Safe for Democracy

Vietnam VIII: End of Indo-China

Here it is, the end of the last real battle of the French war: Dien Bien Phu. After this it’s just Geneva and the transition from French ignobility to American monstrosity.

That all comes next time though. For now, maps. And you can, as always, click these for a larger view.

The overview:

The view from Tonkin:

And the specifics:

Then, since all the characters are the same as last episode (ie…

Vietnam VII: Dien Bien Phu

Finally we’re here, at the end of the French War, at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu.

Some cool show news: we’re registered for the People’s Choice Podcast Awards. Which means I filled out a form at podcastawards.com. For that process to get any further, you folks need to head to podcastawards.comand nominate Safe for Democracy. We’re always looking for ways to get this show in front of a few more…

Vietnam VI: Learning Curve

And here we are, finally, finally making it to the end of the French War.

We still have Dien Bien Phu and the denouement to wrap up, which we’ll do in the next episode, maybe in the fastest-ever-produced next episodes, so fingers crossed there.

Like last time, I’m covering pretty much all the material that I’m trying to cover in these shows, so I don’t have any big ancillary stories to tell here…

Vietnam V: Giap and de Lattre

I’m trying something a little different with these show notes, especially since, with that interim show about Kennan already done, I don’t have any other story I want to be telling apart from the cast. So I’ve got a couple of supplementary things and then all the audio credits, but just giving you the videos they’re from, along with some of the silent Pathé and French newsreels that give you a…

Kennan and Cold War Policy

Like I said at the end of last episode, there were some broader Cold War issues that I wanted to talk about and some history that I wanted to churn through that didn’t quite fit into the framework of the longer shows. That’s because I want those longer ones to be narrowly focused on the French and the relevant US decision-making rather than a panoramic picture—otherwise they’d be six hours…

Vietnam IV: The First Indochina War

We’re getting into the French War proper now, and we’ll make it almost all the way to the outbreak of the war in Korea by the end of this one.

I’ve got some videos whose audio I couldn’t use, for various reasons, in the show itself, but that might serve to give all of us a better picture of the life and times of the place and period we’re talking about.

First we’ve got a silent short on Saigon…

Hey folks,

I thought I’d try something new with the show notes this time around and just give you the script. The only time I give this a real thorough proofread for typos, etc, is when I’m recording it, and I don’t stop to correct them, so keep that in mind. Before the script, as promised, Operation Frequent Wind:

I think it’s…

Vietnam III: The World at War

Well, we’re making time now, and I hope that keeps up. I’ve got some interesting stuff to show you today. First is the cover image for the show. That’s Ho Chi Minh on the left and Vo Nguyen Giap on the right along with their American OSS Deer Team advisors, who we’ll hear a fair bit about this show. Here’s another one of Giap and ‘OSS Agent 19’ along with their American advisors. The OSS teams…

SFD Talk—Vietnam in the US Imagination

Hey folks, in lieu of notes this time, I’m going to give you the full outline that Rob and I were ostensibly working off in the show. Which should be enlightening, especially as we spend a lot of time talking about Syria instead of Vietnam. Ernie, unfortunately, caught that bug that seems to be circling the globe (I’ve had it in Mexico, my sister’s had it in Rhode Island, Ernie’s got it in…

Like it says in title, there’s no show this Monday, but there is going to be a show this week. Rob Morris, Ernie Piper, and I are going to be broadcasting another live show this Thursday from 11am to 2pm EST and this time rather than being tangentially related to what we do here, it’s right up our alley. The three of us are going to be talking about what still fascinates us in the US (or anywhere…

Vietnam II: Ho Chi Minh

It’s a day late but nowhere near a dollar short (except, I guess, in terms of what I’m paid for these shows; in that case it’s several thousand behind: Ho Chi Minh’s entrance into our story. I don’t have a subsidiary story to tell in this set of notes, like I often enough did have during the series on Iran. What I have instead, though, is a wealth of visual and geographic aids to offer you. And…

SFD Talk — Unending Oil

I’m back from down south in Oaxaca, and I’ve got the cut-down of the show that Rob Morris and I did, along with my buddy Ernie Piper, about a month ago. I met Ernie during a very brief stint in Istanbul, and since then he’s been all over the Near East and Eastern Europe, writing a couple of books and doing whatever else it took to stay about financial water far from home. The three of us got…

Hey folks— It’s a longish show where myself and some Peace Corps friends of mine talk about two of the last few shorts, Liberal Arts, Again and Land and Food and Capitalism. The audio isn’t anything I could have wanted, and the looseness isn’t everything I did want, but it’s the first of what may be a series of more, better talks. It’s cut way down from the original runtime, which tightened it up…

Hey Folks, We’re back to a mix of history and short shows, which means we’re back to quick intros on the smaller episodes. It looks like I’m finally going to pull together that shorts discussion with some of my old Peace Corps buddies this week, and if I don’t have Vietnam II out by Monday—I’m about fifty fifty on that, but I think it should be out in two weeks if not in one—I’ll have that up for…

Vietnam I: Ancient History

Well, here we are folks. The beginning of the Vietnam series and very probably the end of SFD. We’re starting, literally, with the dawn of human history and carrying it all the way up to the 1700s. Like the folks over at Blank Check, we’re connoisseurs of context, and to get Vietnam right in a way that the Americans didn’t from 1946 to 1975, and in a way that even Ken Burns failed to get it in…

Writing on the first script starts in earnest this week, and I thought everybody deserved to know more or less where we’re headed. This episode gets into all that, and, for anybody following along, gets into some of the books that are going to be the backbones of the series: Ellsberg, Daniel. Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. New York; Viking Press, 2002. Fall, Bernard. Hell…

It’s the last of all news shows, folks, and it’s barely newsy at all. We’re talking about monopolies in the American economy, which was, incidentally, the subject of Robert Reich’s last book, Saving Capitalism. The show explains itself, and as it promises, here’s some graphs for you: This is an Econ 101 graph of perfect competition. S is supply, D is demand, MC is marginal cost, and P is price.…