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.)

Ken Burn's Vietnam War Documentary--first thoughts

I don't know if this is news stateside or not, but PBS has been making an effort to make Ken Burn's new Vietnam War documentary accessible to the Vietnamese public.
The first 5 episodes have been all subtitled in Vietnamese, and are available for free in Vietnam on the PBS website here.  (Presumably the other 5 episodes will follow eventually).
Despite the fact that Ken Burns's version differs in several places from the official communist version told by the Vietnamese government (in Ken Burns's version, Communist leaders occasionally make mistakes) the Vietnamese government is showing toleration.  Hanoi isn't promoting this new documentary, but they aren't censoring it either.  Any Vietnamese person with a computer and an Internet connection can watch it.

And, if my Facebook feed is any indication, it's creating a buzz here in Vietnam.  Both among the expat crowd, and among the Vietnamese themselves, many of whom seem to be quite fascinated by this documentary.

At the moment, I've only watched the first 2 episodes, and dipped in and out of episodes 3, 4, and 5.  (Episodes 6-10 not yet available here in Vietnam).
I'm not sure if I'll bother meticulously watching the whole thing.  (I do, after all, already have a few Vietnam War documentaries under my belt, so I probably don't need to watch all 18 hours of this one.)  But if I do end up watching all 18 hours, I'll end up giving it a full review and adding it to my TV review project.

For now, I'll just note down a couple things.

Ken Burns and his team are master story-tellers.  So there's nothing to complain about there.  (But of course you knew that already).

Also, I appreciate the fact that the Vietnam War is so polarizing, that it's impossible to make any narrative of the War that won't upset someone.
That being said....,
I do have some disagreements with the first episode.
The episode mentioned only briefly that at the 1955 Geneva Summit, all sides had agreed to nation-wide elections in 1956, but that the U.S. later cancelled these elections and installed a dictator in South Vietnam instead.
They mentioned the elections being cancelled only off-handedly, and then put all the blame on Diem, instead of on Diem's U.S. allies.  (In fact, the United States government was also against the 1956 elections, because everyone knew Ho Chi Minh would win).
The Ken Burns documentary makes it sound like the U.S. was the victim of Diem, and got suckered into the war because of him.  The reality is more that the U.S. created Diem's regime.

This is a major point, and more should have been made of it. It completely undermines the traditional story that the U.S. was fighting for democracy and freedom in Vietnam.  It also means that the whole war was illegal. (It violated the 1955 Geneva Summit).

Also:
The Ken Burns documentary mentions that the CIA warned Diem about meddling too much in the election results, but that Diem ignored their advice.
Like a lot of things in the documentary, this is technically true, but somewhat misleading in its emphasis.  It makes it sound like the CIA had a problem with rigging a democratic election in principle.
In actuality, the CIA didn't have a problem with Diem rigging the election.  What the CIA had a problem with was Diem making the results look unbelievable.
The CIA advised Diem that he could rig the election, but that he should only win the election by a believable margin, and under no circumstances was he to win by 99% of the vote.
So Diem instead won the election by 98.2% of the vote.  (Diem considered it a loss of face if even 2% of the country voted against him.)

Also...
you can always detect bias slipping into any account of the Vietnam War when they use the phrase "The Viet Cong controlled most of the countryside" instead of the alternative phrasing "most of the countryside supported the Viet Cong."
The former phrasing implies the countryside wanted to be liberated from the Viet Cong, the latter implies that the countryside was the Viet Cong.
The latter implication is more historically accurate.  But Ken Burns uses the former phrasing often in his documentary.

Other notes:
1) My Vietnamese girlfriend watched part of it with me, and she was very amused at how the narrator mispronounced all the Vietnamese names.  She thought it was the funniest thing ever.  "It's just like you say those names," she said to me.

2) Looking at the old archival footage, it's amazing how much Saigon has changed.  It looks so peaceful back in the 1950s and 1960s--no traffic jams, only a few vehicles on the road, everyone bicycling instead of on motorcycles.... I was able to recognize some of the big Cathedrals, and some of the other iconic buildings, but other than that, you'd never recognize today's Saigon from that old footage.

So this has been making the rounds on twitter.  Several people I follow have been tweeting it.  For example Phil:

Apparently it's now confirmed that Nixon intentionally sabotaged '68 peace talks. https://t.co/K0hNOkhjgd

— Phil Christman (@phil_christman) January 1, 2017

Funny, I thought this was confirmed as official history back in 2008 when the audiotapes were declassified.  Or back in 2013 when the BBC was reporting it as established fact.

But now we've found notes from Nixon's aide.  And the New York Times is reporting it.  So now it has moved from officially confirmed to super-super officially confirmed now I guess.

I don't like to go into conspiracy theory land, but this is not a conspiracy theory.  The historical records confirm it, and the BBC and the New York Times have reported it.

Nixon really really did sabotage the 1968 peace talks.  It's like super official now.

In my private conversations with people, however, I find that most people don't know this fact.

And I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict that this will never make it into high school history curriculums in the United States.

All The Way

(Movie Reviews)

The Review
This is another in the series of political historical dramas directed by Jay Roach and produced for HBO.
I absolutely love these films.
I loved Recount, I loved Game Change.  And I loved this film.

In a world where popular entertainment is becoming dumber and dumber, these smart political historical films are a welcome breath of fresh air.
The writing is smart, the history is fascinating, the acting and directing are superb.

Well done guys.  You've hit the ball out of the park once again.

Rating
I've got a few historical nitpicks which I'm going to get to down below, but in spite of some historical inaccuracies, I'm going to go ahead and give this film 10 out of 10.  It was entertaining, and it did a good job of teaching people about an important year in American history.

Historical Nitpicking
As I said in my review of Lincoln, I'm one of those annoying history purists who believe historical films should stay as true to history as possible.  And this is especially true of political dramas.  Movies like Braveheart or Spartacus get more leeway, because the entertainment value comes from the battles and the romance, and not from the history.
Movies that dramatize political maneuverings, however, are only interesting because they are historical.  If none of this had actually happened, no one would be interested in it.

But before I take this movie to task for inaccuracies, I'm going to admit right up front I don't know everything.  Nor did I exhaustively research this movie.  I caught a handful of things, but for anything I'm I'm not informed about, I'm just assuming the movie got it more or less correct.  If anyone out there knows better, let me know in the comments.  If I find out this movie took more historical liberties than I thought, I might be persuaded to bring down my rating.

I read these articles on the historical accuracy here and here.

From the above articles, I learned that John Lewis, not Stokely Carmichael, was head of SNCC during this time.  (This was something that I have to admit I would have completely missed if the above article hadn't pointed it out--although I should have remembered this, because I had already written about it in an old high school paper of mine, in which I mentioned that Stokely Carmichael replaced John Lewis as head of SNCC in 1966--not 1964).
Stokely Carmichael is better remembered today as the radical voice of the movement, which is obviously why the writers made the switch, but I think the omission of John Lewis was an unfortunate slight to John Lewis.

The FBI's infamous letter to Martin Luther King I already discussed in my review of J. Edgar, in which I quoted a historian who said that the letter was almost certainly delegated, and not written by J. Edgar Hoover personally.  I'll repeat here what I said then:

 I can understand why the movie wanted to have J. Edgar Hoover himself dictate the letter—from a cinematic standpoint that scene of J. Edgar Hoover yelling out that letter to his secretary makes for much more interesting viewing than a scene of Hoover delegating the task.
            And yet, from a historical standpoint, it’s worth remembering the letter was delegated, because it means that the FBI’s attempts to destroy Martin Luther King wasn’t just limited to Hoover’s personal idiosyncrasies, but was something the whole organization was responsible for.

* Finally, on the Vietnam War:
--the movie portrays Robert McNamara as the one pressing Lyndon Johnson on Vietnam.  However, recorded audio tapes from the white house show that it was the other way around--Lyndon Johnson was the one hounding Robert McNamara to make Vietnam more of an issue--see the documentary film The Fog of War.  Or just listen to this 2 minute youtube video here.



--the movie portrays the Gulf of Tonkin incident as an unwelcome complication to Johnson's plans.  However, Daniel Ellsberg in The Most Dangerous Man in America reveals that the White House and the Pentagon had already determined they were going to escalate in Vietnam, and were just looking for something they could use as an excuse.

Addendum:
One further thought which occurs to me belatedly: Watching this movie makes you realize what a struggle it was to get the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, which makes me angry once again that the Supreme Court struck down the Voting Rights Act in 2013.

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky The Cold War

From the BBC:

Laos: Barack Obama regrets 'biggest bombing in history'

It's good that Obama is expressing regret over this.  And it's good that the U.S. is finally donating money to help clean this up.

But, if you'll excuse the perpetual pessimist in me, I think the striking thing about this article is that for 50 years this went unacknowledged.

The statistics in this article are pretty heavy:

Eight bombs a minute were dropped on average during the Vietnam war between 1964 and 1973 - more than the amount used during the whole of World War Two.

...

Ten of the 18 Laotian provinces have been described as "severely contaminated" by unexploded ordnance (UXO).

The Convention on Cluster Munitions bans the stockpiling, use and transfer of virtually all existing cluster bombs, and also provides for the clearing up of unexploded munitions.

It has been adopted by 108 states, but not the US which, according to some estimates, spent as much on clean-up efforts in Laos between 1995 and 2013 as it spent in three days of bombing during the war.
The number of casualties from air-dropped explosive devices - mostly cluster munitions - in Laos since 1964 is estimated by the Landmine and Clustering Munition Monitor to be around 50,000 people. Of these about 29,000 people were killed and 21,000 injured. The overwhelming majority were civilians.

...

"Before the president's announcement I feared that the UXO operation in Laos would take hundreds of years," Mines Advisory Group country director Simon Rea told the BBC from Vientiane. "Now I am optimistic this can be reduced to decades."

So, I was on YahooNews today, and saw this Chicago Tribune Article in my Newsfeed.

An ugly war, seen through the lens of the Vietnamese by Dahleen Glanton

...and after reading it, I felt the urge to respond.

I know, I know.  It's a losing battle trying to respond to everything wrong on the Internet.  But indulge me on this one.  It's an interesting case study in the kind of propaganda we Americans are subjected to day in and day out through our media.

First of all:

On a recent visit to Vietnam, I followed the path of the war — from Hanoi to Danang to Ho Chi Minh City. In rural towns in the North, the Vietnamese flag — a red banner with a single gold star — waves from pole after pole along busy streets. In the South, a 23-foot-tall bronze statue of former President Ho Chi Minh stands in a downtown square in the city that was once called Saigon.
For anyone who might have any doubts about the outcome of the war, the message throughout Vietnam was clear: The Communists won.

The publication date on this article was May 2nd.  It's unclear when the actual trip took place, but let's assume she wrote this article up just as she was coming off of the trip that she's writing about.
The two days preceding May 2nd were April 30th (the anniversary of the re-unification of Vietnam) and May 1st (International Communist Holiday).  If ever there is a time when the Communist flags are going to be out in full force, this is it.
For comparison's sake, imagine a visitor going to the United States during the week of the 4th of July, and then writing about all the American Flags they saw everywhere.
By the way, as a side note, many visitors to the United States actually do pick up on exactly this--how prevalent the American flag is everywhere you go.  It's not actually like this in all other countries, so it's something that people always remark upon when they visit the United States.  I've had several friends (British, Japanese, Australians, Canadians) make comments to me about how they were so surprised by the prevalence of the American Flag everywhere during their visits to the United States.

So you get what I'm saying here.  For an American to comment on this, as some sort of unique quirk that the crazy communists have, is a bit rich.

Moving on...

In the 40 years since the war ended, most Americans have moved on. Unless you lost a loved one — there were nearly 60,000 American fatalities — or know a veteran suffering in the aftermath, Vietnam has been filed away as ancient history. It has taken a back seat to the more recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That is not the case in Vietnam. The civil war that dragged on for 21 years is ingrained in the country's cultural and political landscape. And telling the story has become an industry.

Yes, this is true enough.  Although at least some of this obsession with Vietnam War history as tourism is demand driven.  Every day thousands of backpackers arrive in Vietnam, almost all of whom have no knowledge or interest in Vietnam's 2,000 year old history other than the American War they've seen in the movies.  So Vietnam caters to the tourists' expectations.
Moving on...

From the Cu Chi tunnels, used as hiding spots and supply routes by Viet Cong soldiers, to the "Hanoi Hilton" prison, where a future U.S. senator named John McCain was among those held as prisoners of war, the Vietnamese government makes a faulty case against good and evil. According to its officials, the captured U.S. pilots were treated like guests at a country club.

One of the interesting little tidbits I picked up from Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War is that there is debate among the captured U.S. pilots themselves as to whether or not their treatment constituted torture.  Some of them feel that they were tortured, but others maintain that they were treated a bit rough at times, but they were certainly not systematically tortured in any fashion.

In the government-run War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, America is portrayed as the archenemy of the Vietnamese people. The exhibits depict U.S. soldiers as heartless villains — even criminals — whose sole mission was to slaughter families, torture innocent villagers and spread ruin across the region.

What?  You mean they don't see us as pure hearted defenders of liberty and freedom?  Why, wherever did they get that impression?

Moving on to the next part of the article:

Displayed among the three floors are remnants of the weapons used by U.S. troops: tanks, missiles, bombs and machine guns. There are life-size pictures of children missing limbs, born without eyes or with tumors covering their faces — the result of Agent Orange, used by the U.S. military to clear foliage in the jungle where the fighting occurred.
But perhaps one of the most startling photographs is that of a young, gun-wielding U.S. soldier standing over the decapitated remains of Vietnamese bodies.
I realized that much of the presentation was just propaganda. Yet my initial reaction was shame. I lowered my head and silently cried.

The phrase "just propaganda" is a loaded phrase.  In one sense, it's true because the War Remnants Museum is guilty of sins of omission.   There is nothing there about the atrocities committed by the Communists (like the Hue Massacre (W)). Sins of omission are of course a form of propaganda.
But in another sense, it's denigrating the exhibits in the museum to label them as "just propaganda" . It makes it sound as if their truth value is questionable.  But it's not.  Everything documented in that museum happened.  Agent Orange happened.  The massacres happened.  The bombings happened.

Continuing to quote from the article, the very next line is:

Then I remembered that these were simply boys, far from home, fighting a war that had no rules.

The conjunction "Then" here is problematic, because it implies a logical progression from completed action to subsequent action.  It reads as if the author is saying "Confronted with photographic evidence of the massacres my country perpetrated, I initially gave in to the impulse to feel shame and sorrow, but THEN I remembered that the soldiers were simply boys far from home, and the feelings of shame vanished."
That is what she's saying here, no?

It is undoubtedly true that the Vietnam War was a war without rules.  But whose fault was that?  When the US army had instituted free fire zones, and started massacring villages, undoubtedly the war was operating without any rules.
But having begun to fight a war without rules, the fact that there were no rules then becomes the excuse?

The My Lai massacre, for example, was not an example of soldiers simply getting out of hand in a war without rules.  It was a massacre lead by the officers.  Officers Captain Medina and Lieutenant Calley were on the ground with the men, ordering them to conduct the massacre.



In other cases, it was clear that discipline broke down among the ranks.  But this has never historically been accepted as an excuse.  For example the Japanese General Masaharu Homma (W) tried to stop the atrocities committed by his troops in the Philippines, but was unable to do so as discipline broke down.  This was not accepted as an excuse, and he was executed by the Americans as a War Criminal.

Moving on, a little bit further down the page Dahleen Glanton writes:

For so many reasons, Vietnam was a war that was impossible for America to win. But isn't freedom worth fighting for?

Oh, where to begin with this one?
First of all, the people living in a country have the freedom to choose their own form of government.  There's no freedom more basic than that.
Secondly, the government in Saigon was never free or democratic.  The government changed frequently in Saigon during the course of the war because of various coups, but it was never a democracy, and it did not allow freedom of speech or freedom of expression.  The Saigon Governments were a series of increasingly unstable military dictatorships that would never have lasted if they hadn't been propped up the United States military.
Thirdly, if you accept that "freedom is worth fighting for" as a justification for getting into foreign wars, then there are all sorts of despotic regimes all around the world that the United States would have to go and overthrow.

The tourist attractions might tell one story, but outside, the impoverished living conditions of many Vietnam people tell another.

Ah gee, a third world country has impoverished living conditions.  Imagine that.  If communism was so great, why didn't Vietnam magically transform into a first world country with American standards of living?  Huh?  Huh?  Answer me that, communism!

In point of fact, Vietnam has made remarkable progress towards modernization the past 30 years.  It's much more advanced than it's neighbors in Laos and Cambodia.  There are, to be sure, still areas of poverty in the countryside, and Dahleen Glanton is going to harp on this for the rest of her article.  But there's also been remarkable progress.

Also, although Dahleen Glanton completely neglects this in her article, some of the problems Vietnam has had overcoming poverty are directly attributable to the massive American bombings.  To this day large parts of the center of Vietnam can not be farmed or built upon because of all the unexploded American bombs buried in the soil.

Next, Dahleen Glanton writes:

During my two weeks in the country, the Vietnamese people I met were kind and welcoming. Without doubt, young people in Vietnam had been taught about the war from the government's perspective. Schoolchildren surely were brought to the museums on field trips.
Why didn't they seem to hate Americans?
The answer, it occurred to me, is that the younger generation isn't buying the message that the government is selling.

First of all, it's always problematic when you describe the opinions of a whole nation of people as if they were a monolithic entity.  Everyone does it, I know, but it's wrong.  Some young Vietnamese people hate their government, some people love it.  Some young Vietnamese are very cynical of the official communist story of the war, some of them buy into it completely.  Some of them are conservative, some of them are liberal.  In short, you have the same diversity of opinion in Vietnam that you would have in any other country.

It is true that Vietnamese people don't hate Americans.  In fact they're very friendly and welcoming to American visitors.  But in my experience, there is no connection between their view of history and their attitude towards Americans.  Some of my best Vietnamese friends have completely accepted the communist version of the war history, but they're also able to understand that individual members of a country do not share the collective guilt for the actions of their government officials.

In Vietnam, the government controls the media — from television to radio to print. The Internet is regulated and censored. Officially, social media are off-limits.

Not true.  Not true at all.  I'm writing this blog post right now from within Vietnam.

But young people know how to get around the rules. Facebook and Google are very popular, particularly among the educated.

Yes, Google and Facebook are very popular in Vietnam.  But notice how she makes it sound like this is true inspite of government laws.  Currently there are no laws prohibiting use of Facebook or Google.

The canals and rivers flowing to the Mekong Delta are polluted and strewn with rubbish. The river water is undrinkable and even the rats, which are considered a delicacy by some Vietnamese, are unfit to eat.

Okay, this is true but...This is true of a lot of regions under a number of different governments.   There are plenty of places in the United States where the river water is undrinkable.  That's why we have treatment plants for our drinking water.
The fact that the Mekong is strewn with rubbish is a societal problem.  It's because individual Vietnamese people are making the choice to throw their rubbish in the river.  It's not because of an evil communist government ordering everyone to throw their rubbish in the Mekong.  If anything, it's a problem from lack of government action, not because of government oppression.

Depending on how poor the family is, the government provides a one-time stipend of up to $10,000 to find better housing. But an apartment in the city costs twice that amount. It is cheaper to live on the banks of the river in the city. Otherwise, they must stay in the countryside, where education and jobs are even harder to come by.

Here I must admit that I don't know anything about the specifics of what she's talking about.  Given how shoddily this whole piece is researched, and how much she gets wrong, I wouldn't be surprised if the details of what she's saying here turned out to be not as she is presenting them.
But for the sake of argument let's go with her version.
Given that housing prices in Saigon are much cheaper than they are back in America, $10,000 actually strikes me as quite generous.  I pay $450 per month, and almost all of my Vietnamese friends tell me I'm paying triple what a normal Vietnamese person pays for rent.  But even given my exorbitant apartment, I could pay my rent for 22 months with $10,000.
Secondly, note once again that what she's complaining about is not tyrannical Communist governance.  She's complaining about the problems of free-market capitalism here, and complaining that the government is not intervening enough to solve the problems of capitalism.  In other words, she's complaining that the Communist government of Vietnam isn't Communist enough.

These problems can't be blamed on the Americans. These are visible failures that the Communist regime cannot hide.

It would be wrong to think that the Vietnamese people don't love their country. They do.

But when it comes to the two-decade war, not everyone sees a clear winner. This was a war in which everyone lost, and its ramifications continue to haunt.

Oh come on!  This is the best you could come up with to describe the failures of communism?  You can go to any country in the world and find poor people who can't afford housing.  Vietnam is a third world country.  Of course it's going to have these problems.

Look, if you want to find problems in Vietnam, you can find them.  The same way you can go to any country in the world and write about how the poor are getting a raw deal, or how government programs aren't working perfectly, or how the rivers are polluted.
But to use this to imply that the wrong side won the war is just lazy propaganda.

And one last point: Both Dahleen Glanton in her article, and me in this rebuttal, have been using the word "communism" as synonymous with the Vietnamese style of government.  But just for the sake of accuracy, I should state that Vietnam abandoned Communist economics back in 1986 (W).  It's essentially now a capitalist economy in a one party state bureaucracy (similar to modern day China).

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

(Book Review)

Why I Read This Book/ My History With Graham Greene

          Like George Orwell, Graham Greene is another one of those writers that I’ve read a little of, and have always been meaning to read more of, but never quite seem to get around to it.

            My first experience with Graham Greene was The Power and the Glory, which was assigned reading for a college literature class I took way back in my undergraduate days.  I read This Gun for Hire back in 2006, and reviewed it on this blog.   And I count The Third Man as one of my favorite films of all time.  (In addition to his novels, Graham Greene did some work for Hollywood, and he wrote the screenplay for The Third Man.)

            I’ve always been meaning to read more Graham Greene, and so I was probably due to get around to The Quiet American sooner or later.  But since I’m currently living in Cambodia, and The Quiet American seems to be required reading for everyone passing through former French Indochina, I decided I might as well read it sooner rather than later.  (Among the expat community, The Quiet American is one of those books everyone over here seems to have read.)

            I have seen the movie of The Quiet American (W), back when it first came out in 2002, but as that was some years ago now, and as the memory of the movie has mostly faded from my memory, (I couldn’t even remember how the movie ended), I was able to enjoy this book as a mostly new experience.

The Review

          Graham Greene is one of those rarities: a classic author who’s actually fun to read.

            Often when I’m reading through the classics, I’m doing so with a sense of obligation, rather than enjoyment.  But Graham Greene is an exception.  Who else can write readable international spy stories, and still get into the canon of respectable literature?  It’s perfect for a middle-brow intellectual like me—someone who can’t handle Joyce or T.S. Elliot, but can read Graham Greene all day long.

            The Quiet American is very readable.  And, like much of Graham Greene’s stuff, the plot involves around international intrigue.

            Greene also shows considerable skill in bringing to life the world of 1950s French Indochina: I got immersed in the world of opium pipes, cynical foreign reporters drinking cocktails at European clubs, the French soldiers playing Quatre Cent Vingt-et-un at the cafes, the heat and the mosquitoes, and the beautiful women walking by.  (Even though I’m currently living in the region, and know full well that life here is as dull and boring as anywhere else in the world, I still got swept up in the whole exoticism of it.  There’s a tendency to imagine that older times must have been more glamorous and exotic than our own time, and I imagined this about the 1950s in Southeast Asia.)

            So, as far as creating an atmosphere, and readability, I give this book full marks.

            My big complaint with this book was the complete lack of subtlety. 

            The book revolves around the relationship between British reporter Fowler, and American State Department Official Pyle.  Pyle represents everything that is wrong about the attitude of the Americans towards Southeast Asia.  He’s read lots of books about the region, and he thinks he understands what’s going on and can help the people, but he doesn’t really understand the realities on the ground, and his attempts to get involved in Vietnam’s politics ends up just creating misery for the people there.

            As an indictment of U.S. policy in Southeast Asia, it’s spot on.  But as literature, it’s problematic.  The character of Pyle is never allowed to evolve into a real person.  He’s just a walking cliché.  And Graham Greene is always emphasizing how honest, earnest, and completely naïve Pyle is, in a way that really hits the reader over the head.  (It reminded me a bit of an Ayn Rand novel,where all the characters aren’t real people, but just symbols of different ideas.  And I don’t mean that comparison as a compliment to Graham Greene.)

            Often, this over-the-top portrayal of Pyle would pull me straight out of the story, and prevent me from getting immersed in the exotic world that Graham Greene had created. 

            There is, for example, one scene where Fowler, as an embedded reporter with a French army unit up in North Vietnam, is sleeping in an abandoned barn in the middle of nowhere, and all of a sudden Pyle walks into the barn.  It turned out Pyle had travelled all the way up from the South, somehow tracked down Fowler’s unit and found them in the barn, all because Pyle just wanted to talk to Fowler about a girl.  It was nothing that could have ever happened in real life, and it pulled me right out of the story and reminded me very clearly that these characters were not real people and that I was just reading a fictional novel.  After that, I had trouble taking any of the characters or situations seriously again.

            All that being said, although the book lacks any subtlety, it is a very eerily accurate prediction of what American involvement in Vietnam would look like.  (The Englishman Fowler keeps trying to make Pyle realize that the people in Vietnam just want  to be left alone to live in peace, but Pyle keeps talking about “martyrs for democracy”, and is remarkably untroubled by the civilian casualties.)  This book was published all the way back in 1955, so Graham Greene had a lot of foresight to recognize what is now universally acknowledged with hindsight—American involvement in Vietnam would be a disaster. 

            [The book was published in 1955, after Dien Bien Phu, but was written when the French War in Indochina was still ongoing.  Although the French were doing the actual fighting during that time, the American government was funding much of the war, and providing aid, expertise, and probably (as Graham Greene imagines) taking an active but covert role in influencing South Vietnamese politics.  According to Wikipedia (W), Graham Greene based the character of Pyle on an actual American official who once gave him a lecture about a third force in Vietnam.  At that time, the fighting was dominated by the French colonialists on one hand, and the Vietnamese communists on the other, but the American officials imagined there was a third force in Vietnam—a grass roots prodemocracy movement, which wasn’t yet visible, but could emerge with the proper encouragement.  Like his real life counterpart, the character of Pyle talks incessantly about the potential of this “third force”.  Graham Greene was smart enough to realize way back in 1955 that this “third force” was purely a figment of the American State Department’s imagination.]

Religion

         Graham Greene is famous as a Roman Catholic writer, and many of his books contain a religious emphasis. 

            I consider myself skeptical of religion, but I didn’t object to any of the discussion in The Quiet American.  Instead of being dogmatic about religion, Graham Greene simply raises questions about religion without providing the answers.  And although I suspect the answer that Graham Greene is sympathetic to might be different than the answer I would arrive at, I didn’t object to the questions being raised.

            In fact, had I not known Graham Greene was Catholic, I would never have guessed it from the book itself.  The kind of probing questions could just have easily been asked by an agnostic.

            However, as with the politics, the religious themes of the book did boarder on being too much.  The first couple times the question of God came up, I didn’t have any problems with it.  Halfway through the book, though, I got a little bit sick of it.

Vietnamese Politics

          I took a course on the Vietnam War back in my college days.  One of the things I remember from that course was that although the Americans viewed the Vietnamese political situation as simply communists versus democrats, in reality there were a lot of different groups vying for control in South Vietnam—various nationalist armies, armed religious groups, Buddhist armies, and ambitious independent generals.

            All of this is shown very clearly in The Quiet American.

Are Americans Quiet?

          So the whole premise behind the title, The Quiet American, is that it’s being used somewhat ironically.  The assumption is that it’s unusual to describe an American as quiet, because Americans have a reputation for being the opposite.

            And if you couldn’t pick that up from the title alone, Graham Greene hits you over the head with it in the text of the actual book.  “He’s a good chap in his way. Serious.  Not one of those noisy bastards at the Continental.  A quiet American,” I summed him precisely up as I might have said, ‘a blue lizard’, ‘a white elephant.’ “  (p. 17)

            Living as an expatriate abroad, I run into this assumption all the time.  And if you’ll excuse the digression here, I’m going to take a few minutes to try to set the record straight. 

            I don’t know how this stereotype of loud Americans got started, but it is not true.  Or at the very least, if we Americans are loud, we’re not the only offenders by far.  Of all the loud obnoxious foreigners, Americans are pretty low down the list.

            Here in Southeast Asia, the loudest most obnoxious expatriates have got to be the Russians.  The Russians are followed by drunk European backpackers, followed by Israeli backpackers.  Then among the English speaking countries, the Australians are much louder and more obnoxious than Americans.

           When I used to live in Japan, anytime a foreigner ended up causing trouble for being drunk and obnoxious, it was invariably an Australian.  (See examples HERE, HERE and HERE).

            Also, having lived in Australia for a year, I can attest that they’re not a quiet people in their home country either. 

            And in Cambodia in Southeast Asia, loud drunk Australian backpackers in muscle shirts are a very common sight.

            The British aren’t quite as bad as the Australians.  And actually most British people are pretty quiet, but I’ve known some loud ones in my time.  Also Britain has much more of a drinking culture than America does, and the alcohol does cause them to sometimes noisy displays of drunkenness.

            We Americans, dare I say it, are actually quite quiet and demur and respectful when we travel abroad compared to the citizens of Oceania and Europe.  (This may somewhat be due to the fact that we know much of the rest of the world hates us, so we try to be on our best behavior when abroad.)

            And yet, you would not believe how often an Australian will make a comment to me about loud Americans, without any sense of shame or irony.

            [When discussing this book with my Scottish friend, I told him, “You know, I’ve got to say it, we Americans actually aren’t all that loud.  Australians are much worse.”

            “Well of course Australians are much worse,” my Scottish friend said.  “But that’s not saying much.  You might as well say Australians are more sunburned than Americans.  Australians are the worse possible comparison you could make.”

            “But half the time it’s Australians who are the ones complaining about loud Americans,” I said. 

            (Which is true.  I get a fair amount of flack from Australians for the “loud American” stereotype.  The other half of the time it’s the British.  If the British complain about loud Americans, I usually let it go.  When Australians try to give me grief for the same thing, I usually try to make a protest.  Of course, the comments aren’t always said to me in a confrontational manner.  Some of the time the comments are made half in jest, and much of the time the comments are expressing surprise that I don’t fit the stereotype of a loud American.  But I still think Australians have no business making these comments.)

            “Yeah, Australians have no business complaining about loud Americans,” my friend agreed.  “Of course you Americans are very arrogant.”

            “Yeah, I’ll give you that one.”

            “I mean you’re very sure of yourselves.”

            “Yeah, I’ll give you that as well.”

            “And you can be very ignorant.”

            “Well, I’ll give you all the rest of it.  We’re arrogant, and ignorant, and overly sure of ourselves.  But we aren’t particularly loud.”

            At last, my Scottish friend conceded.  “No, you’re not loud,” he said.  “In fact, none of the Americans I’ve met have ever been loud.  They’re mostly quiet and usually polite.”]

Link of the Day 

Internet as a Tool of Control and Power

Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War

(Television Addiction)

            Another DVD series.  I’ve been trying to work my way through the history documentaries at the DVD stores in Cambodia, and when I saw this DVD set near the riverside I snatched it up.

            Among the DVD and book sellers in Phnom Penh there seems to be an assumption that people traveling through Southeast Asia are perhaps likely to be interested in Southeast Asian history, so - some - books and documentaries about Vietnam and Cambodia which would be obscure back home are given greater prominence over here.  

            Internet research (W, IMBD) reveals that this documentary series was originally produced for Canadian TV CBC back in 1980.  It aired in Canada as a series of 26 half-hour episodes, and it aired in the US in as 13 hour-long episodes.  The DVD set I got is 13 hour long episodes.

            The style of the documentary is somewhat dated, and the opening credits and theme song especially is reminiscent of the old style documentary film so often parodied on shows like The Simpsons.  The slow pace of some of the episodes indicates that 30 years ago people had longer attention spans than today’s generation.

            And yet, for the history geek, I found it generally interesting viewing, even if I was somewhat frustrated by the documentary’s failure to critically examine some of the key issues behind the war.

The Politics

          During the Vietnam War, the official story sold to the American public was that South Vietnam was a free and democratic country which was in danger of being conquered by the foreign aggressors in North Vietnam.

            This was completely false.  South Vietnam was never a democracy, but a series of increasingly unstable military dictatorship during which basic freedoms, like free speech, free press, and free religion, were denied to the people.

            The Communists in South Vietnam were not a foreign army from the North, but mostly made up of South Vietnamese guerrillas who were unhappy with the government that the Americans had imposed on them.

            According to the 1954 peace agreement, all of Vietnam was supposed to be united in a general democratic election in 1956, but the United States cancelled this election when it became clear Ho Chi Minh was going to win.  Thus the “War for Democracy” began with the United States forbidding free elections.

            At the height of the anti-war movement (during the late 60s and early 70s) these basic facts about the war were becoming widely known, and were even appearing in the mainstream media. 

            But after the War ended, there has been a concerted effort to erase this history.  So the version of history I learned in school (in the 1990s) was back to the old official story—democratic South Vietnam was a victim of North Vietnamese aggression.

            This documentary largely parrots the official version of the War.  It doesn’t commit outright falsehoods, but it puts all the emphases on the wrong places.

            For instance the documentary spends a lot of time describing how North Vietnamese soldiers travelled to the South.  Only buried in the middle of the tenth episode, mentioned briefly as an almost irrelevant fact, does the narrator tell us that most of the communist guerrillas are from the South.

           

            It’s mentioned a couple times that the majority of the South Vietnamese countryside supported the communists, but I think this point should have been emphasized a bit more in the course of 13 hours. 

            Also the documentarians choose their words very carefully.  They are loath to say that the South Vietnamese villagers actually support the communists, so they usually will phrase things like “the villages are controlled by the communists.” 

            In the same way, the documentarians don’t really hide the fact that the South Vietnamese government (or more accurately “governments”, as the several regimes were overthrown during the course of the war) were military dictators.  But they don’t emphasize this point as much as they could.   And many of the talking heads on the program still talk about fighting for democracy in South Vietnam, and nowhere are they corrected.

            The cancellation of the elections in 1956 is mentioned, but again very briefly.  No mention is made of the fact that the elections were cancelled because US intelligence knew Ho Chi Minh would win.  And the significance of these cancelled elections was not emphasized.  (Thousands of Americans and millions of Vietnamese would still be alive today if these elections had just been allowed to proceed.)

            The Phoenix program (a CIA program to assassinate political leaders in South Vietnam) is mentioned briefly, and the CIA director is not corrected when he insists that it was not an assassination program.

            The documentarians acknowledge briefly that the Pentagon Papers showed that the US government had been systematically lying about the war, but never detail what exactly those lies were.

           

            The Gulf of Tonkin incident, even though it had been debunked by the time this documentary was made, is never questioned.  However even back in the 1970s, the official story of the Gulf of Tonkin had been thoroughly discredited.

            Since the release of the Pentagon Papers, it had been revealed that the US government was already committed to sending troops to Vietnam, and the Gulf of Tonkin incident simply provided a convenient excuse for what had already been decided.  Furthermore, the U.S.’s own intelligence was unsure if there was actually a second attack in the Gulf of Tonkin, or just electronic radar confusion.  (President Johnson said privately he thought the sailors were probably just shooting at fish.)

            This was all knowledge in the public domain at the time of this documentary, but they never go into that.  Instead they just largely repeat the official government story.

            It was briefly mentioned that the American bombing of Vietnam was the largest bombardment in history, but the full brutality of this bombing was not explored.

            During the end of the documentary, there’s considerable emphasis on the panic and desperateness in South Vietnam at the end of the war, but it’s only mentioned briefly that when the communists did capture Saigon, the expected bloodbath never took place.

            Again, they’re not lying necessarily, but they’re sure putting the emphases on all the wrong places.

Nevertheless….

          I actually enjoyed this documentary for the most part.  If don’t get frustrated about what they’re leaving out, and just concentrate on what they choose to leave in, it can be very informative.

            I learned a lot about several battles during the war that I hadn’t known about before.

            I thought the section on the American pilots held captive in North Vietnam was interesting.  (I hadn’t known this before, but about half of the American prisoners of war in Vietnam actually turned against the war and made public anti-war statements during their captivity.)

Notes

* One of the more shocking moments in the series was documentary footage of the army chaplain praying with the pilots, and asking God’s blessing on them, before they left on their mission to bomb Vietnam.  My jaw just about hit the floor when I saw that!

* Another interesting moment is a CIA operative talking about his frustrations with South Vietnamese president Diem.  Diem was told by the CIA to rig the election results, but to make sure he only won by a small percentage so as to make it look believable.  “I told him that I didn’t want to read in the papers that he had the election by 99.9%” says one of the ex-CIA advisors.  “And the next day the paper shows he won by 98% of the vote”.  (All misquoted here as I’m quoting from memory, but something like that.)

            I’ve read somewhere else (don’t remember the source now) that Diem felt that it would be a loss of face if any more than 2% of the country didn’t vote for him.

* Interesting to hear the American soldiers complaining about the big rats in Vietnam.  I’ve frequently seen those rats in Phnom Penh as well, and they are pretty huge.

* Having visited Saigon and Hanoi, it was interesting for me to pick out in the documentary footage places that I had actually been to.

* I've used this Chomsky quote before, but it's probably relevant again here, so I'm going to re-post it.

"....It's also necessary to completely falsify history. That's another way to overcome these sickly inhibitions. To make it look as if when we attack and destroy somebody we're really protecting ourselves and defending ourselves against major aggressors and, you know, monsters and so on. There's been a huge effort since the Vietnam War to reconstruct the history of that. Too many people got to understand what was really going on and that was bad. Including plenty of soldiers and a lot of young people who were involved in the peace movement and many others. And it was necessary to re-arrange those bad thoughts and to restore some form of sanity, namely a recognition that whatever we do is noble and right, and if we're bombing South Vietnam that's because we're defending South Vietnam against somebody, namely the South Vietnamese, because nobody else was there. It's what the Kennedy intellectuals called, "Defense against internal aggression in South Vietnam"-- that was the phrase that Adlai Stevenson used. It's necessary to make that the official picture and the well understood picture. And that's worked pretty well actually. When you have total control over the media and the educational system and scholarship is conformist and so on you can get that across. One indication of it was actually revealed in a study that was done at the University of Massachusetts on attitudes towards the current Gulf crisis. A study of beliefs and attitudes and television watching. One of the questions that was asked in that study, people were asked: how many Vietnamese casualties would you estimate that there were during the Vietnam War? The average response on the part of Americans today is about 100,000. Now the official figure is about 2 million. The actual figure is probably 3 to 4 million or something like that. The people who conducted this study raised the appropriate question. They asked the question: what would we think about German political culture if when you asked people today how many Jews died in the holocaust they estimated about 300,000. What would that tell us about German political culture? Well, they leave the question unanswered but you can pursue it. What does that tell us about our culture? It tells us quite a bit. That's necessary to overcome the sickly inhibitions against the use of military force and other democratic deviations. And the same is true on every topic. Pick the topic you like: the Middle East, international terrorism, Central America, whatever it is, the picture of the world that's presented to the public has only the remotest relation to reality. The truth of the matter is buried under edifice and edifice of lies..."

Link of the Day

Noam Chomsky: Mass Media and Control

 Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War: TV Series Review