amid a long discussion and debate over the War and about Burn's documentary - about the American born son of a Vietnamese "boat people" couple who barely escaped from the communist invasion by the North, when Saigon fell. Grownup now, asked by others who were curious, also asked his uncle in Hanoi (the capitol of old North Vietnam, communist Vietnam), "Who won the war?" His uncle replied, "look around" at the McDonalds restaurant; at Wendy's and Burger King, etc. "They did (the US)." Capitalism defeated communism in Vietnam.

People tell me that Vietnam today is barely less capitalistic than New York is today (whose mayor DeBlasio is an avowed Marxist-socialist), who is going to say that the Vietnamese-American's uncle in Hanoi is wrong?

I'm sure facts like these, concluding this criticism of the film, fit nowhere within the purvue of the Ken Burn's or the filmmaker's grasp.

   

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