Ah again a thread trying to uphold the American Dolchstoss legend...
What's MSM?
Ah again a thread trying to uphold the American Dolchstoss legend...
This is like saying that Stalingrad was a defeat for the USSR because the city was destroyed.
What if Walter Cronkite were a bit more restrained and tactful in his editorial did not declare the Vietnam war as altogether lost?
Stalingrad broke the myth of Wehrmacht invincibility, little did it matter that it was achieved at the cost of a destroyed city and huge Soviet losses. Same with Tet: the VC were considered expendable by the North Vietnamese leadership, and expended they were in order to break the myth of American invincibility.At Stalingrad, the German Sixth Army was gutted and captured.
During Tet, the Viet Cong were gutted.
Susano is in fact quite right. There are perfectly valid and relevant similarities between the original Dolchstoss legend, and its more recent incarnation in post-Vietnam America.Playing Godwin games won't win you the argument.
What grounds did Cronkite have to declare the war lost?
Okay, so all the pronouncements about "the light at the end of the tunnel" may not have been accurate. That does not make the fall of South Vietnam inevitable.
Even deprived of supplies and support while the Soviets poured equipment into North Vietnam and even with treachery by Nixon and Kissinger Saigon lasted until 1975.
Magniac, yes! Instead of complaining about one journalist's one statement, only after large scale and deliberate dishonesty by LBJ and the Pentagon, ask people upset about Cronkite what they think of the real and actual decisions by Nixon to sell out an ally.
Uh, I never accused him of lying, he was simply giving his humble and potentially fallible opinion. I'm sure even you would know that not really knowing what you're talking about and lying are two different things.Why would the most trustworthy and honest newsman in the country lie? Unlike his peers, he didn't have much of a track record of fibbing.
Oh, and is this an actual 'declaration' of defeat?
MP, you're not one of these hit-and-run people who just put up a link to someone else's argument (unlike the above poster I got stuck into). Tell us why you think Cronkite was a defeatist, and not just a realist repeating what many in America had already decided at that point--that the 'cost benefits' of continuing to engage the communists in South Vietnam were not in the United States' favour, and that invading North Vietnam could trigger MAD.
That's it? I was under the impression what he said was a lot more blatant.
A lot of Vietnam vets disliked Cronkite and that seems awfully tame to provoke such disdain.
They had a lot of rage that needed a focus. Its a lot easier for some to claim the "MSM" stabbed us in the back, than to admit that 'we were wasted in a pointless, poorly thought out, strategically irrelevant sideshow to the Cold War'.