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Greenhat
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Joined: 09 May 2004
Posts: 405
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 Posted: Sun May 16, 2004 5:35 pm Post subject: |
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The book I am referring to is titled "Memoirs of Vo Nguyen Giap" (in Vietnamese of course) or something similar. I'll dig out my copy, it's around here somewhere. There are other books of his I have called "Big Victory, Great Task" and, of course, "Dien Bien Phu".
For Dave, I have no idea if it is available in other languages or other sources. There are lots of books in SE Asia, many of them dealing with important historical figures and events, that are only available in the language they were written in. Might have something to do with the Eurocentric approach to history that is common in the west.
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Romani ite domum
Seaman Recruit
Joined: 15 May 2004
Posts: 17
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| Posted: Sun May 16, 2004 5:49 pm Post subject: |
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Memoirs of Vo Nguyen Giap doesn't seem to be published outside of Vietnam (at least not under that title). I'll keep looking.
I don't speak or read Vietnamese, but my nephew is a linguist (I don't know if he knows Vietnamese, I do know he's fluent in Mandarin Chinese - I'm sure that in his circle of acquaintances, there is someone who understands Vietnamese even if he does not) I should be able to get a translation once I find a copy. |
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Greenhat
LCDR
Joined: 09 May 2004
Posts: 405
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| Posted: Sun May 16, 2004 5:53 pm Post subject: |
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| Romani ite domum wrote: | Memoirs of Vo Nguyen Giap doesn't seem to be published outside of Vietnam (at least not under that title). I'll keep looking.
I don't speak or read Vietnamese, but my nephew is a linguist (I don't know if he knows Vietnamese, I do know he's fluent in Mandarin Chinese - I'm sure that in his circle of acquaintances, there is someone who understands Vietnamese even if he does not) I should be able to get a translation once I find a copy. |
I may be making a trip to Vietnam in a month or so. If you don't find one, let me know, I'll pick one up. Last time I looked, they were a couple of dollars (a few thousand Dong).
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Romani ite domum
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Joined: 15 May 2004
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| Posted: Sun May 16, 2004 7:14 pm Post subject: |
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Greenhat
Thank you for your offer.
I have a hope that I might find it in French (which I took a very long time ago) but it's probably just wishful thinking. |
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sparky
Former Member
Joined: 06 May 2004
Posts: 546
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| Posted: Thu May 27, 2004 8:29 pm Post subject: The first casualty is truth (and also the last) |
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| Quote: | | The book I am referring to is titled "Memoirs of Vo Nguyen Giap" (in Vietnamese of course) or something similar. I'll dig out my copy, it's around here somewhere. There are other books of his I have called "Big Victory, Great Task" and, of course, "Dien Bien Phu". |
It's an urban myth, Greenhat, and it looks like it started out at NewsMax.
| Quote: | | A few weeks ago in a column about Kerry, I referred to what has turned out to be an "urban legend." Specifically, based on a "news" item that appeared on NewsMax.com, I repeated a reference to a volume of memoirs supposedly published by North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap in 1985 as the source of an assertion by Colonel Oliver North. After a reader requested a reference to Giap's 1985 "Memoirs," I did research that convinced me no such volume exists. For that matter, I haven't been able to verify through Fox News that Colonel North actually made the comments he is said to have made and which I repeated. My apologies to Colonel North and to WashingtonDispatch.com readers for including inadequately verified material in my piece on Kerry. |
http://www.washingtondispatch.com/article_8268.shtml
This article, btw, is from a conservative who then goes on to berate the "liberal media."
If you find your copy, Greenhat, be sure and loan it to the above commentator <snicker, snicker>
Here's another debunking of that bull&%#@:
Oliver North, John Kerry and Gen.Vo Nguyen Giap: Birth of an Urban Legend
by Walter F. Wouk - The Thomas Paine Project Tuesday, Mar 30 2004, 7:17am
tpp@wintersoldier.org address: P.O. Box 121, CObleskill, NY 12043 phone: 518-287-1129
united states / media / opinion/analysis
The claim that Gen.Vo Nguyen Giap said that if it weren't for organizations like Kerry's Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Hanoi would have surrendered to the U.S., is a lie.
On February 10, 2004 NewsMax.Com ran a story entitled, "Gen. Giap: Kerry's Group Helped Hanoi Defeat U.S." http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2004/2/10/222651.shtml
The story claimed that "In his 1985 memoir about the war, Gen.Vo Nguyen Giap wrote that if it weren't for organizations like Kerry's Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Hanoi would have surrendered to the U.S. - according to Fox News Channel war historian Oliver North."
The Giap quote is a lie. According to WashingtonDispatch.com columnist Greg Lewis , who researched the alleged quotation, "no such volume exists." http://www.washingtondispatch.com/article_8268.shtml
Lewis wrote, " A few weeks ago in a column about Kerry, I referred to what has turned out to be an "urban legend." Specifically, based on a "news" item that appeared on NewsMax.com, I repeated a reference to a volume of memoirs supposedly published by North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap in 1985 as the source of an assertion by Colonel Oliver North. After a reader requested a reference to Giap's 1985 "Memoirs," I did research that convinced me no such volume exists. For that matter, I haven't been able to verify through Fox News that Colonel North actually made the comments he is said to have made and which I repeated."
The bogus Giap quote has been repeated as gospel in numerous articles, blogs, commentaries and pseudo-news reports criticizing John Kerry. In the past General Giap is also alleged to have made similar statements about Jane Fonda and Walter Cronkite, though there is no evidence that he did.
The fact is, there is no credible evidence that General Giap ever considered surrender an option during the Vietnam war.
http://cvilleindymedia.org/newswire.php?story_id=327 |
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sparky
Former Member
Joined: 06 May 2004
Posts: 546
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| Posted: Thu May 27, 2004 8:33 pm Post subject: |
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Montana wrote:
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I just read an AP story on General Giap about 2 weeks ago in my
local newspaper. He was giving a speech and is today in his
low 90s. The
thrust of the story was about what the US is doing in Iraq. However,
Giap mentions the Vietnam anti-war groups, and how they
helped him take over South Vietnam much sooner
than anyone thought possible. |
Here's an article in the Billings Gazette, probably the one you read. However, it doesn't say anything about anti-war groups helping the North take over the South. I don't doubt that this is the story you're referring to. The question is, did you really believe that the article included your statements, or were you just embelishing a little for a good cause:
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fortdixlover
Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy
Joined: 12 May 2004
Posts: 1476
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| Posted: Sat May 29, 2004 1:57 am Post subject: Re: My media advice for the Swift Boats campaign |
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| StaunchIndependent wrote: | | Bush and Rumsfeld's initiation and management of the war are now perceived by a strong majority as the most disastrous and ill-conceived military action since Vietnam. |
So? People are fickle. That's why Bush & Rumsfeld do not base their decisions on polls.
Victor Hanson: ( http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200405280813.asp )
After our victory in Afghanistan, the president's approval ratings soared, only to descend during the acrimony leading up to the March invasion of Iraq. But after the three-week war, somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of these same Americans purportedly returned to their earlier support of the president's initiatives.
That hard-earned endorsement slipped again, however, as the Iraqi insurrectionists picked off Americans in late 2003 and 2004. In response, the media turned almost all its attention to power failures, looting, Fallujah, al Sadr, Abu Ghraib, and general criticism from the U.N. and Europe. Almost everything good that was happening in Iraq — and there was much to celebrate — was ignored, as if free-thinking newspapers, real political parties, public audit and control of oil, and the opening of thousands of co-ed schools were everyday news in the Middle East. Here at home, oil-price spikes overshadowed the amazing turn-around in the American economy.
The president, of course, is responsible for these wild swings in his popularity — to a point. It was Mr. Bush's tough but necessary decision to invade Iraq, and Americans rightly went along with it on both practical and moral grounds. The majority stuck with him as long as the U.S. seemed to be winning at minimal cost. This latter point cannot be underestimated. A majority of Americans, like a majority of mankind, does not embrace a strong particular ideology that keeps them levelheaded and always resolute through either bad or good news. Most simply wish to win, and to be identified with a winner — they are as giddy with success as they are dejected with disappointment, as quick to blame others for setbacks as they are to claim credit for progress.
But that primordial concept seems to our sophisticated elites too simplistic — although there is a wealth of historical examples to substantiate this depressing trait of mankind. Why was a defiant Pericles lionized in 431 and censured and fined by 430? Most likely because Spartans were in Attica and an unexpected plague was killing 80,000 Athenians. Few cared that he had nothing to do with a mysterious disease, they cared only that thousands had died on his watch. Ask Churchill's ghost why he was called on in 1939, thrown out as war ended, and brought back again as new dangers loomed.
What made Lincoln popular by October when he had been so pilloried in August? Uncle Billy Sherman had taken Atlanta and suddenly the public saw that the Confederacy was hollow rather than defiant and impenetrable. Had Sherman backed off weeks earlier, Lincoln would have been through — even though he was not much responsible for the degree of nerve and bravery shown by the Army of the West and their mercurial general.
Why was Truman ridiculed as unhinged for removing a MacArthur, who wanted to strike back by crossing into China, and then later praised for such sober presidential judgment? Perhaps it was because Matthew Ridgeway had restored equilibrium in Korea and regained much of the territory that was lost under MacArthur's tenure. Accordingly, a once emotional and fiery uproar — replete with MacArthur's ticker-tape parade — evolved into an academic debate about civilian control of the military.
If one goes back to the fifth week of Bill Clinton's 79-day bombing campaign against Serbia — no U.N. approval, no congressional sanction, NATO partners backing out — one reads of castigation from the American Right about bombing a Christian Orthodox country in Europe, from neoconservatives about not committing ground troops, and from the Left about going to war at all. But with Milosevic in the dock and the mass murder stopped, we now are told that the Clinton administration's efforts to stop the bloodbath in the Balkans proved to be about the only success of his scandal-ridden administration. Why? He persevered and won — and we can imagine what would have happened had he caved in at week six and called it another Mogadishu.
The truth is that for all our education, nuance, and professed idealism, too many of us think and act with our limbic systems, which are hard-wired to appreciate perceived success and feel comfortable with consensus. Like most in the animal kingdom, man wishes to identify with good fortune and abhors apparent failure, and thus seeks conveniently to find distance from it. After Abu Graib and the insurrections in Fallujah and Najef, the loudmouth critic Michael Moore is praised as a gifted filmmaker at the Cannes Film Festival even as prominent conservatives and ex-generals, now in their newfound genius, trash the war and claim they were brainwashed, naïve, or not listened to.
...
(the rest is worth reading in its entirety) |
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Greenhat
LCDR
Joined: 09 May 2004
Posts: 405
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| Posted: Sat May 29, 2004 3:25 am Post subject: Re: The first casualty is truth (and also the last) |
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| sparky wrote: |
It's an urban myth, Greenhat, and it looks like it started out at NewsMax.
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An Urban Myth, huh? I have a copy of the book. Read Vietnamese, Sparky? I'll get you a copy.
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Navy_Navy_Navy
Admin
Joined: 07 May 2004
Posts: 5777
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| Posted: Sat May 29, 2004 3:44 am Post subject: Re: The first casualty is trolls (and also the last) |
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| Greenhat wrote: | | An Urban Myth, huh? I have a copy of the book. Read Vietnamese, Sparky? I'll get you a copy. |
GH, I've been waiting for you to see this ever since sparky went off on this "urban myth" tangent! Thanks for the chuckle.
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Altering course to starboard - On Fire, Keep Clear
Navy woman, Navy wife, Navy mother |
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LewWaters
Admin
Joined: 18 May 2004
Posts: 4042
Location: Washington State
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| Posted: Sat May 29, 2004 5:20 am Post subject: |
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Maybe a book written in Vietnam, in Vetnamese and only available there isn't credible enough for Bush Bashers and other leftwingers. They would rather make veterans out to be liars and scoundrels and reinforce John "F"in Kerry's description of us from 1971.
As for the message not getting out in mainstream media, they are aware of it and deliberately not running it(imagine that). Since mainstream media is predominantly liberal (including the liberals claiming to be moderates), does anyone really expect them to run a story that might embarrass Kerry?
Foxnews's Hannity & Colmes has gotten some new footage of Kerry's "interviews" after he came back home and aired them tonight. Kerry himself has claimed his words then were a "bit excessive" (read exaggerated), but thankfully, Foxnews is growing by leaps and bounds and the public is getting to see what they otherwise wouldn't. Even Colmes can't spin taped and recorded interviews. |
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sparky
Former Member
Joined: 06 May 2004
Posts: 546
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| Posted: Sat May 29, 2004 3:12 pm Post subject: |
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I don't buy it. I do believe that your copy of this book that was never published will miraculously appear and you'll begin quoting from it and you'll believe it's for a good cause.
I still don't believe that the book exists.
| Quote: | | An Urban Myth, huh? I have a copy of the book. Read Vietnamese, Sparky? I'll get you a copy. |
Sure. Get me a copy. I'll find a Vietnamese translator (very easy to do where I am). Just tell me what page. If I'm wrong, I'll admit it and apologize to you.
This page has a similar comment about a book published in 1976. Probably a freeper lying for the cause:
http://www.bookhills.com/How_We_Won_the_War_0916894010.htm (second review)
Amusingly, the review immediately previous to this comment says:
| Quote: |
Nor is this the book in which Gen. Giap supposedly stated that groups such at the Vietnam Veterans Against the War gave the North the resolve to carry on. |
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DougReese
Former Member
Joined: 22 May 2004
Posts: 396
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| Posted: Sat May 29, 2004 3:14 pm Post subject: Re: The first casualty is truth (and also the last) |
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| Greenhat wrote: | | sparky wrote: |
It's an urban myth, Greenhat, and it looks like it started out at NewsMax.
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An Urban Myth, huh? I have a copy of the book. Read Vietnamese, Sparky? I'll get you a copy. |
I think the urban myth was in regards to Giap's 1985 memoirs (it doesn't exist) in which he credited VVAw and/or Kerry with helping end the war. This was supposedly via Ollie North on Fox News. Needless to say, there is no such quote by Giap to that effect.
Having said that, I would like a copy of that book. Either that or give me the title, etc, and I'll have someone get me a copy in Vietnam.
Thanks in advance -- Doug |
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Greenhat
LCDR
Joined: 09 May 2004
Posts: 405
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| Posted: Sat May 29, 2004 5:11 pm Post subject: |
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Doug,
Note the first post on this page for the approximate title. I'll give you the Vietnamese title (without accents) in the next couple of days (after I dig it out). It's a small, thin paperback size book, red cover.
Having read it a while ago, I will say that I don't think it specifically mentions the VVAW or John Kerry. I don't think it even mentions Jane Fonda. What it does mention is the protestors in America and how they affected the prosecution of the war.
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DougReese
Former Member
Joined: 22 May 2004
Posts: 396
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| Posted: Sat May 29, 2004 10:20 pm Post subject: |
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| Greenhat wrote: | Doug,
Note the first post on this page for the approximate title. I'll give you the Vietnamese title (without accents) in the next couple of days (after I dig it out). It's a small, thin paperback size book, red cover.
Having read it a while ago, I will say that I don't think it specifically mentions the VVAW or John Kerry. I don't think it even mentions Jane Fonda. What it does mention is the protestors in America and how they affected the prosecution of the war. |
Sorry, I just now read the earlier posts.
And you're right, those books usually only cost a dollar or two. When I was in Camau last week, we had an entire book (300+ pages) photocopied because there weren't any we could buy. Cost -- 49,000 dong -- that's about $3.10 for those of you who are uninformed as the the dong/dollar exchange rate.
Doug |
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sparky
Former Member
Joined: 06 May 2004
Posts: 546
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| Posted: Sat May 29, 2004 11:29 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | Sparky, if you read elsewhere on the board, at least one member has the actual book where General Giap made his claims. |
Not true. He said he has the book but can't find it at the moment. Greenhat said the book where this claim was made is entitled "Memoirs of Vo Nguyen Giap"
I googled this book title and there's only one link. Try it:
| Quote: | | http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=%22Memoirs+of+Vo+Nguyen+Giap%22 |
Greenhat says:
| Quote: | | Having read it a while ago, I will say that I don't think it specifically mentions the VVAW or John Kerry. I don't think it even mentions Jane Fonda. What it does mention is the protestors in America and how they affected the prosecution of the war. |
But Montana said "Kerry´s anti-war group provided aid and comfort to the enemy (see General Giap´s memoirs),
And Montana also said "his most important guerrilla ally during the war was the America press."
Lew says "However, if you actually read the accounts given, you'd see that mention is more made of Hanoi Jane than Kerry. "
The inability of you guys to get this story straight makes me really suspicious. So does the fact that Greenhat hasn't actually found his copy yet. |
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