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#révisionnisme #mensonges #omissions #air_du_temps

To the north, in Quang Tri province, more bombs were dropped than in all of Germany during the Second World War. Since 1975, unexploded ordnance has caused more than 40,000 deaths in mostly “South Vietnam,” the country America claimed to “save” and, with France, conceived as a singularly imperial ruse.

The “meaning” of the Vietnam War is no different from 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 famous CIA man on whom Graham Greene based his central character in The Quiet American.

Quoting Robert Taber’s The War of the Flea, Lansdale 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 harbours resistance, and that is to turn it into a desert.”

Nothing has changed. When Donald Trump addressed the United Nations on Sept. 19 – a body established to spare humanity the “scourge of war” – he declared he was “ready, willing and able” to “totally destroy” North Korea and its 25 million people. His audience gasped, but Trump’s language was not unusual. His rival for the presidency, Hillary Clinton, had boasted she was prepared to “totally obliterate” Iran, a nation of more than 80 million people. This is the American Way; only the euphemisms are missing now.

Returning to the U.S., I am struck by the silence and the absence of an opposition – on the streets, in journalism and the arts, as if dissent once tolerated in the “mainstream” has regressed to a dissidence: a metaphoric underground.

▻https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/la-fabrique-de-lhistoire/guerre-du-vietnam-34-les-images-de-la-guerre

#Guerre_des_images et imaginaires de guerre dans le cinéma de science-fiction nord-américain
Depuis la #guerre_du_Viêt-nam, le cinéma de Science-fiction Nord Américain, avec notamment des cinéastes comme John Carpenter, John McTiernan ou James Cameron et Paul Verhoeven, s’est fait l’écho de l’histoire sociale, politique ou belliqueuse du pays, à travers des systèmes d’échos, d’échanges et d’influences entre l’imaginaire et l’histoire d’une part, et entre le cinéma et la télévision d’autre part. Ces auteurs augurent moins des dérives à venir qu’ils n’énoncent des problématiques contemporaines, leurs imaginaires du futur, en se nourrissant de ces histoires inventées, nous parlent d’une histoire « en train de se faire », tout en s’inscrivant au cœur d’un questionnement sur la place de l’image dans les représentations historiques, mais aussi son rôle passé, présent et à venir dans l’évolution des sociétés modernes.

▻http://revel.unice.fr/cycnos/index.html?id=517

❝We had to be extremely careful because we had limited amounts of film that had been distributed to us by our paper. For us, one photo was like a bullet ❝
Nguyen Dinh UU

https://i.amz.mshcdn.com/YxWbx3rilRmfEI1e1GcWK7rGJRQ=/http%3A%2F%2Fa.amz.mshcdn.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2016%2F02%2Fanothervietnam2-8.jpg

Arte aurait donc diffusé le même reportage : ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/631910

@Kassem
Je crois que les américains ont droit à 18h de documentaire, effectivement il s’agit du même.

▻http://boutique.arte.tv/f12010-vietnam_neuf_episodes
en partenariat avec Le Monde et France Culture
▻http://www.lemonde.fr/televisions-radio/article/2017/09/15/vietnam-apres-l-apocalypse_5186389_1655027.html?xtmc=vietnam&xtcr=8

Ken Burns Says the Vietnam War Was “Begun in Good Faith.” So Was Every Other Lousy War.
▻https://theintercept.com/2017/09/24/ken-burns-vietnam-war-decent-people-good-faith-afghanistan-soviets

https://cdn01.theintercept.com/wp-uploads/sites/1/2017/09/vietnam-war-1506109245-feature-hero.jpg

Except that actually wasn’t a U.S. State Department cable about Vietnam and Nguyen Van Thieu. It was a December 27, 1979 missive from the Soviet Foreign Ministry about the new Afghan president Babrak Karmal, who had been installed by the Soviet troops who had just entered Afghanistan. All that was changed from the original Soviet cable is a substitution of references to Vietnam with Afghanistan and mentions of the U.S. with the Soviet Union. (As Thieu’s predecessor Ngô Dình Diem had dissatisfied the U.S. and somehow ended up dead, so too with the Soviets and Karmal’s predecessor.)

So what does this Soviet cable — filled with sincere moral fervor about helping Afghanistan — demonstrate? That all catastrophic wars are started by people who believe they’re the good guys.

So Burns and Novick aren’t wrong, exactly, about the good faith of the decent Americans who devastated Vietnam. But what truly matters is, what difference does it make? Saying that these U.S. officials wanted to do the right thing is the same as explaining, “America’s involvement in Vietnam was begun by human beings, who breathed air, ate food, and used their legs to walk around.”

There Is No Rehabilitating the Vietnam War | By Robert Freeman | Common Dreams
▻https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/09/24/there-no-rehabilitating-vietnam-war

https://www.commondreams.org/sites/default/files/views-article/thumbs/vietnam_legacy_0.jpg

There is enormous pressure and a lot of money working to rehabilitate Vietnam, to put the guilt and the shame of it behind us. But it was precisely the guilt of the people, their shame at what was being done in their name, and their courage to denounce it that made it impossible for their government to carry out the savagery any longer.

“It’s important to remember that neither Vietnam, nor Laos, nor Cambodia for that matter, ever attacked the United States. They never wanted to attack. They never tried to attack. They never had the capacity to attack. They had simply wanted their own way of life.”

Those are not the words of a leftist pundit or a scribbling anti-American. They are the words of H.R. McMaster, the sitting National Security Advisor to the President of the United States.

VIETNAM FULL DISCLOSURE
▻http://vietnamfulldisclosure.org

On May 25, 2012, in announcing a 13-year long commemoration of the war in Viet Nam funded by Congress at $65 million, President Obama proclaimed: “As we observe the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War, we reflect with solemn reverence upon the valor of a generation that served with honor. We pay tribute to the more than 3 million servicemen and women who left their families to serve bravely, a world away… They pushed through jungles and rice paddies, heat and monsoon, fighting heroically to protect the ideals we hold dear as Americans. Through more than a decade of combat, over air, land, and sea, these proud Americans upheld the highest traditions of our Armed Forces.”[i]

Commemorations are acts of choosing what to remember about something presumably of significance. There are two parts to this:

creating a memory which is inevitably a direction to remember some things rather than others; a memory with a purpose; ostensibly to honor and thereby define honor for some future purpose;
defining some event as significant: making a major contribution to our world, a turning point.
So I will try to make an argument for the significance of the war and point at what I think ought to be remembered which will diverge from hyperbolic salutations of soldierly valor – though valor there was — to something more substantive. It will end up at cross purposes to Obama’s, I fear.

So let me develop an argument at three levels:

the war’s impact on the U.S.;
its impact on Vietnamese;
its impact on the world.

THE KEN BURNS VIETNAM WAR DOCUMENTARY GLOSSES OVER DEVASTATING CIVILIAN TOLL
▻https://theintercept.com/2017/09/28/the-ken-burns-vietnam-war-documentary-glosses-over-devastating-civilia

▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdTx6zLY0Zk

Vietnam War: The Face of the Enemy (Vietnamese Perspective)

Why Americans still can’t move past Vietnam
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/10/10/why-americans-still-cant-move-past-vietnam/?tid=sm_tw