Mirror Images
Mirror Images
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco [Video Troll]
Published in: The Manila Times, October 12, 1987
THE truly wonderful thing about the Age of Video — apart from its recreational value — is the unlimited source of information it provides at our fingertips.
The multi-part documentary 'Vietnam’, financed specifically for public television by the US National Endowment for the Arts, should be of greater interest to us than ever before — what with members of the political opposition equating our own current affairs with the consummated holocaust in Indochina.
Vietnam is often referred to in this major retrospective as "the first television war," and for good reason. American networks feasted nightly on the enormous footage accumulated for them by wandering teams of television journalists armed with video cameras and nerves of steel. The entire documentary series itself — currently available from most of the major video outlets on six 90-minute cassettes — is reconstructed from this footage, with some supplementary material culled from Vietnamese and French archives, as well as from post-war interviews at home.
It is important to note that the Hanoi-based struggle against the superior forces of the United States was widely perceived among the Vietnamese as an extension of the decades-long anti-colonialist war that was first fought against France. The battle then was for liberation, primarily, and then for the unification of a country torn in half by rival foreign interests — not centered on the upheaval of a ruling per se as it was on the right to self-determination as one people under one flag.
This American overview is strangely sympathetic to the communist leader Ho Chi Minh (literally translated "he who enlightens"), depicted here as a man of marked integrity and almost benign demeanor who started out as a propagandist-in-exile during the early stirrings against French colonial rule.
Equally of interest is the fact that Ho’s Viet Minh fighters were originally armed and trained by the United States, which made effective use of this ragtag rebel army against Japan in World War II. Ironically, although outright independence had been promised to Ho by way of tactical incentive, the allies later betrayed the Viet Minh, returning Indochina to the very same French rulers who had collaborated with the Japanese!
In this regard, America’s poor track record, as gleaned from this documentary series, proves it to be no more of a good ally than a steadfast protector. Even as the Vietnam war raged, diplomatic pacts and "mutual defense treaties" were broken at will, with no more than whimsy, change of heart, or electoral polls looming on the homefront as sufficient reasons for abandoning its strategic commitments and trading off its charges to salvage loose change.
Most disturbing was the patent ineptitude of American military and political strategists in effecting their own objectives. Those of us who still believe that America will never allow our country to fall into communist hands will do well to separate American intentions from American capabilities. What America wants and what America manages to do are two different things, and both the CIA and the Pentagon are depicted here on either count as bungling half-wits whose gross miscalculations in an invariable recourse to trial-and-error almost always has them licking their wounds and counting their dead. Literally millions of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian citizens who had elected to trust in American gung-ho rhetoric now litter the pock-marked countrysides with their bones.
At any rate, the horrors of modern conventional warfare in our own country are far too frightening to imagine. What little we have seen of full-scale war — as terrible as it might have seemed in the 1940’s — is a picnic in the park compared to what might eventually become of us. And in the end, when all ideologies are no more than muddled memories, war itself will emerge as the ultimate enemy.
* * *
Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “Mirror Images” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, October 12, 1987
