Comments

More on the press and that photo of Kim Phuc — 13 Comments

1. There is an interesting book about the reportage on the Vietnam War titled, “Big Story,” that details how many reporters just hung around the hotel bars in Saigon and rather than going out into the dangerous field, they just made stuff up–all in line with the Leftist view of the war.

   In particular the most egregious and harmful reporting was that which characterized the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive, in which U.S. forces basically destroyed the regular North Vietnamese troops and the Communist cadres that rose up with them in the South, winning a decisive U.S. military victory–turned on its head by our “reporters” who gave North Vietnam the victory, when they characterized the Offensive as a successful surprise attack by the North and a military defeat for U.S. and South Vietnamese forces.

   I particularly like his illustration of a lot of the reportage, as exemplified by the videos supposedly taken just after a battle in which the reporter is standing in the foreground with a burning U.S. plane in the background, and the authors contention that such reporters often used this same area as a background for their video shots, and each time they again set the plane on fire.

2. Seems to me that a liberal journo could not conceivably conceive of a conservative’s view of different views of relevance and relative importance of various issues.
   OF COURSE outing Valerie Plame was a big, important deal and OF COURSE, outing Dr. Afridi was not. A lib cannot, under any degree of self-imposed honesty, see why conservatives might be concerned. It cannot even be explained, if the lib’s thinking fails to come up with an answer.

3. Wolla Dalbo: I’ve discussed Big Story quite a few times on this blog. A fascinating book.

4. I posted this over at PJ, I’m echoing it here. The first italicized part is a comment made by one of the visitors to the site. The second one is a quote from the article.

   ===================

   }}}} The photograph is what it is. There is nothing misleading about it. What is misleading is the propaganda the photograph was used to push.

   The photograph is what it is, but there are plenty of variables which are open to interpretation:

   }}} “her clothes torn off and her body badly burned”

   OK, perhaps this is true but there’s nothing whatsoever to suggest that in the picture. She’s terrified, no question, but there are no tatters of clothing on her, as there should be. Lacking any evidence to the contrary, my presumption would be that she was probably bathing when the attack started, and ran, unable to procure (or retain in possession of) any kind of clothing.

   Moreover, as to burns… WHERE? It may be that she was burned but you can’t see any sign of it in this photo to my non-medical eye. Being in black and white doesn’t help, but certainly there are no flames on her body, no discolored areas suggesting burns and certainly no sign of charred flesh of any kind.

   This is a horrific event but being caught in war almost always is. It doesn’t justify giving up like sheep to the wolves of the world. That just makes the carnage piecemeal. Instead of a fight to a solution which provides peace and prosperity for many, if not all, you wind up with Saddam’s Rape Rooms and the gassing of the Kurds.

   ====================

   I cannot speak for others, but let me go down fighting, rather than being led to the slaughter.

   Analysis of pictures and films show that, towards the end of WWII, all the German ammo was being sent to the fronts, and, in actual fact, the concentration camp guards were standing guard with unloaded weapons. Weapons experts can tell this by the position of the firing pins, etc., in the pictures. The Jews were actually herded like sheep into the gas chambers, because none of them had any understanding of weapons. Weak though they no doubt were, they vastly outnumbered the guards, and, had they opted to do so, might have rushed the guards and beaten them just on sheer numbers and mass.

   Me? I’d rather die charging the guards than in a gas chamber.

   …But no one ever called me a sheep.

5. Simplest explanation: the “journalists” were pulling for the Reds to win. Why is obvious.

6. my presumption would be that she was probably bathing when the attack started, and ran, unable to procure (or retain in possession of) any kind of clothing.

   bomb blasts can tear clothing off, and leave a person naked.

   The powerful blast wave which followed tore limbs and clothing off people, and even decapitated one woman as it traveled in a direct line, rebounding off the buildings. – Omagh bombing

   lightning has also blown the clothing off of people.

   and when cars hit people, they quite often knock them out of their shoes.

   if the blast is hot as napalm is, it can also just cinder the clothing which will just fall off. if cotton, whoosh, if plastic it may melt or burn, and silk just disappears.

   Air India Flight 182
   Twenty-one passengers were found with little or no clothing

   Were 21 people on the plane a group of nudists on a charter to some volley ball competition? 🙂

7. if your wondering how a blast can decapitate someone. its pretty easy. when the explosion and wave travels, and they have their heads looking around the corner, their head will get hit with the blast, and their body wont being behind the object. the rest, is shall we say, Newtonian physics..

8. Moreover, as to burns… WHERE? It may be that she was burned but you can’t see any sign of it in this photo to my non-medical eye. Being in black and white doesn’t help, but certainly there are no flames on her body, no discolored areas suggesting burns and certainly no sign of charred flesh of any kind.

   you can see them if you want or know what to look for.

   enlarge the image with your eye, and you can see that she was wearing a shirt much like a tank top… probably a simple dress as is common. where her dress was, she isnt burned as much as its a flash burn. but look at her skin… see the white patch on her right arm? that part is not burned, the rest is darker because it is.

   here is a photo of her at the base.
   its clearer here
   http://i.ytimg.com/vi/nFmWUw0wF6M/0.jpg

   as you can see the water in the tissue boiled and the skin just slid off… and you can see the burns.

   burns are horrors. in movies and such they dont show it as it is, as i saw it when i was a volunteer emt. if you have to pull them to move them or lift, you have to do so under the arms (even thats no guarantee), as the flesh will just tear and come off.
   (you don’t want to see de-gloving either)

   
   Weak though they no doubt were, they vastly outnumbered the guards, and, had they opted to do so, might have rushed the guards and beaten them just on sheer numbers and mass.

   there were many uprisings, but they were beyond weak…

   Sobibor was the site of one of two successful uprisings by Jewish prisoners in a Nazi extermination camp – there was a similar revolt at Treblinka on August 2, 1943. A revolt at Auschwitz-Birkenau on October 7, 1944 led to one of the crematoria being blown up, however nearly all the escapees were killed. Among the few who survived the Auschwitz revolt was Henryk Mandelbaum, who served as a tourist guide at the camp after the war.

   you can imagine it all you like, but your just rationalizing as a way not to believe what others witnesses and confessed and remember…

   ie. not only was it as bad as they are saying, in truth, that horrible bad you don’t want to accept is actually a sanitized version as the truth is even worse.

   how much worse? so bad you cant get your mind around it. so bad that if you were witnessing it, you would detach from reality and it would not be like looking at things every day (and it would never leave you)

   there were also getto revolts.. and in the case of a group of jews in Belarus, living in the woods… there were also latvians, estonians, and lithuanians, who fought the soviet from the forests (and were called forest people) years after the war was over for everyone else.

   you also have no idea what total terror is like. to be woken up at 4am, given 20 minutes to pack, and if you asked any questions you were shot dead on the spot. which tended to prevent others from asking any questions.

   families were punished for the actions of one, whole towns tortured and exterminated in attempts to stop partisan actions.

   and as if that all was not enough, the soviets went on a mass rape and pillage fest through the cities and camps.

   A wave of rapes and sexual violence occurred in Central Europe in 1944—45…..

   The majority of the assaults were committed in the Soviet occupation zone; estimates of the numbers of German women raped by Soviet soldiers range from the tens of thousands to 2 million. In many cases women were the victims of repeated rapes, some as many as 60 to 70 times

   60-70 times…

   At least 100,000 women are believed to have been raped in Berlin, based on surging abortion rates in the following months and contemporary hospital reports, with an estimated 10,000 women dying in the aftermath. Female deaths in connection with the rapes in Germany, overall, are estimated at 240,000. Antony Beevor describes it as the “greatest phenomenon of mass rape in history”, and has concluded that at least 1.4 million women were raped in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia alone…… Natalya Gesse claimed that Russian soldiers raped German females from eight to eighty years old. Russian women were not spared either.

   you can read this over
   Soviet war crimes
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_war_crimes

   and realize that for the most part no one has ever been brought to justice, nor anything as in the west.

   not to minimize the bad that was done by people in the west. absence knowing the above, one might not realize they dont realize the differences all around.

   In Poland, Nazi atrocities ended by late 1944, but they were replaced by Soviet oppression with the advance of Red Army forces. Soviet soldiers often engaged in plunder, rape and other crimes against the Poles, causing the population to fear and hate the regime. There were cases of mass rapes in numerous Polish cities taken by the Red Army,In Kraké³w, the Soviet entry into the city was accompanied by mass rapes of Polish women and girls, as well as the plunder of private property by Red Army soldiers.

   so it wasnt just germany…

   Although mass executions of civilians by the Red Army were seldom publicly reported, there is a known incident in Treuenbrietzen, where at least 88 male inhabitants were rounded up and shot on May 1, 1945. The incident took place after a victory celebration at which numerous girls from Treuenbrietzen were raped and a Red Army lieutenant-colonel was shot by an unknown assailant. Some sources claim as many as 1,000 civilians may have been executed during the incident.

   [in germany: Following the Red Army’s capture of Berlin in 1945, one of the largest incidents of mass rape took place. Soviet troops raped German women and girls as young as eight years old.]

   multiply this out and expand it across the whole and add lots more mass murders, torture, replacements, and so on… with the rescuers as bad or worse than the prior conquerors.

   Hungary, estimates vary from 5,000 to 200,000
   Yugoslavia got off light with just over 100

   China – A foreigner witnessed Soviet troops, formerly stationed in Berlin, who were allowed by the Soviet military to go at the city “for three days of rape and pillage”. Most of Mukden was gone. Convict soldiers were then used to replace them; it was testified that they “stole everything in sight, broke up bathtubs and toilets with hammers, pulled electric-light wiring out of the plaster, built fires on the floor and either burned down the house or at least a big hole in the floor, and in general behaved completely like savages”.

   Beevor claims that Red Army soldiers also raped Russian and Polish women liberated from concentration camps, and contends that this undermines the revenge explanation

9. IGotBupkis: I was wondering about the “clothes torn off” part myself. I assumed it was either the force of the napalm—or, there were some reports that led me to the conclusion that Kim or someone near her had torn off her burning clothes. In fact, I’m inclined to think the latter was the case (can’t find where I read the piece that indicated that, though).

   But she was definitely not taking a bath. The family had taken refuge, along with some South Vietnamese soldiers, in a temple, and had been there for several days. She was not in a house. The temple is where they were all running from when the napalm hit and then the photo was taken.

10. “I saw the bombs. I saw the fire. There was a terrible heat,” Kim remembers. “I tore off my burning clothes. But the burning didn’t stop. People poured water over me from their canteens. Then I fainted.”

    http://www.peace.ca/kimstory.htm

11. A few carefully staged pictures and a “narrative” to go with them can have enormous impact, and can drive policy, change the course of History, and determine the fate of men and nations–for another example, see the “Al Dura incident”

    If you accept the thesis of “Big Story,” that the MSM has been deliberately twisting reality and lying to the American public in the service of its Leftist ideology and/or profit (and lying to the rest of the world, too, in the process). And, in the case of the Vietnam War, convinced the U.S. public that, after Tet, the war was lost (cue the iconic picture of the South Vietnamese officer shooting his Communist captive (who had just killed that officer’s family I believe, but that little detail is always left out) in the head during the Tet Offensive, and basically dictated the policy decisions that made us withdraw–more like “cut and run” (cue the next iconic picture, of the helicopter hovering over our Embassy, while a line of people on the roof struggles to get on board the last plane out), and thus led to, among many other consequences, the torture, imprisonment, and deaths of millions of South Vietnamese at the hands of the Communist North Vietnamese–a fate that likely need not have been. Well, then, it is clear that this wholesale lying by the MSM, and their interference with and direction of national policy, is not a recent phenomenon, but has been going on since at least the 1960s. Lying and “reportage,” and photography that was praised then and still is, as being in the highest standards of journalism, and which garnered their producers awards, quite a lot of fame (and probably quite a chunk of change as well).

    However, you could say that it was the Hearst newspapers reportage on conditions in Cuba, and on the sinking of the battleship “Maine” in Havana harbor that basically instigated the 1898 Spanish-American War, which demonstrates that this lying and interference in the decision making process started much longer ago, but I see massive, pervasive, and eventually nearly unanimous lying as starting in the 1960s.

12. Wolla Dalbo: actually, the thesis of the book Big Story was that some of it was deliberate on the part of the press, but that some of it was also misperception, incompetence, ignorance, and/or stupidity:

    [The thesis of the book is that the MSM never] solved the problem of describing an unconventional war in conventional news terms. They indulged in hyperbole, second-guessing, overreaction, and reliance on second- and third-hand information. There was fierce rivalry between the wire services, newspapers rushing to judgment, and networks fighting for ratings, while editors and news managers sat in New York and Washington reprocessing fragmentary bulletins they often didn’t understand. There was a credibility gap between a White House pressuring General Westmoreland for “a better image,” and an increasingly skeptical press and anti-war constituency. Braestrup spares no one: “In the case of Newsweek, NBC, and CBS. . . the disaster theme seemed to be exploited for its own sake.” Few newsmen were familiar with the language or culture of Vietnam, and they had the “odd characteristic of American journalists” of vastly overrating their country’s enemies, particularly in wars fought with Asians. Braestrup’s most serious charge: when stories were later found to be erroneous, the record was not set straight; corrective stories, if any, were relegated to inside pages.

    It’s hard to know how much was due to “leftist ideology” and how much to “profit.” My guess is that it’s often a pretty strong combination of both, but that the majority of journalists are not committed leftists, but rather “useful idiot” liberals who are very interested in making a buck while making a big name for themselves.

13. I have heard that a lot of reporting occurred at the officers’ club at the air base and the bars of the hotels. Etc.

HTML tags allowed in your comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>