• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2668 0

” we learn—namely, in demanding that the agreements be signed, a fact ignored; and “In South Vietnam, too, the agreement was still unacceptable,” the familiar evasion of U.S. responsibility (see “The Paris Peace Agreements,” p. 212). The terms of the January 1973 agreement are given, but with no indication that the U.S. government announced at once its intent to disregard them, as it did. Rather, we hear that “to the North Vietnamese and Vietcong, the struggle had not ended,” because “Vietnam was still divided.” The facts are quite different, as we have seen. They are indeed more accurately stated, although briefly, two episodes later (episode 12), although the U.S. role is suppressed except by implication: “America was still committed to South Vietnam,” the narrator says, without noting that this commitment to the GVN, identified with South Vietnam by the U.S. government and by PBS, is in explicit violation of the agreements signed in Paris.

“Whatever their views of the war,” the narrator adds, “most Americans now believed that the cost had been too great,” particularly the cost of American lives; “They believed that no more Americans should die for Vietnam.” The only other Americans are those who thought it proper that “more Americans should die for Vietnam.” Americans were dying for Vietnam in the same sense in which Russian boys are dying for Afghanistan, but those who could perceive this fact, and who opposed the war not merely because the cost was too great but because aggression is wrong, are excluded from the category of Americans.

As in the media retrospectives, the antiwar movement is given short shrift. A few activists are quoted, but permitted to discuss only questions of tactics. Even Eugene McCarthy, plainly the favored antiwar figure in this presentation, says nothing except that “I think the case is rather clear about what’s wrong about our involvement”—which is fair enough, since the media’s favorite dove had never been a serious critic of the war and was to disappear quickly from the scene after failing to gain political power, thus demonstrating again where his commitments lay. James Fallows is permitted to describe “the spirit of the times”: “to look for the painless way out, namely, a physical deferment.” In the real world, this was a position that hardly defined “the spirit of the times,” although it is a facet of this “spirit” that is far more acceptable to mainstream opinion than the principled and courageous resistance of many thousands of young people, an intolerable phenomenon and therefore erased from the record. As Peter Biskind observes, for all the attempt at “balance,” and “despite the preference of [the PBS series] for doves over hawks, it is the right, not the left, that has set this film’s political agenda,” in conformity to elite opinion.

Biskind concludes his review of the PBS series by stating: “The truth is that the war was a crime, not a tragedy. The tragedy is that this film lacks the conviction to say so.” The same may be said about the retrospective commentary generally. The war was a “tragic error,” but not “fundamentally wrong and immoral” (as the overwhelming majority of the American people continue to believe), and surely not criminal aggression—the judgment that would be reached at once on similar evidence if the responsible agent were not the United States, or an ally or client.

Our point is not that the retrospectives fail to draw what seem to us, as to much of the population, the obvious conclusions; the more significant and instructive point is that principled objection to the war as “fundamentally wrong and immoral,” or as outright criminal aggression—a war crime—is inexpressible. It is not part of the spectrum of discussion. The background for such a principled critique cannot be developed in the media, and the conclusions cannot be drawn. It is not present even to be refuted. Rather, the idea is unthinkable.

All of this again reveals with great clarity how foreign to the mobilized media is a conception of the media as a free system of information and discussion,