For decades, the U.S. mainstream media has shied
away from a clear-eyed view of the Vietnam War, not
wanting to offend the war’s apologists, a residue of
which tainted the recent PBS series, as John Pilger
told Dennis J Bernstein.
By Dennis J Bernstein
October 03,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- Ken Burns’s 18-hour documentary on the Vietnam
War, which aired on PBS and BBC, presented
extraordinary footage of the war’s grotesque
brutality but also soft-pedaled the motivations of
U.S. policymakers as well-meaning albeit misguided,
or as the prologue put it, a conflict begun in “good
faith by decent people out of fateful
misunderstandings.”
This
glossing over of U.S. neocolonialism and its deadly
consequences angered John Pilger, who cut his
journalistic teeth covering the Vietnam War for a
decade. I spoke to Pilger after he watched the first
couple of hours of the highly touted series.
Dennis Bernstein: I was reading your piece called “The
Killing of History”
and these lines stood out for me: “The revisionism
never stops and the blood never dies. The invader is
pitied and purged of guilt while ‘searching for some
meaning in this terrible tragedy’.” What is your
initial response to the framework of the film?
John
Pilger: That quote, “searching for some meaning in
this terrible tragedy,” is from Lynn Novick, who is
Ken Burns’ collaborator on this series on the
Vietnam War. If we don’t understand the meaning of
the Vietnam War by now, I don’t know where our
brains have been all these years.
Like so
many colonial wars, it was an invasion based on a
series of deceptions and lies. This is effectively
denied in the Burns series. It starts off with the
narrator saying that it was all conducted in good
faith by decent people. It was all a big
misunderstanding that grew out of the Cold War, and
so on. That is complete nonsense.
The Vietnam
War started specifically with the US arming the
French to reclaim their colony in Indochina after
the Second World War. It really got underway for the
US with the Gulf of Tonkin incidents, following
which Congress gave President Johnson the authority
to start one of the longest bombing campaigns in the
history of warfare, called “Rolling Thunder.” The
long litany of official documents say it all.
But these
filmmakers put aside all this demonstrable truth and
obfuscate what really happened in Vietnam. The word
“invasion” was never used by the press during the
Vietnam War and it still isn’t being used. Instead
that awful word “involved” is used. The United
States was “involved” in Vietnam. It must be very
difficult for truly decent Americans and especially
veterans to watch. But it is very interesting, we
get such a supply of special forces officers. Maybe
we will see the drafted men later on. They were the
truth-tellers, in my experience.
DB: You
write in your piece The Killing of History:
“The meaning of the Vietnam War is no different than
the meaning of the genocidal campaign against the
Native Americans, the colonial massacres in the
Philippines, the atomic bombings of Japan, the
leveling of every city in North Korea. The aim was
described by Colonel Edward Lansdale, the CIA man
who served as the model for the character in the
Graham Greene story ‘The Quiet American.’ He said,
‘There is only one means of defeating an insurgent
people who will not surrender, and that is
extermination. There is only one way to control a
territory that harbors resistance, and that is to
turn it into a desert.'”
JP: This is
the concept of total war, which the US adopted from
Korea. The devastation of the Korean War, the
millions killed, the new weapons, including napalm,
that were used, the dikes that were bombed, costing
countless lives. This was the model and it was
during this time that the United States assumed its
post-World War II imperial role. This concept of
total war has been pursued in every colonial war
that the US has been involved in since, either
directly by the Americans or indirectly through
proxies.
In Vietnam,
for instance, they established “free fire zones.”
You ringed an enormous area with heavy artillery,
then you bombed it from above and then you strafed
it, so that it would be a miracle if anyone
survived. When I went to the province of Quang Ngai,
where the massacre of My Lai took place in the late
1960’s, free fire zones had killed something like
50,000 people.
It happened
also in neighboring Laos, the most bombed country in
history. In southern Vietnam, since the end of the
war, something like 40,000 people have died from
unexploded ordnance, a great many of them children.
We can go on forever talking in these terrible
statistics.
You get
some sense of that in this PBS series, the archive
is really astonishing. But the way it is projected
reminds me of the Newsweek cover that described the
My Lai massacre as “an American tragedy.” You get a
sense of the same thing in the Burns film. Yes, they
interview Vietnamese, yes, you see terrible things
happening, but the overall sense you are meant to
come away with is that it was a great perplexing
tragedy, a great blunder.
The whole
thing was genocidal. The bombing of Cambodia between
1969 and 1975 was something like five times the
equivalent of Hiroshima. According to one study that
seemed to have credibility, something like 750,000
Cambodians were killed in that bombing. And that was
simply a sideshow to the main event in Vietnam.
Total war is a form of industrialized killing. The
obsession in Vietnam was with body counts and we get
no sense of that from the Burns film.
DB: There
is a lot of discussion now of how dangerous Trump
is, but if you look back at the Vietnam policy,
Trump seems to fit right in.
JP: Trump’s
specialty is abusing the world. But you’re right, he
is just the latest on the team. In fact, he is a bit
of a wimp in comparison with the ones who have come
before. Obama was probably one of the most violent
presidents in US history. He conducted a record of
seven simultaneous wars, not to mention his
assassination campaign.
This is not
to say that Trump cannot get up in speed to equal
this terrible record. But Once you unTrump
should be understood as a symptom and a caricature
of a violent, extremist system.derstand that, you
can understand how the past has helped create the
present. Trump is not an aberration, he is a
caricature. Much more interesting is the way the
suave Obama went about his violent presidency
without due recognition.
DB: Let’s
not forget that Hillary Clinton threatened to
“totally obliterate” Iran.
JP: She
said that when she was running against Obama. Well,
Iran has 80 million people.
DB: She and
Colonel Lansdale were talking the same language.
JP: Yes,
and President Truman was talking the same language
when he dropped two atomic bombs for reasons that
had nothing to do with making the Japanese
surrender. These were the first terrible explosions
in the Cold War, aimed at intimidating the Soviet
Union.
DB: What
responsibility does the corporate media have for the
US and world population not knowing the real story?
JP: They
are the gatekeepers. People turn to the media for
their information, to be able to make some sense of
a difficult world. And they don’t get it. You will
find that most of the exceptions are on the World
Wide Web. That is where my article was published. It
would not have been published in The Guardian, where
I used to publish.
I don’t
agree that everyone is wildly enthusiastic about
Burns’ film. I think there has been a lot of
critical response to the film as well. This is going
to build, and I suppose he has done us a service in
opening up the wound so that people who really
experienced Vietnam can describe what happened.
DB: Burns
also says he is grateful to “the entire Bank of
America family.”
JP: The
Bank of America was a corporate prop of the invasion
that killed up to 4 million people. That is just
corporate speak and it rather demeans a filmmaker to
talk like that.
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