Ken Burns Get Vietnam Wrong

Ken Burns documentary on the Vietnam War has turned out to be a disappointment. It is a strangely schizophrenic piece of work, torn between the squalid reality of the American involvement in Vietnam and Burns' compulsion to affirm America's "goodness." The American involvement in Vietnam was based on a series of deceptions. The first was the Truman administration being bamboozled into supporting the French attempt to re-colonized Vietnam (1946-54). Then followed by Eisenhower's "domino theory" which among other things, lead them to create the puppet Republic of Vietnam. It now turns out that JFK, LBJ, and even Nixon believed that the war was unwinnable, yet the escalated the war killing an estimated 2 million people (on all sides).

Burns cannot conceal the ugly reality of what should be called the American War against Vietnam. It's obvious that American troops came to see the Vietnamese people as the enemy, and treated them with a brutality that doomed the effort to "win hearts and minds." A large part of the reason why America lost the war is from the American inability to empathize with and understand people of other cultures. It's a mistake we keep making, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the next country we attack.

Burns only becomes objectionable occasionally. Like on last night's episode when the narrator claims that the puppet Saigon regime was a "free" society. What kind of freedom is this; millions of people having their culture and way of life destroyed so they can eke out a living as peddlers and prostitutes? This is what America has brought to the world: wealth for the few, poverty and squalor for everybody else.