The Tet Offensive
In 1968 Vietnam was attacked by the North Vietnamese communists in the Tet offensive. The North Vietnamese attacked the South in the winter of 1968 and suffered heavy losses. The communists lost 48,000 men, America lost 249 men and the South Vietnam lost 500 men.
It was an overwhelming blow to the communists. They were defeated.
Walter Cronkite spent one and a half hours talking to General Frederick Weyand, then the man in charge of the forces in the South of Vietnam around Saigon. Walter Cronkite said:
“Well you’ve got a fine story. But I’m not going to use any of it because I’ve been up to Hue. I’ve seen the thousands of bodies up there in mass graves and I’m determined to do all in my power to bring this war to an end as soon as possible.”
In 1968 there was no CNN or FOX News, we had three network stations, CBS, NBC and ABC. There was no internet and the newspapers had a comment section that was filtered.
Walter Cronkite goes back to the states and releases this comment:
“It seems now more certain than ever,” Walter Cronkite told his audience in a de facto editorial, “that the bloody experience of Vietnam is a stalemate” and that the war was “unwinnable.” Cronkite’s statement and call for U.S. withdrawal helped turn public opinion against the war. It also demoralized American troops and Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, who was said to have declared that losing Cronkite’s support meant he had lost the backing of Middle America.
When Republican President Richard Nixon refused to withdraw U.S. forces from Vietnam, the Democrats used the Watergate scandal to topple his presidency. Cronkite played a key role in the political process that ousted Nixon — chiefly by broadcasting a news story every night on the CBS Evening News under the banner “Watergate.” At the time, Cronkite insisted that he was non-partisan, objective and fair. After his retirement, however, he acknowledged his liberal political views.
After Walter Cronkite retired he pushed for a one world government ruled by the United Nations where America would give up its veto powers.
He said that there had to be some middle ground between capitalism and communism.” “[T]he first priority of the new order,” he added, “must be a revision of the [American] educational system to … guarantee that each of our citizens will have equal resources to share in the decisions of the democracy, and a fair share of the economic pie.”
https://www.scribd.com/doc/121319768/You-don-t-need-a-Weatherman-Bill-Ayers
Submitted by Karin Asbley, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, John Jacobs, Jeff Jones, Gerry Long, Home Machtinger, Jim Mellen, Terry Robbins, Mark Rudd and Steve Tappis
.From /New Left Notes/, June 18, 1969.
International Revolution
The contradiction between the revolutionary peoples of Asia, Africa and
Latin America and the imperialists headed by the United States is the
principal contradiction in the contemporary world.
The development of this contradiction is promoting the struggle of the people of the whole
world against US imperialism and its lackeys.
Lin Piao, Long Live the Victory of People’s War!
People ask, what is the nature of the revolution that we talk about-Who will it be made by, and for, and what are its goals and strategy-The overriding consideration in answering these questions is that the main struggle going on in the world today is between US imperialism and the national liberation struggles against it.
This is essential in defining political matters in the whole world: because it is by far the most powerful, every other empire and petty dictator is in the long run dependent on US imperialism, which has unified, allied with, and defended all of the reactionary forces of the whole world. Thus, in considering every other force or phenomenon, from Soviet imperialism or Israeli imperialism to “workers struggle” in France or Czechoslovakia, we determine who are our friends and who are our enemies according to whether they help US imperialism or fight to defeat it.
So the very first question people in this country must ask in considering the question of revolution is where they stand in relation to the United States as an oppressor nation, and where they stand in relation to the masses of people throughout the world whom US imperialism is oppressing. The primary task of revolutionary struggle is to solve this principal contradiction on the side of the people of the world. It is the oppressed peoples of the world who have created the wealth of this empire and it is to them that it belongs; the goal of the revolutionary struggle must be the control and use of this wealth in the interests of the oppressed peoples of the world.
It is in this context that we must examine the revolutionary struggles in the United States. We are within the heartland of a worldwide monster, a country so rich from its worldwide plunder that even the crumbs doled out to the enslaved masses within its borders provide for material existence very much above the conditions of the masses of people of the world.
The US empire, as a worldwide system, channels wealth, based upon the labor and resources of the rest of the world, into the United States. The relative affluence existing in the United States is directly dependent upon the labor and natural resources of the Vietnamese, the Angolans, the Bolivians and the rest of the peoples of the Third World.
All of the United Airlines Astrojets, all of the Holiday Inns, all of Hertz’s automobiles, your television set, car and wardrobe already belong, to a large degree to the people of the rest of the world. Therefore, any conception of “socialist revolution” simply in terms of the working people of the United States, failing to recognize the full scope of interests of the most oppressed peoples of the world, is a conception of a fight for a particular privileged interest, and is a very dangerous ideology.