Vietnam - A Television History

As a six-year project completed in 1983, it is probably what is to be expected in that the Hanoi government was not about to let former ARVN officers or So.VN government officials in front of a camera. In that context, one wonders how much the content was edited (censored or permission to interview denied) by Hanoi. Meanwhile, all NVA and VC always fought as heroes and heroines.

The NVA/VC side still use the same tired rhetoric about defeating "imperialism" as if the US gained anything in land, materials or other resources from South Vietnam, as an imperial power would. No clue of this is demonstrated, or any comprehension how much it cost; hence the communists interviews show no idea they were fighting politics of idealism, as an opposite to economic imperialism or colonialism. Had they still not figured this out in the early 1980s -- so immersed in their own propaganda version -- or was this just the expedient side of saying it?

Were the subject not so tragic, some of the interviews, especially the communists, would be humorous. One claims to have killed three Americans in a single battle with his bayonet! Why bother to leave such content in the interview, unless one wants to discredit the interview without stating the obvious or to illustrate the over exuberance of victory? Any idea how rare American bayonet deaths were in Vietnam? Another says communists never killed anyone who surrendered to them! Another says he led the team that temporarily captured Saigon's main radio station during Tet. One of his wounded SUBORDINATES TELLS him to go find out if they should stay and fight -- when out of ammunition -- or set off their explosives! This is his reason for not being still with his men when they blew themselves and the building up.

Khe Sanh almost does not exist and then as a sideshow of Tet. General Giap repeatedly is inteviewed. The carrot of similarities to Dien Bien Phu were raised by the Americans and he took the bait. Four NVA divisions, a total of about 40,000 troops, plus more as support personnel were not available for Tet. They were sucked in and chopped up so badly by the Marines and by air power that they never again confronted Americans in a conventional large land battle even when they had superior numbers. Giap never says anything about this; he apparently was either never asked or the answer was edited out, and nothing is said about it in the commentary. Giap got three of four divisions shredded. Are we to conclude he still did not understand a dozen years later?

While the villagers permitted to be interviewed all complain about the Americans and to a lesser extent the ARVN troops, there is a decided lack of complaints about the assassinations, "taxes," theft, conscription, forced labor, torture, rape and abuse by the other side. Again, what happened to the rest of the story? Curiously, two interviewed veteran raises important points; but there is no answer. The subject simply changes. Why did the civilian population always use the roads when they knew them to be mined? Indeed, why so few civilian mine casualties on trails and roads? Would the VC warn neutral or opposition civilians of all mine locations? When the civilian population, willingly or unwillingly, had the VC in the village, disguised as civilians in the middle of a war, why did they think it legitimate to complain about being treated with distrust? Do the uncooperative villagers -- indeed, liars ("I know nothing. No VC here.") expect better? Again curiously, while being told of treatment ranging from harsh to atrocious, footage being shown in three places is of suspects smoking while held for interrogation. (What is wrong with that picture?) Rather than visual images contradicting the words, why not skip both?

Without going further into specific examples, this is good for overview, for the other side's perspective, for the U.S. government's perspective, and for general history as an intro -- allowing that 'television history' is an inherent oxymoron. Take its content with lots of grains of salt and look to other sources for details and for the parts of the story omitted from here. One wonders what the content would be like if this project was redone after more time has passed, if the interests not presented are included, with more depth, with less selective editing out and with more thoroughness.


Shameful and Egregious Censorship   November 7, 2005
E. Gordon
56 out of 57 found this review helpful

Typically, DVDs offer added features that are not found on a film's/program's earlier VHS version. At the very least, one expects a DVD to offer the same content as the video. The producers of this DVD set, however, evidently decided to buck that trend. If you are looking for the same content that the original historical and influential video series contains, DO NOT buy this item.

The first episode alone reveals several omissions, such as the "red termite" remark mentioned by another reviewer. (The remark, a memorably racist statement by a French official, clearly depicted the attitude of at least some of the French leadership at the time, who saw the Vietnamese rebels as "termites" --vermin to be exterminated. Not an unusual mind-set in colonizer/colonized relations.)

Another blatant omission concerns the French exploitation of Vietnamese rubber plantation workers. Here, the DVD not only edits out footage of workers in a plantation (with extremely vivid images of the slicing of tree bark to extract the rubber), but it omits an entire interview with a Vietnamese national who describes the brutal treatment suffered by rubber workers. This man recalled a popular expression of the time in which the plantation workers were known as "fertilizer," because so many of those who died were buried beneath the trees among which they toiled. Unless you see the video, though, you'll never know this--because the DVD cuts all of it out.

The edits I have seen so far (episode one) clearly seek to minimize Vietnamese suffering under the French colonial system. I can only imagine what the later episodes omit. The producers seem to want to put a fresh "spin" on their documentary-watering down harsh imagery and language, and thus sanitizing the war. This is a shameful achievement, and one that I find hard to believe PBS condones. It is all the more appalling given the stature of the original program.

If you want the real thing, then get the VHS. And put pressure on PBS to release the series on DVD in its true, original form. It's worth noting that, on the PBS website for the documentary, even the official program transcript has been altered to reflect the "new and improved" version. Why would this highly touted documentary seek to rewrite its own lauded history? Are there political pressures at work? Who knows-maybe these questions will lead to the creation of a new documentary. One that answers the question: Why did American Experience and PBS gut their own masterpiece?


So This is History?   November 4, 2002
Claude Sasso (Kansas City, MO. USA)
48 out of 78 found this review helpful

This series is not solid history. There are two essential facts you must get right to start with in order to interpret the Vietnam war. First you must understand who Ho Chi Minh was and second you must understand the nature of the Geneva Conference of 1954. Third, in order to understand why the U.S. lost one must be understand the critical importance of two decisions made during the administration of John Kennedy. First, the 1962 Geneva Accords which created the "facade of Geneva" and prevented the U.S. from selecting a winning strategy (i.e., cutting the Ho Chi Minh Trail). See Norman Hannah's book, "The Key to Failure: Laos the Vietnam War." Second, you must understand the unethical decision made by the Kennedy administration in backing the coup against Ngo Dinh Diem that resulted in his assasination and a deeper immersion of the U.S. into the military government we created without even knowing the makeup of the characters in it. Read "A Death in November: American in Vietnam, 1963" by Ellen Hammer. The point is the war is hugely complex and the video series is not. It is extremely biased, Ho Chi Minh, a dedicated international communist is the hero! and the U.S. is the villain. The
It is only in video 13 that the producers discover that the communists are bad guys and it is a belated discovery! So they killed one third of the population in Cambodia, subjected Vietnam to hellish re-education/prison camps and produced millions of deaths, not to mention two million or so boat people who fled the country. This is the regime of a nationalist? But they constantly produce a dialog heavy in ideology, communist ideology. Perhaps that is a concidence, like their land reform program that killed off the landlord class or their police state. Just coincidences I am sure, after all, Uncle Ho was a nationalist wasn't he? The video series never takes the trouble to examine the Soviet Union or Communist China's role in the Vietnam war in any depth. It is as if all of history is understood by psychoanalysis of the what goes on in Washington. I use this series in the classroom to teach students how to detect bias in a badly flawed historical series and while there is some good history in it, there is far too much that is poorly done and now, outdated, given new information. Even communist histories belie some of the points made in the series. Hanoi now admits that planning for the war in the South began in 1956 and was well along in 1959, when the 15th Party Plenum ordered armed struggle in the South to begin. For example, Communist Party Politburo member Le Duan was responsible for the formation of 37 guerilla companies by October 1957. The respected Soviet diplomat, Andre Gromyko, said of Joseph Stalin in his Memoirs, "it seems to me that the nature had endowed him with the ability to hide the harsh side of his character, and very effectively so. He also seems to have had the capacity to appear at times even gentle and sensitive to others. The conversations he had with some foreign personalities, especially writers, confirm this." These words could have written about the man who called himself "Ho Chi Minh" or "He who enlightens." His frail and gentle manner belie the harsh, ruthless man beneath the veneer. In fact, having studied him for many years, I would have to say he was one of the greatest actors of the twentieth century and one of its most evil men. The key to understanding him lies in understanding what brought tears to his eyes. It was not the nation but rather Lenin's "thesis on national and colonial questions" which called for international communist liberation of oppressed peoples from colonialism. The trouble is so many fail to study this and therefore miss the import of Ho's ardor for the doctrine. Nationalism is the foe of internationalism and communism embraces only the latter. This is clear from Lenin's writings. Recommend you read Lenin! There is a video series that attempts to correct some of the errors (Television's Vietnam: The Real Story) in this one and although, it carries some biases of its own, it does help to bring out some of the worst features of this seris. It is put out by Accuracy in Media and is worth your effort to investigate if you are going to view this poorly done series. On the Tonkin Gulf incident, the Canadian series, the Ten Thousand Day War, is far superior. It seems American film makers are more enamored with Uncle Ho than his own people. Ask them if you don't believe me.


Radical Left Pro-Communist Propaganda   April 24, 2005
J. DeMeo (Ashland, OR USA)
41 out of 79 found this review helpful

In the 1980s when I first viewed this PBS series, from Boston's very liberal WGBH and produced/directed by a well-known leftist, I was somewhat ambivalent about it, not fully comfortable with its presentation, but unable to put my finger on what bothered me about it. Today, some 15 years older and wiser, having studied history in some detail and being aware of Communism's 100 million victims during the 20th Century, I decided to take a fresh look. I purchased the series on VHS videotape through eBay, as the DVD version was not then available -- which was a good thing as those videotapes preserved a lot of stuff which was NOT transferred to the DVD version.

Notably, at the time of the first VHS release, there was some protest against the PBS "documentary", claims that it was highly biased towards the Vietnamese communists, and so the producers added short notes at the end of the videotapes, indicating where one might find those sources of contrary opinion, and rebuttals to the PBS series. Those important end-notes have vanished from the DVD version, which I subsequently purchased to have a better quality reproduction for my historical archive. The DVD version will therefore leave the viewer with the false impression there never was such a loud howl of protest as actually happened. So I will repeat here several of the more important corrective end-notes, as have been censored off the DVD version, and to which the intelligent reviewer will naturally want to consult.

Firstly and foremost, there is the book "Losers Are Pirates" edited by James Banerian, with contributions from "Vietnamese refugees living in the USA". This book goes through the PBS "Vietnam TV History" series, section by section, stripping away its phoney objectivity, revealing the lies and half-truths, and more seriously the Lies Of Omission (the worst kind of lie, as Orwell noted). For specific example, the PBS-WGBH series hardly informs the viewer of the vast evidence of Ho Chi Minh's deep commitment to Red Fascism, his years of study with communist cells in Paris, and later in Moscow and Beijing. Nor does it educate about Ho's assassination program , which he participated in and later led after his return to Vietnam, during the chaotic years of French colonial rule, exterminating most of the pro-Vietnamese nationalist leaders who held democratic sentiments. Ho wanted a communist totalitarian state from the get-go, but none of the documentation on that is ever presented. Instead, Ho is falsely misportrayed as a "Vietnamese Nationalist", even as he was guilty of assassinating nationalist leaders. Not to blame American leftists entirely, this was the cover story fabricated by the Vietnamese communists themselves. Capitalizing on legitimate Vietnamese nationalist fervor, Ho Chi Minh created a gigantic illusion and lie about himself and his motivations, leading his people into a communist nightmare, leaving behind a trail of corpses, complete with "land reform" programs which basically turned all colonial lands into state lands, abandoning the peasants except to forcibly organize them into communist agricultural communes, complete with thought-control, neighborhood spy systems, village level "people's trials", and with the inevitable firing squads. Mass graves began to fill in Northern Vietnamese regions controlled by the communists, with anyone who dared to object, including whole families who tried to flee to French-held non-communist territory.

None of this is detailed in the series, however. Similarly not described, the repeated communist violations of treaty agreements made with the "capitalist enemy" of the south -- the Geneva Accords, the Paris Accords, and minor truces of all sorts -- were nearly immediately violated by the North Vietnamese, and their created Viet Cong cadres in the South. The evidence for the Viet Cong being fabricated, controlled and by the North Vietnamese communists also is never detailed. While many discontented Vietnamese nationalists joined the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces, often as not, after being exposed to their propaganda and methods, the flow of desertions in the other direction was just as brisk. But none of the testimony from Vietnamese officials or citizens on this important issue is revealed. No hint of dissention on such issues ever appears, which are nearly uniformly cast as "fact" purely on the basis of testimony or claims from communist sources -- revealing how the PBS producers were NOT interested in objetivity, presenting both sides, but only that which would support the communists, and misportray the French and USA as villans. Likewise, the NVA/VC terrorism in South Vietnam always exceeded, by perhaps a factor of 10, anything ever done by the USA during Operation Phoenix. Viet Cong massacres of entire families of South Vietnamese officials, with public beheadings and disembowlments in the nature of the Fallujah criminals, are never mentioned, even though this was a major terror tactic of the Viet Cong -- and one of the pre-existing factors which led to the creation of Operation Phoenix, which aimed to assassinate Viet Cong leaders. Likewise, the massacre at Hue -- where NVA and VC forces executed something between 3-5000 civilians in cold blood -- is but one of many similar examples which are glossed over in the Vietnam TV History series. Old communist thugs, sneering with pride at their butchery, are interviewed in such cases, without identifying who they really are, and it is misportrayed as if "ordinary civilians" are being interviewed, rather than high-up communist party officials, or spies who lived in Hue only to emerge after the NVA forces took over, helping after to "round up" the government workers and their families who would be shot in the head and dumped into pits in the jungle. And so on. "Losers Are Pirates" is filled with documentation and eye-witness testimony on the events NOT covered in this phoney PBS "TV history", which was a heart-break for all the refugees who survived the nightmare of communist aggression in SE Asia.

Events DURING and AFTER the fall of South Vietnam are likewise obliterated from open discussion. For example, the full-scale NVA invasion (who were fully equipped with Soviet and Chinese tanks, artillery, troops, etc., in total violation once again of every treaty agreement) are NOT covered in the DVD version, supporting the overall lie that a communist victory was inevitable, and no treaty violation was worth to mention if that violation brought the communists closer to power. In fact, the entire last segment of the PBS series, titled "Legacies" which appeared in the VHS version, is NOT repeated on the DVD version. Why would the PBS-WGBH producers leave out an entire segment of the original production? Because "Legacies" was produced late in the series, after the first segments had been shown on USA television and after those segments had triggered the legitimate outrage from so many American military and Vietnamese refugees, who had lived through all those terrible events, and knew what was being lied about, and omitted. So, "Legacies" was created to present at least some of the "dark side" of the communist victory. It detailed some aspects of the miserable Boat People, hundreds of thousands of "liberated" Vietnamese risking death on the high seas just to escape the communist paradise. You can still buy "Legacies" on VHS, separately, but even this small begrudging admission of communist crimes (white-washed as they were in "Legacies") was "too much" for PBS to include today. "Legacies" also details the communist genocide in Cambodia -- sort of -- like Noam Chomsky, they cannot quite bring themselves to admit that millions were massacred by the communists, and of course they try to blame it all on the USA, even though it was communists who were pulling the triggers, and strangling victims in every case.

The facts of Pol Pot's totally communist origins, his links to the Vietnamese communists and hence to Moscow and Beijing, is again glossed over and distorted, with emphasis placed on his much later disagreements and power-struggles with fellow Vietnamese communists. Likewise, Sianouk's hate for democratic America, and love of the dictatorial communists is totally ignored. Even "Legacies" fails to mention such "small details" as the tens of thousands of ordinary Vietnamese who were slaughtered during the last months of the war, in Vietnam, being deliberately machine-gunned and pounded by artillery as they fled along narrow roads leading south, away from the advancing NVA military. The "Highway of Terror", where one had to carefully step over the corpses of women and children scattered mile after mile along the roads -- perhaps 50,000 dead civilians within a few days... but really, the photos of that atrocity are buried in North Vietnamese archives, never released to the public. Much easier to point to Mai Lai. But... this is "ancient history", and nobody wants to hear it today.

Vietnam TV History instead displays numerous interviews with self-righteous communist cadres and old war-criminal Vietnamese generals, who give their "heroic" side of things, always with the smear against the USA and French, and distortion of fact and events -- as if only North Americans are liars, while Vietnamese communists can always be trusted to tell the truth -- but the producers don't even make the slightest attempt to counter their bald propaganda by interviews with non-communist Vietnamese leaders, or by US generals or troops, except in ways that are calculated to make them appear as evil, stupid, cowardly, sadistic, and so forth. No such prejudicial treatment is afforded to the communists, however! Even the occasional racist or rapacious statement by a communist official is translated into English so as to "tone it down", always to make them appear as "rational", "feeling", "knowledgable" and "honest". Only native Vietnamese-speakers will pick up on this, which is where "Losers Are Pirates" educates. Exactly the opposite treatment is given by the PBS directors to American and South Vietnamese officials.

The producers even use old East German and NVA propaganda movies, without identifying them as such, as if they are "real" battle-scenes! And of course, how heroic the VC and NVA appear -- one never hears Ho Chi Minh roaring that "he" would willingly sacrifice the entire generation of Vietnamese Youth, and fight for 20 or 30 years if necessary, to secure a Red Fascist communist paradise., much as Hitler or Stalin screeched from their podiums, nor do we see any quotes from Chairman Ho praising Stalin and his cruel methods. And one also never hears much about Laos, which was gobbled up by the Vietnamese communists, nor about the very many good things of South Vietnam -- its chaotic but vital democracy, the freedom of speech and of the press which existed, the higher GNP, food production, standard of living, etc., etc., which they held over the communist North... all that is distorted as well, as the South Vietnamese are misportrayed as drug-pushers, prostitutes, parasites living off American military encampments, secretly sympathetic to the communists, and cowards on the battlefield. One wonders why the Tet offensive failed so miserably, as NOT ONE South Vietnamese city rose up to join the communist forces against the Americans -- perhaps because the VC during Tet had the bad habit of shooting rockets and mortar shells into residential neighborhoods of the cities they wanted to "liberate"? -- and even after the fall of the South, so many Vietnamese took to boats or fled on foot, to escape what everyone knew was coming when the communists took over. Many died in the escape attempts, and others who were caught trying to escape also faced death. Death camps (excuse me, "re-education camps"), totalitarianism, controls over press, speech, thinking, actions, work, neighborhood spys, restrictions on travel, listening to foreign radio, etc., etc. "Vietnam TV History" mentions nothing of any of this. Any wonder why ordinary Vietnamese often behave so friendly towards Americans who visit Vietnam?

Ho Chi Minh is always misportrayed as a gentle old fellow, loving of his countrymen, in his heart wanting a Jeffersonian democracy for Vietnam, but thwarted by those mean old Americans --- one wonders how it went so wrong, how Cambodia slipped into genocidal butchery, and so forth with so many well-intentioned enlightened communists being in control, and all the evil capitalist being driven out. Of course, this is balderdash, and the butchery which gripped SE Asia after the fall of non-communist South Vietnam is totally the responsibility of the victorious communist forces, who after the war could have shaped events however they wished. And they did, which is why genocidal butchery occurred! That is what they wanted! History shows, that is fairly standard practice whenever communists take over.

Another rebuttal documentary is the VHS production "Television's Vietnam: The Real Story" and "Televisions's Vietnam: The Impact of the Media", which detail how our major news figures -- such as Walter Cronkite -- basically repeated the communist propaganda, helping to seal the fate of the South Vietnamese. Don't believe it? Get these documentaries and judge for yourself. Both are available on a single VHS casette from Accuracy In Media www.aim.org. This VHS, and the "Legacies" VHS, and the "Losers Are Pirates" book are necessary reading, assuming you want the facts.

Don't take my word for anything, but don't believe the "standard lies" of the left-wing on this subject either. Educate yourself, by reading the penetrating analysis as given in these rebuttals. Dig deeper than the shallow propaganda presented in this PBS series. That is, assuming fact and truth hold meaning for you. For the producers of this PBS series, fact and truth meant nothing.