Posted on 06/19/2009 7:14:12 AM PDT by ETL
Who won and who lost in the great Tet offensive against the cities? I’m not sure. The Vietcong did not win by a knockout, but neither did we. The referees of history may make it a draw.
It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.
But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could. (Emphases added)
“We paid a high price, but so did you…not only in lives and material…After Tet the Americans had to back down and come to the negotiating table, because the war was not only moving into…dozens of cities and towns in South Vietnam, but also to the living rooms of Americans back home for some time. The most important result of the Tet offensive was it made you de-escalate the bombing, and it brought you to the negotiation table. It was, therefore, a victory…The war was fought on many fronts. At that time the most important one was American public opinion.” (The Vietnam War: An Encyclopedia of Quotations, Howard Langer, 2005)
“On April 30, 1977, Pol Pot’s troops launched a surprise attack on 13 villages in eight Vietnamese border provinces. Ba Chuc was the hardest hit. The massacre was at its fiercest during the 12 days of occupation, April 18-30, 1978, during which the intruders killed 3,157 villagers. The survivors fled and took refuge in the pagodas of Tam Buu and Phi Lai or in caves on Mount Tuong, but they were soon discovered. The raiders shot them, slit their throats or beat them to death with sticks. Babies were flung into the air and pierced with bayonets. Women were raped and left to die with stakes planted in their genitals.”
The John Birch Society is ANTI-Communist.
Until, Kerry is swinging from a yardarm for treason, Vietnam will never be over.
First of all, I was a member of the Birch Society from 1977 to 1981.
Second of all, you completely missed my point. The Birch Society and the section of the Right it represents is a descendant not of traditional American conservatism (Hamiltonianism) but of the Populist and Progressive movments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It's villains are the same as those of the socialist Populists/Progressives: the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Morgans, the "international bankers," etc. The only difference is that in the Populist/Progressive days the Eastern Establishment was conservative and the heartland was socialist (William Jennings Bryan, anyone?) while today the opposite is true.
My remark about Cronkite was that he is one of the number one exhibits in the JBS claim that the Left is secretly run by the Old American Establishment--therefore they owe him a great deal.
Also you give the Birch Society too much credit. They are the number one peddlers of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories (with the word "Jew" removed) and most of the out-and-out anti-Semites started out in the Birch Society. They also numbered the notorious Revilo P. Oliver (mach shemo!) among their founders--a man whose blasphemous atheist ideology was remarkably similar to the Holocaust Museum shooter.
Finally, the Birch Society is opposed to the war in Iraq or any action against Iran because Israel might conceivably benefit. They are vehemently anti-Israel and you will be hard pressed to find one of their spokesmen who isn't hostile to Israel. In fact, some time back I visited G. Edward Griffin's web site. He rebuked an anti-Semite not for being anti-Semitic, but for making it very difficult to oppose Israel respectably.
The Birch Society is garbage. They think we fought on the wrong side in WWII.
Walter’s avuncular demeanor hid the fact that he was a raging commsymp. And his pronouncement during the news segment ushered in an era in journalism in which the messenger is the message.
It is not an improvement.
Oh yeah...old Walter is a full pledged liberal. I think that is why he always seems unhappy (ever notice that about liberals?).
You wrote ;
If Cronkite and his ilk could have their way, they would do the same to Iraq.
I agree.
How can it be that we are all Americans and yet feel so deeply different about our nation and her place in the world?
I guess, in a way, it is the press corp of America that is going to bring us down. Do they not realize their own fate?
Ping
I didn't know they were fans of Hitler. Do you have any linked evidence to support this?
the Birch Society is opposed to the war in Iraq or any action against Iran because Israel might conceivably benefit.
Again, any credible evidence that they are "opposed to any action against Iran because Israel might conceivably benefit"?
Did you read what I said about Revilo P. Oliver, one of the society's founders?
Listen, I used to think the Birch Society hung the moon. But they're absolutely nuts. Their conspiracy theory is merely Nazism with the word "Jews" removed.
Again, any credible evidence that they are "opposed to any action against Iran because Israel might conceivably benefit"?
Go to their web site or the web site of their magazine, The New American.
I noticed a few times when Birchers set up recruiting tables at some gun shows. Five minutes perusing their literature convinced me they were screwballs of some kind.
As I said, I used to be a Bircher, and I thought they hung the moon. Boy, was I wrong!
All you need to know is that they supported the draft in the Sixties when we were fighting North Vietnam but say it was a mistake during WWII and that it's wrong today. Now what do WWII and the WOT have in common that would make a draft any worse during those wars than during the Sixties?
The Birch Society was also all for not minding our own business when it came to Central America in the Eighties. But now all of a sudden when it comes to Iraq and Iran all that has been forgotten and they're pacifists.
The Birch Society is basically a political cult of the "Reconstructionist" movement (Rushdoony, Gary North, etc.). They have also abandoned whatever Hamiltonianism they ever had for full fledged Jeffersonianism. I wouldn't be surprised if they don't believe the US Constitution were Divinely inspired.
One of their big COUNCIL members, Chuck Carlson (not to be confused with Chuck Colson) has a nasty little site called "We Hold These Truths" which contains a section called "Pharisee Watch." I'll give you one guess whom they're watching.
When there was a temporary schism a while back and some old time members started a "Robert Welch Foundation" (Robert Welch was the JBS's founder) and I wrote a couple times to protest anti-Israel positions the second reply was a screed about the "Zionist Bolsheviks" that ended up with a threat of violence toward me.
You want to know what the Birch Society believes? It's no big secret. Just go to their web sites or the web sites of big Birchers (like Carlson, G. Edward Griffin, and Alan Stang--the man who influenced me to join the JBS and who is today a full-throttle lunatic). Or just take a look at the Paulites or the "US Constitution Party" or any Cartoite organization.
The Holocaust museum shooter's first link on his site was to a collection of writings of one of the JBS eleven founders, Revilo P. Oliver, who thought religion was a cancer destroying "aryans."
From wikipedia, with loads of linked references at site...
In the 1960s, [Revilo Pendleton] Oliver supposedly broke with conventional American conservatism and, having become convinced that Welch had either cozened him from the start or sold out later, he even severed his connections with what he called "the Birch hoax." He thus came to openly embrace an essentially far-right worldview, and eventually to assist William Luther Pierce in forming the National Alliance, a White Nationalist organization, a significant portion of whose supporters and members would re-form under the name National Vanguard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revilo_Pendleton_Oliver#Biography
_______________________________
Origins:
The John Birch Society was established in Indianapolis, Indiana on December 9, 1958 by a group of twelve men led by Robert Welch, Jr., a retired candy manufacturer from Belmont, Massachusetts. One founding member was Fred Koch, founder of Koch Industries, one of the largest private corporations in America. Another was Revilo Pendleton Oliver, a University of Illinois professor who later co-founded the "white nationalist" National Alliance. A transcript of Welch's two-day presentation at the founding meeting was published as The Blue Book of the John Birch Society, and became a cornerstone of its beliefs, with each new member receiving a copy.[9]
According to Welch, "both the U.S. and Soviet governments are controlled by the same furtive conspiratorial cabal of internationalists, greedy bankers, and corrupt politicians. If left unexposed, the traitors inside the U.S. government would betray the country's sovereignty to the United Nations for a collectivist New World Order, managed by a 'one-world socialist government.'"[11][12]
Welch saw "collectivism" as the main threat to Western Civilization, and liberals as "secret communist traitors" who provide cover for the gradual process of collectivism, with the ultimate goal of replacing the nations of western civilization with one-world socialist government. "There are many stages of welfarism, socialism, and collectivism in general," he wrote, "but Communism is the ultimate state of them all, and they all lead inevitably in that direction."[12]
The society's activities include distribution of literature, pamphlets, magazines, videos and other educational material while sponsoring a Speaker's Bureau, which invites "speakers who are keenly aware of the motivations that drive political policy"[13].
One of the first public activities of the JBS was a "Get US Out!" (of membership in the UN) campaign, which claimed in 1959 that the "Real nature of [the] UN is to build a One World Government."[14] In 1960, Welch advised JBS members to: "Join your local P.T.A. at the beginning of the school year, get your conservative friends to do likewise, and go to work to take it over."[15]
One Man's Opinion, a magazine launched by Welch in 1956, was renamed American Opinion, and became the John Birch Society's official publication. The society's current publication is called The New American. [16]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society#Values
_______________________________
Values:
The John Birch Society says it is anti-totalitarian, particularly anti-socialist and anti-communist, and leans to libertarian. It seeks to limit the powers of government and defends what it sees as the original intention of the U.S. Constitution, based on Judeo-Christian principles. It opposes collectivism, including wealth redistribution, economic interventionism, socialism, communism, and it also opposes non-Collectivist ideas, like fascism. In a 1983 edition of Crossfire, Congressman Larry McDonald (D-Georgia), then its newly appointed chairman, characterized the Society as belonging to the Old Right, rather than the new right.[9]
The John Birch Society opposed aspects of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s because of its concerns that the movement had communists in important positions. At this time, however, there were more reports that Hollywood was harboring "Communists in high positions" than the Civil Rights Movement. The Society opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, saying it was in violation of the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and overstepped the rights of individual states to enact laws regarding civil rights.
The Society is against a unified "one world government", and has an immigration reduction view on immigration reform. It opposes the United Nations, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), and other free trade agreements.
The Society argues that there is a devaluing of the US Constitution in favor of international government, and that this is not an accident. It cites David Rockefeller's 2002 autobiography Memoirs in which Rockefeller writes, "Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure — one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it."[10]
They were for intervention in South America in the Eighties, but they're against intervention when Israel might possibly benefit. Plus they're totally in the tank for Rushdoonyite "Reconstructionism."
Almost every anti-Semite of the past fifty years has spent time in the Birch Society being fed conspiracy theory, then when they drew the logical conclusion (that the Jews were behind it all) the Society put on a big show of kicking them out.
I'm not going to argue with you. If you want to admire the Birch Society, go right ahead. I know they are detestable.
As a veteran of the Vietnam War from August of 1969 to January of 1971, serving as an infantry squad leader in a mechanized infantry company, and with another unit as a tank commander on an M48A3 tank; I am keenly interested in the distortions, lies, and half truths perpetuated about the Vietnam war by many of those who helped to undermine the US effort there. Much of the conventional understanding of the US involvement in the South East Asian conflict indicates a general disapproval of the United States war effort, and an acceptance of the oft regurgitated leftist conventional wisdom as to it’s historical course and outcome. That is painting the American war effort in Vietnam as misguided at best and an imperialistic effort to establish SE Asian capitalistic hegemony at worst. The antiwar left is portrayed as being noble and idealistic rather than populated by a hard core that actively hoped and worked for a US defeat, the US government as destructive of basic civil liberties in its attempt to monitor their activities, and the North Vietnamese and Vietcong as nationalists who wished to preserve their unique culture against an imperialistic onslaught. The South Vietnamese government’s struggle to survive a ruthless Communist assault while engaging in an unwarranted assault on human rights .while ignoring the numerous genocidal atrocities of the Vietcong (VC) and North Vietnamese Army (NVA) is also part of this narrative. The deceptive reporting of the Tet Offensive, the Communist’s worse defeat among numberless hundreds of others was probably the most grievous deceit perpetuated by the Press .
The reason that the United States opposed nationwide elections that were to be held in accordance with the 1954 Geneva accords was due to the murder and intimidation campaigns carried out by Ho Chi Minh. This fact is in Professor R. J. Runnel’s book Death by Government, in which he cites a low estimate of 15,000 and a high figure of 500,000 people in the “murder by quota” campaign directed by the North Vietnamese Communist Party Politburo that would have made the election a corrupt mockery. This campaign stipulated that 5% of the people living in each village and hamlet had to be liquidated, preferably those identified as members of the “ruling class.” All told says Runnel, between 1953 and 1956 it is likely that the Communists killed 195,000 to 865,000 North Vietnamese. These were non combatant men, women, and children, and hardly represent evidence of the moral high ground claimed by many in the antiwar movement. In 1956, high Communist official Nguyen Manh Tuong admitted that “while destroying the landowning class, we condemned numberless old people and children to a horrible death.” The same genocidal pattern became the Communists’ standard operating procedure in the South too. This was unequivocally demonstrated by the Hue Massacre, which the press did a great deal to downplay in its reporting of the Tet Offensive of 1968.
The National Liberation Front was the creation of the North Vietnamese Third Party Congress of September 1960, completely directed from North Vietnam. The Tet Offensive of 1968 was a disastrous military defeat for the North Vietnamese and that the VC were almost wiped out by the fighting, and that it took the NVA until 1971 to reestablish a presence using North Vietnamese troops as local guerrillas. The North Vietnam military senior commanders repeatedly said that they counted on the U.S. antiwar movement to give them the confidence to persevere in the face of their staggering battlefield personnel losses and defeats. The antiwar movement prevented the feckless President Lyndon Johnson from granting General Westmoreland’s request to enter Laos and cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail or end his policies of publicly announced gradualist escalation. The North Vietnamese knew cutting this trail would severely damage their ability to prosecute the war. Since the North Vietnamese could continue to use the Ho Chi Minh Trail lifeline, the war was needlessly prolonged for the U.S. and contributed significantly to the collapse of South Vietnam. The casualties sustained by the NVA and VC were horrendous, (1.5 million dead) and accorded well with Gen. Ngyuen Giap’s publicly professed disdain for the lives of individuals sacrificed for the greater cause of Communist victory. They were as thoroughly beaten as a military force can be given the absence of an invasion and occupation of their nation. The Soviets and Chinese recognized this, and they put pressure on their North Vietnamese allies to accept this reality and settle up at the Paris peace talks. Hanoi’s party newspaper Nhan Dan angrily denounced the Chinese and Soviets for “throwing a life bouy to a drowning pirate” and for being “mired on the dark and muddy road of unprincipled compromise.” The North Viets intransigent attitude toward negotiation was reversed after their air defenses were badly shattered in the wake of the devastating B-52 Linebacker II assault on North Vietnam, after which they were totally defenseless against American air attack.
To this day the anti-war movement as a whole refuses to acknowledge its part in the deaths of millions in Laos and Cambodia and in the subsequent exodus from South East Asia as people fled Communism, nor the imprisonment of thousands in Communist re-education camps and gulags.
South Vietnam was NOT defeated by a local popular insurgency. The final victorious North Vietnamese offensive was a multidivisional, combined arms effort lavishly equipped with Soviet and Chinese supplied tanks, self-propelled artillery, and aircraft. It was the type of blitzkrieg that Panzer General Heinz Guederian would have easily recognized. I didn’t recall seeing any barefoot, pajama-clad guerrillas jumping out of those tanks in the newsreel footage that showed them crashing through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon. This spectacle was prompted by the pusillanimous withdrawal of Congressional support for the South Vietnamese government in the wake of the Watergate scandal, which particularly undermined this aspect of President Nixon’s foreign policy. It should be noted that a similar Communist offensive in the spring of 1972 was smashed, largely by US air power; with relatively few US ground troops in place. At the Paris Accords in 1973, the Soviet Union had agreed to reduce aid in offensive arms to North Vietnam in exchange for trade concessions from the US, effectively ending North Vietnams hopes for a military victory in the south. With the return of cold war hostilities in the wake of the Yom Kippur war after Congress revoked the Soviet’s MFN trading status, the Reds poured money and offensive military equipment into North Vietnam. South Vietnam would still be a viable nation today were it not for this nation’s refusal to live up to it’s treaty obligations to the South Vietnamese, most important to reintervene should they invade South Vietnam.
There is one primary similarity to Vietnam. A seditious near traitorous core of anti-war protesters is trying to undermine U.S. efforts there with half-truths, lies, and distortions. In that respect, the war in Iraq and the war in Vietnam are very similar. A significant difference is that thus far the current anti-war movement has not succeeded in manifesting contempt for the American military on the part of the general U.S. public as it did in the Vietnam era.
When I was in Vietnam, I recall many discussions with my fellow soldiers about the course of the war in Vietnam and their feelings about it. Many, if not most felt that “We Gotta Get Outta this Place,” to cite a popular song of the time by Eric Burden and the Animals, but for the most part they felt we should do it by fighting the war in a manner calculated to win it. I do not recall anyone ever saying that they felt the North Vietnamese could possibly defeat us on the battlefield, but to a man they were mystified by the U.S. Government’s refusal to fight in a manner that would assure military victory. Even though there was much resentment for the antiwar movement, and some (resentment) toward career professional soldiers, I never saw anyone who did not do his basic duty and many did FAR MORE THAN THAT as a soldier. Nineteen of my friends have their names on the Vietnam War Memorial Wall in Washington DC. They deserve to have the full truth told about the effort for which they gave their young lives. The U.S. public is not well served by half-truths and lies by omission about such a significant period in our history, particularly with their relevance toward our present fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Thanks, Frank! I’ll read your post more carefully tomorrow. About ready to go to bed now. Looks like another great one from you.
Just, Thank You.
BTTT
Excellent piece of writing once again, Frank! I would (or could, not having served myself) only add that the "anti-war" movement in the U.S. then, like today, was led by groups and individuals who were/are PRO-communist. Most of the marchers, similarly like today, were just easily manipulated dupes who really hadn't a clue what was going down. They simply saw war as violent and wanted an end to it, without any understanding of the occasional necessity for it. They were brainwashed by left-wing, communist-sympathizing 'teachers' at school, countless musicians and other entertainers drumming 'anti-war' messages into their heads, and left-wing 'news reporters' like Cronkite who continually mangled the truth in order to sway public opinion against the war and a U.S. victory. They were rarely, if ever, informed of the oppression and brutality of communism.
PS: I don't know whether or not you write professionally, but if you don't, you damn well should! Seriously. America needs people like you to get this message out to future generations. You would also be excellent, no doubt, doing public speaking tours at colleges and universities, assuming you can find a few that wouldn't turn their back on you.
___________________________________________________
"'The Black Book of Communism,'; a scholarly accounting of communism’s crimes, counts about 94 million murdered by the supposed champions of the common man (20 million for the Soviets alone), and some say that number is too low."
Forgetting the Evils of Communism: The amnesia bites a little deeper
By Jonah Goldberg, August 2008:
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZmY0MjI1MDgyYjg1M2UwNDMzMTk2Mjk5YTk0ZTdlMWE=
Weather Underground Organization linked to North Vietnamese and Cuban governments, KGB (my title)
[420 pages in all on pdf]
Source: FBI, via Freedom of Information Act
In 1976, the FBI's Chicago Field Office prepared a summary which described the activities of the Weather Underground Organization, also known as Weathermen. This organization described itself as a revolutionary organization of communist men and women. The FBI's analysis of its motivations, beliefs, and international travels are outlined in this summary.
[some excerpts from the 1976 report linking the organization to foreign governments...]
From the moment in October, 1967, when Radio Hanoi announced the formation of the South Vietnamese Peoples Committee for Solidarity with American People (by the National Liberation Front (NLF), the political arm of the Viet Cong) with the objective of establishing relations with "progressive organizations and individuals in the United States," a political front was enjoined in behalf of the national interests of the Democratic Republic of North Vietnam (DRV) (and the NLF), the purpose of which was to intensify the anti-war sentiment in the United States.
From the initial meeting between the Vietnamese and leading anti-war activists held in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, in November, 1967, to the July, 1969, meeting with leading Weatherpeople held in Havana, Cuba, the influence of Vietnamese representatives on the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) leadership became sharply pronounced. At the same time, the example of the Cuban revolution became the guide for the emerging American student revolutionary. With an increasing number of trips to Havana where the youthful revolutionary could learn at first hand how to create revolution, the influence of Cuba on the developing WUO [Weather Underground Organization] was enormous.
The WUO obtained their revolutionary methodology from the Cubans and Vietnamese and, importantly, put into practice what they had learned from them. The Weathermen, of course, did not just happen to come about during the June, 1969, SDS National Convention. They fully admit their radical heritage began during experiences gained in SDS and as shown herein their international contacts with representatives of the DRV and NLF which began in 1967 increased their anti-imperialist consciousness so that by 1969 they had solidified their revolutionary commitment to include the maximum optimum of armed struggle. So, when Huynh Van Ba, representative of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of Vietnam (PRG), instructed the WUO to "look for the person who fights hardest against the cops...Don't look for the one who says the best thing. Look for the one who fights," the campus base was forgotten and the WUO began to recruit the greasers and assorted oddments who had displayed their hatred of authority in direct combat with police.
Source: FBI
http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/weather.htm
Extremely insightful and very well written. It's a ridiculous additional burden on our military that the leftwing media impose. They are clearly on the other side, and have been since about 1966, in the war to win over the hearts and minds of our people.
And the fact that there is such a significant portion of our country that can be lead around by the enemies of freedom is distressing.
Thanks again for the ping, and thanks so much for your service. A VERY significant portion of this country recognizes and very much appreciates what you and all other military personnel do for this country. Just not many of us work in the media, I guess.
Thank you for the kudos, and spread the word so all will know the shameful nature of the Communist “victory” in collusion with our home grown seditionists and the honor, yes even glory attendant to most of the American troops who served there.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.