The Vietnam War by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick

(Television Addiction)

I mentioned two weeks ago that if I ever finished the whole thing, I'd review it on this blog.  Well, here it is.

First, some brief comments on...
Watching This Documentary from Vietnam

I suppose I should give some background to my situation.  (Just in case someone stumbles upon this blog who doesn't know me).
I am currently living in Vietnam, in Saigon.  (Officially now renamed Ho Chi Minh City, but still colloquially referred to as Saigon by the people who inhabit it.)

Through the magic of the Internet, I was able to watch this documentary series.  PBS made it available on its website.
In an effort to reach out to the Vietnamese people, PBS translated the documentary into Vietnamese, and had a version on their website with Vietnamese subtitles.
The Vietnamese government did not promote the documentary, but it did not censure it either.

The Voice of America website states that:

Moriarty added that people in Vietnam "can still watch the Vietnamese documentary film with Vietnamese subtitles" on the PBS website. He also said they have "people in Vietnam [who] have checked and confirmed this.”

Indeed, speaking officially in my capacity as "a person in Vietnam," I can also confirm that the series has been available here.
And actually, this is not so surprising  The Vietnamese Government rarely censures anything on the Internet nowadays. (Contrary to popular perception).   It would have been more surprising if they had censored it.

Through the magic of Facebook, I can also confirm that this documentary generated some interest among the Vietnamese population.  Or at least some of them.  (A few of my Vietnamese friends on Facebook posted about it.)

Initially just the first 5 episodes were available.  Then, from last week, the whole series became available on PBS's website.

...But then, yesterday around 11 AM, right as I was finishing off the last episode, the video player suddenly stopped working, and I got the message that "This video unavailable in your area"

My first thought was "Oh, so Hanoi finally got around to censuring this."  But, actually, after doing some research, it appears this restriction comes entirely from PBS's side.
Apparently this type of thing is quite common.  New series only get released for free on the Internet for a short amount of time, and then after that, international licensing fees and royalty agreements have to be worked out region by region.
What a shame! I thought.  For all its flaws (and I'll get to its flaws down below) the series had provided a nice counter-balance to the official communist version of the War, and I had rather hoped it would stay on-line as a permanent resource for Vietnamese citizens.

...Although maybe it doesn't matter anyway.  In my conversations with friends and co-workers, it turned out I was one of the only people I knew who was watching this documentary legally through the PBS website.  Almost everyone I knew was illegally downloading the series through various torrent websites.
I think Illegally downloading everything has pretty much become just a way of life among the younger generation.  And especially out here in Asia, because it's hard to legally get access to American television, torrenting everything has become just what people do. (People were so in the habit of pirating everything, they didn't even check to see if the series was legally available).

In my case, I only had 40 minutes in the series left to go by the time PBS restricted access to it, so I just finished it off on Youtube.  (Several people have uploaded this series onto Youtube, where it is temporarily available until it gets a copyright notice)

I watched most of this series with my Vietnamese fiancee, so we watched the Vietnamese subtitled version.
Unfortunately, the Vietnamese subtitled version didn't include subtitles for all the Vietnamese language parts (i.e. interviews with Vietnamese soldiers).  So most of those sections I wasn't able to understand.  (Feel free to take my opinion on this series with a grain of salt if you feel that this omission compromises my ability to review the series.)

My Biases
So, I've got some opinions on the Vietnam War, and I suppose I may as well just lay down all my biases upfront rather than pretend I'm a neutral observer.

I think what America did to Vietnam was one of the greatest war crimes in the modern era.

America cancelled the scheduled democratic elections in 1956 (because they knew Ho Chi Minh would win) and instead installed a dictator in South Vietnam, whom the majority of South Vietnamese did not support.
Then, in order to keep this dictator in power, America bombed South Vietnam.

The bombing of Vietnam is an event completely without parallel in the history of the world.  Never before in history has a country ever been bombed so heavily.  Never again since has a country ever been bombed this heavily.
More bombs were dropped on Vietnam than were dropped in all of World War II (by all sides combined).
And all these bombs concentrated on a tiny 3rd World Country made up almost entirely of peasant rice-farmers.

As Chomsky wrote in 1969 (long before the bombing had even finished) “The Pentagon will gladly supply, on request, such information as the quantity of ordnance expended in Indochina. From 1965 through 1969 this amounts to about 4.5 million tons by aerial bombardment. This is nine times the tonnage of bombing in the entire Pacific theater in World War II, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki—“over 70 tons of bombs for every square mile of Vietnam, North and South…about 500 pounds of bombs for every man, woman and child in Vietnam.” The total of “ordnance expended” is more than doubled when ground and naval attacks are taken into account.  With no further information than this, a person who has not lost his senses must realize that the war is an overwhelming atrocity.” (Chomsky, At War With Asia p. 225)

Added to this, one-fourth of Vietnam was covered with the poison herbicide Agent Orange.  (One-fourth!)
Added to this, the free-fire zones in areas such as Quang Ngai, where everything that moved was considered a target.
Added to this, several massacres of whole villages by U.S. soldiers.  My Lai is the most famous example, but during the investigation of My Lai, an army colonel told reporters: "Every unit of brigade size has its My Lai hidden someplace."  Other reports indicate that the obsession with body counts and free fire zones were creating the equivalent of a My Lai every month during the Vietnam War.

So what about Ken Burns take?
While, Ken Burns's documentary mentioned some of this, hinted at other bits, and omitted others.

He interviewed several government and CIA figures, but very few anti-war activists.  And when he did interview anti-war activists, it was mostly to talk about the protest marches, and not what was actually happening in Vietnam.

To be honest, it was about what I expected.  I didn't really expect a documentary airing on PBS, and sponsored by the Bank of America and David Koch to get too in-depth on America's war crimes.

John Pilger has already registered his outrage at Ken Burns.  But I find the whole thing too predictable to bother about outrage.

So the documentary barely mentioned that this was the most extensive bombing campaign in history, and that much of it fell on civilian targets?  So the cancelled 1956 election only gets a one-sentence mention?  So My Lai is presented as an isolated incident?  Well, what did you expect?
As one of  my co-workers said: "Ken Burns's trademark is Americana."

There are, however, several things the documentary does well.

First of all, the story telling is amazing.  Burns, Novick, and their team have unearthed tons of interesting footage from the time, and it's fascinating to watch.
Also Burns skillfully weaves several individual stories through his documentary on the larger war.

Secondly, the documentary makes it crystal clear right from the start that this was an unwinnable war.  Right from episode 2, we can see that the South Vietnamese government has no support outside of Saigon.  And then, when mass protests erupt in Saigon, we see that the South Vietnamese government has no support even in Saigon.

The only way to keep this government in power would have been for the United States to stay in Vietnam forever.  It is immediately clear right from 1963 that the moment we left Saigon, the Saigon government would have crumbled without us.

To the viewer watching Ken Burns's documentary, the fact that this war was unwinnable is clear right from 1963.
What is amazing, then, is that it took the American public so long to realize this.

Everyone remembers all the anti-war protesters, but what people forget is that the anti-war protesters were only a vocal minority.  Almost right up until the end, the majority of Americans supported the War in Vietnam.   (Ken Burns points this out repeatedly in his documentary).

Why?

It appears that changing your mind about something, and admitting you were wrong, is very hard for some people to do.
I'm reminded of the Global Warming debate we're having right now.  The same stubbornness still seems to exist.  Despite all the over-whelming evidence, people still don't want to change their mind once they've committed themselves to believing something.

Other Notes
* Ken Burns's Civil War documentary has been so successful it's become pretty much THE version of the Civil War history.  It's possible that in the future, this could become THE history of the Vietnam War that the next generation grows up watching.

* Also to the documentary's credit: it mentions that Nixon illegally sabotaged the 1968 peace talks.  (This is something that's been declassified for years  - now, but that has still been under-reported, so I'm glad Ken Burns put it in the documentary).

* This is the second long documentary on the Vietnam War that I've sat through now.  The previous one was the 1980 Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War.
On the whole, Ken Burns's documentary is much better, but there are several details that I learned from Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War which are absent here.
For example, in Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War several of the capture American bomber pilots, after being shown what their bombs were doing to the country of Vietnam, actually willingly came out against the war and made recorded statements for Hanoi.
In Ken Burns's documentary, it doesn't mention any of this.

* Barbarella: Queen of the Universe, which I reviewed on this blog way back in 2007, gets briefly mentioned on the documentary.  (The documentary makes the same point that I did in my review--that because this movie established Jane Fonda as a sex symbol for that generation, it made her that much more hated when she came out against the war.)