On Fri, 28 Feb 2003 01:46:53 +00, Bastiaan Edelman, PA3FFZ wrote: > On Thu, 20 Feb 2003 15:10:23 -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>> On Thu, 20 Feb 2003 Casper Gielen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> <snip> <snip> > The first casualty of war is the thruth... would be nice to have some > more references on Caspers story. > Yesterday night television showed some faint evidence that the story: > "Iraqi troups murdering babies in a hospital at the invasion of Kuwait". > This was a fake by the Kuwaity government who ordered a New York > advertising firm to make a TV-spot showing the badness of Sadam. > If the television chanel is right or wrong? I can not check that. In waging war as well as in conducting business as usual, the truth will always suffer. It doesn't matter whether the propaganda showed staged events or whether it was real film footage of events that actually happened. It is not the purpose of propaganda to present the truth. The only purpose of propaganda is to present information designed to influence your opinions, your attitudes, and your behavior in favor of the parties behind the propaganda machine. If the propaganda influences you in the way it is intended to do, the propaganda is good. Normal advertising is an example of propaganda. If it influences you to buy the product, the advertising is good, even if I could successfully prove to you later that the product you bought is greatly inferior to the competitor's product which was ridiculed in the staged demonstration you saw in the advertising video. Propaganda does not need to appeal to intelligent people in order to be effective. Just look at all the millions of people who are buying the Micro$oft Butterfly. From the standpoint of trying to knock out its major competitor, is Micro$oft doing anything wrong by promoting the Butterfly? > Anyway... wars often start with a lie. The North Vietnamese did not > attack an American Navy vessel. This story started the Vietnam war. > History books are filled with lies... detected many years after the wars > are over. The story did not start the Vietmam war. It just gave rise to the escalation of the war. The Vietnam War started with the Viet Minh uprising to kick out the French colonialists. The French lost. Then the country was divided between north and south. Some accords were written and agreed to. The US signed on to the accords and pledged to help protect the sovereignty of South Vietnam. A revolutionary movement arose within South Vietnam. The revolutionaries called themselves the Viet Cong. The Viet Cong were supported by North Vietnam. South Vietnam asked the US to for military assistance. The US sent money and military equipment. Also they sent a few troops which were to serve only in an advisory capacity. Gradually the struggle against the VC escalated and more and more military equipment and US troops were sent. They started serving also in combat. Then North Vietnam contributed their troops to the conflict to support the VC. The story about the North Vietnamese patrol boats attacking a US naval vessel in the Gulf of Tonkin might have been true. It might have been just partially true, or it might have been pure fabrication. The story of the attack was used as a pretext to justify the passing of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized the president, then LBJ, to bomb North Vietnam. Even without such a story they would probably come up with some kind of self-defense justification for bombing North Vietnam. The Vietnam War was supposed to be just a small scale operation to crush a relatively insignificant and upstart guerrilla movement, but it eventually turned out to become a major war and a really nasty affair. Sam Heywood -- This mail was written by user of The Arachne Browser: http://browser.arachne.cz/
