1965-1975 Another Vietnam by Alex Q. Arbuckle.
From the post:
For much of the world, the visual history of the Vietnam War has been defined by a handful of iconic photographs: Eddie Adams’ image of a Viet Cong fighter being executed, Nick Ut’s picture of nine-year-old Kim Phúc fleeing a napalm strike, Malcolm Browne’s photo of Thích Quang Duc self-immolating in a Saigon intersection.
Many famous images of the war were taken by Western photographers and news agencies, working alongside American or South Vietnamese troops.
But the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong had hundreds of photographers of their own, who documented every facet of the war under the most dangerous conditions.
Almost all were self-taught, and worked for the Vietnam News Agency, the National Liberation Front, the North Vietnamese Army or various newspapers. Many sent in their film anonymously or under a nom de guerre, viewing themselves as a humble part of a larger struggle.
…
A timely reminder that Western media and government approved photographs are evidence for only one side of any conflict.
Efforts by Twitter and Facebook to censor any narrative other than a Western one on the Islamic State should be very familiar to anyone who remembers the “Western view only” from media reports in the 1960’s.
Censorship, whether during Vietnam or in opposition to the Islamic State, doesn’t make the “other” narrative go away. It cannot deny the facts known to residents in a war zone.
The only goal that censorship achieves and not always, is to keep the citizens of the censoring powers in ignorance. So much for freedom of speech. You can’t talk about what you don’t know about.
The essay uses images from Another Vietnam: Pictures of the War from the Other Side. I checked at National Geographic, the publisher, and it isn’t listed in their catalog. Used/new the book is about $160.00 and contains 180 never before published photographs.
Questions come to mind:
Where are the other North Vietnam/Viet Cong photos now? Shouldn’t those be documented, digitized and placed online?
Where are the Islamic States photos and videos that are purged from Twitter and Facebook?
The media is repeating the same mistake with the Islamic State that it made during Vietnam.
No reader can decide between competing narratives in the face of only one narrative.
Nor can they avoid making the same mistakes as have been made in the past.
Vietnam is a very good example of such a mistake.
Replacing the choices of other cultures with our own is a mission doomed to failure (and defeat).
I first saw this in a tweet by Lars Marius Garshol.