[grayhog]

Thank God for Steve Sherman and VVFH giving a running review of this propaganda movie. Sadly, many schools are requiring the children to watch it. It needs a lot of counterpoints, and VVFH is providing just that.

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[blueunicorn6]

The communists convinced the Vietnamese people to die so that the communists could ride in the government limousines.

[SMARTY]

Burns is the gospel for Liberals.... he will not be challenged in the schools.... THEIR propaganda will not be derailed

[Menehune56]

VVFH link seems to be down.

[uncbob]

If Nixon had cranked up the B52s and went into Cambodia the week after he took office he could have won the war

Instead of putzing around like he did till he finally took action to get the POWs back and a peace treaty signed

But then he was neutered by Watergate and the War was lost

[clintonh8r]

Bump

[T-Bird45]

Thanks for linking this resource. I’ve watched each episode and have my own personal critique so it’s good to have further references. The first episode covered time before I was alive so those details are particularly helpful.

[dfwgator]

He’s right on.

Ho was a typical Commie thug.

[Chainmail]

I have noticed that only battles discussed so far are the ones where we or the ARVN had it rough. The method is to make audience think that we just lost over and over against a skilled enemy.

They’re propagandists and liars: in almost all major battles, we creamed them. Operations Hastings and Prairie, Hue City, Khe Sanh - we killed them in heaps.

But if showed any of that, goodbye to the underlying narrative that we were doomed from the beginning.

[Uncle Sam 911]

Anyone who expects the media to be honest on Vietnam is dreaming.

[Skooz]

bfl

[rlmorel]

"...Ho curried favor with the Americans simply because the Nationalist Chinese were not providing his communist guerrillas with any assistance after 1942 and he was willing to do just about anything to get US money and military equipment, using the gullible (and pro-communist) elements in the OSS to achieve it..."

I know this below is a bit lengthy, but this is an interesting element to fit into the puzzle at that time albeit early in the stage of developments.

Anyone who followed the activities of Joseph McCarthy are probably aware that the US government was riddled with a huge number government employees, who, if not outright Soviet Agents (such as Alger Hiss) were "Fellow Travelers".

Particularly infiltrated and corrupted was the State Department. When the Communists took over China shortly after WWII, the cry became "Who Lost China", and any attempt to fix that lost foothold in the Truman Administration which was ultimately culpable.

The State Department (which advised the Truman administration on China affairs) had three officials in China who fed the State Department and the White House with the critical information they used to guide affairs with China. They were the ones typing up situation reports on a routine basis, which were sent back to Foggy Bottom and shared with the White House. Since the USA was considered to be better connected and equipped and knowledgeable in China to report on these things, the British government asked us to share our reports with them, and they guided their China policies accordingly.

Interestingly, this process also worked in reverse to monitor and set national policy in the Balkans, where we took our cues, reports, information and suggestions from the British Foreign Service who supplied them to us, since they were considered to be better connected, equipped, and knowledgeable about the Balkans.

But what the vast majority of Americans don't know is that the American State Department team in China, and the British Foreign Service team in the Balkans, were both composed of Soviet agents. In the case of Chiang Kai Shek and the nationalists in China, and the pro-American partisans led by Draza Mihailovich in Yugoslavia, both were betrayed by these agents, Chiang Kai Shek was exiled (he was lucky) and the non-communists supporting him were destroyed (if not then, through the upcoming purges through the Sixties) and Mihailovich was captured, tried and executed as were many of his partisans who he led.

These two Soviet agents in Chunking (John Stewart Service and Solomon Adler) who worked for the State Department and the third one, a Chinese national (Chi Chao-ting, who was educated in the US, and was an economist working for the KMT (Kuomintang) government who was also a soviet agent) all lived in the same building. Service and Adler shared an apartment, and Chi Chou-ting lived in the floor above them. They would all get together and bang out their reports, deliberately trashing Chiang Kai Shek and the KMT as deeply as they could manage to do without someone having reason to call them out on it, and building up the "Yenan Comrades" (Led by Mao and Chou En Lai) to a ridiculous degree. When you read the verbiage of the reports, it is hard to see how someone didn't call them out, but they accepted them. They deliberately did this in such a way to reinforce and buttress the reports coming from General Stilwell, so it would look like two independent sources of info that aligned. In actuality, Gen. Stilwell was blinded by his hate for Chaing Kai Shek and blew every negative thing wildly out of proportion and openly encouraged his staff to do so as well. (Stilwell was a great admirer of Agnes Smedley who was a well known writer and later accused of espionage) This, coupled with their unbelievably ridiculous assessment of Mao as an "Agrarian Reformer" dedicated to "the same kind of democracy we have in America", convinced our administration not to support the KMT.

Fantastically enough, we had pledged $800 million in gold bullion to the KMT government along with armaments, and elements in the State Department deliberately sabotaged the process, delaying shipments, to the point Chiang Kai Shek was screaming for promised military equipment to fight both the Chinese Communists and the Japanese, and when confronted, delayed them some more.

All that said, there were elements working against any kind of aid getting to the Chinese Nationalist government from the USA, and there was therefore nothing to send anything to French Indochina. So there would be no rapprochement with them of any kind.

[Az Joe]

Bump

[frog in a pot]

Thank you for this, greyhog.

It appears with this documentary Burns is involved in a campaign by the left to refresh and advance its historical attack on our military. That campaign is no doubt intended to impact the prospective action that may well be taken in the near term by our CinC.

Vietnam and Trumps's presidency are perhaps the two recent events that presented the greatest threats to the left's worldview.

[LeoWindhorse]

VVFH is on Facebook

[faucetman]

I tried to watch an episode and couldn’t make it through it. It wasn’t about “The War”. Maybe later on there will be, but the war footage consisted of close ups of dead bodies.

I was unimpressed and cancelled the remaining episodes.

[Vermont Lt]

To the children today, Vietnam is akin in relevance to WWI back when I was a young boy (during the Vietnam war.)

It was too long ago, and too confusing. No matter how much we want them to learn about history in this world, they won’t spend more than a week on the entire sixties. And less on the 50s.

We are better off working to keep us out of the next one. Oops...too late.

[Shadow44]

The show is stupid and commits blatant doublethink.

It parrots how Hot Chi Minh cribbed from the Declaration and wanted US recognition, and then later on talks about the Maoist land reforms that occurred.

If Ho wasn’t a Communist first, why would he push for such Maoist policies immediately?

It doesn’t even address that or say how they were forced to do so, it just casually states such.

[Intolerant in NJ]

Bump.....

[MadMax, the Grinning Reaper]

For additional supporting information on what Steve has written so well about Ho Chi Minh and his communist fanaticism, try to find online the Sen. Judiciary Committee, Senate Internal Security Subcommittee study “The Human Cost of Communism in Vietnam”, 1972 (there are two followup parts to it, the Testimony of D. Gareth Porter and THCCIVN, Testimony of Daniel Teodoru).

I created the original study and with the late David Martin (SISS analyst, supporter of Mikhailovich and his Chetniks in Yugoslavia), we put the publication together. It included original interviews with Vietnamese figures, plus communist terrorism casualty figures from at least three countries (good through early 1972 (not including those after the Easter offensive and then thru the fall of SVN in 1975, and its aftermath of slave labor camps and massive executions in secret of GVN and ARVN members.

VVFH also has a serious of yearly “Yellow Books” entitled “Vietnam in the Year of the (Goat, Snake, Tiger, etc) that go from 1963 through 1975, 1974 will be coming out next year).

VVFH also took on John Kerry and his war crimes claims before Congress and elsewhere (Steve was a Special Forces leader who had operational connections to John Kerry and his Swift Boats on the Bay Hap River).

At a National Archives meeting in DC several years ago, VVFH members totally redirected their Vietnam symposium by having people who dealt directly with Pres. Diem talk about what it was like and what was happening in VN at that time. The opposition never produced anyone like that, and revelations about what was going on in SVN by VVFH members really shook up the participants and the audience, because they were hearing things from the people who were there, from grunts to provincial advisors, diplomats to journalists, etc.

The purpose of VVFH is to bring to the public’s attention “factual history”, not some of this leftist cdrap and propaganda that you find in the works of Prados, Porter, Appy, Turse, Young, etc.

VVFH could adopt the motto “The Truth Shall Set You Free” from communist propaganda and disinformation which many heard from Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, Dr. Spock, Dave Dellinger, and a lot of other reds and dupes.

Ken Burns’ documentary has some very good material in it and some crap, including a distinct anti-VN bias that Burns privately told some people about.

Watch the VVFH sites for more articles and analysis, stuff you wont’ get in the mainstream media or academia.