That’s right, Sheri. The Vietnam war was the first time that reporters took the side of the Left in a big, public way, and used propaganda and lies to push the anti-war narrative and divide the American nation.
Before the Vietnam war, the MSM (a much smaller MSM than now) reported the news fairly straight. No huge bias towards either Left or Right, although they were pro-Kennedy and anti-Nixon during the 1960 elections, but their criticisms of Nixon were very mild compared to today (they made fun of Nixon sweating profusely on camera during one of the debates), but they didn’t make up lies about Nixon to harm him, like they are doing today against Trump.
Kennedy won the election that year. Both Kennedy and Nixon were in support of the war in South Vietnam, fearing a communist “domino effect” that might spread to the whole of Southeast Asia and even India, if something wasn’t done to stop it. Communism, at that time, was on the march all over the globe. The Left and the MSM have never looked back after the Vietnam war, and have made demonizing the Right as their main focus of attention, in order to gain and keep political power.
And they have been doing this “propaganda and lies” against the Right ever since, culminating in the flood of lies being put forth by the MSM today, in order to demonize Trump, and the Right in general. I actually went to Vietnam because of the lies put out by the MSM. According to the MSM, the American military was barely hanging on by a thread in South Vietnam, and getting beaten at every turn, when they fought against what the MSM described as “the toughest soldiers in the world”, the North Vietnamese and South Vietnamese Viet Cong communists.
They called them that, as a method of discouraging Americans and to make Americans give up on the war. All the MSM reporting was focused on this goal throughout the war and continues to this day. Lies and propaganda are legitimate tools as far as the American Left is concerned. I haven’t seen one Vietnam documentary I would consider even half-way accurate. I haven’t seen the new 10-part series on Vietnam that was recently broadcase on tv yet, but I’m sure that when I do, I will be disapponted in the accuracy of the reporting. If I’m not, it would be the first time.
Remember, the Left owns most of the media, so don’t expect a fair accounting of the Vietnam war from them. If it were a fair accounting, it would be an indictment of the anti-war Left and the MSM, and they can’t have that, so they continue to lie about the Vietnam war all these years later. I was in the Army, stationed in Wildflecken, Germany, at this time, and I read these daily dire reports of failure by the U.S. in South Vietnam, and said to myself, this can’t be true, because if it were true, then my whole worldview was wrong, so I had to go see for myself because I had to know. So I volunteered to go to South Vietnam in May 1968.
When I got to South Vietnam, I found out that they were all lies and anti-war propaganda. The “toughest soldiers in the world’ were the American troops who kicked the hell out of the North Vietnamese troops and the Viet Cong, throughout the war. My worldview was the correct worldview after all. General Giap, the Supreme Commander of the North Vietnamese military, and the architect of the war strategy, told a reporter after the war, that the American troops won just about every battle in South Vietnam, but that didn’t matter because North Vietnam had the American anti-war Left and the MSM on their side. He was exactly right.
American troops defeated the North Vietnamese troops and the North Vietnamese finally came to the bargaining table, and after the Peace Accord was signed, South Vietnam was still there as a viable nation with a bright future ahead of it. Then the anit-war Left in the U.S. Congress just threw away all that blood, sweat, and tears expended in Vietnam, by refusing to come to South Vietnam’s aid after North Vietnam violated the Peace Agreement and again attacked South Vietnam in 1975.
The Left controlled Congress in those days, and it was right after Nixon had resigned over Watergate, so the Left felt imboldened and just turned their backs on South Vietnam and threw them to the wolves. Like Obama did to the Iraqis in 2011. In both cases, millions of innocent people were killed and displaced from their homes as a result. What is so ironic is that this last attack by North Vietnam in 1975, started out with them sending a large proportion of their fighting forces into northern, South Vietnam, to the point that they created gridlock with every highway, road, and trail jam-packed with North Vietnamese troops and military equipment frozen in place, and unable to move forward or backward, and they were sitting ducks for American B-52 bombers out of Guam.
The B-52’s could have spent about a week or two carpet bombing the stalled North Vietnamese forces and would have for all intents and purposes, wiped them out where they sat, and the war would have been over and North Vietnam would have been in very dire straights with most of their military destroyed. It would only have taken a short time (hours) to get the B-52’s over the enemy, but the American Left refused to come to the aid of South Vietnam, even though they were legally and morally obligated to do so.
My natural skepticism sent me to Vietnam. I found out that the MSM had been lying all along (like today) and that the MSM was biased, and were not above lying to push this political objective of getting the U.S. out of Vietnam. Up until then, I thought the MSM was telling it straight but I found out otherwise when I saw it for myself. I have been on a one-man crusade against the Left and especially the MSM, ever since. I know how dangerous their lies really are to our society and to our allies in the world. In other words, the Left and the MSM, and their lies, put U.S. national security at risk every day because they lie about the true situation.
American Leftists are incapable of defending U.S. national interests. They have proven it time after time, Obama being the latest example of the delusional thinking taking place in Leftist’s minds. The Iraq war was won, then Obama sat there and twiddled his thumbs while the Islamic Terror Army attacked and gained in strength and territory every day, displacing and killing millions of innocent people in the process.
Obama acted like an innocent bystander and never took any serious measures to stop the terroirsts. It was almost like he was on the terrorists side, not our side. So the big divisions in the U.S. did start during the Vietnam war, and the Left continues to divide us to this very day, epitomized again by Barack Obama and his racebaiting and identity politics. One bright spot is the public is on to the MSM now. They know they are a bunch of partisan, political liars. The Left and the MSM still have millions of people fooled, but there are millions more who are no longer fooled, Trump’s election demostrates this.
We should all get down on our knees and thank God that Trump got into Office. Only a person like him, vulgar and brash as he is, could take on the Left and the MSM successfully and win this battle. If he wins, we all win. We all need to stand up and fight the false narratives and distorted realities put out by the Left and the MSM, if we value our personal freedoms.