Ken Burns is getting static for his new PBS series on the Vietnam War. This is completely understandable. Because so many are still here that were/are personally involved with that era. Many millions on all sides of that drama are still very much here, and still have profoundly strong sentiments about it.
I have personally felt that the real history of that war will not be rightly told until the Vietnam generation is gone. Until all that planned it fought in it or tried to stop it have passed away. Until then the story cannot be objectively told.
We are just still too emotionally damaged to be remotely rational about it no matter which side of it you're on. Everything we say about it now today. We do as ongoing 'participants' in the war. What we do, and say even now will eventually be incorporated into the saga of the War because we're 'still' fighting it.
This story can only be told by future writers journalists, and artists. Those whose hands are clean of our history. They will tell our story.
1 comment:
The problem is that our wars since WWII (and often before it) have always been wars of empire, designed to maintain control of global resources by deciding for people in faraway lands what kind of government they're going to have, and often killing lots of them in the process. We shouldn't have ever had an empire. We probably would never have been as rich as we were, but our future at this point would look a lot better than it does now.
Our justification has always been the moral duty to defeat Communism. But I don't have the impression that capitalism kills fewer people than communism, or that it is any less tyrannous. In fact a good measure of Norwegian-style milquetoast socialism would be a damn sight better than what we have now.
Z
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