Slightly P: Ken Burns//The Vietnam War
Keith Davis
kbob42 at gmail.com
Tue Oct 3 20:56:10 CDT 2017
Yes, that makes sense.
Www.innergroovemusic.com
> On Oct 3, 2017, at 9:45 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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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