Vietnam Documentary

[GloryofGreece]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1877514/

Direct Free Streaming (here)
http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-vietnam-war/watch/

A lot of context explained. Good production as usual. Anyone else digging this/thoughts ?

[Montegriffo]

BBC4 started showing this on Monday night. They had the first two episodes which went upto 1963.
Very detailed and watchable documentary so far.
The two things which stood out for me were JFK lying about not having combat troops on the ground and the dignity of the Bhuddist monk as he calmly set himself on fire.

[GloryofGreece]

BBC4 started showing this on Monday night. They had the first two episodes which went upto 1963.
Very detailed and watchable documentary so far.
The two things which stood out for me were JFK lying about not having combat troops on the ground and the dignity of the Bhuddist monk as he calmly set himself on fire.

Yea to both those substantive things. I still don' t really understand why France was involved in Vietnam for that long...I mean was it really that financially viable and profitable?

[Smitty-48]

BBC4 started showing this on Monday night. They had the first two episodes which went upto 1963.
Very detailed and watchable documentary so far.
The two things which stood out for me were JFK lying about not having combat troops on the ground and the dignity of the Bhuddist monk as he calmly set himself on fire.

It can't be that good of a documentary, if that is in fact what it is saying, because JFK didn't lie about having troops on the ground, and people were fully aware that the advisers were engaging in combat, JFK never had to lie about that, in fact, from 1960-1963, the general consensus was that JFK wasn't doing enough, and the only way to do it right, was to put large numbers of US troops in, Lyndon Johnson may have lied about believing that America could win, but he didn't pull the escalation out of his ass in 1965, the vast majority of Americans were in favour of escalation.

There's no significant opposition to the Vietnam War in America, until Tet in 68', the peace movement didn't take off, until four years into the war and 40,000+ killed, from 1960 to 1968, the American public was gung-ho for Vietnam, dissenters were a tiny fringe minority, who were dismissed as being commie sympathizing beatniks.

And really, they were still being dismissed as commie sympathizing beatniks by the majority, right to the bitter end, and they're still being dismissed as commie sympathizing beatniks, to this day in fact.

[Montegriffo]

There was footage of him being mealy mouthed about the distinction between advisors and combat troops. He was saying that if the ''advisors'' were shot at they would return fire, yet there were 11000 troops there at the time and there were active units going on missions. Maybe lying is a bit strong but he was definately arguing semantics to avoid admitting the truth.

[Smitty-48]

Oh, and another thing, when it was just the advisers from 1960-1963, the Americans were actually kicking ass, the NLF was getting pummeled, the Americans were flying around in helicopters and lighting the VC up with impunity, it wasn't until the North Vietnamese intervened directly, down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, that the Americans faced any sort of serious opposition at all, the North Vietnamese only escalated in response to the Americans escalating, they weren't actually propping the NLF up in the early days, it wasn't until the NVA entered the war, that things went sideways for the Americans, but then they went really sideways really fast, it was the NVA who the Americans couldn't handle, if it had just been the NLF, the Americans could have won easily.

The NLF was losing, the Americans were winning, that's the whole reason why the North intervened, but once they did, all 17 million of them, there was no way the Americans could win then, that was the Big Lie, that was the lie that Johnson told, when he already knew that the Americans were doomed in Vietnam.

Johnson, McNamara, all of them, they did the math, and they said in private "there's no way we're going to win here", but then they came out in public to the American people, and said exactly the opposite.

JFK never told the Big Lie, and JFK never said to escalate, JFK very clearly said, "we will help the South Vietnamese, but this is their war, we cannot fight this war for them, they will either win it or they won't, we can't win it for them".

[GloryofGreece]

So all those Vietnamese died to save face...but that didn't really work either so if they all "knew" it was unwinnable then why?

[Smitty-48]

So all those Vietnamese died to save face...but that didn't really work either so if they all "knew" it was unwinnable then why?

Johnson wouldn't take the political hit for it, he wouldn't go to the American people and tell them the truth, because he didn't think they would react well to that, he thought that they would fire him and elect the Republicans instead, so he lied to safe face for himself, and to win the election in 1964.

What Johson hoped, was that if he racheted the pressure up on the North, with bombing, the North Vietnamese would come to the table and sue for peace, so he was hoping that he wouldn't have to win militarily on the ground, he was just playing for time, until the bombing brought the North to their knees, problem of course being, they didn't cave, quite the opposite, it just pissed them off and made them escalate exponentially, absolute mobilization for total war.

If you asked your average North Vietnamese soldier why he was fighting, he wouldn't say Communism, there was actually widespread discontent with Communism in the North, what the North Vietnamese soldiers said was; "we're fighting them because they are bombing us".

The bombing of the North, gave the Communists in the North the mandate they were looking for to fight a total war, which they were confident they would win in the end, but the actual peasants whom they drafted to fight that war, they were mostly fighting because the Americans attacked them out of the blue with a massive and largely indesrciminate strategic bombing campaign.

[Montegriffo]

An interview with the director

[Smitty-48]

Yeah, that's absolutely true, today's devisiveness is all about Vietnam, this the still the Vietnam schism which the Americans are fighting about now, it's just all done with proxy at this point, but Vietnam was the breach, and it all started in one place at one moment, LZ Albany, Ia Drang Valley, 1315hrs local time, 17 November 1965, that was the point of no return.

It wasn't JFK, it wasn't the advisers, it wasn't even the coup to depose Diem, at that point there was still wide lattitude for America to turn back, it was all Lyndon Johnson, he's the one who took America across the point of no return, and lied through his teeth to make it happen, and that lie, that's the lie that broke the republic, everything in America, is before and then after, 17 November 1965.