Posted on 03/06/2023 8:00:50 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Remember all that political hay the far left and its media allies made during the Vietnam War about the wickedness of America's South Vietnamese ally and the importance of abandoning that country to the communists?
Here's the Pulitzer Prize-winning AP photo that was supposed to prick our consciences and make us turn against that "immoral" war against a communist takeover:
There's no doubt about it, the photo is hard to look at. It's crude, rough, wartime justice, a picture of South Vietnamese Police Captain Nguyễn Ngọc Loan coldly executing Viet Cong Captain Nguyễn Văn Lém. The film is even harder to look at.
It ran on the front page of the New York Times, cropped from the original to fill the space and make its impact even more immediate.
And it got the results the anti-war left wanted: Public sentiment abruptly turned against the war as a result of this photo. The Vietnamese people abandoned by the Americans whose cut-and-run evacuation from the Saigon embassy rooftop was only recently bested by Joe Biden's Afghanistan pullout. After that, the reeducation camps rolled in, the boat people launched into the high seas, and the killing fields of Cambodia began.
Jane Fonda must have been so proud of herself.
Just one problem, though: The context was missing and that context mattered.
The guy who got shot, who went by the nom de guerre of Bay Lop, was a death squad psychopath in the Viet Cong who just got done massacring 34 innocent people.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
RE: He was bad. The police were doing the right thing under those conditions. Nothing new here.
Does the photo deserve a Pulitzer?
The media showed their true colors for the first time in the Vietnam war, pro marxist, pro communist. We could have won that war 10 times over had we wanted to but LBJs disasterous administration and Nixon’s waffling meant we through away 56,000 lives for nothing.
According to Wikipedia it was a Smith & Wesson Bodyguard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_%26_Wesson_Bodyguard
S&W model 49 was introduced in 1959. I have been shooting small frame Smiths for over 50 years snd that picture looks right to me.
Biden's COWARDLY abandonment in Afghanistan was far worse than Viet Nam, IMO
I did my time (68-76) and remember it all. It's ironic that those 'hippies' of the 60s who were against US involvement in Vietnam (which was in accordance with SEATO, BTW - how come that was inappropriate for us then but okay now for NATO and Ukraine?) are now largely infesting our deep-state government (i.e., DEMOCRATS like the Clintons)
Interesting! Never noticed that.
Air America?
been done looong ago...
but it was ignored
“Were there hammerless .38s back then?”
Yup and even further back. Think late 19th century. After all it is just a simple shroud.
no and yes...
thank you for your service.
this is all before she was born, and she acts like it’s a revelation...
I don't know the standards for a Pulitzer. It is a remarkable photo. As a newsworthy moment captured on film, perhaps a Pulitzer was justified.
My issue is the propaganda aspect. The truth has been known for a long time. The mis-use of the image for anti-US propaganda purposes has been known for a long time. I don't see why this is much of a news story in 2023.
Now, if someone is building a case that the Pulitzer Prize is really only awarded to people if their work can be re-purposed into anti-US propaganda, then that is something worth talking about. I know that has happened multiple times. This case. Other cases. Perhaps someone could build as comprehensive investigation into the Pulitzer really being a pure tool of anti-US propaganda. Seems like that idea has potential.
But this individual photograph seems like a remarkable moment in photojournalism. The fact that it won a prize doesn't shock me.
Walter Cronkite, the “Most Trusted Man in Media”, was complicit on this.
Remember the Tet Offensive? A surprise series of attacks launched during Tet, the Vietnamese New Year festival. Many South Vietnamese troops were on holiday when the attacks began, and the military was caught off guard. The campaign initially targeted more than 100 cities and towns, including the strategic southern capital of Saigon, now named Ho Chi Minh City.
The Tet Offensive was a catastrophic military failure for the communists. Historians estimate as many as 50,000 communist troops died in the effort to gain control of the southern part of the country. The South Vietnamese and American losses totaled a fraction of that number.
Although a military loss, the Tet Offensive was a stunning propaganda victory for the communists. In fact, it is often credited with turning the war in their favor. Walter Cronkite was on TV several nights telling Americans that all was lost in Vietnam. Yeah, that helped the Communist propaganda a lot.
Many Americans began to question military and political leaders who assured them the Vietnam War would be won soon. In the wake of the Tet Offensive, popular U.S. journalist Walter Cronkite said, “We are mired in a stalemate [and] the only rational way out, then, will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could.”
https://www.americanrifleman.org/content/this-old-gun-smith-wesson-model-49-bodyguard/
It was actually a frame out of a film that was taken.
Under the circumstances who gives a crap about the Geneva Convention!
I have thought of this photo for years. To tell the truth I did not even know the story of who was pulling the trigger and how it was supposed to make American’s want to quit the war, that it was all propaganda. I had no interest in all of that even though my brother was in Vietnam. I just took things as they happened and figured we needed to be there because, if you remember, Vietnam was the rice bowl of the world and we needed to keep it free from Communism. For years I thought just go in and slam ‘em all and get out. I still think that. As far as I’m concerned, Ukraine is another eg; of that whole mess in Vietnam.
Now I know the real story behind this photo and it makes more sense to me.
Thanks.
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