COMMENT POSTED TO A REVIEW IN THE GUARDIAN
The Vietnam War:
terror, heartbreak and helicopters ablaze in an epic documentary
Ken Burns produces the video-equivalent of coffee table
books.
His past historical series are expensive kitsch, having
little historical value beyond viewers seeing some interesting archive photographs.
His whole career has been in doing this for Public Television
in the United States, an institution so cautious, so safe, so unflinchingly
patriotic, so unquestioning that much of its programming resembles pabulum for
babies.
I lived through the war and protests and horror, and I would
not give Ken Burns five minutes to lay out his interpretation.
I understand from other reviews that he is basically using
the "tragic mistake" line, the line which can be easily swallowed by
most now – again, much like baby pabulum - eliciting little controversy or
anger or truth.
But it most certainly was not a mistake.
It was a deliberate war of aggression which Lyndon Johnson -
always a loyalist to folks like J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI or the Pentagon and
CIA - started firing up as soon as he was safely in office, having lied to
everyone in order to get there.
The Gulf of Tonkin incident was no mistake. It was a deliberate
fraud to provide an excuse for war.
And what a war.
It was a true holocaust. Americans killed about three
million people there, many of them in the most horrible fashion, as with
napalm, early cluster bombs, and carpet bombing. It left the country a savage
wreck with land mines and Agent Orange spread everywhere.
It helped kill at least a million more in Cambodia, a land
it kept bombing and sending troops secretly into until its neutral government
fell, making way for the horrors of the Killing Fields, something, by the way,
America did nothing to stop.
No, throwing prisoners out of helicopters was not a mistake.
The CIA’s Project Phoenix – in which belly-crawling American
special forces slipped out night after night to cut the throats of village
leaders and other non-military figures, killing somewhere between twenty and forty
thousand in this way – was not a mistake.
And those American helicopters taking off from the embassy
at the shabby end, with the desperate hands of Vietnamese associates being
pried or gun-butted off the landing gear as they took off to leave them all to
their fate, was not a mistake.
Nor were the countless incidents of rape and murder by
troops or the thousands of women left with no support for their Amer-Vietnamese
children.
And all for what? For Captain Ahab seeking "the damned
white whale."
The war displayed American values at their most raw and
vicious. What we see today in Trump and others is almost child’s play by
comparison.
________________________
Response to a reader
who wrote "Vietnam is a rare war for which Britain (thanks to Harold
Wilson) didn’t sign up":
Yes, thanks to Wilson.
And thanks to Pearson in Canada.
You know, Lyndon Johnson actually grabbed Peace-Prize winner
Pearson by the lapels and pushed him against a wall, trying to
"convince" him to commit some troops. We have the story from a very
reliable source.
That's the Lyndon Johnson who created all the horror in
Vietnam, and much more before he left the presidency.
It is a sad exercise today to compare Europe's leaders under
America's almost equally-destructive and brutal Neocon Wars in the Middle East.
