My old friend Ed continues to provide me fodder for blog posting. Recently Ed sent me an email pointing out how it was the fault of the press that we lost the war in Vietnam. Ed writes:
General Giap was a brilliant, highly respected leader of the North Vietnam military. The following quote is from his memoirs currently found in the Vietnam war memorial in Hanoi:
“What we still don’t understand is why you Americans stopped the bombing of Hanoi. You had us on the ropes. If you had pressed us a little harder, just for another day or two, we were ready to surrender! It was the same at the battles of TET. You defeated us! We knew it, and we thought you knew it. But we were elated to notice your media was definitely helping us. They were causing more disruption in America than we could in the battlefields. We were ready to surrender. You had won!”
General Giap has published his memoirs and confirmed what most Americans knew. The Vietnam war was not lost in Vietnam — it was lost at home. The exact same slippery slope, sponsored by the US media, is currently well underway. It exposes the enormous power of a biased media to cut out the heart and will of the American public.
A truism worthy of note: Do not fear the enemy, for they can take only your life. Fear the media far more, for they will destroy your honour.
Now don’t get me wrong there are all kinds of reasons to cast doubt on job the media is doing for this country but why do it in such a way that can be so easily disproved? And beyond that, what purpose does it serve to once again try to rewrite history?
Ed’s email certainly threw me for a loop. The Vietnam war has been one of my areas of interest for a long time. I’ve read a few books on the subject and felt I was fairly well informed on the issue. Ed’s email took me by surprise. What General Giap had said in Ed’s quote did not comport with anything I had ever read about Vietnam. In fact, the quote stood out as really not making any sense at all.
I was sitting in the bath tub and enjoying the hot hot water and thinking about the implications of what Giap had to say in Ed’s quote. I then began to wonder, did Giap mean that if we had continued to bomb North Vietnam the communist regime there would surrender and abdicate? Or, did Giap’s quote mean that North Vietnam would acquiesce to our conditions for peace? And what terms of peace are we talking about those of 1970 or 1973? Since Ed’s email did not provide any sourcing for his quotes I was wondering why I had never heard of General Giap’s Memoirs. So thanks to Google I took Ed’s quote and put the whole thing in and goggled it. Viola, and to my surprise here is what turned up:
Comments: Circulating in various forms since the 1990s, this alleged statement by General Vo Nguyen Giap of North Vietnam is not authentic, has never been authentic, nor will any amount of mindless repetition will make it so.
It surfaced most recently in an anonymous forwarded email (example above) composed in December 2007, just days after being repeated on Rush Limbaugh’s website, which cited an October 3, 2007 NewsMax.com column by Geoff Metcalf. The latter attributes the passage to “[Giap's] memoirs currently found in the Vietnam War memorial in Hanoi.”
But not only that I went a little further, not only is what Newsmax and Rush Limbaugh are trying to push inaccurate and a distortion of history it is the exact opposite of what General Giap actually did say in his memoirs. What this amounts to is an outright lie to push their current political agenda in the Iraq war. Just for the record here is what General Giap actually did say in his memoirs:
Vietnam: General Vo Nguyen Giap
Military Review, March-April, 2005 by William S. Reeder, Jr.
<< Page 1 Continued from page 1. Previous | NextThere are five principal lessons that come out of Giap’s memoirs. The first is the importance of understanding an insurgent adversary’s history, geography, and culture. The second is to not underestimate any asymmetric enemy. The third is that the use of military force is but one component of a successful campaign strategy. The fourth is the criticality of ideology and the charismatic energy injected into that ideology. And the fifth is that the people and the governing institutions of North Vietnam were prepared to endure longer than were the people and government of the United States.
The last message comes forth throughout the text. From the outset, as Giap reflects, there was never any thought other than continuing the fight until the United States tired of its involvement in Vietnam. This important lesson–that conflicts couched in the rhetoric of peoples’ wars can continue for many years and even decades–is one of the most significant from the Vietnam War and, certainly, an extremely relevant message of this book.
What Giap does not divulge, however, is the enormous strategic leverage of a controlled and astutely manipulated population. He also does not discuss the large-scale military and economic aid the Soviet Union or China provided to the North, or the eventual extinguishing of military aid from the United States to the South.
Well that comes from the Army Center of Lessons Learned at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. I don’t know how reliable that is as a source as compared to Newsmax or Rush Limbaugh. Oh by the way, have either of these sources, Limbaugh or Newsmax ever gone about correcting their mistakes in this instance? Wonder about that. Needless to say, Limbaugh and Newsmax said the complete opposite of what Giap actually said. Probably what Giap really said did not fit the propaganda they were trying to spread. Surprising how many fools there are out there ready to assist in helping to spread the lies.
If you click on the link to the military review you will manually have to follow on down to the March-April 2005 issue and Col. Reeder’s article.
