Effects of media!

[Scott]

Subject: Fw: Effect of MEDIA !!


Giap's memoirs...




(Gen. Giap was a very famous and knowledgeable


General in the North Vietnamese Army.)









General Vo Nguyen Giap.










General Giap was a brilliant, highly respected leader of the North Vietnam military. The following quote is from his memoirs currently found in the Vietnam war memorial in Hanoi:


"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!"


General Giap has published his memoirs and confirmed what most Americans knew. The Vietnam war was not lost in Vietnam -- it was lost at home. The exact same slippery slope, sponsored by the US media, is currently well underway. It exposes the enormous power of a biased media to cut out the heart and will of the American public.


A truism worthy of note: Do not fear the enemy, for they can take only your life. Fear the media far more, for they will destroy your honour.

[Aardvark]

It goes to prove, you can only win a popular War !!

[laphanphon]

popular War

didn't know they existed, sort of like, jumbo shrimp

[aznyron]

I still don't know the true reason why we were there
and it definatly not about communism that was a excuse
I do have a opinion but you will think i am nuts

[Krukan]

I still don't know the true reason why we were there
and it definatly not about communism that was a excuse
I do have a opinion but you will think i am nuts

Please tell me about your opinion.

[aznyron]

krukan

[BKKSTAN]

I believe we were there because the French blackmailed us by refusing to allow NATO bases in France if we didn't bail them out of Viet Nam.The Soviet Union was the biggest threat at the time!

[aznyron]

stan I do believe also the french was the problem and the cause of the war
but I also believe it could have been avoided. I think the defense contractors saw a chance
to make tons of money and promoted the war also. if I remember president kennedy said he did not go to war 90 miles of the coast florida he will not go 12000 miles to fight a different war
Bang bang president kennedy was assinated 45 years later we are still being feed smoke & mirrors
first it was oswald then cubans then the mafia now it back to oswald what ever happened to the grassy nold any way that another topic for another time

[BobHelm]

Ah....sorry to put in my bit, but us Brits are more than a bit to blame.
After end of 2nd. world war we wanted Vietnam to go back to the French, don't ask me why, I guess as a way of justifying taking back most of the rest of SE Asia
This shafted Ho Chi Min who had been supplied by the Allies in the War to harass the Japanese. Sadly for the French (& later the Americans) he had learned a little too much about jungle warfare for anyone else's good. His defeat of the French caused the country to be split in two by the Geneva convention. Sadly the government of the southern 'Free' part of the country was as corrupt as could be & hugely unpopular with the majority of the population.
The serious lessons to be learnt from this are many but sadly do not appear to have been learnt to this day. Maybe one day......

[Aircraftdoc]

Ah the American Media...........CRIMINAL

[jackspratt]

Far rather an aggressive and curious media (even if they get it wrong sometimes) than a compliant, unquestioning government lapdog/mouthpiece.

The Fourth Estate has a very important role to play in any democracy.

[Aardvark]

Just a shame it does'nt suffer from a little Morality at times, or a sense of common decency.

[Jing Jing]

Granted the media serves a useful role in a free society but that media also has a responsibility to be educated about what it is reporting on. To often the journalist and writers are talking heads that do not know the subject matter they are reporting on. They tend to string together information with partial quotes from government officials or other quote experts.

For all their tough talk LBJ, Nixon and Bush didn't have the cojones to tell the American people they efed-up.

[westerby]

Granted the media serves a useful role in a free society but that media also has a responsibility to be educated about what it is reporting on. To often the journalist and writers are talking heads that do not know the subject matter they are reporting on. They tend to string together information with partial quotes from government officials or other quote experts.

Jing Jing, you're onto something here. It depends what motivates those in the media. While an organization like BBC News believes that it reports the truth, other TV stations will use subtle language and phrases to influence your opinion. For example, the BBC may report events concerning British military operations in Iraq in an impartial manner while other well known stations will report the same events but imply that we shouldn't be there anyway because we're out of our depth, i.e. they have a political or commercial agenda. The motivation for reporting in this manner could be down to a desire to increase viewing figures or because the person who runs a media empire may wish to place a Government in a difficult position. Those that control the media aim to influence our politics because they wish to control the nation to some degree. I'll always remember the UK Sun's headline when the Conservatives won one of their last elections - 'It's The Sun That Won It'.

[Laan Yaa Mo]

Here is some more background about Vietnam during and, in the immediate aftermath, of the Second World War.

In the winter of 1944/45 some 400,000 to 2 million Vietnamese peasants died from starvation. The political significance of famine was that it made some peasants question the authority of village elites who influenced the allocation of food. The French strategy of ruling Vietnamese villages through traditional Vietnamese notables was destroyed. The famine destroyed the notables of their aura of moral superiority and it became easier for communist agents to mobilise the peasants.

Also, the French colonial regime treated the real anti-colonial activists more harshly than anyone else. They were guillotined. The Dutch sent them into exile and the British permitted them to act openly. But in French Indo-china, all political leaders were arrested. As a result, the only genuinely anti-French party to survive had to have a secretive dictatorial leadership that lived outside Vietnam. These two factors apply only to Vietnam in Southeast Asia.

The Vietnamese communists were the only nationalist group that was committed, intelligent and organised enough to escape French destruction. They had the ability to organise their headquarters in Canton (Gwongchow) where Ho Chi Minh trained cadres at the Whampoa Academy.

Only in Vietnam and Indonesia did the people have to fight protracted long drawn out wars for self-government. It was only in these countries in Southeast Asia that the communist party became strong.

The first prong of the communist strategy was to eliminate all other nationalist groups by turning them in to the French authorities or assassinating them. The second prong was to disrupt the French administration through sabotage and assassination. The third prong was to set up village soviets in areas not under strong French control.

On 23 Dec. 1944, General Vo Nguyen Diap created the first army platoon of the National Liberation Army with 34 soldiers. By 1946 the army had tens of thousands of troops. The army seized the granaries and re-distributed the food to the villagers. The village chiefs were overthrown and tax registers destroyed in a peasant rebellion.

On 2 September 1945 the independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam was proclaimed with Ho Chi Minh as President. The date chosen was the day of the Festival of Catholic Martyrs to gain Catholic support for the revolution. The proclamation of independence began by quoting the American Declaration of Independence with a reference to France, but not the U.S.S.R. This was a brilliant tactic to attract diverse support. Americans in Hanoi at the time approved of the Viet-Minh government. This August revolution was a bid for popular support, not a communist revolution.

In mid-September 1945, allied forces arrived with the British in the south acting as French proxies to take control of French interests. Japanese troops were used to police the Vietnamese. Also, at the Peace Conference, China was permitted to invade North Vietnam. The Chinese invaded the north with a disorganised army of 180,000 men. This was an oppressive invasion using the right to receive Japan's surrender as an excuse. The real motive of the KMT (Chiang K'ai-shek) was to tighten its relations with the overseas Chinese community in Vietnam, to replace Ho with anti-communist politicians and to replace the people's committees in the countryside. This was a very critical moment that might have broken Vietnam. What saved it?

Ho's skill as a politician. He welcomed the KMT invaders as defenders of Vietnam's independence. This was a cunning move that could have backfired since his own party opposed this policy. The party went underground and were very confused by Ho's tactics.

The French returned to Saigon in Oct. 1945 and re-established control over cochin-china, but they never fully pacified the countryside. The Viet-Minh were in charge of the administration of Tonkin and Annam. The KMT would not allow the French in the north until they gained treaty concessions; moreover, they wanted to loot Vietnamese homes and take Japanese arms and supplies.

In a most controversial move, Ho invited the French back to northern Vietnam to act as a counterweight to the Chinese. On 6 March the French and Viet-Minh reached an agreement in which Ho allowed French troops to re-occupy Hanoi for a period of five years. A refernedum was promised to see if all of Vietnam was to join the republic. The problem for Ho was how to explain all of this that was criticised as a Treaty of Humiliation.

Between 1945 and 1950, there was no political force inside or outside Vietnam that had the means to resolve the situation. France was too weak. China was about to enter a civil war. The Vietnamese communists were beset by a bankrupt and starving population. Neither the Soviet Union nor China provided any aid until 1950. The Americans lacked the will to intervene with more effort than anyone else.

War between the French and Vietnamese broke out in Hanoi and Haiphone in Nov. 1946 in which 6,000 Vietnamese were killed by a French naval bombardment. This led to the Viet Minh launching the opening phase of a classic guerrilla war that lasted 30 yeaars for control of Vietnam.

In May 1954, the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu and all of their 16,000 troops were killed or captured (hundreds of Algerian prostitutes were also captured). The defeat was an acute shock to the French and it marked the end of the First Indo-China war and ended the French effort to hold on to their colonies.

A ceasefire was arranged at Geneva in 1954. Vietnam was partitioned at the 17th parallel.It seems that both the Soviet Union and China put pressure on Ho Chi Minh to accept this demarcation. This was to be a provisional arrangement for two years after which a national referendum was to be held in 1956 to determine the terms of reunification. This was an advantage for the communist north as they had greater numbers than the South (under Emperor Bao Dai and Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem). Not surprisingly, neither South Vietnam nor the United States signed this document. But it did the French an honourable way out of North Vietnam.

[Laan Yaa Mo]

And a bit more information, including some reference, but not much, to the media.

From 1954 to 1963, the U.S.A. tried to construct an independent non-Communist government in South Vietnam to be an effective counterweight to the communists in the North. In 1954, the Americans had a deep fear of China from the Korean War experience. The American President, Eisenhower, could not understand Vietnamese nationalism and the desire to lead their country. He forgot the defence of the Alamo. In the spring of 1954, American academics conceived of the 'Domino theory' that is, if one state falls to communism, they all fall. It was thought that China would expand into Southeast Asia, but it was a myth, one believed even by American liberals.

This was the beginning of an ambitious project by culturally self-centred Americans to change Asian nations to conform to the American way. In 1956, Wesley Fishel, assistant professor at Michigan State University, was sent to supply Diem with a modern constitution, police force, schools and a bureaucracy. The Americans believed that they could transfer their own
institutions to Monsoon Asia esily and it really looked like it would work for awhile.

The chief difficulty was that Diem and his family were isolated by their wealth and Catholic religion from most of the South's population. The Americans thought that Diem's Catholicism was a great asset, but they overlooked the fact that this was a Buddhist and Confucian country.

The two chief sponsors of Diem were the CIA and Cardinal Spellman, an arch conservative. Spellman used money from the diocese to support Catholic migration from North to South Vietnam. Major-General Edward Lansdale was the CIA's man on the spot and you can read about him in Graham Greene, The Quiet American, the Ugly American. Diem's chief American adviser claims to know how to rule Vietnam better than Diem. But Diem betrayed the naive American faith that the Vietnamese were culturally and historically virgin.

Diem wanted to be an updated Confucian emperor which meant he would be intolerant of opposition since there was no loyal opposition in a Confucain society. In the event, Diem was not an American puppet, he triumphed over the puppeteers. Diem rebuilt South Vietnam in his own way.

In mid-1963, serious trouble developed when southern troops moved against a Buddhist demonstration and eight of the Buddhists set themselves on fire in protest, which was shown in the western media. The American romance with Diem ended at this point. On 20 October, Henry Cabot Lodge, the American Ambassador to South Vietnam, let it be known that the Americans wanted Diem replaced. Diem was slain on l Nov. in a coup led by Big Minh. There were nine successive governments in Saigon between then and June 1965. These governments failed to give the political stability that was needed to win the war.

Samuel Huntington, a political scientist at Harvard University, exalted the overwhelming importance of political organisation in history. His goal was political stability. South Vietnam became Huntington's laboratory for forms of political institutionalisation to expand political participation, and to ostracize the communists. It was an attempt to get around the problem of Vietnamese nationalism. Huntington failed to see that the fate of political institutions is determined by the people who run the institutions and their traditions. Reform becomes a substitute for revolution.

This is a remarkable form of empire building. Academics were part of the Vietnamization process. It was a utopian vision that ignored that it was impossible to change peacefully a society in which there was no agreement on political or social goals. Therefore, it led to a civil war. Even the United States had not undergone a peaceful transition from a pre-modern to a modern culture without a revolution, and a civil war. The South Vietnamese hated instability, but instability was the norm.

President Johnson had liked Huntington's idea. In February 1966, before the television cameras, Johnson had visited Vietnam, and he lectured Vietnamese political elites on democracy in the ricefields. It was a partial resurrection of village politics. Johnson called it the 'chief coonskin on the wall'. The press, at this time, was promoting the success of the American involvement in Vietnam.

In 1968 the bottom of the abyss was reached for U.S. involvement in Vietnam. There had been a surprise attack on China in 1789 during Tet. The Tet offensive followed an American progress report that everything was under control. During the Tet offensive television showed the American Embassy in Saigon briefly occuppied by the communists. To the Vietnamese, President Johnson and the Americans were losing the Mandate of Heaven. The most significant effect of Tet was that the media supposedly exposed the utter bankruptcy of Johnson's claim that the Americans were winning the war.

As a result, the U.S. changed their objectives: no more troops were to be committed to Vietnam, the bombing of North Vietnam was to be discontinued, President Johnson withdrew from the Presidential race and the American anti-war movement grew. The American military wanted to invade the north and close the port of Haiphong in response to the Tet offensive, but the CIA said that U.S. troops in the north would not change anything since the South Vietnamese army was incapable of pacifying the countryside.

Peace talks with North Vietnam were proposed. The peace talks began in 1968 and were a prelude to the communist victory in 1975. This was a grim story in which self-interest and vanity combined with sophisticated weapons.

[aznyron]

to matter what political party you are just remember this if your not willing to fight or send your children to fight then it wrong for you to send any one else childeren to go and fight.
we have 365 members of congress 100 US Senators 50 Governors I only know of one senator who son is a marine serving in iraq & that U.S Senator Webb from Virginia
when i was a young man of 18 every body went no matter who your father & mother was
it was called the draft if you did not wanted to get drafted then you enlisted in the reserves or a branch of service you were attracted to Vietnam war changed things about the draft and only poor white kids as well as blacks & hispanics went to Vietnam some thing is wrong with that picture
and you ask why kids ran off to canada or demostrated against the war just remember the only people who benefit from war are the auto makers oil co. defense contractors and people like douglas aircraft & lockeed I never saw a poor person make money on the war

[gulfman]

For a general and factual background on Vietnam from 1945 to 1975 I suggest "The 10,000 Day War" by Michael MacLear.