Free Republic

Remember all that political hay the far left and its media allies made during the Vietnam War about the wickedness of America's South Vietnamese ally and the importance of abandoning that country to the communists? Here's the Pulitzer Prize-winning AP photo that was supposed to prick our consciences and make us turn against that "immoral" war against a communist takeover: There's no doubt about it, the photo is hard to look at. It's crude, rough, wartime justice, a picture of South Vietnamese Police Captain Nguyễn Ngọc Loan coldly executing Viet Cong Captain Nguyễn Văn Lém. The film is even harder...

I was gob stopped. As a young man I was just as brainwashed by the media as anyone else.This began with listening to an interview of overturner of idols, Thomas Sowell, on how vain and puffed up intellectuals are. Thomas Sowell on his book Intellectuals and Society, queue at 24:13 / 36:32 Prof. Sowell was remarking that Nixon didn't care about intellectuals, but according to the true principle, that when a democratic country led around by the nose by academics, decides that a war is unwinnable, it becomes so; despite America's de facto !!!VICTORY!!! in Vietnam, when intellectuals managed to...

The Book of Ecclesiastes says that there is nothing new under the sun. And while many have spoken of the “unprecedented” nature of the rioting in the early summer of 2020, it is actually quite precedented. The Long, Hot Summer of 1967 was the peak of urban unrest and rioting in the United States in the lead up to the 1968 election. While there are certainly a number of key differences, there are also a number of striking parallels that make the topic worthy of discussion and examination. Continue reading The Long, Hot Summer of 1967: A Forgotten Season of...

A celebrated book and a major museum exhibition revealed the harrowing tale behind the image of a wounded Marine. Their version was wrong. ============================================================== The fighting in Hue City, Vietnam, was as intense and confusing as anything the Marines there had ever seen. It was mid-February 1968, and American and South Vietnamese forces were desperately trying to counter a surprise onslaught that became known as the Tet offensive. First Battalion, Fifth Marines had breached the city’s historic Citadel. Radio communications were out. From front-line positions, Marines ran back a block or two to give updates to commanding officers and to...

Saturday, in Pittsburgh, a Sabbath celebration at the Tree of Life synagogue became the site of the largest mass murder of Jews in U.S. history. Eleven worshippers were killed by a racist gunman. Friday, we learned the identity of the crazed criminal who mailed pipe bombs to a dozen leaders of the Democratic Party, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. From restaurants to Capitol corridors, this campaign season we have seen ugly face-offs between leftist radicals and Republican senators. Are we more divided than we have ever been? Are our politics more poisoned? Are we living in what...

The official anniversary of the Tet Offensive is January 30th, the day it began, but it was on this day that network television news (the cutting edge most important news source 50 years ago today) was able to bring viewers dramatic and startling footage of the Vietcong suicide attack on the US Embassy in Saigon. The attack came at around 3am Saigon time but there was no live video capability in 1968 from Vietnam. The films of the attack were put on airplanes and sent to locations like Hong Kong or Tokyo where they could be sent via satellite earth...

Josef Goebbels called it the Big Lie, the deliberate misrepresentation of facts and reality in order to achieve a political objective. It’s been part and parcel of the New World Disorder we’ve lived under for the past century, ever since Vladimir Lenin first used a Big Lie to disguise his seizure of power from Russia’s post-czar provisional government in November 1917, by telling the Russian people he was preventing a coup not perpetrating one. America’s first major encounter with the Big Lie, with all its disastrous consequences, started 50 years ago today, when the American mainstream media — CBS and...

But buried in the dusty archives of CBS News was another Cronkite report from Saigon broadcast days earlier – nearly two weeks earlier to be exact. The “lost” Feb. 13 clip, shows Cronkite had a much different and unambiguous view of the recent Tet battlefront immediately after it was over. “First and simplest, the Viet Cong suffered a military defeat,” he reported. “Its missions proved suicidal. If they had intended to stay in the cities as a negotiating point, they failed at that. The Vietnamese army reacted better than even its most ardent supporters had anticipated. There were no defections...

The Butterfly Effect January 31, 1968 is an important date in American History, but very few Americans are aware it. Since the birth of our Republic, there have been a number of significant events that have drastically affected our country’s future development and wellbeing. Some of these events were immediately recognized as significant but others took more time, and the damage caused to our country by the “Butterfly Effect” spawned by the 1968 Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War is just now beginning to be realized by a few of us who were there. Those who were there know all...

Remembering when we had a real president. Remembering our brothers who gave all. Freedom is not free. Freedom is never more than one generation from extinction. God bless America.

We are told by careful pollsters that half of the American people believe that American troops should be brought home from Iraq immediately. This news discourages supporters of our efforts there. Not me, though: I am relieved. Given press coverage of our efforts in Iraq, I am surprised that 90 percent of the public do not want us out right now. Between January 1 and September 30, 2005, nearly 1,400 stories appeared on the ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news. More than half focused on the costs and problems of the war, four times as many as those that discussed...

James S. Robbins, who has been a contributor to National Review Online since the September 11 terrorist attack, is author of a new book, This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive. The book, as he describes in an interview with NRO’s Kathryn Jean Lopez, is an effort to bury a myth and crush a continuing source of inspiration to America’s enemies. KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: You call the Tet Offensive a “powerful symbol divorced from its reality” and describe it as a having become “more than a battle; it is a legacy, a legend, a continually replicating story line.” How...

“Since it’s generally accepted–but wrong–that Tet drove the American people against the Vietnam war, you have a class of commentators, and people in government too, who keep anticipating this kind of event–some grand event that will suddenly mark a sea change in the support of any military effort overseas, at which point people just turn against it,” says James S. Robbins, author of the new book "This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive."... To Robbins, the Vietnam narrative must be reclaimed from the “ruling class of hippies and leftists, who went from protests to the U.S. Senate in some...

Today is the publication date of This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive, by James Robbins. ... I vividly remember following news of the Tet offensive in 1968 and subsequently fell for virtually every element of the myth of Tet that Robbins exposes in this lucid, important book. The book thus rings a bell with me, as I suspect it will for many readers of this site. Robbins argues that the myth of Tet has lived on to do much damage.

Walter Cronkite created Fox News. Cronkite's fundamental role as a "cultural artist" in creating Fox. one of the most notable moments of Cronkite's liberalism being unmasked in a highly visible fashion was his now famous series on Vietnam. But by this time conservative Americans were already well awake to the realization that this powerful new institution of television was being used in ways both subtle and not, to convey the message that there was no more enlightened or superior world view than modern American liberalism. Broadcast by broadcast it was increasingly apparent that those who disagreed or who challenged the...

Journalism: After the eulogies, the fact remains that "the most trusted man in America" betrayed that trust. He helped snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in Vietnam and tried hard to do the same in Iraq.President Obama on Friday praised Walter Cronkite as a journalistic icon, calling the CBS anchor the "voice of certainty in an uncertain world." More to the point, he was the father of advocacy journalism, the patron saint of media bias. He went from reporting news to recreating it in his own image. Far from the image of the patriotic war correspondent, Cronkite was a...

"We had a false sense of security," said Larry Rosser, a Vietnam veteran who now resides in Quartz Hill. Rosser served as a signalman in the 4th Infantry Division and was stationed in Vietnam's central highlands, outside the town of Pleiku, when the attack came. "Between 1 and 3 in the morning, they started rocket and mortar attacks on our base camp," Rosser said. "It was the first time it had been attacked." Rosser said no one was prepared for the attack. In fact, just a few weeks before Tet, commanders at his camp, Camp Enari, had started locking up...

Sometime within the next six months or so, al-Qaida or Saddamist terrorists will attempt a Tet offensive. No, Middle Eastern mass murderers don't celebrate the Vietnamese festival of Tet, but trust that America's enemies everywhere do celebrate and systematically seek to emulate the strategic political effects North Vietnam's 1968 attack obtained. This spring marks the 40th anniversary of Hanoi's offensive (yes, 40 years, two generations). It will also mark the umpteenth time American enemies have attempted to win in the psychological and political clash of an American election what they cannot win on the battlefield. In the course of Tet...

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Sen. John McCain said Monday he fears an offensive by Iraqi insurgents similar to the Tet Offensive by the Viet Cong that sent U.S. casualties soaring in Vietnam nearly 40 years ago. The Arizona Republican and likely presidential candidate also said in an Associated Press interview that lapses remain in U.S. intelligence as the nation assesses a potential nuclear threat from Iran. In defending President Bush's proposed troop surge in Iraq, McCain said it's not the American presence in Iraq that troubles Americans, it's the number of casualties and the possibility that they could escalate. "By...

RICHMOND, Va. - Republican presidential hopeful John McCain (news, bio, voting record) said Monday he fears an offensive by Iraqi insurgents similar to the Tet offensive by the Viet Cong that sent U.S. casualties soaring in Vietnam nearly 40 years ago. McCain, a Vietnam war veteran who spent 5 1/2 years as a prisoner of war, said in an interview with The Associated Press that it's not the U.S. presence in Iraq that upsets voters but rather the number of casualties and the possibility those numbers could rise. The U.S. death toll is more than 3,100 in the nearly four-year-old...