The Vietnam War: A conversation with Ken Burns and Lynn Novick

Iraq....those who don't learn from history are bound to repeat it.

A total of 180,000 Chinese soldiers were killed while they fought with North Korea against US aggression in the early 1950s, a Chinese major general said ahead of the 60th anniversary of the Korean War, which fell last Friday.

... notoriously referred to the public self-immolations of Buddhist monks—who burned themselves alive protesting the Diem regime's corruption and repression of Buddhists—as "barbecues" and crowed, "Let them burn and we shall clap our hands."

I'm becoming more cynical as I get older, and certainly don't trust the military establishment,

The Russians may have given North Korea technical help in building nuclear weapons.

Said Nixon: “My, I would never do anything to encourage….Saigon not to come to the table….Good God, we’ve got to get them to Paris or you can’t have peace.”

In the four years between the sabotage and what Kissinger termed “peace at hand” just prior to the 1972 election, more than 20,000 US troops died in Vietnam. More than 100,000 were wounded. More than a million Vietnamese were killed.

But in 1973, Kissinger was given the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the same settlement he helped sabotage in 1968.

According to Parry, LBJ wanted to go public with Nixon’s treason. But Clark Clifford, an architect of the CIA and a pillar of the Washington establishment, talked Johnson out of it. LBJ’s close confidant warned that the revelation would shake the foundations of the nation.

Wait a second--this was a little before my time, but didn't Kennedy start the war

LBJ escalate it

and then Nixon finally end it (with maybe a few "tricks" but that's why they called him Tricky Dick)?

Introduction

On March 18, 1969, the United States began a four year long carpet-bombing campaign in the skies of Cambodia, devastating the countryside and causing socio-political upheaval that eventually led to the installation of the Pol Pot regime.


History
During the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese Liberation Front and the PAVN used a network of supply routes that partially ran through Laos and Cambodia. As the War progressed, the U.S. ostensibly invaded both Cambodia and Laos in order to disrupt these routes.

The Bombing
The initial operation was authorized by then President Richard Nixon, but without the knowledge or approval of U.S. Congress. The bombings became public knowledge in 1973, after which they were stopped.

The United States dropped upwards of 2.7 million tons of bombs on Cambodia, exceeding the amount it had dropped on Japan during WWII (including Hiroshima and Nagasaki) by almost a million tons. During this time, about 30 per cent of the country's population was internally displaced.

Result

Estimates vary widely on the number of civilian casualites inflicted by the campaign; however,as many as 500,000 people died as a direct result of the bombings while perhaps hundreds of thousands more died from the effects of displacement, disease or starvation during this period.

The Khmer Rouge, previously a marginalized guerrilla group, propagandized the bombing campaign to great effect; by the CIA's own intelligence estimates, the US bombing campaign was a key factor in the increase in popular support for the Khmer Rouge rebels. After their victory in 1975, the Khmer Rouge oversaw a period in which another one-to-two million Cambodians died from execution, hunger and forced labour.

After it became public, the bombing campaign was a subject of contention within the U.S. as opposition to the U.S. military project in Indochina intensified.

References

http://www.khmercity.net/forum/topics/map-of-us-bombed-cambodia

http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/cambodia/tl02.html

http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/2582[/quote]

http://rabble.ca/toolkit/on-this-day/us-secret-bombing-cambodia

The Vietnam War

...The "East v West" paranoia is exploited by the MIC for profit, and also by the leaders inside the proxy states to get money from Washington..."You must help us defeat communism, ignore the drug dealing and arms trafficking I do with the weapons you give us....".....

False Patriots shilling for Arms Merchants.

If you have an MIC Hammer, all the world is a nail, for profit.

There were two sorts of wars in the 20th century world:

1. The "East v West" war where morons cannot see the struggle through anything other than a shallow Capitalism v Communism lens. No matter what, the possibility of ceding "strategic" ground to the other side must be stopped, at the cost of millions of lives dying in the most savage way possible.

The "East v West" paranoia is exploited by the MIC for profit, and also by the leaders inside the proxy states to get money from Washington..."You must help us defeat communism, ignore the drug dealing, extortion rackets and arms trafficking I do with the weapons you give us...that's just my side hustle..."

Throw in a little (or a lot) racism, mix and stirred by opportunists.

2. The "North v South" wars which are really wars of National Liberation from Colonial Powers. These are wars of legitimacy and agency for a people to resist their slavers.

Vietnam was such a war of National Liberation, but internal factions exploited the E v W duality for their own ends, with predictable tragic results. Uncle Ho for military aid, Diem for the same. Both cost millions of lives.

Only Ghandhi had the right means to do it. Peaceful resistance and time. No colonial power can resist tens of millions of people in a foreign land forever.

Now we fight in Iraq for Oil. Yes, ISIS is fighting for Oil, despite their own propaganda and ours.

Now we fight in Afghanistan for Minerals (est $2-3 Trillion in Strategic Metals in the ground there). While the Afghans fight a war of National Liberation.

Guess who will win?

Hint: A couple of hundred thousands troops cannot defeat 35 Million Afghans regardless of firepower. All they have to do is keep having babies and wait.

A couple of hundred thousand troops cannot defeat 35 Million Afghans regardless of firepower.

tuolumne_tradster:
The Khmer Rouge, previously a marginalized guerrilla group, propagandized the bombing campaign to great effect; by the CIA's own intelligence estimates, the US bombing campaign was a key factor in the increase in popular support for the Khmer Rouge rebels. After their victory in 1975, the Khmer Rouge oversaw a period in which another one-to-two million Cambodians died from execution, hunger and forced labour.

Kissinger relayed these orders to his military assistant, Gen. Alexander Haig: “He wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn’t want to hear anything. It’s an order, it’s to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves.”

Khmer insurgent (KI) [Khmer Rouge] cadre have begun an intensified proselyting campaign among ethnic Cambodian residents . . . in an effort to recruit young men and women for KI military organizations. They are using damage caused by B-52 strikes as the main theme of their propaganda.

In November 1975 — seven months after KR forces seized control of Phnom Penh — Henry Kissinger said to Thailand’s foreign minister that he “should tell [the KR] that we bear no hostility towards them. We would like them to be independent as a counterweight to North Vietnam.” Kissinger added that he “should also tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way. We are prepared to improve relations with them.”

As the New York Times reported, “the Carter administration helped arrange continued Chinese aid” to the KR guerillas. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, explained that he “encourage[d] the Chinese to support Pol Pot.”

SteveA: . . . on occasion someone will say to me, "thank you for your service". I always reply that you need not thank me, since I don't think the war was justified.

I still thank you all for your service. There are no just wars.

I have not been able to watch the series, even though its quite watchable and I tried. Not a big Ken Burns fan but that's not it. I really can't put it to words. I can't stand seeing what my country did to Vietnam. It disgusts me.

Why any American deifies JFK is utterly beyond me. What a grade a sonofabitch. May he rot in a hell of your own choosing.

DMT

And its very very difficult to dispel ignorance if you retain arrogance.

Will take a break tonight and watch Wonder Women!

Kingtut: . . . these "best of intentions" were intended to prevent the worst of . . . .

88.4% of the men who actually served in Vietnam were Caucasian; 10.6% (275,000) were black; 1% belonged to other races.

86.3% of the men who died in Vietnam were Caucasian (includes Hispanics); 12.5% (7,241) were black; 1.2% belonged to other races.

Vietnam Veterans are less likely to be in prison - only one-half of one percent of Vietnam Veterans have been jailed for crimes.
85% of Vietnam Veterans made successful transitions to civilian

82% of veterans who saw heavy combat strongly believe the war was lost because of lack of political will.

Nearly 75% of the public agrees it was a failure of political will, not of arms.

97% of Vietnam-era veterans were honorably discharged.
91% of actual Vietnam War veterans and 90% of those who saw heavy combat are proud to have served their country.

Isolated atrocities committed by American Soldiers produced torrents of outrage from anti-war critics and the news media while Communist atrocities were so common that they received hardly any media mention at all.
The United States sought to minimize and prevent attacks on civilians while North Vietnam made attacks on civilians a centerpiece of its strategy.
Americans who deliberately killed civilians received prison sentences while Communists who did so received commendations.

From 1957 to 1973, the National Liberation Front assassinated 36,725 Vietnamese and abducted another 58,499.
The death squads focused on leaders at the village level and on anyone who improved the lives of the peasants such as medical personnel, social workers, and school teachers.

The [Phoenix] program was in operation between 1965 and 1972, and similar efforts existed both before and after that period. By 1972, Phoenix operatives had neutralized 81,740 suspected NLF operatives, informants and supporters, of whom between 26,000 and 41,000 were killed

The normal procedure would be to go into a village and just grab someone and say, 'Where's Nguyen so-and-so?' Half the time the people were so afraid they would not say anything. Then a Phoenix team would take the informant, put a sandbag over his head, poke out two holes so he could see, put commo wire around his neck like a long leash, and walk him through the village and say, 'When we go by Nguyen's house scratch your head.' Then that night Phoenix would come back, knock on the door, and say, 'April Fool, motherf*#ker.' Whoever answered the door would get wasted.

Given the Third World as it is, with its venal but unavoidable realities, can any advisory counterinsurgency succeed at all?

The Phoenix program is arguably the most misunderstood and controversial program undertaken by the governments of the United States and South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. It was, quite simply, a set of programs that sought to attack and destroy the political infrastructure of the Lao Dong Party (hereafter referred to as the Viet Cong infrastructure or VCI) in South Vietnam.

Unfortunately, there have been few objective analyses of Phoenix, and it still is looked upon with a great deal of suspicion and misunderstanding by many who study the Vietnam War.

These forces went to the villages and hamlets and attempted to identify the named individuals [Viet Cong] and "neutralize" them. Those on a list were arrested or captured for interrogation, or if they resisted, they were killed.

Operating in small groups of six to 12 men, they quietly penetrate into contested or Vietcong-contrtolled territory to carry out their missions. And despite whatever denials are being made now in Washington or Saigon, their mission is to get their man, dead or alive.

who were quicker to take their money [from the CIA], get drunk and go off on their own robbery and extortion operations...

The first hand photos you guys have been posting on this thread are amazing.

Marlow ..... so what?

We did put those first A-bombs to good use.

When an interviewer asked Truman whether the decision was morally difficult to make, he responded, “Hell no, I made it like that,” snapping his fingers. In fact, Truman never publicly acknowledged doubts or misgivings. When Edward R. Murrow asked him in a 1958 interview if he had any regrets about using the bomb or about any of his other presidential decisions, Truman responded, “Not the slightest--not the slightest in the world.”

Nor did he welcome others expressing doubts. Upon meeting Oppenheimer for the first time on October 25, 1945, Truman, with his typical insecurity-masking bluster, asked Oppenheimer to guess when the Soviets would develop a bomb. When Oppenheimer admitted that he did not know, Truman declared that he did: “Never.” Unnerved, Oppenheimer said at one point, “Mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands.” Truman responded angrily. “I told him the blood was on my hands—to let me worry about that,” he recounted to David Lilienthal. Truman liked this story enough to repeat it on several occasions, his responses varying slightly, but his contempt for Oppenheimer always evident. He told Acheson, “I don’t want to see that son-of-a-bitch in this office ever again,” and another time called him a “cry-baby scientist.”

We in America are living among madmen. Madmen govern our affairs in the name of order and security. The chief madmen claim the titles of general, admiral, senator, scientist, administrator, Secretary of State, even President. And the fatal symptom of their madness is this: they have been carrying through a series of acts which will lead eventually to the destruction of mankind, under the solemn conviction that they are normal responsible people, living sane lives, and working for reasonable ends.

Soberly, day after day, the madmen continue to go through the undeviating motions of madness: motions so stereotyped, so commonplace, that they seem the normal motions of normal men, not the mass compulsions of people bent on total death. Without a public mandate of any kind, the madmen have taken it upon themselves to lead us by gradual stages to that final act of madness which will corrupt the face of the earth and blot out the nations of men, possibly put an end to all life on the planet itself.

VE DAY was in may 1945, BIGGAH BOOOMBA wuz aug 1945

Ole man of steel had plenty of time to invade western europe if he wanted to ....

The first bomb should have been dropped on an unpopulated mountainous area or, second best, a military target. The Japanese should have been given a chance to see the bomb's destructive capabilities and throw down the towel before we slaughtered tens of thousands of civilians. Anyone who says that racism wasn't a factor has their head firmly up their ass.

The military draft brought the war to the American home front. During the Vietnam War era, between 1964 and 1973, the U.S. military drafted 2.2 million American men out of an eligible pool of 27 million. Although only 25 percent of the military force in the combat zones were draftees, the system of conscription caused many young American men to volunteer for the armed forces in order to have more of a choice of which division in the military they would serve

"The first bomb should have been dropped on an unpopulated mountainous area or, second best, a military target. The Japanese should have been given a chance to see the bomb's destructive "

Many historians say the bombings did not lead to the Japanese surrender, and the Soviet declaration of war on Japan two days later was a bigger shock.

It put an end to any hope the Soviets would negotiate a favourable surrender for Japan.

The severely-weakened Japanese Imperial army had no capacity to fight the Soviets on a second front in China and Northern Japan.

Japanese historian Yuki Tanaka said the country had no choice because the Soviets would have killed Emperor Hirohito, seen as the heart and soul of imperial Japan.

"The Soviet Union would demolish the emperor system and they would execute the emperor as well as all members of the royal family," he said.

9,087,000 military personnel served on active duty during the Vietnam Era (Aug 5, 1964 – May 7, 1975).

8,744,000 GIs were on active duty during the war (Aug 5, 1964 – March 28, 1973).

2,709,918 Americans served in Vietnam , this number represents 9.7% of their generation.

As flawed as communism is, we often manage to make it a better choice than what we offer.

One of my disappointments is that we don’t have a wider range of responses. We don’t hear, for example, from an American who would take the view that this was without question a war of American imperial aggression in the pursuit of counterrevolution, as opposed to the dominant narrative told by Burns and Novick, which is that this was a great tragedy on all sides. That, I would submit, is the dominant American view. And maybe increasingly in Vietnam as well, as they look back on 3 million lost lives and ask, “Was it really worth it?” But it certainly doesn’t explain the mix of wartime feelings, when people would get into open battle over these different interpretations of the war.

To understand the basic reality of this war, you have to understand that military force does not guarantee political legitimacy. The government you’re backing in South Vietnam never had sufficient political support from its own people, otherwise the outcome might have been different. So all of this battle-after-battle that the documentary reveals ultimately is meaningless except insofar as it did eventually wear down the political will of Americans and South Vietnamese — both soldiers and civilians — to keep fighting against their more resolute enemy.

I spent a lot of time watching again and again the way the films end. A lot of them end in a kind of montage of photographs with a classic song over it. The one I really studied was this one at the end of Episode 5, where it’s the Rolling Stones playing “Paint It Black” — which is a very bleak song: “I look inside myself and see my heart is black” — but you’re seeing these very beautiful black-and-white pictures, they’re treated as works of art, really, mostly of American soldiers. It freezes them in the moment when this song came out and where this happened. It’s like a butterfly collection.

Many historians say the bombings did not lead to the Japanese surrender, and the Soviet declaration of war on Japan two days later was a bigger shock.

It put an end to any hope the Soviets would negotiate a favourable surrender for Japan.

As agreed with the Allies at the Tehran Conference in November 1943 and the Yalta Conference in February 1945, the Soviet Union entered World War II's Pacific Theater within three months of the end of the war in Europe. The invasion began on 9 August 1945, exactly three months after the German surrender on May 8 (9 May, 0:43 Moscow time).

Although the commencement of the invasion fell between the American atomic bombings of Hiroshima, on 6 August, and only hours before the Nagasaki attack on 9 August, the timing of the invasion had been planned well in advance and was determined by the timing of the agreements at Tehran and Yalta, the long term buildup of Soviet forces in the Far East since Tehran, and the date of the German surrender some three months earlier; on August 3, Marshal Vasilevsky reported to Premier Joseph Stalin that, if necessary, he could attack on the morning of 5 August.

When I first started getting in fights in combat, I was very religious & prayed a lot.

Then I was an athesist.

Now I only pray, when I am in a fight.