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>I went through the US educational system and while we know about the Vietnam war, the protesters, this is definitely not the picture of the war that we were gi

>I went through the US educational system and while we know about the Vietnam war, the protesters, this is definitely not the picture of the war that we were given. I just want to be one anecdotal voice to disagree with this statement. I went to a city university and my American history class 1945-present included a curriculum with media such as: A People's History of the United States The Fog of War (documentary) Hearts and Minds (documentary) Last Night I Dreamed of Peace: The Diary of Dang Thuy Tram Gary R. Hess, Vietnam: Explaining America's Lost War. Nick Turse. Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. I know some of my friends took courses where the Vietnam War was referred to pejoratively as the American War. We learned about My Lai in high school even. Where did you go to school that the Vietnam War was glossed over in such a pro-American way? Maybe it's a regional thing? I was educated on the east coast.

musage 9y ago
> It was necessary to rearrange those bad thoughts and to restore some form of sanity, namely, a recognition that whatever we do is noble and right. If we’re bombing South Vietnam, that’s because we’re defending South Vietnam against somebody, namely, the South Vietnamese, since nobody else was there. It’s what the Kennedy intellectuals called defense against "internal aggression" in South Vietnam. That was the phrase used by Adlai Stevenson and others. It was necessary to make that the official and well understood picture. That’s worked pretty well. When you have total control over the media and the educational system and scholarship is conformist, you can get that across. One indication of it was revealed in a study done at the University of Massachusetts on attitudes toward the current Gulf crisis-a study of beliefs and attitudes in television watching. One of the questions asked in that study was, How many Vietnamese casualties would you estimate that there were during the Vietnam war? The average response on the part of Americans today is about 100,000. The official figure is about two million. The actual figure is probably three to four million. The people who conducted the study raised an appropriate question: What would we think about German political culture if, when you asked people today how many Jews died in the Holocaust, they estimated about 300,000? What would that tell us about German political culture? They leave the question unanswered, but you can pursue it. -- Noam Chomsky, "Media Control", 2002 ( https://chomsky.info/mediacontrol01/ https://chomsky.info/mediacontrol01/ )
chrischen 9y ago
I think a college class would have to delve into the topic a bit more. But given a high school history curriculum being limited they'd have to pick and choose what to cover, and the majority of American kids would end up with the highly distilled, pro-American leaning retelling. I went to high school in the mid-west (Michigan) in a probably center-left leaning (though in the last election probably Trump-leaning) area.

musage 9y ago

> It was necessary to rearrange those bad thoughts and to restore some form of sanity, namely, a recognition that whatever we do is noble and right. If we’re bombing South Vietnam, that’s because we’re defending South Vietnam against somebody, namely, the South Vietnamese, since nobody else was there. It’s what the Kennedy intellectuals called defense against "internal aggression" in South Vietnam. That was the phrase used by Adlai Stevenson and others. It was necessary to make that the official and well understood picture. That’s worked pretty well. When you have total control over the media and the educational system and scholarship is conformist, you can get that across. One indication of it was revealed in a study done at the University of Massachusetts on attitudes toward the current Gulf crisis-a study of beliefs and attitudes in television watching. One of the questions asked in that study was, How many Vietnamese casualties would you estimate that there were during the Vietnam war? The average response on the part of Americans today is about 100,000. The official figure is about two million. The actual figure is probably three to four million. The people who conducted the study raised an appropriate question: What would we think about German political culture if, when you asked people today how many Jews died in the Holocaust, they estimated about 300,000? What would that tell us about German political culture? They leave the question unanswered, but you can pursue it. -- Noam Chomsky, "Media Control", 2002 ( https://chomsky.info/mediacontrol01/ https://chomsky.info/mediacontrol01/ )

chrischen 9y ago

I think a college class would have to delve into the topic a bit more. But given a high school history curriculum being limited they'd have to pick and choose what to cover, and the majority of American kids would end up with the highly distilled, pro-American leaning retelling. I went to high school in the mid-west (Michigan) in a probably center-left leaning (though in the last election probably Trump-leaning) area.