PBS Series on Vietnam an Emmy nomination?
The Koch Brothers and Bank of America bring you the Vietnam War as the military/industrial complex would like you to remember it.
Doug Rawlings remembers it differently. He was in a foxhole, while the Koch Brothers were busy making billions in the oil industry. It is painfully obvious why these corporate sponsors would try to distort the record of one of America's most hideous wars of aggression. And it was painfully easy to do, Just throw some money at PBS and at the filmmaker named after a cheesy editing technique. War crimes whitewash will be the new Ken Burns effect.
Counterpunch said it best. "The liberal conception of an honorable effort that tragically failed is every bit an obfuscation as the conservative perspective that a well-intentioned but flawed effort that should not have been undertaken if the U.S. was not going to be 'serious' about fighting. But that these two narrow perspective were allowed to fight it out provided the appearance of a free and open media at the same time that the media obscured."
Doug Rawlings takes us through the various omissions the film makes. The GI resistance movement, for example, gets no mention. Those GI's "serving" in Vietnam knew their officers were afraid of sending them out into the field. They were afraid of turning their backs on them, and often reported to their "superiors" that their men were close to mutiny. The Bank of America must have considered this story of rebellion unhealthy for a corporatized twenty first century.
