Opinions on this?

I was not that impressed. It's really a very basic outline of the war and the subject has been beat to death. He showed remarkably little interest in the military side of the war or the geopolitics. It didn't really feel like a Ken Burns documentary.

The documentary focused a lot on the NVA, probably because of Western media’s tendency to treat them as “le bad guy” like Germans and Russians.

Are ARVN the most shat on people of that entire war?
>Commies hate them because they fought on the American side
>Americans bitch about them being lazy, useless, traitors etc even though they did most of the fighting and suffered majority of the casualties

See shit like this. Do people unironically think Vietcong and burgers were the only ones who fought?

I mean I'm Vietnamese-American so I'm a little biased in my support for the ARVN. I can't say they didn't have *serious* military failures, and their officer corps was corrupt as fuck through the war...but I mean if you compare them to the Afghan National Army or the Iraqi Army..jesus christ at least they stood and fought and bothered to aim.

Agreed, he couldn't even make a baseball documentary without turning it into a narrative of social justice. He literally built up a player named Ty Cobb as this giant evil KKK supporting monster without ever going to primary sources. He just parroted lies from a hack writer and took what was a somewhat believed conception about Cobb and turned him into baseball's most vile and viscerally hated figure. It wasn't until recently some guy wrote a book on Cobb and proved almost all of it wasn't just false, but the opposite of true. Cobb was actually the descendant of abolitionists and wanted integration. The disabled black man he supposedly beat to near death just for being black was actually a regular white guy.

Civil War is overrated too.

What's your opinion on Pham Xuan An?

I think its funny that to this day the Western journalists that relied on him as a source for life in South Vietnam are still adamant that an undercover North Vietnamese intelligence officer gave them a completely unbiased, objective version of South Vietnamese society and politics

>Outdated
VC yes, PAVN no.

Yeah my Grandpa was furious at the documentary for omitting things like this. It ignored the truly good, brave people who wanted a democracy in South Vietnam and pretending the failures of the Republic of South Vietnam were purely because of malicious leadership.

Thank you for making Pham Xuan An known to me, user.
I was wondering who was Dinh's friend was in Vietnam: A Reporter's War and his description seems to fit him

...

> Personally I think it is Ken Burn's best work but does it paint a good/accurate picture of the war?

Propaganda and watered-down history for plebs, like all of Burns stuff.

Pic related for example was presented out-of-context simply because it’s a powerful pic - history be damned….

>mfw the backstory to that photo has been sent down the memory hole

Pretty crazy when you find out that VC death squads were murdering anyone with ties to the South Vietnamese government during Tet

Kinda pisses me off that this photo is so used as propaganda.

I saw a news story about it the other day, it even painted most of the full picture, as it directly said that that guy was responsible for the deaths of many South Vietnamese. But the piece still managed to try and paint the general as the bad guy.

Burn’s Vietnam documentary came up a Superbowl party this past Sunday, where I was discussing it was a Lefty friend of mine and he insisted it was perfectly ok to present that pic without explaining the story behind it, because the documentary was showing what Americans knew _at the time_.

I told him that while it may have understandable at the time for the pic to be presented out-of-context, it no longer qualified as a “documentary” if the information wasn’t presented to viewers now and made it nothing but propaganda.

>a Lefty friend of mine

Surprised he didn't go with the "Yeah, well, they deserved it for being collaborators with a corrupt regime like South Vietnam" option 2bh

>corruption means a country can be invaded without moral repercussions
annoys me to no end when people think this desu

Why the fuck do people even trust journalists when even back in the so called Golden Age of reporting they were this gullible?

>retarded gook executes another retarded gook

theres no out of context here, you dont execute ppl on spot no matter what they do or if you do you make DAMN SURE theres nobody to record it

>Why the fuck do people even trust journalists when even back in the so called Golden Age of reporting they were this gullible?

Because Boomers, user
>pre-Boomer generation: everyone knows that journalists just sell whatever their owner demands
>Boomers and after: journalists are literally the most objective, unbiased, neutral profession in the history of humanity - if you so much as question a journalist's motives, you're literally Hitler

>theres no out of context here, you dont execute ppl on spot no matter what they do
you do if you see them commit the act, and if you know for certain that they won't get any penalty from it because the south is crumbling apart. american soldiers killed nazi prison camp guards and they're lauded for it.

> theres no out of context here, you dont execute ppl on spot no matter what

The issue isn’t one gook executing another, it’s what’s being presented as a documentary on American (PBS) tv.

cherrieswriter.wordpress.com/2015/08/03/the-story-behind-the-famous-saigon-execution-photo/

“This man’s name was Nguyen Van Lem, but he was also known as Captain Bay Lop. Lem was no civilian; he was a member of the Viet Cong. Not just any member, either, he was an assassin and the leader of a Viet Cong death squad who had been targeting and killing South Vietnamese National Police officers and their families.

Lem’s team was attempting to take down a number of South Vietnamese officials. They may have even been plotting to kill the shooter himself, Major General Nguyen Ngoc Loan. It is said that Lem had recently been responsible for the murder of one of Loan’s most senior officers, as well as the murder of the officer’s family.

According to accounts at the time, when South Vietnamese officers captured Lem, he was more or less caught in the act, at the site of a mass grave. This grave contained the bodies of no less than seven South Vietnamese police officers, as well as their families, around 34 bound and shot bodies in total. Eddie Adams, the photojournalist who took the shot, backs up this story. Lem’s widow also confirmed that her husband was a member of the National Liberation Front (Viet Cong), and that he disappeared before the beginning of the Tet Offensive.

After being captured with the bodies during the Tet Offensive, Nguyen Van Lem was taken to Major General Ngoc Loan. In a street in Saigon, Loan executed Lem with his .38 caliber Smith & Wesson.”

>In 1991, he was forced into retirement when publicity about his past led to a sharp decline in business. Adams recalled that on his last visit to the pizza parlor, he had seen written on a toilet wall, "We know who you are, fucker".[18][2]

This is why you leftshits get thrown from helicopters (apart from the whole "everyone who disagrees with my autistic vision of socialism should be shot at once")

Link?

>no business being there
fuck off, Nam was OURS BABY

his wikipedia page iirc

aks are outdated weapons in the 60s?

The part where that dude talked about being a radio operator was spooky as fuck.

As someone who knows dick about the Vietnam War, what do people here who've read Chomsky think of his opinions of it? It just seemed like he was whitewashing the crimes of the communists tbqh.

>Uber leftist intellectual Chomsky whitewashing radical violent leftists
Sounds about right

I got really annoyed in the last episode at all the ex-hippie faggots baaawwing at how they treated veterans because it was mow politically expedient to respect veterans again when they made the return to civilian life a nightmare for draftees who didn't even believe in the cause.

notalllefties tbqh
Charlie deserved it

t. leftie