John Pilger doesn't think highly of Ken Burns' new series about the Vietnam War. Here is his assessment:
I watched the first episode in New York. It leaves you in no doubt of its intentions right from the start. The narrator says the war “was begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War misunderstandings”.
The dishonesty of this statement is not surprising. The cynical fabrication of “false flags” that led to the invasion of Vietnam is a matter of record – the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” in 1964, which Burns promotes as true, was just one. The lies litter a multitude of official documents, notably the Pentagon Papers, which the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg released in 1971.
There was no good faith. The faith was rotten and cancerous. For me – as it must be for many Americans -- it is difficult to watch the film’s jumble of “red peril” maps, unexplained interviewees, ineptly cut archive and maudlin American battlefield sequences.
You can read the rest @
http://johnpilger.com/articles/the-killing-of-history
I tend to agree with Pilger. The Vietnam War was a cynical lie from start to finish. That so many of us still believe that lie is amazing, and if Burns supports it then I will be crossing him off my list of must watch documentarians.
No comments:
Post a Comment