Thus, most observers believed that Tet cost somewhere between one and two thousand American dead. The US public cared little that its soldiers were killing the enemy at unheard-of ratios of 30 and 40 for each GI lost. see Historian Victor David Hansen Ho Chi Minh knew that even though he lost 30-40 soldiers to every 1 of ours it did not matter because he was winning the War of Public Opinion in the USA because of Walter Cronkite, Media who was slanting the news to confirm their opinions, help achieve their desire to avoid war at all cost including the loss of the America's Self Confidence. Boy he started a Trend that continues in the Main Stream Media of Today and has destroyed Journalism the so called Fourth Estate by our Founding Fathers! Ho Chi Minh, having failed to defeat the South Vietnamese militarily is now using another weapon, one as cleverly conceived as the poison tipped bamboo spikes his men plant underfoot for the unwary enemy. He plans to force a halt in American bombing by (a) mobilizing pressure on the United States from the non-Communist world and by (b) creating pressures on President Johnson within this country. The New York Times' Harrison Salisbury is Ho's chosen weapon. Soviet diplomats in Washington appear to think that Salisbury 's reports of death and injury to civilians and destruction of non-military targets could do the trick." Alongside mainstream journalists from respected media outlets were paid propagandists. Wilfred Burchett of the National Guardian used his access for maximum effect. Unknown at the time were that: Burchett had assisted the communist North Koreans with their interrogations of Australian, U.S., and U.K. prisoners of war during the Korean War (from eyewitness testimony during the Jack Kane libel trial in Australia) and that he had been on the Soviet KGB payroll (KGB defector Yuri Krotkov in testimony to the U.S. Senate). The Communist public opinion strategy against the United States was a natural extension of their strategy against the French. Truong Chinh (Secretary General of the Lao Dong Communist) Party and President of the Marxist Study Group) describes how to fight the French "concerning our foreign policy, we must isolate the enemy, win more friends. We must act so the French people will actively support us. The French people and soldiers should oppose the war by every means: oppose sending troops to Indochina , they should demand peaceful negotiations with the Ho Chi Minh government. The political situation in France is confused. The antiwar movement has been launched, the general Confederation of Labour organized many demonstrations. In the future, the antiwar movement in France will grow extensively." When employing propaganda against the United States , the communists in Hanoi executed a very similar strategy to the one they had used against the French. While Americans viewed the press mainly as a vehicle for informing the public with the objective truth, North Vietnamese had a very different view of the function of the press. Through the writings of Vladmir Lenin, they saw the press purely as a political instrument. Lenin described the press as the "most important tool, the sharpest weapon," it is used to educate and agitate the people and give them the correct outlook. The North Vietnamese understood the press to be a powerful force for spreading ideas and gave no credence to the concept of an objective press. Lenin saw the press as inherently biased and having only one valid function, that of spreading the ideas of Communism to the people. The Communists saw the press as a weapon, and that is precisely how they used it. They used the media and demonstrations in an integrated information strategy. Their strategy paralleled Lenin's writing on the need for both propaganda and agitation. He described propaganda as the written word and agitation as the living word. Ho Chi Minh was trained in Marxism-Leninism in France and the Soviet Union . While working in Paris after the First World War, he joined the French Socialist Party and began his study of socialism. Ho's patriotism fueled his initial attraction to Communism. He read Lenin's "Thesis on the National and Colonial Questions" and took from it the antipathy Lenin had for the colonial system at the time. Later, he spent time in the Soviet Union and China undergoing training and organizing Vietnamese exiles. Ho Chi Minh's education included the Marxist-Leninist theories concerning the value and nature of the press, news, propaganda and agitation. Ho's training prepared him to develop a cohesive press, propaganda, and agitation strategy for the war against the United States . Hanoi was waging information warfare long before the West popularized the term. His skillful exploitation of the information sphere during the Vietnam War should serve as a lesson tous today. Understanding Vietnamese Success Vietnamese communist's information warfare strategy against the United States was successful for three reasons. First, the communist's strategy in the United States depended upon an active, robust community of supporters in America willing to act as their proxies. The Wall Street Journal illustrated the importance of this movement in an interview with Bui Tin, a Colonel on the North Vietnamese Army General Staff, published 03 August 1995. Mr. Tin was asked if the American antiwar movement was important to Hanoi 's victory. Mr. Tin responded "It was essential to our strategy. Support of the war from our rear was completely secure while the American rear was vulnerable. Second, the Communist strategy put the United States on the horns of a dilemma. Continue to allow the Vietnamese Communists to use the First Amendment guarantees in the US Constitution as an enabling agent for their information war, or shut down their American campaign and violate the values we hold dear in the process. Third, the Communist campaign was successful because they were the only ones fighting it. While Americans counted bodies, compared forces, and arrogantly concluded we could not lose the war, the Vietnamese had a wider view of the war. They saw the American public's will as a center of gravity, and they attacked it relentlessly. John Podhoretz brilliantly describes Walter Cronkite's effect on America and shows when the Fourth Estate became the Fifth Column for Secularism, Liberalism and what Marcus Tullius Cicero an Ancient Roman Lawyer, Writer, Scholar, Orator and Statesman, 106 BC-43 BC called the Enemy within "The enemy is within the gates; it is with our own luxury, our own folly, our own criminality that we have to contend"The enemy is within the gates; it is with our own luxury, our own folly, our own criminality that we have to contend" "A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague." Some in the MSM are blatantly the Enemy Within and some like better described as Vladimir Lenin's Useful Idiots! Cronkite was a key figure in many ways, but foremost among them, perhaps, was the fact that he cleared the way for the mainstream media and the Establishment to join what Lionel Trilling called "the adversary culture." Cronkite, the gravelly voice of accepted American wisdom, whose comportment suggested he kept his money in bonds and would never even have considered exceeding the speed limit, devastated President Lyndon Johnson in the wake of the 1968 Tet Offensive by declaring that the United States "was mired in stalemate" in Vietnam—when Johnson knew that Tet had been a military triumph. This on-air editorial, spoken during the most-watched newscast in the country when that meant 30 million people were watching (as opposed to 7 million today, with the nation having added more than 100 million in population), was a transformational moment in American history. "If I've lost Cronkite," Johnson was reputed to have said, "I've lost middle America," and shortly thereafter he announced he would not run for reelection. This was a mark of Johnson's own poor political instincts—a president who thought a rich and powerful anchorman living the high life in New York city was the voice of the silent majority was a man out of touch with reality—but it was a leading indicator of how the media were changing. Cronkite didn't know what he was talking about when it came to Tet, as the late Peter Braestrup demonstrated in his colossal expose of the scandalous media coverage of the battle, Big Story. But he knew that among the people who mattered to him, and who were the leading edge of ideological fashion, Tet was a failure because the war in Vietnam was bad, and he took to the airwaves to say so. Indeed McNamara & US Military Generals, JFK and President Johnson bear a great great burden for the US debacle in Nam! But Cronkite's opinions & videos demoralized the USA! His views polarized Americans against this War & resulted in our loss of commitment 2 help our boys win the Vietnam War! See Debbie Schlussel's post and this opinion that explains how this venerated Man hurt USA RIP Walter Cronkite but on the sad day of your passing the USA must Know how you helped under,mine the Fourth Estate which continues in our present day and age. Iraq would have been another Nam if not for New Media and our amazing American Citizen Soldier who fights reluctantly and with one hand tied behind his back because are Politicians are weak, leftist and neutered by the Media! docFXY |
