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Vietnam

Veterans’ Group Says “No” To Emmy For PBS Vietnam War Series

June 2, 2018 By Mike Ferner, Commondreams.org , ,
“In this war-torn world, what is desperately needed – but what Burns and Novick fail to convey – is an honest rendering of that war to help the American people avoid yet more catastrophic wars.” A national veterans’ organization is weighing in on this year’s Emmy awards with a full-page ad in Variety, saying Ken Burns and Lynne Novick’s “Vietnam War” series does not deserve a “Best Documentary” award. Veterans For Peace (VFP), headquartered in St. Louis, with 175 chapters in the U.S. and six overseas, will run the Variety ad prior to the awards on September 17, to generate discussion about the series and the lasting impact it will have if “crowned with an Emmy.”

Vietnam Locks Up US-funded Agitators

April 18, 2018 By Joseph Thomas, Asia-pacificresearch.com , ,
Vietnam has tried and imprisoned several members of a US-funded network engaged in sedition across the country. The move follows  trials and prison terms handed out earlier this year for other US-funded operatives meddling in Vietnam’s internal political affairs. The prison terms for agents of US-funded political meddling in Vietnam come as the US and its European allies continue pushing accusations of Russian meddling. However, unlike the US and Europe’s accusations against Russia, agents of US-funded sedition in Vietnam are exposed by extensive evidence, much of which comes from the US government itself. The BBC in its April 6, 2018 article, “Nguyen Van Dai: Vietnam jails activist lawyer and five others,” would claim...

50 Years Later: Has US Learned From My Lai Massacre?

March 19, 2018 Barbara Myers, Truthdig.com , , ,
My Lai. The images of women and children clinging together in their last living moments on that March day, a half century ago, still sear our collective memory. While we harbor no doubts that My Lai was a crime, there has been no accountability for the atrocity, or a national reckoning for the wider holocaust that was Vietnam. On March 16, 1968, 504 women, children and old men were shot at point-blank range by American soldiers over the course of a few hours in Son Myvillage—407 were killed in the “My Lai 4” hamlet and another 97 were slaughtered in the hamlet known on U.S. military maps as “My Khe 4,” about a mile from My Lai. The soldiers’ mission: to “search and destroy.” It would take another 20 months for news of the atrocity and subsequent cover-up to reach the public, after exposure by journalist Seymour Hersh.

The Antiwar Movement Then & Now

October 24, 2017 Staff, www.vietnamfulldisclosure.org , ,
By Staff of Vietnam Full Disclosure - It is offered—not in expectation of agreement—but to provoke a serious discussion about the current state of antiwar politics. Burns and Novick in their PBS documentary: The Vietnam War could not ignore the antiwar movement, but exhibit little interest in its dynamics, except in its supposed hostility to American GIs. Since my interest still lies in how to build a more effective antiwar movement, I want to focus on the lessons learned and not learned by the Vietnam antiwar movement as a prelude to exploring how we might move forward to confront the multiple wars and threats of war that beset our world. Of course, there was not one unified antiwar movement, but a conglomeration of tendencies featuring contending critiques, strategies and tactics. What follows is an attempt at a succinct, dispassionate description of those tendencies, which no doubt risks over-simplification. I will look at three general perspectives. I will begin with a critique of tendencies with which I was associated. The first set of tendencies included the anti-imperialists, militants, and Marxist-Leninists. Members of these overlapping, but distinct groupings, all grasped the depth of the problem that the war in Vietnam exposed. The war was not a mistake or an aberration from the general direction of US global policy. Its goal was to dominate the world and, in this particular case, to gain a strategic foothold in mainland Asia.

How The Vietnam War Prepared Puerto Ricans To Confront Crisis

October 9, 2017 Michael Stewart Foley, www.wagingnonviolence.org , , , ,
By Michael Stewart Foley for Waging Nonviolence - This week, as Puerto Ricans feel once again like a White House afterthought, it is hard not to conclude that Puerto Rico matters to Washington only when mainland political and business leaders need to conscript the island itself for some larger financial or military purpose. Consider the impact of Vietnam War policy on Puerto Rico. Thanks to a new Ken Burns documentary and Hurricane Maria, the headlines have us talking simultaneously about Vietnam and Puerto Rico for the first time in 50 years. Today, few Americans remember the impact of the Vietnam War on Puerto Rico. Yet the war struck the island with the force of a political hurricane, tearing at Puerto Rico’s social fabric, raising the same questions of colonialism that are again in the news in the wake of Maria, and fueling its independence movement. Not unlike Puerto Rico’s recent fiscal crisis, the Vietnam War brought into sharp relief the island’s unequal status as a territory of the United States, particularly after President Lyndon Johnson escalated the war in 1965. Draft-age men in Puerto Rico were subject to the Selective Service Act and called for induction into the U.S. military — even though they had no representative in the Congress that passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution...

Burns’s War Stories Fog The Truth

September 22, 2017 Bob Buzzanco, www.historynewsnetwork.org , ,
By Bob Buzzanco for History News Network - Now, a half-century later, America’s best-known documentarians and teachers of popular history, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick have produced an 18-hour examination of the war for PBS (with sponsorship and promotion from the Koch Brothers, Bank of America, and Pentagon, inter alia) which is getting a huge amount of attention already. Like their documentary on the Civil War, The Vietnam War will surely become a major work of public history and be ingrained in our national consciousness. But what do Burns and Novick do, is it anything new, and what consequences will their work have? Burns and Novick, in their public relations blitz for the show (which debuted Sunday night, September 17th) have stressed that this documentary is different than the studies of Vietnam that have preceded it because they focused on the people who were involved in the war and especially representatives of the enemy (the “North Vietnamese” in their parlance, not the “revolutionaries” or “the NLF”). Their goal was to “triangulate” the telling of the war—speak to people from North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and the United States. Their main purpose is to “honor the courage, heroism and sacrifice of those who served,” and “we have tried to do this by listening to their stories.”

Dr. Orange: The Secret Nemesis Of Sick Vets

November 22, 2016 Charles Ornstein, www.propublica.org , ,
By Charles Ornstein for Pro Publica - A Pentagon consultant was recommending that Air Force officials quickly and discreetly chop up and melt down a fleet of C-123 aircraft that had once sprayed the toxic herbicide Agent Orange across Vietnam. The consultant also suggested how to downplay the risk if journalists started asking questions: “The longer this issue remains unresolved, the greater the likelihood of outside press reporting on yet another ‘Agent Orange Controversy.’”

Anti-War Activist And Member Of ‘Chicago 7’ Tom Hayden Dead At 76

October 24, 2016 Staff, www.huffingtonpost.com , ,
By Staff of Reuters - Veteran social activist and politician Tom Hayden, a stalwart of America’s New Left who served 18 years in California’s state legislature and gained a dash of Hollywood glamour by marrying actress Jane Fonda, has died aged 76, according to media reports. Hayden died in Santa Monica, California, after a lengthy illness, The Los Angeles Times reported on its web site.

Is The Trans-Pacific Partnership President Obama’s Vietnam?

July 26, 2016 Dean Baker, www.truth-out.org , , , ,
By Dean Baker for Truthout - The prospects for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) are not looking very good right now. Both parties' presidential candidates have come out against the deal. Donald Trump has placed it at the top of his list of bad trade deals that he wants to stop or reverse. Hillary Clinton had been a supporter as secretary of state, but has since joined the opposition in response to overwhelming pressure from the Democratic base. As a concession to President Obama, the Democratic platform does not explicitly oppose the TPP.

No Welcome Mat For Monsanto: Vietnam Must Draw Line

June 14, 2016 Dien Luong, www.truth-out.org , ,
By Dien Luong for Truthout - Monsanto -- the US biotech company that manufactured the devastating Agent Orange chemical used against civilians during the Vietnam War -- has been quietly welcomed back into Vietnam to cultivate genetically modified animal feed, even as it has continued to refuse to compensate its Vietnamese victims. This grotesque irony is just one of a series of ironies associated with the recent rapprochement between the US and Vietnam.

Muhammad Ali Risked It All When He Opposed The Vietnam War

June 6, 2016 Justin Block, www.huffingtonpost.com , ,
By Justin Block for The Huffington Post - Muhammad Ali’s most famous act of social activism — one that would strip him of his best fighting years, cost him millions of dollars, forever alter his image and eventually send him into debt — began with one off-hand quote: “Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.” It was March 1966, and the U.S. military was escalating its fight in Vietnam. It began substantially lowering its standards for the draft so it could conscript more men, and call up men with lower IQs for 1-A service.

Veteran’s Apology To People Of Vietnam, Cambodia And Laos

May 31, 2016 Staff, www.mendocoastcurrent.wordpress.com ,
By Staff of Mendo Coast Current - There will never be a day when the Vietnam War is not on my mind. It was one of the worst mistakes America has ever made. Vietnam was fought for big money interests and promoted under the guise of nationalism. The war should have taught us a humbling lesson, but we let it slip away. Peace has become the enemy of corporate-run America. Our nation is accustomed to viewing life through the crosshairs of a rifle scope. We are a society in search of constant battle.

Remembering All The Deaths From All Our Wars

May 29, 2016 S. Brian Willson, www.counterpunch.org ,
By S. Brian Willson for Counter Punch. Celebration of Memorial Day in the US, originally Decoration Day, commenced shortly after the conclusion of the Civil War. This is a national holiday to remember the people who died while serving in the armed forces. The day traditionally includes decorating graves of the fallen with flowers. As a Viet Nam veteran, I know the kinds of pain and suffering incurred by over three million US soldiers, marines, sailors, and airmen, 58,313 of whom paid the ultimate price whose names are on The Vietnam Wall in Washington, DC. The Oregon Vietnam Memorial Wall alone, located here in Portland, contains 803 names on its walls. The function of a memorial is to preserve memory. On this US Memorial Day, May 30, 2016, I want to preserve the memory of all aspects of the US war waged against the Southeast Asian people in Viet Nam, Laos, and Cambodia – what we call the Viet Nam War – as well as the tragic impacts it had on our own people and culture.

US Military Returns To Vietnam

May 28, 2016 Bill Van Auken, www.wsws.org ,
By Bill Van Auken for WSWS - President Barack Obama’s announcement in Hanoi on Monday that Washington is lifting its four-decade-old arms embargo on Vietnam is described by the media, and Obama himself, as a decisive step in the “normalization” of relations between the US and Vietnam. That process has been ongoing since the restoration of diplomatic relations in 1995. On the military front, the US agreed to sell Vietnam non-lethal military hardware in 2007, and last year it agreed to provide the Vietnamese coastguard with five unarmed patrol boats.

Vietnamese Boat People Raise Money To Help Syrian Refugees

December 7, 2015 Staff, www.cbc.ca , ,
By Staff of CBC News - Calgary's Vietnamese community is coming together to help welcome and support the wave of refugees coming from war-torn Syria. Organizers put on a fundraising dinner at a local Vietnamese restaurant and held a silent auction Thursday night. Their goal was to raise $10,000 to help settle the refugees. Hundreds of thousands of people fled or were expelled from Vietnam after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, with approximately 60,000 eventually reaching Canada. Those who came by boat became known as the Boat People.
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