IN HIS OWN WORDS

General Vo Nguyen Giap leading a council of war during the planning phase of the Dien Bien Phu campaign, 1953.


The most relevant statement I could find that is actually attributable to General Giap was uttered in a 1989 interview with Morley Safer, as excerpted in The Vietnam War: An Encyclopedia of Quotations by Howard Langer (Greenwood Press, 2005, p. 318):


"We paid a high price (during the Tet offensive) but so did you [Americans) . . . not only in lives and materiel . . . Do not forget the war was brought into the living rooms of the American people . . . The most important result of the Tet offensive was it made you de-escalate the bombing, and it brought you to the negotiation table. It was, therefore, a victory . . ."


The war was fought on many fronts. At that time the most important one was American public opinion.







. . . and that's about the last word I want to dedicate to the matter - we've already given more than enough free publicity to a guy whose uniform features red stars, sickles and hammers - S.L.



Friday Bird HERE


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THE STORMBRINGER CONTROVERSY

Was I guilty of some kind of great journalistic faux-pas when I posted the General Giap quote - which turned out to be of questionable origin?





Anonymous said - and I appreciate his counsel -

Sean,

Please don't take my comment the wrong way. I'm a big fan of your blo9g (sic) which I read daily. However, I'm a bigger fan of truth as I believe you are as well. what you posted about General Giap is essentially an email that has been circulating for years. I've been on the receiving end of it many times and have researched it quite a bit. I posted the link to Snopes simply as the shortest and quickest way to the heart of the matter. I agree that Snopes has a liberal slant but that doesn't make them wrong anymore than your conservatism makes you wrong. Truth is truth whether we like it or not.


I agree with the above sentiments - STORMBRINGER is about Truth and Honor - it occurred to me that the place I might have seen that Giap quote before was in the same email trail that Anonymous refers to above - such is the nature of the modern Internet-based media where urban myths cross with fact. Of course, such fooling with fact & fiction is not new in the media; there was once a time that if it was printed in the paper or uttered on TV it was taken as Gospel Truth regardless of the truth of the situation.




Walter Cronkite Defeated America on TV in his coverage of the Tet Offensive. The 1968 Tet Offensive was actually an overwhelming American victory and a tactical defeat for the Communist Viet Cong, yet Cronkite reported Tet as an incredible loss, fueling for the anti-war movement Left its allies in the Congress.


Military historians regard Tet as the decisive battle of the war because it shifted American public opinion against the war; this was directly due to Cronkite’s flawed reporting.


The difference nowadays of course is that we can sort it all out so much more quicklier. Consider when Cronkite's protégé and darling of the Left-leaning Mainstream Media Dan Rather floated his infamous George Bush National Guard memos during the 2004 Presidential Elections:




Respected news anchorman and darling of the Left Dan Rather and his Nemesis.




Who got re-elected and who got fired as a result of manufactured news, Dan?


The irony of it all is that ten or fifteen years ago Rather would have gotten away with his legerdemain - but it's a whole new ball game these days, and it cost Rather his job and worse; his reputation, and he can never get that back. Never mind the fact that Dan Rather was a respected newsman who climbed to the top of his profession, earning the respect of an entire nation; he was consumed - as was the rest of the the Left - in his personal hatred of George Bush that it drove him to present forgeries as legitimate news. And as if this wasn't bad enough; when he got busted out on it, he stuck his OTHER shoe in his mouth by DEFENDING HIMSELF; pressing involved parties to claim that even if the memos weren't true, this was the way people THOUGHT it should be.

This is the Left-Leaning Mainstream Media's modus operandi.

Anonymous is right; this is the modern Blog-o-Sphere and we Conservatives now own the high ground. We fought long and hard to gain this strategic advantage, and to maintain it we must be staunch defenders of the Truth. We don't have to like the Truth; but we are honor-bound to present it, and to call out falsity wherever and whenever we see it.


SEAN LINNANE SENDS





Thursday Bird HERE


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VO NGUYEN GIAP - DISCLAIMER

A reader commented that I should have run the post on Giap (below) through SNOPES. He claims that this is an internet urban legend, that it's not true.

While this may or may not be the case, one thing is certain; SNOPES is not a reliable source of information for the purpose of critiquing accuracy - they have a decidedly liberal slant on how they present "facts".

Let me work it - my source said he checked SNOPES beforehand, and I've heard this quote somewhere else, somewhere reputable. I will do the homework; in the meantime even if this is not a direct quote, I believe this is quite accurate; that Giap said words to this effect.


More on Giap, and the Art of War:




Sun Tzu


Historically, there have been a number of military philosophers and practitioners who spoke not only of a physical plane of war but also of the political, economic, and psychological (also known as moral) planes of war. Whereas Sun Tzu outlined five fundamentals of war, including weather and terrain, he also rated politics – or the wider context within which war is fought – as the first fundamental. Further, he included in his maxims “. . . to win a hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the supreme excellence.”




General Vo Nguyen Giap


Providing more contemporary currency to those notions, General Vo Nguyen Giap, the brilliant North Vietnamese battlefield tactician and strategist, said:

". . . for us, there is no such thing as a single strategy. Ours is always a synthesis – simultaneously diplomatic, military and political. Which is why, quite clearly, the Tet Offensive had multiple objectives . . . And that was our biggest victory: to change the ideas of the United States. The Tet Offensive had been directed primarily at the people of South Vietnam, but . . . it affected the people of the United States more. Until Tet they thought they could win the war, but now they knew they could not. President Johnson was forced to decrease military activity and start to discuss with us around the table of how to end the war."






Today's STORMBRINGER Bird HERE


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GENERAL VO NGUYEN GIAP

General Giap was the 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 battle of TET. You defeated us!

We knew it, and we thought you knew it.

But we were elated to notice your media was 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 same slippery slope, sponsored by the US media, is currently underway. It exposes the enormous power of a biased media to cut out the heart and will of the American public.




General Giap planning the Dien Bien Phu campaign, 1953-54, his brilliant victory against the French.



A truism worthy of note:

Do not fear the enemy,
for they can take only your life.
Fear the media,
for they will destroy your honor ! ! !


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