Veterans’ Group Says “No” to Emmy
for PBS Vietnam War Series
commondreams.org
Thursday, May 31, 2018
“In this war-torn world, what
is desperately needed – but what Burns and Novick fail to convey – is an honest
rendering of that war to help the American people avoid yet more catastrophic
wars.”
Ken Burns and Lynne Novick’s
“Vietnam War” series does not deserve a “Best Documentary” award. (Photo:
Getty)
A national veterans’
organization is weighing in on this year’s Emmy awards with a full-page ad in
Variety, saying Ken Burns and Lynne Novick’s “Vietnam War” series does not
deserve a “Best Documentary” award.
Veterans
For Peace (VFP), headquartered in St. Louis, with 175 chapters
in the U.S. and six overseas, will run the Variety ad prior to the awards
on September 17, to generate discussion about the series and the lasting
impact it will have if “crowned with an Emmy.”
The ad says that because “The
Emmy Award is a powerful recognition of truth in art,” Emmy judges are asked to
consider whether, “In this war-torn world, what is desperately needed – but
what Burns and Novick fail to convey – is an honest rendering of that war to
help the American people avoid yet more catastrophic wars.”
The ad (attached) identifies
what it considers 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.
Many VFP members have
first-hand knowledge of the broad anti-war movement, some as participants in
the active-duty G.I. resistance where they conducted peaceful protests,
sabotage and outright mutiny, and some in the civilian peace movement after
their military service. Nowhere in 18 hours of programming does the G.I.
resistance movement merit mention and “instead of honoring the civilian peace
movement for its accomplishments, activists are generally belittled as
self-interested and self-indulgent, with stress on its supposed deep antagonism
toward American soldiers,” the ad protests.
VFP concludes its ad, just
above an iconic photograph of protesting G.I.s holding a banner emblazoned
with, “We won’t fight another rich man’s war,” by saying that if the
Burns/Novick series is “crowned with an Emmy, this defective history of the
Vietnam era will become required viewing for generations of young Americans—a
seductive, but false, interpretation of events.”
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