Posted on 03/29/2020 10:03:20 AM PDT by otness_e
Vietnam War Topical information:
VHS Video tape: Television's Vietnam, narrated by Charlton Heston, Sony Vietnam Video Collection, produced by Accuracy In Media.
Note: PBS was legally forced to show this, but only once, as a response to their own completely false representation of the war history. Their response to my inquiry was quite negative, deceptive and misleading. I got my copy, years ago, from an 800 number for the AIM organization, but do not see it on their current website. Amazon no longer carries it, and I can't find it anywhere. It shows how the Mainstream Media, with Cronkite in the lead, not only politically Spun the news they reported, but outright lied - big, wide and continuous - throughout the entire Vietnam War, for the apparent purpose of lowering Democracy in the eyes of the public while helping the International Communist cause. It shows them lying, in their own footage. I wonder if I have the last copy in existence. Please let me know if you find a source for one.
Update Sun Sep 03 2017 (See Comments for that date):
Television's Vietnam, Part I (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsYwdCoOIEI ).
Television's Vietnam, Part II (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaECqmMYtxM ).
(Excerpt) Read more at catholicamericanthinker.com ...
Thank you for the detailed replies. I will read them tonight and process them.
I appreciate your details.
Thanks again.
Thank you for this information and link.
“It shows how the Mainstream Media, with Cronkite in the lead, not only politically Spun the news they reported, but outright lied - big, wide and continuous...”
I recall watching a news cast on youtube about the Ia Drang Valley battle - our first major fight. While we took many losses, the enemy lost a bunch more (10x?)
At the end of the video was some famous reporter saying something like “While the battle is considered a victory, I only wonder how long the mothers and fathers of our young men will put up with an endless line of body bags coming home from the jungles of a country so far from home.”
Crap like this, after the first major battle of the war!
The Tet Offensive showed the American public that any reports they’d heard about the progress of the war weren’t true. That such an attack could be launched, and only stopped by massive American intervention (as opposed to being quelled by the ARVN) made it clear the South couldn’t stand on its own. The lesson for the communists from Tet was that there would be no South Vietnamese uprising to support the communists - not that the communists couldn’t beat the ARVN.
The fact that four years later, the communists could launch the Easter Offensive demonstrated their losses from Tet could be absorbed, and the ARVN still couldn’t stand on its own. Three years after that, North Vietnamese tanks rolled onto the presidential palace in Saigon. It is true that failure to supply South Vietnam after our withdrawal doomed them, but it would seem that was inevitable.
How would you define “victory” to say Nixon “won”? The war was fought with the same rationale as Korea, but in the end South Korea remained an independent state.
The Jacobins were arguably the proto-Communists.
Yeah, well, tell that to General Giap, the North Vietnamese general who pretty much commanded the Vietcong de facto. After the VC were decimated as a fighting force during the Tet Offensive (and for the record, there were plenty of places that wiped out the VC without our even being involved, anyhow, which the news reports DIDN’T report. What we directly were involved in was our fighting off the VC within the area nearing the embassy.), he, from his recollection, outright stated that had it not been for Walter Cronkite’s broadcast, they actually WOULD have surrendered.
And in any case, again, Prager University defined it as a victory not just under our view, but even by our ENEMIES’ view, meaning it wasn’t even CLOSE to inevitable that they would have fallen. It’s like saying the USSR was inevitable to succeed during the Cold War, which quite frankly it wasn’t.
And the funny thing about news reports is... they can be faked, specifically to communicate the wrong impression deliberately. You ought to know with the burning monk, as described from the Politically Incorrect Guide, or how about the Killian Documents controversy. Even back then, the mainstream media reports were NEVER our friend, or even our ally.
Might as well add, by that exact same logic, we lost World War II when we fought in the Battle of the Bulge, which was World War II’s equivalent to the Tet Offensive.
Oh yeah, and when I said that there were plenty of places during the Tet Offensive that the VC got creamed without Americans being involved, there were even some hamlets that actually had the citizen rising up... AGAINST the VC, and even dumping their kitchen waste on them. To say little about the ARVN driving them off. The news media, obviously being biased against the war effort, buried those stories. Look up this site as well, that makes clear that ARVN, especially their armored vehicles, also played as big of a role, if not an even BIGGER role, in Tet than we Americans did: http://grunt-redux.atspace.eu/arvn_armour31.htm
Like I said, the news media is NOT our friend, or even our ally, and hasn’t been so for quite some time.
Yeah, no kidding. And the fact that Jefferson cheerleaded for them after seeing their actions first hand, not to mention continued to cheer them on even when the other founding fathers (who at least had communications being delayed due to how long messages to and from Europe took during that time as an excuse for initially supporting them) began to get disgusted with the September Massacres, is truly disgraceful of him. It’s probably a GOOD thing he wasn’t part of the Constitutional Delegation due to being in France at the time, as otherwise, we’d probably have our own French Revolution, and all that that implies, had he played a role in the Constitution, being as broken as if not even MORE so than the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
And quite frankly, had Cronkite and those news media jerks not tried to paint Vietnam in a bad light, the anti-war movement would not have gained traction. That’s one reason why, even though I’m otherwise supportive of the Constitution, I am NOT fond of so-called “freedom of the press” (they certainly more than demonstrated that right during Vietnam, and if anything abused it while the government if anything was too fearful to even dare try to stop them. Abusing it as much as Voltaire did in France, and he was in part responsible for the Jacobins, acting as a role model for them if their “temples of reasons” bearing his quote is of any indication. When freedom of the press goes as far as to outright bully the state and deliberately push false narratives and be the de-facto state, it makes me think such a “right” isn’t even WORTH having).
The problem with modern media is centralization of the press. When 6 companies own 90% of media, it’s a problem.
I think the problem’s even worse than 6 companies owning 90% of the media. In fact, the problems probably stemmed back to at the very least Walter Lippmann’s “Public Opinion” thing, where he advocated for many of the same crap that the news media’s doing right now with his “objective press” crap.
“Objective press” is a big lie used to sell the wire services. Everyone carries their biases into any reporting. “Objective press” is a unicorn, a mythical beast that does not exist in nature.
Surrender? Why would Giap surrender? His country (North Vietnam) wasn’t occupied at all, and they were still free to roam much of the South, as well as the neutral border states.
I think you mean “would have negotiated”; North Vietnam was never in danger of losing the war in terms of its own territory.
This is from his memoirs:
“What we still don’t understand is why you Americans stopped the bombing of Hanoi. You had us on the ropes. If you had pressed us a little harder, just for another day or two, we were ready to surrender! It was the same at the battles of TET. You defeated us! We knew it, and we thought you knew it.
But we were elated to notice your media was definitely helping us. They were causing more disruption in America than we could in the battlefields. We were ready to surrender. You had won!”
So from his own words, Giap actually WAS going to surrender. It was Walter Cronkite who convinced him to continue fighting. And while North Vietnam WASN’T occupied by us by any stretch, it WAS fighting us. Cold War paradigm, after all. And yes, it WAS in danger of losing the war regarding territory, especially when the North Vietnamese were communists and wanted a Communist South Vietnam.
You can also find it here: https://americanranger.blogspot.com/2008/04/north-vietnamese-general-giap-admits.html
I understand what you’ve posted; the best we could hope for (with a North Vietnamese “surrender”) was that South Vietnam would have to deal with its own communist problem instead of dealing with North Vietnamese interference as well.
Unfortunately, the communist problem in South Vietnam is intrinsically tied to the North Vietnamese as well, since the communists in South Vietnam answer to the North Vietnamese, and by extension to the Soviets and to a lesser extent the Red Chinese. Even if they were to deal with the Communist problem in South Vietnam, more will just come in from North Vietnam.
The fact is the communists of South Vietnam (Viet Cong) itself were strong in numbers (both they and the North Vietnamese were armed by the ChiComs); the ARVN couldn’t deal with the Viet Cong by itself. The ARVN couldn’t secure the borders against infiltration.
To be fair, we Americans didn’t exactly deal with the Brits by ourselves during our War for Independence (the French did provide us with arms). Not to say our beating the Brits wasn’t impressive by any stretch, don’t get me wrong, but saying that they couldn’t handle the VC isn’t exactly a good excuse. Heck, if anything, the VC probably WOULD have been wiped out by the ARVN if it WEREN’T for ChiCom and Soviet aid. Same goes for the North Vietnamese. So it goes both ways.
Besides, a lot of those numbers also came from the North Vietnamese as well, so there’s that to be said as well.
Sure - and the ARVN was supplied by us. Their dependence was illustrated by the speed with which they collapsed after Dems in Congress withheld aid. Within a couple of years of the failed Easter Offensive (beaten back by US airpower), North Vietnamese tanks were smashing through the gates of the South Vietnamese presidential palace.
Yeah, and if the Soviets withheld aid from the North Vietnamese, you can bet that the North Vietnamese would end up suffering the exact same situation. In fact, we got something similar in Afghanistan when the Soviets withdrew.
Even if the ARVN WERE dependent on us, the North Vietnamese were dependent on the Chicoms and Soviets as well. Heck, in a way, WE were dependent on the French as well. By your logic, we don’t even deserve to exist as a country precisely BECAUSE we got aid to get where we are today rather than truly lacking any help in our efforts for independence.
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