Slightly P: Ken Burns//The Vietnam War

[David Morris]

On Roku only the first two episodes are free.  It might be that episodes
become free after their broadcast.

David Morris

On Tue, Oct 3, 2017 at 8:30 PM Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Went to PBS to watch episode 7, only to find that I now have to sign up as
> a member for $75/year or a monthly donation to have access. And so it goes,
> to borrow a quote.
>
> Www.innergroovemusic.com
>
> On Oct 2, 2017, at 11:32 PM, Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I posted another article that belongs in this thread...from Truthdig.
>
> Www.innergroovemusic.com
>
> On Oct 2, 2017, at 5:07 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Thanks for writing and sharing this, Joseph.
>
> I can only really speak from my own perspective. Born in the American
> midwest in 1989. Four episodes in, the Burns doc seems to me a relatively
> moving and plain-spoken evocation of the moral & political failures of
> those who wielded a tragically disproportionate amount of power/influence
> and eventually the perpetuation of those failures by those who inherited
> the already-fucked situation from their predecessors.
>
> The apparent futility of the people who suffered the war most to do
> anything to stop it is heartbreaking. This needless and widely distributed
> pain itself seems to be as much of the raison d'être of the series as
> anything else. It seems to have the skin of a diagnosis but the bones of an
> elegy.
>
> My father was born in 1950 and was assigned some impossibly unlucky
> lottery number. He accepted that he was going to go to war and was very
> possibly going to die. He said goodbye to his mother. And then he didn't
> hear about it again. To this day he thinks his draft card must've been
> burned by protestors. The anti-war movement thus being something like my
> and my family's raison d'être in family lore.
>
> On Mon, Oct 2, 2017 at 3:18 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>
>> I understand and respect the sincerity and passion of what you are
>> saying. Please hear me with patience as some of what I say may be hard to
>> hear. I sometimes go back in my mind to the last time i went to the black
>> wall in DC. There are always tears. So bear with me.
>>
>> I never refused to feel this war, I never refused to understand this war.
>> Very few parts of human history affected me more deeply. I was ready to
>> join David Harris in prison when they refused my application for
>> coscientious objector status. No one wants to go to prison but I was ready.
>> The year I came up for the draft they did a lottery and I had a high
>> number, I was off the hook but my war resistance continued. I  Will not be
>> watching this documentary about this war. More tears will help no one.
>> Since 1969 I have demonstrated and worked with anti-war activists, and for
>> environmental sanity, since 2000 I have engaged in direct action with vets
>> for peace multiple times and that work is ongoing. I have read many volumes
>> written about the issues and history of Vietnam. There is a time to feel, a
>> time to understand, and a time to act.  Our future and the future of
>> humanity hangs in the balance. The internet didn’t bring peace and
>> democracy, nuclear weapons didn’t, cell phones didn’t do it, Jesus didn’t
>> do it, drugs didn’t do it, art hasn’t done it, trips to Europe, nature
>> documentaries, Obama, Bush, Mohammed, Bono, Apple, money, sex, sports.
>> Enough personal and social self delusion; it’s up to us to act. The US war
>> machine is growing still and is currently the most dangerous force in human
>> history.
>>
>> Just because something bears the aspect of the inevitable one should not,
>> therefore, go along willingly with it.
>>        Philip K Dick, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
>>
>> “If only there were vile people ... committing evil deeds, and if it were
>> only necessary to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them,”
>> Solzhenitsyn wrote. “But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the
>> heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his
>> own heart?”
>>                               Alexander Solzhenitsyn
>>
>>   At the start of the gulf war I saw my children go with their friends to
>> DC to try to prevent the attack on Iraq. That weekend was, on a global
>> scale, the largest anti-war demonstration in the history of the world. I
>> was there too and the crowds in DC were immense as in the rest of the
>> world. But it seems the largest anti-war demonstration in history is not
>> really news in the US. The media coverage in the US was minuscule and my
>> kids were deeply discouraged. I wonder how many felt that their voices were
>> refused and denied by NPR, CBS, NBC etc. The mainstream media in the US is
>> a pro-war lie machine. They don’t stand up for the constitution, or for
>> human rights in  any consistency and they give virtually no voice to the
>> many eloquent voices who represet the consistent 40 % of citizens who
>> oppose our wars of aggression. They never interview veterans for peace.
>> Instead NPR does stories heroizing US soldiers while ignoring their
>> victims. It is just as sickening now as it was during the Vietnam war.
>>
>>       "There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing
>> innocent people."
>>     ( Howard Zinn)
>>
>>    I have endured a lot of personal insults because I don’t like the
>> democratic war party much better than the republican war party. LBJ was one
>> more in a long line of democratic party war mongers. Obama started new wars
>> and Hillary promoted the war in Libya. But  I took my stand  a long time
>> ago and never looked back on this issue. People can tell themselves this
>> war is different, these people are evil and must be bombed, we’ve heard it
>> all. The deception is not only in the past. The Democrats just voted for
>> more defense spending than the increase requested by the dangerous Trump. I
>> will not be voting or supporting war mongers from any party. Until people
>> demand peaceful means to conflict resolution, there will be no peace.  No
>> god will bring it from the sky, no turning of the stars, no sentiment
>> alone.  We must accept our responsibility to change the course of history
>> that leads to annihilation.
>>
>>     Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must
>> love our enemies - or else? The chain reaction of evil - hate begetting
>> hate, wars producing more wars - must be broken, or else we shall be
>> plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation. (Martin Luther King)
>>
>>    I really hope the Burns documentary will help people understand  the
>> Vietnam war for what it produced, how the lies of the CIA, politicians and
>> ideologogues; and how the equation of patriotism with a war of aggression
>> against a nation that never attacked us led to the cruel violation of every
>> constitutional principle we claim to stand for,  that it was a shallow
>> political egotistical act of mass murder in defense of  racist colonialism.
>> I hope it will allow to people to see the courage of the Vietnamese in
>> refusing the continuation of colonialism. I hope it will help people see
>> through the current lies and distortions of the media. I hope it will
>> dampen the idea of war as heroism. These wars never really end. As many
>> soldiers committed suicide after coming home from Vietnam as died in the
>> war.
>>
>> Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the
>> liberty of a democratic people.
>> The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the
>> people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes
>> stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is
>> Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any
>> other controlling private power.
>> The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its
>> business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute
>> goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living.
>>     Franklin D Roosevelt
>>
>>
>>
>> > On Oct 1, 2017, at 6:35 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > It should not allow emotional equanimity--and doesn't. You put your
>> whole self in. And feel.
>> >
>> > "Dramatized actuality" as a great documentarian defined such. Burns
>> does this: gives slices of 'both sides' as history YET,
>> >  the right 'interpretative' words, the right straightforward
>> presentation of deception, of actively chosen lies, with the repetition--a
>> theme is what is steadily repeated in variations in the work, said someone,
>> maybe Susan Sontag--of the horror truths of death and suffering and
>> incompetence, it becomes one the the best anti-war movies/tragedies made.
>> >
>> > On Sat, Sep 30, 2017 at 9:11 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>> > I am not able to watch, cable is needed where we live to get tv and
>> don’t like tv that much. I am glad it is having such a strong impact on you
>> and specifically inducing sympathy toward the Vietnamese. My only other
>> contact with a local person, who is not a close acquaintance, watching the
>> series. He seemed to see it as a thrilling story of american courage and
>> cool scenes of war. I hope the series will wear away this bizarre
>> enthusiasm.
>> >    The Nick Turse article was not a scathing put down or anything like
>> that. He seemed to think the series pretty decent and thorough. He spent a
>> decade writing a book about Vietnam and brought to light via FOIA many
>> atrocities that had been histoorically suppressed. I hope the series has
>> more the effect it is having on you than it did on this person I mentioned(
>> a political centrist electrician in his early 50s). I cried enough tears at
>> the time and fought with the war mania at home, in school and elsewhere. I
>> could never watch it with any emotional equanimity.
>> > > On Sep 30, 2017, at 9:33 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > >
>> > > I am not even going to bother to read it to say IT DOES NOT!....I
>> have NOT been able to get the repeated huge numbers out of my head--because
>> I, hating to even read about war, had NO IDEA they were so high---with
>> scene after scene of massive numbers
>> > > of dead Vietnamese...When we see that bombing and extrapolate--how
>> else can it be done?--and see the deaths and extrapolate......THE HORROR,
>> THE HORROR....
>> > >
>> > > and they come up in EVERY discussion I have had--and I am in a
>> discussion group about it in my soft liberal bourgeois town.
>> > >
>> > > "Sometimes simply seeing what is on front of one's eyes is the
>> hardest thing"---G. Orwell, surely paraphrased.
>> > >
>> > > On Sat, Sep 30, 2017 at 9:21 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>
>> wrote:
>> > > This is a brief article by Nick Turse who wrote an important recent
>> book on Vietnam.
>> > >
>> https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/09/29/ken-burns-vietnam-war-documentary-glosses-over-devastating-civilian-toll
>> > >
>> >
>> > -
>> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>> >
>>
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>>
>
>
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