Contrary to media reports and the perception of a majority of Americans, the United States was winning the war in Vietnam following the successful watershed battle known as the Tet Offensive. Sadly, the Vietnam War was not lost on the battlefield. The carnage and repressive regimes that followed the U.S. exit may have been avoided had the truth been known by the American public. The United States was defeated by a carefully conceived, multi-pronged propaganda campaign that set the stage for America’s eventual failure in the region.
The ingredients for the U.S. defeat consisted of the funding and encouragement of the anti-war movement by Hanoi and Communist splinter groups, enlistment of “useful idiots” in Hollywood to publicize and popularize the movement, media complicity with negative portrayals of the war, anti-American proselytizing by professors and students on American university campuses, denigration and demonizing of the military and, ultimately, withdrawal of support and appropriations by the U.S. Congress. All these factors led to the perceptual reframing of the Vietnam War as an ignoble imperialistic atrocity, a far cry from its launch as a fight to extinguish communism in Southeast Asia...
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Labels: media coverage, Moonbats, opinion, politics