How long ago the 2004 election seems…
Today I was greeted by this Washington Post review of “Winter Soldier,” the documentary movie about the Vietnam Veterans Against War investigation held over over three days in Detroit in 1971. If this old movie sounds somewhat familiar, it’s because you might have heard about due to one of its stars – John Kerry.
Washington Post staff writer Ann Hornaday fawns over the powerful testimony from Vietnam vets thusly,
See “Winter Soldier.”
This extraordinary documentary, made in 1972 and having its first theatrical release, not only revisits events during the Vietnam War that have uncanny resonance today but also stands as a riveting example of pure filmic storytelling. An unadorned, black-and-white record of a three-day gathering held in Detroit in 1971, “Winter Soldier” turns the camera on the testimony of former soldiers invited by Vietnam Veterans Against the War to share accounts of atrocities they committed or witnessed. The result is a spellbinding film that achieves impressive power through little more than the spoken word.
Political junkies might remember the Winter Soldier meeting from last year’s presidential campaign, when Sen. John Kerry’s involvement in the event was the subject of the film “Going Upriver.”Amazingly that’s as close as she ever gets to mentioning that what is shown (and that which she finds so powerful) has been thoroughly debunked. She proceeds to spend the rest of the piece gushing over the “actors,” many of whom it turns out were never actually in Vietnam.
While I have no problem with the fact that Hornaday likes or recommends the movie, the fact that she fails to even acknowledge that there are (at a minimum) serious questions about the authenticity of what is presented is just intellectually lazy.
Visit the Winder Soldier site; read excerpts from Guenter Lewy’s “America in Vietnam,” read this background piece by Mackubin Thomas Owens at National Review; or read an interview with former VVAW member Steve Pitkin, who appears in the film, and says that John Kerry and others pressured him to give false testimony about American atrocities in Vietnam. Not one bit of that information manages to inform Hornaday’s review.
You can leave your own review of this turd of a movie here.
Update: More at NewsBusters
Thanks, I too saw this WashPost review. Today’s Washington Times has a much more critical review; you might want to read that and post some excerpts.
Entertainment Weekly was glorifying this “documentary” months ago… expect plenty more of this pap from the leftist media.
“Intellectually lazy”?
How about “intellectually dishonest”?
“Intellectually lazy”?
How about “intellectually dishonest”?
Smartguy scooped me. His comment was EXACTLY what I was going to write.
People like Hornaday nauseate me: “Oh for those halcyon days when we could call ourselves war criminals.” Recycling 30-year-old lies is all the Left has these days. How else can one explain the very same John Kerry’s grotesque, lost-in-the-70s remarks on Face the Nation last Sunday?
Ms. Hornaday, take your false, “uncanny resonance today” bullshit and stick it where the sun doesn’t shine.
Sorry folks, but the review of the WSI documentary is correct and the testimony given at the WSI was true and real. Steve Pitkin was the one vet out of over a hundred that recanted his testimony, and he only bellyached about the military, not a real testimony. The vets were vetted, with two or more collaborating the testimonies, as well as having their DD214s verified. The testimony was real and true.
Did the article happen to mention that JFK used PI to run out on his men after only serving 3.5 months or 26.9% of a (one or 0.269) tour in Nam?
PI is military talk for Political Influence
Rod – are you saying that the yellow belly JFK is a coward?
Redhand expresses it perfectly:
“…Recycling 30-year-old lies is all the Left has these days…”
I think this just about sums up the Barbara Streisand “paradigm” — along with everyone who insists on using that wornout, aerie of a trendy word itself — Michael Moore, Molly Ivins, Barbara Boxer, Pelosi, Ted Kennedy (the whole Kennedy generation/s), Robert Redford (yeah, sorry), the entire lot of Moveon.org, most everyone in CA and Massachusetts and N.Y. and now Wisconsin and Illinois who isn’t a conservative and/or a Christian…
And the list goes on and on among today’s opining, troubled Left who are the Sixties counterculture grown older and yet not grown out of it.
Some of us grew older AND grew out of it (ha) (referring to the countercultural influences), for reference.
Jo macDougal…I’ll go ahead and say it and that is that John Kerry is a yellow-bellied coward but he’s also quite delusional. Delusional to the point of intentionally lying, engaging in treason while enlisted in service and so much more. I still can’t believe John Kerry is not in a federal pen.
Rod S: Did the article happen to mention that JFK used PI to run out on his men after only serving 3.5
==============
I seem to recall that Kerry VOLUNTEERED for Swiftboat duty for his SECOND term in Vietnam. He had already completed his FIRST YEAR’s assignment.
Let’s see……I don’t think President Bush was EVER in Vietnam, right? Did he even complete his NG tour?
You guys are Swiftboating again.
Kerry’s first term wasn’t IN Vietnam; it was well
off the coast.
I don’t think Kerry was EVER in Cambodia as he
so boastfully claimed, right? Bush never claimed
to be in Vietnam.
I seem to recall that Kerry VOLUNTEERED for Swiftboat duty…
Under the impression that swiftboats would stay out in blue water, where they’d been until about the time he transferred, instead of working the rivers which is what he ended up doing.
Nice that Hornaday — and people like PeaceVet — buy what’s being sold by Scott Camil (one of the only people mentioned by name in Hornaday’s piece. Camil has admitted he proposed assassinating prowar members of Congress. Camil is either a blowhard of immense proportions or someone who was committed to anything that he thought would stop the war. If atrocities were as prevalent in Vietnam as the WSI would have us believe, there would be many more than 150 people with these stories.
One of the few predictions I’m willing to make: 30 years from now there will be a documentary about Gitmo and Abu Ghraib (and probably a few other sites we haven’t heard about yet), and there will be the believers and the deniers. People will be arguing whether atrocities occurred and, if they did, how far up the chain of command did responsibility go.
Nothing ever really changes, except the format: film, video, digital….
The military tactic of discrediting and dehumanizing anything threatening is being used here. The Winter Soldier Vietnam Veterans risked everything to tell the truth. They even risk your slander. What’s in it for them? I know some of these people, and what was in it for them was the hope that someone might hear the Truth and do something about it. It is not wrong to question their veracity. That is supposed to be the American way. But to know, in your heart, and when presented with the facts that this testimony, by and large is the truth, as these vets know it — and THEN to slander and discredit them, says way more about you than them. You think you are protecting something by lying and discrediting veterans with a story to tell that you want to suppress. Really, you are playing into very un-American (and powerful) forces who want to contain this kind of testimony, and control the truth, for personal and professional gain. You show me what personal and professional gain the Winter Soldier veterans attained from their testimony! Look into their eyes and, if your instincts tell you they are lying, then you are one seriously duped human. In addition, if you look into the eyes of the Swift Boat Veterans, which I have, I see dupes, people who in some cases believe their lies are doing some important for America, but who are actually attemtping to suppress Truth that America must hear. In any relationship, there is good and bad, personal or professional. Suppressing Truth that might be uncomfortable or hurt the image of America will only work for a time. People know the truth. Even the Swift Boat Vets know the truth. But they feel that a greater truth — i.e., protecting America’s image — is worth any means to an end. It is a very interesting, but very destructive process to watch.
Knowing the Truth should not be threatening, it should be liberating. Suppressing it only works for a time. I believe in the power of all people, including the American people, to know the truth. If you could put all that energy into not suppressing the truth, but facing it and trying to make things better — that is progress.
Signed,
Lace
Mr Kerry’s veracity has long been suspect . 3 Purple Hearts and no blood ? . As for the “Post ” Like the NY Times and LA Times , seldom ever read them .
Print Media is dieing .
The commie bastards are still stuck in 1971.
The great hero Kerry, one tour in the blue water navy with effective odds of getting killed by enemy action at about zero, followed by tour in what he thought would be a blue water PT boats. except the swift boats duty was changed just as he got in. So after a miraculous 90 day combat tour replete with more medals than Audy Murphy he is rotated back home. Who wrote up his medal’s citations? why hasn’t he released his service records? What was he doing talking to the enemy while a reserve officer? Full of shit then and still full of shit now.
The Democrats, traitors in 1861,1864,1971,1974 and continuing the tradition today.
The Winter Soldier Vietnam Veterans risked everything to tell the truth. They even risk your slander.
And just think what they would have risked if most of them had ever even actually been in Vietnam during the war!
I think if you add Wizbang to Technorati a link to this blog entry will show up in the “Who’s Blogging” box at the end of the Post’s review.
Right wingers only support troops and soldiers if they support their agenda or if they have the letter R next to their name. If not, the gloves come off.
jo, that’s simply not true at all. the marine command charged with investigating the wsi testimony delivered to congress by kerry was unable to corroborate anything presented. in fact many of the dd-214’s turned out to have belonged to men who had never heard of vvaw and said they’d never been to detroit in their lives. the actual wsi “investigation” was held as basicly a big closed door loft party, behind the doors of which all information was strictly controlled. dozens of high profile vvaw members were proven to have never served at all and much or the remainder, as mcghee alluded, were vietnam-ERA soldiers who were never in combat or even the pacific.
consider these facts and then consider whether dianne wood’s ham-fisted mock compassion is sinister or merely sleazy.
as for wrongwinglib, he accuses us of being partisan. but what conditions do progressives put on “support the troops”? well, its hard to say. for as long as soldiers train and fight, they are jocks, dupes or baby-killers in their view. progressives only support dead troops, whos’ corpses they feel licensed to use as sock puppets. a dead soldier to them is a silent soldier, who cannot talk back. a living soldier is invisible to them.
it should also be noted that jesse macbeth had a dd-214 to show.