>>"it's complicated"
"If the people knew what we'd done..."
--George H.W. Bush
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=george+h+w+bush+quote+if+the+people+knew&t=hq&ia=web
Posted on 07/17/2017 7:08:59 AM PDT by rktman
PBS is planning to run a new documentary series this September on the Vietnam War, produced and written by Ken Burns. Burns is a left-wing "historian" and documentary film producer with a history of having his politics shape the narrative of the story he is telling, with a number of resulting inaccuracies.
Ken Burns correctly identifies the Vietnam War as being the point at which our society split into two diametrically opposed camps. He is also correct in identifying a need for us to discuss this aspect of our history in a civil and reflective manner. The problem is that the radical political and cultural divisions of that war have created alternate perceptions of reality, if not alternate universes of discourse. The myths and propaganda of each side make rational discourse based on intellectual honesty and goodwill difficult or impossible. The smoothly impressive visual story Burns will undoubtedly deliver will likely increase that difficulty. He has done many popular works in the past, some of which have been seriously criticized for inaccuracies and significant omissions, but we welcome the chance of a balanced treatment of the full history of that conflict. We can only wait and watch closely when it goes public.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
I’m too young to have lived through the Dust Bowl but my folks were ages 10 and 5 in 1929 and lived in Kansas so they saw some of the effects. I’ve been on farms in those areas as a wheat harvest hand back in the 70s and did get to talk to some who went through it. What I write below is my impression of those relationships, conversations, personal observation, etc. No claims of scientific data or accuracy at all.
I did not see Burns’ “Dust Bowl” series so I’m operating at a disadvantage by not being able to offer compare/contrast analysis. I will proceed from your statement on “man-made” vs. climate to offer opinion. In this case, I believe it was a combination of both factors: poor farming practices that were compounded by horrific weather patterns. Fence to fence plowing exposed topsoil to moisture loss and had little to stop it from blowing if exposed to significant wind. Some of the soils being used for cultivation agriculture were not well-suited for that and would not have been except for price production pressure.
General financial conditions then added to the disaster as many were operating close to the line and one small event could cascade to topple the house of cards. Pledged farm values fell due to poor crop prices and the loss of soil productivity. This collapse drove farmers off the farm as bankers foreclosed so the great migration to CA ensued.
So, yes, men made plenty of mistakes and poor choices in the years leading to the Dust Bowl. It still required the uncontrollable causative factor of the weather pattern going into drought to expose all the mistakes and poor choices. Drought has certainly visited the same area many times since but some lessons were learned and improvements were applied to lessen the effects. The potential still exists, IMO, because some of the “improvements” could yet become future causative factors.
My first thought, and a near certainty. Over the years I have noticed a subtle, yet steady, effort to affix all of the Vietnam woes on Nixon. And rarely, if ever, is Kennedy ever mentioned in any discussion of Vietnam.
“the late Shelby Foote. He made an otherwise mediocre series worth watching.”
Agreed, definitely the best part of The Civil War documentary.
Lyndon and Lady Bird made a fortune on the Vietnam escalation. LBJ on shipping investments, and Lady Bird on Huey transmissions. With both investments awarded lucrative govt contracts. I’m sure sure other politicians followed suit.
Hands off insider trading and now insurance exemptions are paying/benefiting legislators handsomely, for decades!
No argument from me on this.
>>"it's complicated"
"If the people knew what we'd done..."
--George H.W. Bush
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=george+h+w+bush+quote+if+the+people+knew&t=hq&ia=web
>>Truman sent the OSS to Vietnam 1945.
The same OSS infested by Frankurt School Marxists like Herbert Marcuse...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Marcuse
Wasn’t Ho Chi Min one of their allies?
Well, sort of. Actually, it was Truman who had previous commitments to the French and the emperor of Vietnam, Bao Dai. Then, in 1954 the French suffered a great military defeat in the battle of Dien Bien Phu so Ike sent advisors.
It was Kennedy who amped things up, but in historical context, we had just emerged as a true super power this short time after WWII and there was now an active emerging Communist threat as the world was undergoing a shuffling of alliances. IMO, with the still burning afterglow of heroism and patriotism of WWII our over confidence following WWII led us to misread a lot of foreign policy and our own national will (a lot of people forget that many in the nation wanted no part of engaging in WWII -- until Pearl Harbor). At any rate, this afterglow led us into the failed adventures and outcomes in both Korea and Vietnam.
In Eisenhower’s defense, he refused to send US forces to intervene in the battle of Dienbienphu. A good general knows you shouldn’t start a war unless victory is a sure thing. That is now considered one of the best things Ike did as president.
I always thought that Ken Burns and Linda Graham would make a cute couple. They each had baby faces for years, and now they have old baby faces typical of graying boy-poofters.
Thank you kindly! I will keep an eye on this, especially if it airs before my podcast episodes on the Vietnam War.
That is how I view it.
And the negotiated peace might have stood up as long as the Korean Armistice had the leftist radicals who controlled Congress and the Media allowed us to fulfill our obligations under the treaty to South Vietnam, which they did not.
They completely abrogated our national responsibility and left the South Vietnamese out to dry.
A black mark on our national soul, much the same as Operation Keelhaul negotiated at Yalta and our national treatment of Joseph McCarthy.
I have very dear friend who was an advisor in Vietnam in 1957.
That looks like OJ Simpson on the left.
Yep, me too. Some of them think it was all on the republican Nixon. When I tell them democrat LBJ was the one that expanded the Vietnam war and Nixon ended it, they don’t believe it.
A recent poll (few years ago) showed that almost 20% of Americans believe that LBJ was behind the murder of JFK.
No matter how big the lies the presstitutes and the gubermint tell, the truth will eventually come out.
“... we allowed the French to have back her colonies ...”
Bingo! If the story begins in the middle, you can’t ever understand what happened. After having been a “colony” of Germany twice in 25 years, you might think France would get the picture but they made the mistake of trying to go back to being a colonial power after the U.S. once again saved their bacon. Looking at the current situation in France I’m not sure they have yet.
Eisenhower was the first to send military advisors to South Viet Nam, not JFK.
JFK is famous, not for increasing the number, which he did, but for reacting to the book “The Ugly American” by requiring special training for the Special Forces that included good deeds with the anti-Communist South Vietnamese.
LBJ is famous for giving the war to McNamara and the whiz kids who had no clue. They undid everything JFK intended by sending us 550,000 guys over there with no training of any kind.
So far, I have not seen an accurate history of the war from either left or right. The closest thing to reality is a couple paragraphs in Susan Brownmillers “Against Our Will”.
Considering the metrics, Ike lost 9 people over 4 years. Kennedy lost 186 over 3 years, Johnson lost about 48,000 over 6 years and Nixon lost about 9,500 over 7 years.
It is clear to see a casualty spike with Kennedy and Johnson. They are not saints in this comparison.
But ultimately the war was lost by the incompetent South Vietnamese government, who could never rally their own population to the degree that it needed to be to defeat the North.
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