[Peace-discuss] Obfuscating the Truths of Vietnam

Tue Sep 26 02:42:46 UTC 2017

September 25, 2017 

<https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/09/25/obfuscating-the-truths-of-vietnam/>
Obfuscating the Truths of Vietnam

by  <https://www.counterpunch.org/author/4azeca4rafrebre/> S. Brian Willson 

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I have hesitated to comment on the instructive discussion on VFP's Full
Disclosure page about the Burns-Novick Vietnam PBS series because I am not
watching it. I have enjoyed reading many of the comments, and have
communicated with people who have seen advance screenings.

In 2014, I heard Burns' publicly discuss his pending PBS Vietnam series. He
responded to a question about Agent Orange with a "safe" position that
damage to human beings from the chemical herbicide was scientifically
inconclusive. This was not surprising given that Burns is a popular,
established film maker of various aspects of history from jazz, to baseball,
to the Civil War. However, any deep threat to the US American basic "good
guy" self-image would likely curtail his continued popularity, not likely to
lend itself to corporate funding on PBS, whether from Bank of America, the
Rockefeller or Koch Brothers.

Any treatment of the US War against the Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians
that does not establish the historic foundation of the US criminal invasion,
occupation, and destruction of an innocent country, murdering and maiming
millions - profound moral issues - flunks authentic history. And, equally,
if the presentation ignores the US creation of a fictional puppet government
in the South that was so unpopular that the US was forced to deploy 3
million troops and massive airpower to protect it from the Vietnamese people
themselves, it will fail miserably to do justice to genuine history.

Despite this history, Viet Nam is still commonly called a "Civil War" of
relative "equivalencies", a preposterous representation suggesting an
"enemy" of basically poor people 8-10,000 miles distant on their own ground
who for some unknown reason might threaten the wealthy US with bombs or
naval and ground invasions, or... ? And to represent that the war was "begun
in good faith by decent people", ignores the revelations of the Pentagon
Papers.

Thus, Burns's and Novick's 18-hour "The Vietnam War" series severely
obfuscates the most significant great truths of the US war - that "The
Vietnam War" was and remains a Great Lie. Provoking national discussion
about the war is important, but for it to be acceptable to a national PBS
audience, the producers had to assure that in the framing the US remains
basically the good guy against evil.

The honest portrayal of a people who wanted authentic autonomy from a stream
of colonial intervenors seems outside our capacity to embrace, and certainly
we were not able to comprehend the deep Vietnamese commitment to do whatever
they believed necessary to rid itself of its latest occupier. Instead, the
US created and funded a fictitious government with a corresponding enemy to
justify our intervention against the shadowy, deceitful, evil, though
tenacious "communists". This US policy was intended to prevent a successful
"Third World" post-WWII revolutionary movement that possessed the potential
to spread to other restive peoples.

Without establishing this fundamental immoral foundation to the history of
the US intervention, this Burns-Novick documentary history safely avoids
provoking the US American people into an overdue, painful self-examination
of its cultural "DNA". Our geltanshauung was cast as a divinely guided
"predestination" for goodness in 1630 when Puritan John Winthrop of the
Massachusetts Bay Colony declared "that we shall be as a city upon a hill"
and "the eyes of all people are upon us".

We are reminded of such arrogance in "Founding Father" Thomas Jefferson's
hypocritical words penned in the 1776 Declaration of Independence that
claimed "all men are created equal", yet a few words later declared the King
of England using the "merciless Indian savages" to attack with "known rule
of warfare" the new settlors with "undistinguished destruction of all ages,
sexes and conditions".

Let's see.. those words describe well our behavior in Viet Nam, genocidal
behavior then, as in Viet Nam, off limits for US to consider.

*The US destroyed more than 60 percent of Viet Nam's 21,000 inhabited,
undefended villages, including use of unprecedented 8 million tons of bombs
and 370,000 tons of napalm, murdering 4 to 5 million, leaving a decimated
landscape with 26 million bomb craters and as many as 300,000 tons of
unexploded ordnance that continue to kill and injure thousands every year;

*USAF manuals instructed the intentional bombings of the "psycho-social
structure" of Viet Nam such as pagodas and churches (950 of them), schools
(over 3,000) and hospitals and maternity wards (1,850, many with large red
crosses painted on their roofs);

*US and South Vietnamese pilots were trained to "cut people down like little
cloth dummies" during daytime raids;

*US employed the most intensive use of chemical warfare in human history,
spraying 21 million gallons of lethal poison leaving millions deformed, sick
and dead, now with third generation birth deformities;

*The US used torture in every southern province to extract confessions;

*The US imposed free fire (genocide) zones over 75 percent of the South,
mass murdering villagers on the ground, etc.

In fact, our behavior was unspeakable, but similar to what our forebears did
against our Indigenous inhabitants. Viet Nam was no aberration.

Yes, the PBS series will present much important history for the viewers
through its artful selection of dramatic war footage and wide-ranging
interviews with Vietnamese and US Americans. It will indeed educate and
raise questions..as long as the storyline essentially preserves the US as
the better of two basically equivalent fighting forces. It admits making
terrible mistakes, but not crimes, implying or expressing justification for
our intervention against evil - here the convenient Cold War Pavlovian
"communist" bogeyman.

This PBS series is being aired as the US deepens its atrocious pattern of
perpetual war around the globe since Viet Nam, the chess pieces continually
moving from Viet Nam to almost everywhere else under a philosophy of "full
spectrum dominance". This includes use of the ultimate wholesale terror from
the sky using missile-laden drones.

The nature of US behavior in Viet Nam, and in the little understood tragic
Korean war more than a decade earlier, and in virtually all countries in
which it intervenes, covertly or overtly, is virtually ungraspable to the
majority of US Americans. In 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr delivered his
anti-Vietnam War speech, declaring that "the greatest purveyor of violence
in the world today is my own government". Hmm!

Without a willingness to honestly address our long pattern of immoral and
criminal military and covert interventions to preserve essentially selfish,
narcissistic values, utilizing deceit and grotesque barbaric techniques,
when and how might the US people be awakened to discover a political
consciousness of mutual respect? The Burns-Novick series will produce
healthy debates about the US War in Southeast Asia, but it will tragically
steer clear of revealing, while obscuring, the Grand Lie of the war itself,
even as the documentary is touted by observers and viewers as monumental
history. What a lost opportunity!

So, as people are glued to this intriguing PBS series, they will nonetheless
continue to shop, their government will continue to bomb, and the warmakers
will continue to get richer. Nothing changes.

S. Brian Willson, USAF Combat Security Police Officer, Viet Nam, 1969.

 <https://www.facebook.com/CounterPunch-official-172470146144666/> Join the
debate on Facebook 

More articles by: <https://www.counterpunch.org/author/4azeca4rafrebre/> S.
Brian Willson

S. Brian Willson, as a 1st lieutenant, served as commander of a US Air Force
combat security police unit in Viet Nam's Mekong Delta in 1969. He is a
trained lawyer who has been an anti-war, peace and justice activist for more
than forty years. His psychohistorical memoir, "
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1604864214/counterpunchmaga> Blood
On The Tracks: The Life and Times of S. Brian Willson" was published in 2011
by PM Press. A long time member of Veterans For Peace, he currently resides
in Portland, Oregon 

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