Did the liberal media cause America to lose the Vietnam war?

Did the liberal media cause America to lose the Vietnam war?

Other urls found in this thread:

dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a401184.pdf
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Republic_of_Vietnam
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Đắk_Sơn_massacre
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_casualties
history.com/this-day-in-history/viet-cong-bomb-brinks-hotel
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965_Saigon_bombing
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

We pulled out because of the shitastic rules of engagement set by incompetent politicians in DC.

Now this can be attributed to the media's portrayal of the war. However I think that the media at the time was more capitalistic and less liberal than today. As such, they started catering to the left when they saw they could profit from it.

However the only reason the above could happen was technology. Being able to see little Jimmy get shot or shoot someone who could be a noncombatant I'm real-time can do a real number on the home front which is were wars are won. If your people back home won't support it then you can't wage war.

No, poor Vietnamese farmers did.

Lack of clear grand strategy other than "contain communism" and failure to understand the enemy led America to lose Vietnam.

It doesn't matter if you win every engagement if the enemy is still capable of giving you hell.

dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a401184.pdf

We lost because it was an unwinnable war we shouldn't have been fighting.

nah it was winnable. the us just wasn't willing to do what was necessary.

Why are you even on a history board if you obviously hate history?

The guys shooting back at us did

...

>Muh lost cause.

I've always thought the Vietnamese had something to do with us losing Vietnam

Like killing every single last Vietnamese? You wasted like 2-3 million of them, and they still don't like you. I really wonder why...

Mark Wahlberg was part of the Vietcong?!

WTF?

I think you need to look up the history behind that image.

Not alone, although it did play a big part in inspiring protests in the US that would stress Nixon into going through with vietnamization. The vietnam war was one of the first to be covered by the media with recent inventions so, seeing oppurtunities for popular stories, the media delved headfirst into the war exposing for the first time to the average 21st century american the horrors of war from a footman's prespective. The sight of this violence and records of war crimes such as the Lai massacre. This made people question their morals on the subject of war and fear for both the Americans and Vietnamese people fighting a war that people though was pointless.
>tldr All media (not just liberal) exposed the horrors of war for the forst time, inspired protests which enchourged vietnamization.

You mean sending tens of thousands of young American men to die in some muddy rice paddy of a country so that a bunch of suits in Washington could congratulate themselves?

yes, indisputably. The Tet offensive tore the guts out of the Vietcong and left the North Vietnamese leadership demoralised at the complete failure of what was intended to be the big uprising that would finally light the South on fire. It was only when they realised that they'd scored a big propaganda victory, despite the total failure of their military objectives, that they fully committed to continuing the war.

If Walter Cronkite had gone on air and said 'We have been disappointed by the optimism of our leaders BUT it is time that we realised that war is not an easy business and that no victory was ever one without blood, nor without the full commitment of the nation to the cause.' North Vietnam would have sued for peace and allowed the continued existence of capitalist South Vietnam. The biggest lie in the narrative of the Vietnam war is that the North Vietnamese leaders were fanatics who had no qualms against taking on the might of the US to advance their cause and would have thrown as many millions of their soldiers into the fight as necessary. The reality is that the North Vietnamese didn't think they were fighting a bloody, pointless struggle against an enemy too big for them ever to defeat. The US media had TOLD them that they had a path to victory. All they needed to do was keep up the pressure for a little while longer and they would win. Costly in terms of North Vietnamese lives, yes, but it was a cost with a measurable gain in sight, thanks to the likes of Walter Cronkite.

Of course, we only found out decades later, when the cold war ended and relations between the US and Vietnam started to normalise, how badly Tet hurt the Communists and how it could have been the turning point the US media said it was - just in the opposite direction. And by that point the narrative of the brave independent media standing up to the liars in the government to stop an 'unwinnable' war had already been firmly established.

No. It was people's healthy unwillingness to die in a war they rightly didn't view as important to thier country's security coupled with incompetent leadership that wasted the initial credit it was given by the public.

South Vietnam being plagued from the beginning with corruption, tyranny, and nepotism lost the Vietnam War.

American aid or no American aid, South Vietnam was not going to survive with a government that inept at running the country.

Americans didn't lose Vietnam, the South Vietnamese did.

>liberal media

Hi, I'm from the 60s and what is this?

South Korea had corrupt, autocratic leadership at the time of the Korean war, and America was still able to save them.

>Couldn't even send ground troops north

>However I think that the media at the time was more capitalistic and less liberal than today
bullshit. The entire news media establishment was even more overwhelmingly liberal back then. These days we have shit like Fox News and Breitbart to give a platform to conservative views, but back in the day there were only a handful of channels, which made it difficult for diverse viewpoints to get airtime.

This

Ho is much more competent than Kim (the former being a nominal socialist who is more or less just a nationalist) and Diem is completely retarded compared with early South Korea

the us should have stayed at home since the beginning
full respect for those who avoided the draft

Most of the 'south' Vietnamese leadership was born in the northern part of the country, and only moved south in the fifties.

>liberal media
>60s

That doesn't really explain why Diem was capitalist and more corrupted than Ho

Nor does it matter (though I would not concede that Ho was more corrupt than Diem). It does point out the futility of dividing that country (or any other) in half by means of foreign military intervention.

Last year, the Viet-Nam war cost the U.S. taxpayer app $300,000,000,000.

>though I would not concede that Ho was more corrupt than Diem
?
Diem rigged his own election since he did jackshit when Ho was leading the people to take back the country from Jap, it's a miracle that Diem could sit on the president chair when the majority had no idea who he was

More like we had real journalists in those times. Now we have yellow journalism, corporate media( which is just pr for the elites), and the alternatives on radio and the web are no better (just people trying to make money off your skepticism and dabble in conspiracy theories with no proof to back their shit up). Fox News and Breitbart are like MSNBC and huffington post, just opinion not news.

Vietfag here. We are okay with Americans, but we hate the French and loathe China.

Hey thats what happen if you televise people dying and showing dead civilian bodies.

From memory Vietnam basically won, then Nixon resigned and Democrats took over the house and senate and blocked funding and equipment for the AVRN ensuring that North Vietnam could conquer the South.
>tfw if they had held on for a little while longer the Asian economic boom would have happened and they could have stood on their own

Breitbart was literally created to be a more extreme rightwing version of Huffpo.

>"We are going to be the Huffington Post of the right," said Steve Bannon, executive chairman of Breitbart News Network. "That is our focus every day."

How was the south's economic state at that time? Pretty good by their own?

Not very well due to after effects of the war and it was reliant at least on US support in order to maintain an effective army. That being said over the long term Vietnam would probably have been able to industrialise earlier similar to other either East Asian or South East Asian countries.

Forgott this link
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Republic_of_Vietnam

america never intended to win the war
t. knower

America didn't lose the Vietnam war

They didn't, they brought burger to the natives and they keep it

memes

Lol are you unironically suggesting liberation through genocide?

This was a politically unwinnable war, and war is only politics through another mean. The government we set up was corrupt, inefficient, and ideologically compromised. They were seen as dogs eating out of the hand of the west. Would you support them if you were a dirt poor Vietnamese farmer with no hope of ever getting ahead in life, no education for your children, no medicine for your sick mother? Ho Chi Minh had all the street cred.

There was never any intention of winning it. We were going to prolong the spending as long as we could

>liberal as an insult

How's it going in your truck, Cletus? Do you even know what "liberal" means?

>Cletus

You have to go back

I was born here and live in the south. Not everyone down here is a fucking troglodyte.

No it's because you couldn't into COIN.

THe U.S set up and propped that government up

Did the liberal media cause the assassination of Caesar?

>They were seen as dogs eating out of the hand of the west. Would you support them if you were a dirt poor Vietnamese farmer with no hope of ever getting ahead in life, no education for your children, no medicine for your sick mother? Ho Chi Minh had all the street cred.
Bull. Shit.

The government of South Vietnam might not have had much respect or trust, but that doesn't mean that people in the south liked the communists any better. The reason the Vietcong were able to operate in the countryside had nothing to do with their ideology being more popular. It was because they terrorised the villagers into compliance. The idea that Ho Chi Minh's government had wide popular support outside the cities, which the US would never have been able to dislodge, is another myth spread by the left to justify their anti-war position.

Most Vietnamese in rural areas were apolitical. They just wanted to be left alone by both sides.

Yeah too bad they didn't usually get what they wanted

Probably partly at the end. It was one of the firat major wars where actual imagery was everywhere. The US troops on the ground suffered because of our government and the media turning people against them. We still could have won the war but what we needed to do was far above and beyond what the populas would handle. We spent too much time in stupid battles that didn't matter because of the terrain which gave time for the unpopular war to get more unpopular.

>muh genocide
no, more like decisively crushing the north and cutting off their trail to the south. you also falsely assume most people outright supported the communists.

>You wasted like 2-3 million of them
many of whom were killed by the reds.

Did the liberal media cause the assassination of Trump?

Oh, I've said too much.

>The government of South Vietnam might not have had much respect or trust
The people had two choices
>Side with the one who helped French to colonize them again
>Side with the one who liberated the nation from Jap and beat French again
The people knew Ho but not Diem, guess who they would likely to follow
>It was because they terrorised the villagers into compliance
Ever heard of Bui chu phat diem? And then when My Lai happened shit went south
>many of whom were killed by the reds.
So they actually killed more of their own? Not by the bombing and landmines which exceeds the amount of the entire WW2?

>So they actually killed more of their own?
the communists killed a significant amount of civilians, yes, and they also committed massacres contrary to what some people would like to believe.

Citation?

do you really not know about this? here, have a wikipedia link for example: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Đắk_Sơn_massacre

the communists also employed the use of landmines and committed numerous bombings that killed civilians in the south.

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Đắk_Sơn_massacre
The rest of the massacre link are mostly not by them, so need more facts to confirm they indeed killed more than Americans.
>the communists also employed the use of landmines and committed numerous bombings that killed civilians in the south.
Have no idea about this, link? Sound hard to believe they could afford fighters to the south for bombing

>Over 600 troops marched into the village, using F L A M E T H R O W E R S to destroy the shelters and kill the men, women, and children who lived there.
>kek
Reverse image shows the 1st pic is from Phong Nhất and Phong Nhị massacre, 3rd pic is from My Lai massacre
Feeling dumb yet ?

>Ever heard of Bui chu phat diem? And then when My Lai happened shit went south
The upper estimate for deliberate attacks on civilians carried out by US forces is 10k dead. The /lower/ estimate for civilians deliberately killed by the Communists is over 100k, while the upper estimate is over three hundred thousand.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_casualties

>Side with the one who helped French to colonize them again
>Side with the one who liberated the nation from Jap and beat French again
well thank you for repeating the North Vietnamese propaganda verbatim - very informative. Unfortunately for you, even if that were true being able to come up with reasons why in theory the people should have loved Ho Chi Minh doesn't make any difference to how they actually felt.

>Not by the bombing and landmines which exceeds the amount of the entire WW2?
the US bombing was directed mostly against the North. Bombing in the south generally only occurred in support of ground troops in the area.

>so need more facts to confirm they indeed killed more than Americans.
what are you talking about? overall? massacres? what?

>Have no idea about this, link? Sound hard to believe they could afford fighters to the south for bombing
jesus really? history.com/this-day-in-history/viet-cong-bomb-brinks-hotel
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965_Saigon_bombing

blame the retards at wiki then because dak son is well documented.

It certainly helped end it but what helped it more was a lack of grand winnable strategy or something tangible in benefit to the united states.

That the US was supporting horribly corrupt and heinous government didnt help.

I wouldnt say communism had alot of sway with the south vietnamese but many of them hated their government, hated being a vassal state of the US. Remember that the South Vietnamese forces were also not afraid to use fear and terror to keep people in line.

The US had 20 years to win the war. TWENTY YEARS, That is more than enough time to achieve something. You cant pin the blame on hippies and the media for that.

>North Vietnam would have sued for peace and allowed the continued existence of capitalist South Vietnam.
How would a modern capitalist South Vietnam look? Like South Korea?

no it had to do with a lack of leadership

people like donald trump who had been gifted everything in life historically wouldve taken up the charge to defend freedom but instead all the rich kids were doing cocaine and laying the foundations of our post nationalist society

it would've probably struggled in the immediate post war aftermath as would've the north to an extent, but would likely have become one of the asian tigers after it got back on its feet.

>Like South Korea?
Thailand probably

It literally wasn't. Bannon didn't found Breitbart, he inherited it from Andrew Breitbart when he passed away.

You are an idiot.

>Did the liberal media cause America to lose the Vietnam war?
Yes. Next question.

If you believe that, then you must believe that the media today is conservative.
The reason being is that the images about the Iraq war and the conflict in Afghanistan was about 100x tamer than the report on Vietnam.

Or the government is censoring.

>If you believe that, then you must believe that the media today is conservative.
>today
You mean ten years ago when the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were in full swing.

in 2003 the media was a lot more conservative than it had been before (or has been since) because it was the heyday of Fox News. Fox News only got going in the late 1990s and because it was tapping into a huge market that had been previously ignored (i.e. viewers who weren't hardcore liberals) it's ratings - and profits - exploded. This created a follow the leader effect where other news organisations adjusted their programming to copy Fox News' model to a certain extent. Media in the past two decades has also become a lot more corporate than it was at the time of the Vietnam war, with programming being decided by executives rather than journalists - and corporations like inoffensive, pro-establishment programming. There is also the 9/11 effect, which made it very hard to take an anti-war line in the early 2000s.

The novelty of Fox News has steadily worn off though, and it's nowhere near as dominant as it was in 2003. Especially over the last eight years since Obama came to power the balance has shifted back slightly as the aggregate effect of the average journalist's liberal leanings has pushed back against the conservative culture of the mid-2000s - although outlets like Fox News still have a large market share. So yeah, it's much easier for conservative ideas to get a platform in today's media. But that doesn't mean the modern media isn't still largely liberal, just that the liberal stranglehold in the 60s and 70s was so overwhelming that there was basically nowhere to go but more conservative.

It didn't help but I would argue that the biggest issue was the slow escalation on the American side. If we went balls to the walls like Nixon decided to do to bring them to the peace table at the start we would have been fine albeit we would have to maintain troops just like in Korea.

The biggest issue was most likely LBJ and Kennedy planning staff to be honest, they would just dump a little more in and ask if it had gotten any better and when told no they would realize that it had in fact gotten a bit more out of control and then proceed back to step 1.

I can't completely blame them though they severally overestimated how easily the Soviets and Chinese would get provoked when it came to actual hard line attacks on North Vietnam up until Nixon called their bluff and mined the coast and started nonstop bombing of everything as opposed to solely military objectives.

I would still argue that the media is still conservative. Namely the U.S. is still involved in conflict overseas and it isn't beinng reported with the intensity of the late 60's.
Though I would suppose that it could be that that the modernity of war (drone strikes or the idea of second hand conflict) allows the media to be more offhanded in regards to U.S. intervention.

However, I can't say it is liberal now. Maybe if we compare it to 10 years ago, it might of shifted slightly over the Obama years.
My most recent examples to the lack of liberal report would be the Kunduz hospital bombing in Afghanistan that had little reporting and if that was done during the time of the Vietnam war, how differently it would have been reported.
The United States is still involved in armed combat and civilians are being killed, however it is an interesting thought experiment that if the Iraq and Afghanistan were started today, how would it be reported.
I personally doubt little would have changed.

I said that the media today is conservative compared to the 60s, but that doesn't mean that it can't still be described as largely liberal. Just not as overwhelmingly liberal as it was 50 years ago.

Also, America took far fewer casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there was no conscription, so there was never going to be the same level of public interest that there was in the Vietnam era to drive media coverage. Plus after ten years of war the public aren't as interested in seeing reports on the iraq and afghanistan conflict.