Vets for Peace oppose Emmy for Burns

Side issue.

“…because “The Emmy Award is a powerful recognition of truth in art,” Emmy judges are asked to consider whether….”

Um…no. the Emmy Award is not a “powerful recognition of truth in art.”

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Zooey wrote:

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/05/31/veterans-group-says-no-emmy-pbs-vietnam-war-series?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=socialnetwork

The battle over history….

… the fundamental flaw of the PBS series: Burns and Novick “assert at the beginning that the war ‘was begun in good faith by decent people, out of fateful misunderstandings.’” Questioned about this in a New York Times interview, Burns admitted that might have been “too generous to our leaders,” but he stuck by it.

VFP’s ad quickly responds to that “generous” remark, saying, “Even a cursory reading of the Pentagon Papers disclosed by Daniel Ellsberg,” (inexplicably missing from this history) “demonstrates the falseness of this claim of American innocence.” The painful truth, according to the ad, is that the United States “rained incredible violence on the Vietnamese people merely to replace France as the dominant power in Southeast Asia.”

Another shortcoming in last fall’s series was it paid far too little attention to the millions of civilian deaths the U.S. caused in Southeast Asia, skips over the millions of people still suffering from the effects of Agent Orange and ignores some 700,000 tons of unexploded ordnance still lurking in the fields of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, still killing and injuring today.

Acknowledging that Burns and Novick were “justifiably critical of American presidents and military leaders” the veterans say the filmmakers, “mainly focus on the harm to U.S. soldiers” and “reinvigorate Cold War myths that the Vietnamese anti-colonial struggle was merely an extension of Soviet and Chinese communist expansion.”

Another shortcoming in last fall’s series was it paid far too little attention to the millions of civilian deaths the U.S. caused in Southeast Asia, skips over the millions of people still suffering from the effects of Agent Orange and ignores some 700,000 tons of unexploded ordnance still lurking in the fields of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, still killing and injuring today

Zooey wrote:

Yeah. That, too.

Those are the kinds of things that are routinely absent from the history Americans learn, and the kinds of details that we have all faced hostility for drawing attention to over the years.

They are crucial frames. And their absence from the narrative is a big reason why our government is able to continue to perform these kinds of atrocities to standing ovations from the general public.

There was a controversy about this earlier on the board when it was pointed out that Burns did not even mention the Gulf of Tonkin incident was faked. The Ken Burns version of Vietnam http://theramshuddle.com/search/Tonkin/

When I realize they did that I decided to never watch it.

….

Makes me wonder about his Civil War documentary. I dont know enuff about the civil war to critique the burns doc on it, but I imagine there were ‘marxist’ angles he didnt include.

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