From James Lewis at American Thinker:
The Vietnam War was won by American forces in the field, together with South Vietnamese, but it was lost in the media. Even forty years ago the media were largely penetrated by the hard left, which has its real sympathies with Marxist internationalism; it is ideologically anti-national, as is plainly stated in its founding works, like Marx’s and Engels’ Communist Manifesto of 1848.
The left won the Vietnam War using photographic images of the horrors of war, but very selectively, showing only one side of the carnage. The most memorable image showed a little girl, naked, fleeing toward the photographer in horror. In a sense, that image defeated America and South Vietnam. Dramatic images go straight through our verbal defenses, which is why both movies and “news” photography focus on emotive images rather than rational thinking.
The Democrats deprived South Vietnam of American aid, and the result was another classic image: the last helicopters lifting off the roof or the US Embassy in Saigon, with desperate Vietnamese trying to cling to the undercarriage. They were doomed to be executed by the North Vietnamese invaders.
The media never cared that hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese Boat People were rescued by American vessels for years afterwards, fleeing Ho Chi Minh’s concentration camps and mass executions, economic mismanagement, and starvation. The American left always caused the morally most cruel and destructive side to win, just as they supported Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. The left always claims compassion and covers up mass murders. It is standard operating procedure.
But now the tables may be turning. We are finally seeing the sadistic cruelty of Islamist terrorfare, and we are seeing through social media that are difficult to censor.
The criminal monsters of ISIS like to show their killings on a social network called Diaspora, which is less controllable than Facebook or Twitter. The result is what critics call “war porn” – but it means that after six decades of monopoly control of the media by the left (and by Saudi and Qatari money), we are seeing the true horrors of the worst ideological murderers in the world.
At this point, no one in the “mainstream” (left-controlled) U.S. media denies the horrors of Islamist terrorfare anymore. Last year they were still accusing truth-tellers of “Islamophobia” — but you can’t have a phobia of some bloody-handed Nazi type charging you with a suicide bomb. That single image – and we are now seeing hundreds if not thousands – explodes the very idea of “Islamophobia.”
Read more: American Thinker