Excellent reading...too bad leftists never learn. B
http://www.frontpag <http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=E700B64D-6B0B-422E-A903 -3CF806B38F2A> emag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=E700B64D-6B0B-422E-A903-3CF806B38F2A Forty Years of the Tet Offensive By David Warren Ottawa Citizen | Monday, February 04, 2008 Breaking the negotiated annual truce, for surprise, Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regulars launched the Tet Offensive, in the night of 30/31 January 1968, named for the Vietnamese lunar new year. This campaign continued in various forms through September of that year, ending in total military defeat, for the aggressors. And a brilliant propaganda victory, for the same. Thinking back on the Vietnam War this last week. And while I was doing so, a young leftist friend wrote to me, on an entirely unrelated topic, taunting with a remark about 2008 being, "The last year of the American Empire" -- as if it started and ended with George W. Bush. He does not seem interested in the question: By whose Empire will that vacuum be filled? My friend does not even think of himself as a leftist, only as a person with an "open mind." We agree on that, but define "open" differently, for to my mind, a skull without a brain inside is completely open. The more brain, or more precisely, the more brain used, the more resistance it can offer to the importation of nonsense. Forty years have now gone by, which one might figuratively characterize as the forty years of the Tet Offensive, against Western Civ. The West has done fairly well in the field: we have still not lost a purely military encounter with any of the enemies of the West. Going back farther, the French didn't even lose their battles in Algeria. Rather, Charles de Gaulle decided they were not worth fighting. The Tet Offensive was a desperate ploy by the Communist enemy in Vietnam. Tens of thousands of his troops were flung simultaneously at more than 100 South Vietnamese towns, and into the heart of Saigon. The Communists announced a general uprising, but that did not occur. The tide was actually turned within a few days by the U.S. and South Vietnamese armies. As they re-took town after town, they discovered massacres the Communists had committed while in possession. The enemy's real object had been to decapitate a whole society. My friend, Uwe Siemon-Netto, a German Lutheran pastor and also life-long journalist, was there as a reporter. Entering Hué as the smoke was clearing: "I made my way to university apartments to obtain news about friends of mine, German professors at the medical school. I learned that their names had been on lists containing some 1,800 Hué residents singled out for liquidation. "Six weeks later the bodies of doctors Alois Altekoester, Raimund Discher, Horst-Guenther Krainick, and Krainick's wife, Elisabeth, were found in shallow graves they had been made to dig for themselves. "Then, enormous mass graves of women and children were found. Most had been clubbed to death, some buried alive; you could tell from the beautifully manicured hands of women who had tried to claw out of their burial place. "As we stood at one such site, Washington Post correspondent Peter Braestrup asked an American TV cameraman, 'Why don't you film this?' He answered, 'I am not here to spread anti-communist propaganda'." The Tet Offensive ended not only in a huge allied victory in the field -- some 45,000 of the Communist soldiers had been killed, and their infrastructure destroyed. It was victory after an event that showed sceptical South Vietnamese, and should have shown the world, the nature of the enemy our allies were fighting. Walter Cronkite, the famous news anchor of CBS, led the American media reaction. After a very brief visit to Saigon, in which he got himself filmed wearing flak jackets, he returned to the United States, declaring before his huge prime time audience: "It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honourable people who have lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could." The media turned a tremendous victory into a tremendous defeat. Yet seven more years would pass until an America, which had by then abandoned Vietnam, and a Congress, which had cut off military supplies to the South Vietnamese, watched the helicopters removing America's last faithful servants from a roof in Saigon's old embassy compound. The South Vietnamese Army had surrendered, to another Tet Offensive, as it ran out of ammunition. We have seen this "Vietnam syndrome" writ large, through the intervening years. We see it today in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Romans, too, had a facility for winning ground battles. Comments Posted: The Question About Tet - Pellet_Man 2/4/2008 3:01 PM is why didn't the admin and the anti-com folks press their case, using the mass executions as evidence? RE: The Question About Tet - Dennis39 2/4/2008 6:37 PM Perhaps you are revealing your to-young-to-know age. Back then, there was no cable television, internet, and radio talk shows. There were basically three television networks and the print media. Then, as now, these media outlets were agenda driven, and the agenda they were driving was not pro-American victory in Viet Nam. Did you read the entire article, including the TV cameraman who was quoted as not being there for anti-Communist purposes. I can assure you that if there had been an alleged American mass executin he would have filmed it and it would have made it on American TV. With any good luck, television readers and hacks like Cronkite will die as quickly as is possible. The world, or at least this country, will be a better place without them. RE: The Question About Tet-An Answer For You - MadMax 2/4/2008 8:19 PM Several reasons about why the mainstream media failed to adequately report the extent of the communist political genocide during the Tet Offensive 1968. 1. It took months of digging to uncover anywhere between 5,000 - 8,000 bodies (many were found in villages on the outskirts of Hue - as Jim Minarik, a Marine told me). I have a list of over 3,000 people specifically identified as having been killed in Hue (which included their age and home address. I also have "List of Civil Servants, Cadres & Civilians of the Republic of Viet Nam Abducted by the Communists Since 1954" , published by the So. Vietnam Govt on March 24, 1973, over 2 inches thick). 2. The media moved on to the Battle of Khe Sanh(which they basically misreported, esp. CBS). 3. Most newspapers did not run photos of the mass graves that were found in and around Hue. The So. Vietnamese did show them in their publications. 4. The US media was not going to cooperate with the new Nixon Administration by showing that Tet was an Allied victory of major importance, and that the Communists were genocidal in their occupation policies and actions (a forerunner of what would happen in Cambodia, Laos, and So. Vietnam in 1975 - i.e. "hit lists") 5. Uew Simen-Netto, who I met and talked with, told us that the newspapers, both in the US and Europe "got tired of showing atrocity photos" and simply stopped doing it. When my compendium study "The Human Cost of Communist in Vietnam", 1972, Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, Sen. Judiciary Committee, came out in Feb. 1972, the Wash. Post did NOT call me about it. Nor did the Wash. Star, the NY Times, or any other major publication. I don't think that they contacted Dave Martin, SISS Research Analyst, who helped me put the study together. Only one or two conservative columnists reported on the study, yet it remains today the single most important congressional work on this subject during the war (There were two correlary hearings in this series (Testimony of D. Gareth Porter, the Hanoi apologist, "The Myth of the Bloodbath in Vietnam", and "The Human Cost of Communism in Vietnam, II," 1972, testimony of Daniel Teodoru, who ripped Porter a new one and exposed his deliberate propagandizing in order to cover up for Hanoi's deliberate policies of political genocide). Hope this answers your question. If there had been the internet at that time, I'm sure that the whole world would have known about the Hue massacres in record time. PS Friends of mine were still finding wire-bound bones in 1970 on their trip up to Hue. I could't get there because a typhoon wiped out the airstrips during the time I was scheduled to be there. Spreading propaganda - SFLBIB 2/4/2008 1:08 PM 'I am not here to spread anti-communist propaganda' So what propaganda was he there to spread? Democrat Media made the Tet Offensive work - Max47 2/4/2008 9:58 AM And, the Democrat Media is still at work lying for the Democrat Party. Mexico's Tet Offensive - Old Atlantic 2/4/2008 8:48 AM is going on still. We have the same defeatist response. The MSM leads the way to surrender. The same to Muslim immigration in Europe. . <http://geo.yahoo.com/serv?s=97359714/grpId=2420737/grpspId=1705303292/msgId =135594/stime=1202180471/nc1=3848614/nc2=4507179/nc3=4990217> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? 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