J Greg (tanjaw68)

Unfortunately, Ken Burns’ filtering of the war is deeply flawed and demonstrably unbalanced in its interpretation of the facts. It’s deeply sad what the Series does to obfuscate the facts of the war in Vietnam. I’ll list just a few but the reception Ken Burns’ biased interpretation was cold and scathing when his series was premiered before folks who lived those days because of the distortions and largely one sidedness. One glaring hole is the way Tet was reported by liberal news media as a disaster for the US when the real known numbers told a different story. What mattered was the imagery of chaos and that was sold as a disaster when it was far from it. The reality was that the Vietcong were decimated never to rise again. However Cronkite’s fake news resulted in the US withdrawal from their “police action” there. The portrayals of Ho Chi Minh as basically a nice guy who admired Roosevelts New Deal was one of the many silly assertions. Hitler and the Nazis admired The new Deal that doesn’t make someone a better person. Ho Chi Minh killed untold numbers of his own people during the land reforms which has been outlined in books like Paradise of the blind and many others. Additionally the idea that the north Vietnamese people were just trying to kick out the evil colonialists as a pretext of the war falls apart when much of the land fought over belonged for Millenia to indigenous non Vietnamese Mon Khmer and Cham tribes who hated the North Vietnamese and their imported ideology. These were powerful and righteous allies of our US special forces there and the series made sure their story was lost. This entire topic of indigenous non Viet people groups was badly bungled and none of the surviving large group of indigenous tribes were interviewed for this series. Appalling. I could go on and on but am running out of space for my ire