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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, MARCH 26, 1982
PAGE 17
outcome of the war was determined not on the battlefield but on
the printed page and, above all, on thetelevision screen.--
"Looking back coolly, I believe it can be said that South Viet
namese and American forces actually won the limited military
struggle. They virtually crushed the Viet Cong in the south...
and thereafter they threw back the invasion by regular North
Vietnamese divisions.
"Nonetheless, the war was finally lost to the invaders after the
U.S. disengagement because the political pressures built up by
the media had made it quite impossible for Washington to maintain
even the minimal material and moral support that would have en
abled the Saigon regime to continue effective resistance..•."
Why did the press side with the enemy?
Some, because they
believed the communists would build a better society, most be
cause it was "fashionable" peer pressure....
Not unexpectedly, the media refuses to acknowledge responsibility
"for the enormity of having helped...to bring tens of mi11ions
under grinding totalitarian rule--and having tilted the global
balance of power....It is easier to absolve one's self by blam
ing, exclusively, Johnson, Nixon and Kissinger."
The issue is not academic. "As long as the 'Vietnam Syndrome'
affects the media, it seems to me it will be virtually impossible
for the West to conduct an effective foreign policy."
When one adds the Western media's pro-revolutionary "Vietnam Syndrome" to
the enormous volume of "dis-information" dispensed by the Communist propa
ganda machine, there is little chance of ultimate U.S. success in Central
America. In a major opinion piece in the March 4, 1982 WALL STREET JOURNAL,
entitled "U.S. Is Losing Salvadoran War of Words," noted French author
Jean-Francois Revel writes:
In El Salvador, the Duarte junta seems to be losing the political
war and the army will probably lose the military war, but one
thing is certain: The United States has already lost the propa
ganda war.
All the usual ingredients of the disaster are there. Mr. Duarte
is depicted as a sort of fascist, in spite of the fact that he is
a Christian-Democrat like those who are democratically ruling
Venezuela••..The pro-Soviet, pro-Cuban side is labeled "demo
cratic" and the other side, supported by the U.S., as "reaction
ary."
Everybody knows that in Cuba there exists what we might call a
"negative double-F system": no Freedom and no Food••.•Everybody
knows now that Cambodia's corrupt, American-supported Lon Nol
was, after all, less bad than the Khmer Rouge who subsequently
murdered millions. In spite of these tragedies•••the [Communist]
"strategy of tension," which is the art of triggering on purpose
the right-wing, death-squad backlashes [as have occurred recently
in El Salvador] still draw(s) the sympathy of the civilized
world.