by Morley Evans
IF YOU READ the long essay below, you will see that nothing has changed since the War in Vietnam. If you look at history, Vietnam looks like the Korean War. The main difference between the War in Vietnam and today is that the public is silent today. Everyone is in a coma. Then the public was up-in-arms. Protest songs filled the airwaves. Thousands marched in the streets. CBS, NBC, and ABC competed to bring the War into every livingroom every night. The media has been silenced. The Left supports war. The Right supports war. Pulpits are silent. Pews are empty except in the warmongering churches that preach heresy.
This picture would not appear in the Main Stream Media (MSM) today. Israel Defense Force (IDF) snipers have murdered thousands of unarmed Palestinians on the Gazan border. When it reports anything, the MSM reports "violence" as if Palestinians were responsible. The IDF murders journalists. The Saudis murder journalists. Insanity rules everywhere. Washington wants war. Washington's vassalages support their liege lord. Ottawa will lick American boots on Remembrance Day.
WW III and everyone's annihilation looms. Satan smiles.
FIFTY YEARS AGO the world received a lesson in the revolutionary power of protracted people’s war when some 84,000 Vietnamese communist peasants stunned the world’s greatest military power, the United States, with an astounding offensive considered impossible by America’s Army generals who had only weeks before declared the communist revolutionaries of South Vietnam essentially defeated.
This amazingly shocking assault was the Tet Offensive of January-February 1968. It was so powerful in its execution and effects that it became the crucial event of America’s Vietnam War. No history of that war can be complete without an analysis of this offensive. The significance of Tet was that it compelled the American leadership to make the decision to quit Vietnam; it was thus the pivot point in the war. Often described as a military loss for the communist forces, it was nonetheless a political loss for the Americans and their Saigon client regime – a loss so great that the United States eventually began a process of gradual, yet brutally violent, disengagement. The study of how that definitive decision to disengage came to be and how it was subsequently interpreted after the war offers important lessons regarding the contradictions of the war exposed by Tet – contradictions involving the imperatives of international finance, the exercise of political power, the dishonesty and incompetence of military leadership, the erosion of America’s moral legitimacy at home and abroad, the reemergence of communist politics within the United States, the dramatic upsurge in leftist resistance globally, and the rewriting of history to hide the failures of the American military.
What was the Tet Offensive? It was the first of three offensives in 1968 in which the communist forces of the National Liberation Front (NLF) in coordination with the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) attempted to take over cities and towns throughout South Vietnam in hopes of causing a collapse of the South Vietnamese government. Tet was the largest of the three offensives and was the one that had the most damaging effect against the United States and its Saigon protégés. Beginning January 30 and 31 the NLF attacked 5 of 6 major cities including Saigon, 35 of 44 provincial capitals, 64 of 242 district seats, and more than 50 hamlets for a total of 166 targets throughout South Vietnam (Prados, 2009: 239). In this first assault alone, much of the countryside – and thus the rural pacification program–was lost to the communists as the Saigon regime pulled back 8,000 troops to defend towns and cities. On May 4 a second offensive lasting into early June began with attacks on 119 cities, towns and bases. Because the American military had claimed that the first offensive resulted in losses so great for the communist forces that they were “on the ropes” without major offensive capability, the second offensive’s rather substantial nature could not be acknowledged – doing so would be an admission of continuing communist strength. The U.S. military therefore referred to the second offensive as “mini-Tet.” On August 17 a third set of attacks began with fighting continuing for six weeks (Young, 1991: 221-222). All in all, the Tet Offensive of late January 1968 kicked off a series of communist offensives over a period of eighteen months inflicting relatively high American losses.
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https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/11/02/the-significance-of-the-tet-offensive/
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