Propaganda that Killed Millions

Lies, Propaganda and Facts

One of the processes that led the Democrat dominated US Congress in 1978 to break the treaty the US had signed in Geneva I 1973 was a public opinion poisoned by propaganda lies.

It was a shameful thing for the US Congress to break a treaty obligation. It was all the more shameful when it left South Vietnam at the mercy of the 130,00 strong North Vietnamese invading army backed by hundreds of tanks as well as artillery pieces and aircraft.

As a result we know about a million Vietnamese fled as refugees with about half perishing in the attempt. We don't know the numbers murdered or”re-educated” by the Communists. WE also know that subsequently Cambodia and Laos fell, with two million of innocent civilians being brutally murdered.

Three Communist propaganda coups spread far and wide and repeated over and over by gullible or culpable media featured highly in this swing in public opinion. All three were powerful, emotive, but painted a false picture.

The Tet offensive was a simultaneous sneak attack on about 100 targets by the Viet Cong and NVA during a cease fire for the Tet holiday in 1968. The highly influential broadcaster Walter Cronkite witnessed part of it in Saigon. He assumed the violence of the attacks was an indication of Viet Cong strength, when in fact it was their last ditch “do or die” effort, and on returning to the States said that the war was “unwinnable”. Actually the battle was an overwhelming victory for the South and US forces. The Viet Cong suffered so many casualties that thereafter the war was carried on almost exclusively by the North Vietnamese army.

However the truth never caught up with Cronkite's false report.

Second: The photo by Eddie Adams of General Loan executing a Viet Cong operative. The photo captures the moment that Loan shoots the handcuffed Viet Cong captain Lem in the head during the '68 Tet Offensive. It had a profound impact, galvanising the anti-war movement in the US.

Previous to the Third Geneva Convention, guerillas were held to be Francs-Tireurs and not under the protections of the rules of war. At the Nuremberg trials, no criminal responsibility was attached to the summary execution of partisans by German officers. The Third Convention extended the protection of POW status on four conditions. 1. They are responsible to a chain of command. The Viet Cong captain Lem probably fulfilled this condition. 2. They have a fixed distinctive sign which is recognisable at a distance – that is to say, they wear a uniform of some sort and are not dressed to make them indistinguishable to the civilian population. The Viet Cong deliberately violated this condition precisely to pass unnoticed among the civilian population. 3. They carry arms openly, which is debatable in this case. But 4. They conduct their operations in accordance with the “laws and customs of laws”, which captain Lem most certainly failed.

‘Lem was arrested during the Tet Offensive after having captured a South Vietnamese officer, Lieutenant Colonel Tran. Lem and his men then held Colonel Tran and his family hostage and demanded that Tran show them how to drive the South Vietnamese tanks they had just captured. When Colonel Tran refused, they slit the throats of his wife, his six children, and his 80 year old mother.

Captain Lem was a very nasty piece of work. When he was captured, standing at the mass grave of another 34 victims, he announced he was proud to carry out his orders and murder these people. So there was not a shadow of a doubt he was guilty of multiple murders. General Loan, as chief of police, subjected him to summary execution, entirely within even the stricter terms of the Third Geneva Convention.’

As an interesting post-script, General Loan fled the fall of Saigon and arrived in the US. He was initially refused immigrant status because of that photo, but the photographer Adams testified on General Loan’s behalf. General Loan owned a pizza shop in Washington DC for many years, and died of cancer in Virginia in 1998. Another photo.

Third: The picture of “Napalm Girl” Phan Thi Kim Phuc, the young girl who ran down the road naked after tearing off her burning clothes.

That was in June 1972 – just six months before the signing of the peace accords and after most US troops had been withdrawn, no US forces were in eny way involved in the event, and yet it is still cited as an illustration of the US war in Vietnam.

Here is the real story:

Kim Phuc was from the village of Trang Bang in South Vietnam. The village had just been overrun by NVA forces. Kim Phuc and the other villagers were fleeing along with the surviving South Vietnamese soldiers towards safety. The South Vietnamese – not American – South Vietnamese pilot of the plane was trying to protect the civilians by cutting off the North Vietnamese pursuit. But he mistook the fleeing South Vietnamese soldiers for the pursuing NVA. His napalm killed four civilians, and Kim Phuc and several others received third degrees burns.

In an interesting post-script to that photo, Kim Phuc was flown to Germany for surgery, then returned to South Vietnam. She was captured in the fall of South Vietnam and became a propaganda tool for the communist government. She was allowed to go to Cuba to study medicine, where she met her future husband Bui Hue Toan. They were married, and allowed to go the Moscow for their honeymoon. When their plane landed to refuel in New Foundland, the two of them stepped off the plane and asked for political asylum. Kim Phuc became a Christian, founded the Kim Phuc foundation to provide medical and psychological assistance to child victims of war, and still lives in Canada.

So we were taken in by propaganda, lies, misinformation, and mistaken information. The people believed the lies. The politicians bowed to the people – and at least two and a half million innocent men, women, and children died as a result!

We must remember to fight back against lies with the truth, no matter how much we are the minority of voices.

Vietnsm Mistakes No.2

Strategic Mistake No. 2

On the world stage our repeat of the first Vietnam mistake is failing to see that the West is already in a cold war – not of our choosing – with China and that this war is all about trade, intellectual property, and interference in our internal national affairs.

For our next lesson let's go back to the strategic analysis of Vietnam. General Westmorland started out fighting a war of attrition. Remember the grisly business of the “body count”.

To evaluate this we need to reiterate our lesson on “centre of gravity”. The definition of a CoG is "the source of power that provides moral or physical strength, freedom of action, or will to act." Thus, the center of gravity is usually seen as the "source of strength"



One wants to destroy the enemy's CofG. It is standard modern military doctrine that directly attacking one's opponent's CofG – that is to say hitting him where he is strongest – is a bad idea. Better is to work out what things this CofG itself requires to operate (critical requirements) or what its critical vulnerabilities are and deal with one or more of these.



For example, say your house has an ant problem. What is the CofG of an ant nest? It is that they just keep coming. So if you try attrition warfare against them – spraying them as they appear – sure you'll kill some, but more will just keep coming. What does the ant nest's CofG require? Well it is the queen who keeps pumping out larvae. So feed the ants a slow poison that they take back to the queen and … kill the queen and the whole nest dies.



So what was a source of strength for North Vietnam? It was that it was a brutal dictatorship whose leader Ho Chi Minh had thought nothing of killing half a million of his own people in his “reforms” already. He didn't care how many soldiers were killed. So attrition warfare was exactly the wrong move against him.



On the other hand the US had a glaring critical vulnerability. The US politicians had to face elections, so they were very afraid of public opinion. One strong lever on public opinion was the US death toll. So Ho knew that killing US soldiers was exactly the right tactic for him to use against the US.



I really hope that top military minds are working out how this applies to Russia, China, and Muslim extremists right now.
On the internal threat, I suspect strategy is not being applied, and so this is where we need to start thinking using these tools.



The two lessons so far we can apply to the destruction of Christianity and the whole moral fibre in the West are these:



1. What sort of conflict are we fighting? I suggest we need to do a re-think of our position here: Once “we” were the established “government” so to speak, Of course actors were ideas rather than people. Then a cleverly disguised neo-Communism came as a guerrilla attack.



We have been fighting rearguard actions since the 70's thinking we were still the majority voice. We're not any more. We may as well scrap the tactics we've been using – they didn't work even when we were fighting an insurgency. Now they are the government and we are the insurgents. We need to switch to the tactics that work for insurgents! And we need to get in and fight with zeal.



2. What is the source of strength of the progressives and their ideology? That will take a great deal of thinking out. But it is an important question to answer, and the more people who are pondering it the more chance of success. Though two things I've noticed already I will mention. First progressives are very often fuelled by anger and hatred. These are very powerful emotions and so are a source of strength for “the cause” but they are very unpleasant and ultimately self-destructive for the individual. If we can rescue people from bondage to these we will be doing them a favour. The second we see in young adherents to progressive ideology. They are so indoctrinated that they cannot carry on any discussion. Their only response to views that are different from theirs is to shut down the “dissent”. Their response is that anyone who questions their “orthodoxy” is therefore a fascist or Nazi and so “should not be allowed to speak”. Having thoroughly brainwashed adherents is a source of strength, but very dysfunctional.

Vietnam Mistake No.1

Strategic Mistake No.1

In case you are wondering, no, I don't claim to be an expert on Vietnam strategy, I've just read books by men who are.

Also, in case you are wondering how the story ends, it is not how we've been told. They say we lost the war. No, that's not quite accurate. We actually won the war in '73. There was a peace conference remember. Ho promised not the attack the South again. America promised – under the terms of the agreement - to re-supply the South one-for-one ammunition and equipment if the North did attack. The Russians and Chinese promised not to do more than one-for-one.

In '75 Ho's army invaded the South – about 130,000 combat troops backed by hundreds of tanks, artillery pieces and aircraft. In the US a new Democrat dominated Congress reneged on their agreement, and despite President Ford's pleas refused to re-arm the South, while Russia and China poured armaments into The North. Hence the pictures we saw on TV of people desperately trying to escape Saigon before it fell to these overwhelming invasion forces.

But I want to draw lessons from strategy failures so I shall leave that discussion till later.

The first, and perhaps most basic mistake was was about the nature of the war.

President Kennedy had decided that warfare of the future would be guerilla warfare. Partly because the nuclear stand-off between Communist and Free worlds made conventional warfare too dangerous, partly because Mao, Castro, and Guevara had produced handbooks on insurgency or “people's war” and there were guerilla armies rising in central and south America.

Kennedy had ordered army chiefs to concentrate on counter insurgency techniques. Indeed he had made in known that opposition to this shift in focus would be a career stopper.

Also the first US involvement consisted of advisors to the South Vietnamese army, who were indeed mopping up Viet Minh guerillas. However what was being faced was actually mostly a conventional war with the North invading the South.

It was really only when President Nixon carpet bombed the supply lines through the empty jungles of Cambodia – the “Ho Chi Minh Trail”, and bombed industrial and military targets in North Vietnam itself that that the war was fought appropriately for what it mostly was. And when this was done the war was brought to an end. True, Ho should not have been trusted to keep the peace agreement – but my point is that when the real nature of the war was recognised, more effective tactics were employed.

So what could we be missing about our “battles” in the West?

I am going to suggest that we are fighting on two separate fronts. Internal and external.

Internally our moral strength is being eroded. I have written already on this topic.

Externally we are facing possible threats from Russia, China, and Muslim extremists. Like everyone I pray for “peace in our time” I am just identifying possibilities. With only one of these I think we have misjudged the type and reality of conflict. That is China.

China is a bully. China is militarising its artificial islands in the South China Sea. This we see. What we do not see yet is that China is weaponising its trade links.

For China trade is to be used just like Clauzewitz's description of war as: “Politics by additional means”. Trade is a modern variation on “gun-boat diplomacy”. If you doubt this consider the trade repercussions on South Korea when it defied Beijing and allowed US THAAD missile launchers on its soil.

We are thinking of military clash. China is at present being more cunning and planning for the long term with defensive and offensive emplacements: they are using trade, and particularly to ability of a dictatorship to cut off imports, steal intellectual property, buy up infrastructure in other countries, and buy influence with “aid” gifts or loans, and corruption to enable them to force nations to do their will just as effectively as with guns.

If need to wake up to this fact we: are in a cold war but fighting it the wrong way.

Vietnam Myths

Vietnam Myths

I've confessed before to being anti-war in my youth. Indeed that remained almost sub-consciously my position until my elder son started to make comments on Vietnam. Although it was all a long tome ago, often he would say something and I would think: “Wait on! That was not what we were told at the time!” Partly because he was writing a military thriller and needed to allude to Vietnam he did some research. He bought up (isn't the internet amazing) quantities of books both for and against. I read a selection of these too and found my beliefs shattered. I, like many other well meaning people had been hoodwinked!

I have a number of reasons for dragging this past history up again. First to be fair too the men and women who fought there: they deserve to have the truth told. Then If I could be so completely won over by false propaganda, so can today's idealistic young people – there may be lessons we can learn from our past to help rescue them. Also, there were strategic errors made which subsequent military analysts have illustrated. These I think may transfer over to our non-military fight against progressivism / collectivism / statism as lessons help us adopt better strategies.

Ho Chi Minh is central to the story. He was a lying, cheating, murdering scoundrel totally devoted to International Communism.

Central to understanding what happened are three facts about Ho.

Communists, and to a large extent progressives in the West are not truth tellers. “True” is their adjective to describe anything which aids their cause. In short they are liars. Their promises are worthless. Any agreement they sign is purely a matter of expediency – generally in the hope that their more noble adversaries will feel bound by the agreement – which they never intend to let interfere with their grand plans. Ho broke every promise he made and every agreement he signed.

Socialists in general sprout the dictum: “You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs”. Wherever they have operated they have broken the eggs but made no omelette. They have murdered millions of innocent people to no benefit. Even had there been huge benefit – would that have justified the murders? In the West we have produced the benefit without the murders! However the point is that Ho as an ardent Communist did not care in the least how many people he killed or what human misery and suffering he wrought in advancing Communism. Ho killed some 500,00 people just reinforcing his leadership and “land reforms” in North Vietnam.

Ho was a brilliant strategist and propagandist. He understood war, he had read all the manuals, and thought up some more! He was a born liar and propagandist. His adopted name “Ho Chi Minh” means literally “thr one who enlightens” but as one author pointed out in the vernacular “He who charms the pants off useful idiots.” Ho proved the truth of this by understanding American politics and playing us useful idiots in America, Australia and the West generally like a violin!

So no sooner was the peace accord signed in Geneva, granting Ho the North, and Diem the South than Ho began planning what would be a twenty year war to invade the South and spread Communism to Cambodia and Laos. Overall this would result in some six million people dying

Another important factor on Ho's side was that Communism was internationalist at that time. Since then Russia, China and Vietnam have become nationalist. (Properly we should call Russia and China “Fascist” - but it is all a bit of a case of “a rose by any other name ...”. So Ho could count on – and received – huge amounts of military and other aid from Russia and China all in the cause of spreading Communism around the world.

Why did President Kennedy get involved? His speeches focussed on protecting the people of South Vietnam – which was a real but I suspect not decisive factor. My guess is that uppermost in his mind was the safety of the US. The world was divided Communist Vs Free. True the US had just bested China in a war in Korea. But Soviet strength was certainly believed to be very great. The prospect of the Communists taking over SE Asia with Russian and Chinese backing was a real and dangerous security threat.

Next I hope to look at some of the strategic mistakes.