Advocating genocide/mass murder, by, for instance suggesting that the U.S. path to victory in Vietnam was to murder 80% of the population, is a Banning Offense.
To Coventry with you.
US Victory in Vietnam
- Thread starter Fulton 44
- Start date
To Coventry with you.
This reminds me of another of my pet tropes (along with super-populated Frostpunk Alaska, Cowboys, etc): a chance for a President William Westmoreland. If there was a snowball's chance of Vietnam being winnable with Westmoreland.
In any event, this C-SPAN video may be helpful to the discussion. The thesis of the author is that failure in Vietnam was primarily due to Westmoreland, and that the better prosecution of the War under Abrams was too little, too late, and would have been beneficial in 1964/1965 but not by that later point.
www.c-span.org
In any event, this C-SPAN video may be helpful to the discussion. The thesis of the author is that failure in Vietnam was primarily due to Westmoreland, and that the better prosecution of the War under Abrams was too little, too late, and would have been beneficial in 1964/1965 but not by that later point.
<em>Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam</em>
Military historian Lewis Sorley recouneds the career of General William Westmorland, who led American forces in the Vietnam War from 1964-1968. Mr. Sorley recounted General Westmorland's service prior to Vietnam, from his participation in World War II and the Korean War to his appointment as...
www.c-span.org
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marathag
Banned
...When the Press turned against the War completely
The Black Eye from the Embassy overshadowed the asskicking that otherwise went on, and hardly a peep about the thousands killed in the Hue massacre by Communist Death Squads.
Like Solzhenitsyn called out the Big Three News, ABC,CBS and NBC, for having little on air for it, they denied it, Embassy was the 'Big Story' along with My Lai
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That would be a particularly specialised point in that masters thesis typescript for Solly and Pike to be simultaneously the relevant to cite sources. Western press don’t have a great record at handling mass or political deaths. Regardless of who does them to whom. They just don’t like the topic. US, UK, French, Bonn Republic.
Historians do okay but there’s a strain of theoretical social scientists who were funded to lose it to the braineater. And I’m not talking Democide, I’m talking the mass killing people.
And ink blot won’t work because the VWP were better at political murder than the CIA, ARVN or US forces. Achieved desired effects.
1968 demonstrates that the US as a system is vulnerable to general offensives.
1972 and 1975 demonstrate that the VWP is capable of rolling general offensives.
Historians do okay but there’s a strain of theoretical social scientists who were funded to lose it to the braineater. And I’m not talking Democide, I’m talking the mass killing people.
And ink blot won’t work because the VWP were better at political murder than the CIA, ARVN or US forces. Achieved desired effects.
1968 demonstrates that the US as a system is vulnerable to general offensives.
1972 and 1975 demonstrate that the VWP is capable of rolling general offensives.
The press opinion on the war lagged behind public sentiment concerning the war; the public opinion shifted far earlier than the media treatment of the war. The myth is that it was the other way around.
The Columbia History of the Vietnam War
America's experience in Vietnam continues to figure prominently in debates over strategy and defense and within the discourse on the identity of the United States as a nation. Through fifteen essays rooted in recent scholarship, The Columbia History of the Vietnam War is a chronological and...
books.google.com
marathag
Banned
The press opinion on the war lagged behind public sentiment concerning the war; the public opinion shifted far earlier than the media treatment of the war. The myth is that it was the other way around.
The Columbia History of the Vietnam War
America's experience in Vietnam continues to figure prominently in debates over strategy and defense and within the discourse on the identity of the United States as a nation. Through fifteen essays rooted in recent scholarship, The Columbia History of the Vietnam War is a chronological and...books.google.com
Just before Tet
CI= Column Inch
And that's just Time
The Myth of the Media's Role in Vietnam
Of the many myths that mushroomed from the carnage of the Vietnam War perhaps none is more specious than the fable about how a bold, aggressive mainstream media turned America against the
web.archive.org
Page 110
What lost public support for Vietnam was not the media. It was the average American living with the war, seeing it, and feeling it. It was knowing someone who died or came back severely injured. And it was especially bad because of Tet, because the government line was that the enemy was crippled and on the verge of defeat, yet that massive attack occurred which completely contradicted the government message. Even if Tet crippled the Viet Cong, and regardless of the ARVN and US beating back the attack, it demonstrated a massive gap between the line the military and Johnson administration were espousing and the reality on the ground. The state of the Viet Cong that the government was selling to the American people was not one capable of anything like Tet.
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Are we really using a noted anticommunist to argue that Vietnam war coverage was skewed towards the communists?
Well it’s an uncited typescript probably MA thesis probably from the 1970s citing Solly in passing for colour. I’m not sure that its theory of press determined public sentiment is correct or even tenable. Usually we claim that the working class and bourgeoisie are somewhat capable of independent and various political thought.
Also Solly’s anti communism isn’t what makes him uncitable: it is that he’s a poet, not a historian or media analyst.
This is like citing a linguist on America’s air bombardment as genocide.
yours,
Sam R.
(I have previously been corrected on “At war with Asia’s” citation variety but I *do* remember a Noam text published as ‘scholarly’ which exclusively relied on _Christian Science Monitor_ for its claims of fact.)
marathag
Banned
It's a followup on this
for more background, and terrible OCR
WERE THE HUE MASSACRES HEAVIl.Y REPORTED, AS SEV AREID CLAIMS? Seva.reld's rebuttal of Solzhenitsyn was of particular interest to AIM because it raised the much neglected question of how the American news media. had reported the Hue m.assa.cres. Seva.reid said they were heavily reported and this meant that Solzhenitsyn had simply been careless with his facts in stating the contrary. Who is right. Sevareld or Solzhenitsyn? On the very evening that Mr. Sevareid broadcast his rebuttal of Solzhenitsyn, AIM's chairman, Reed J. Irvine, sent a letter to Eric Sevareld, describing what his clipping file on Vietnam revealed a.bout the reporting of the Hue massacres. Here a.re some excerpts from Mr. Irvine's letter: I have checked my clipping files on Viet- nam for evidence of this heavy reporting of the Hue massacres. I am sorry to say that I cannot find it. The first clipping I find on the massacre was in The New York Times of February 12, 1968. The Times devoted all of 5-column inches on page one to a charge by the mayor of Hue that the enemy had executed 300 South Vietnamese civllia.ns and burled them 1n a common grave. On May 1, 1968, The Times had another page one story headed: "U.S. Mission Says Enemy Slaughtered 1,000 Hue Civilians." The story was given 4-column inches on page one and 19.5 column inches on the inside. The same day, The Washington Post put this story on page 22, giving it 11-column inches. The Post did follow this with a short, 150- word editrial on May 2 which condemned the slaughter. I could find no editorial com- ment 1n The New York Times. Neither of these papers carried any photos of the mass graves, corpses or coffins. The next story I find on this subject was published in The Washington Post over a year and a half later, on December 7, 1969. In fact. The Post had two stories on the sub- ject that day, one from Hue. saying that 2,750 bodies had been discovered so far, and the other from Hong Kong reporting on Douglas Pike's analysis of the massacre. While I may have missed something in be- tween, my file gives no indication that the Hue m:issacre story was subject to anything that could reasonably be called "heavy" re- porting. On the contrary, I would consider it one of the most under-reported stories of the decade .... Of course, you may consider two front page stories 1n The New York Times "heavy" coverage, but I suggest that you contra.st this with the coverage The Times gave to the My Lai massacre, an atrocity which did not begin to compare with the Hue butchery. This story broke in No- vember 1969. The New York Times Index for 1969 alone contains 8~ pages of entries (over 50 entries per page) on My Lal plus one page of photos. It ls remarkable that Solzhenitsyn, lack- ing access to the American press, perceived so accurately the disproportion 1n the atten- tion devoted to the massacre at Hue and that at My Lai, while you, with all the resources at your disposal, should have failed to note this glaring disparity. Surely on this point you owe Solzhenitsyn an apology and your audience a. correction.
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRECB-1973-pt30/pdf/GPO-CRECB-1973-pt30-5-2.pdf page 40
Aww, no-one would ever do that..
Support for the war fell apart because the American public correctly saw that - given the strategy of search and destroy - there would be no end point. The North Vietnamese could simply keep sending more troops South, take a break from time to time to regroup and then fight at times and places of their choosing.
Cutting the trail would have led to some traditional set piece battles between the North Vietnamese Army and the US Army with low civilian casualties. The Administration could put up a map and we could see how we were doing. Our superior firepower would carry the day.
As long as the Ho Chi Minh trail was wide open, the war could last a theoretically infinite amount of time.
Cutting the trail would have led to some traditional set piece battles between the North Vietnamese Army and the US Army with low civilian casualties. The Administration could put up a map and we could see how we were doing. Our superior firepower would carry the day.
As long as the Ho Chi Minh trail was wide open, the war could last a theoretically infinite amount of time.
Clear and Hold was certainly part of an effective strategy. But I think that there was an institutional bias in favor of "mobility" especially because of the military's desire to use its latest equipment and the mindset that the failure of the Maginot Line proved that positional warfare was obsolete. In fact, positional warfare is very relevant when facing a dispersed insurgency. Your basic problem is that an insurgency is generally too dispersed for your superiority in the air and your firepower edge to carry the day. But if you contest a key position which they cannot afford to lose then they will be forced to concentrate their forces and provide a target for your firepower. Thus, blocking the Ho Chi Minh trail would have forced the North Vietnamese attack in large groups in order to attempt to break through and that would give us the opportunity to blow them apart.
The maritime route could be cut off using our naval superiority plus a combination of bribes and threats aimed at the Cambodians. The ARVN is a dribble compared to the Ho Chi Minh trail. Cutting the trail and implementing clear and hold would have put the enemy on the horns of a dilemma - 1. try to break through the barriers to the trail leading them to be exposed to our fire power, 2. fight against areas already cleared with the very limited resources available to them after the trail is closed, and 3. do neither and watch South Vietnam gradually slip away from them.
Inkblot was a good strategy for the areas of the South, but had to be paired with a growth in an effective South Vietnamese paramilitary force. They did have one, but it was a joke because the US didn't understand its importance. For the areas closer to bordering states where you had larger guerilla and conventional formations moving in and out that can curb stomp paramilitaries a more conventional strategy was needed. It was a hybrid war after all.
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If the United States won the Vietnam War South Vietnam would probably be one of the Tiger economies of Asia seeing massive economic growth in the 80s and 90s.
one is necessarily burdened by this not happening in real life and not for lack of trying
the chief issue being political, which returns us to PRG/NFL efficacy which block the trail discourses ignore.