On this day in 1968

On this day in 1968;
The Tet offensive, attacking cities across South Vietnam, including the base at Khe Sanh.
The pundits say this is make or break- if the VietCong don't complete the task, they have lost.

(The Spectator archive has gone offline. This could be really inconvenient if access doesn't come back)

P.S. This found on the Time site;

The blast of strings of exploding firecrackers jerked me awake as Vietnamese neighbors continued their celebrations into the early hours of the morning. It was Saigon, January 31, 1968, the first day of the year of the traditional lunar calendar, Tet Nguyen Dan, and the most important Vietnamese festival. Amid the cacophony I noticed a loud, methodical rat-tat-tat that shook our apartment shutters as though someone was banging on them with a hammer. I’d heard that sound before in the battlefield, the roar of a heavy-caliber machine gun, and it seemed to be shooting up Pasteur Street just three room-lengths away. A weapon that lethal had not been discharged in Saigon since the overthrow of President Ngo Dinh Diem four years earlier. I opened my bedroom window and watched as war came to Saigon from the jungles and paddy fields and peasant villages where it had lingered for years. Red tracer bullets zipped through the sky and firefights were erupting near the centers of power in South Vietnam’s capital, the presidential palace and the American embassy. As the sounds of exploding grenades and rockets vibrated through the darkness, I bundled my wife Nina and my young children, Elsa and Andrew, and our maid into the bathroom, which I hoped was safer than the rest of our small apartment, and I covered them with mattresses from the beds. I phoned the Associated Press office, and bureau chief Robert Tuckman answered, his voice high-pitched and excited: “They’re shelling the city, for God’s sake.” I told him I was on my way.

time.com...

a reply to: DISRAELI

For those that may not know, in Vietnam 58,000 U.S. troops were killed to secure the Golden Triangle for the illegal drug-trade.

All wars are deliberately staged and orchestrated for nefarious reasons, TPTB are behind ALL of them.

The history being taught to most students today, from grade school to college, is a a pack full of malicious lies. Something you won't learn about in any government-controlled classroom is the truth about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which took place in 1964, and was used to go to war against Vietnam, costing 58,000 American soldiers lives.

As unbelievable as it may seem to some people, our own U.S. government fabricated the Gulf of Tonkin incident to go to war with Vietnam. It's not difficult to believe, for anyone who has studied the history of our government knows that they lie so much, you can't believe anything they say.

The Fraudulent Gulf of Tonkin Incident in Vietnam

The least-talked about conspiracy that should anger every person on earch is the Gulf of Tomkin incident. In simple speak, this is proof that the Vietnam War was a manufactured hoax - a conspiracy between the US and North Vietnam. This is 100% admitted by the Navy (if you read the Wikipedia post I just listed).

www.reddit.com...

Incessant wars have no purpose other than to increase the wealth and power of the Illuminati, reduce the population, and create a global police state.

"All war is based on deception." -- Sun Tzu, The Art of War

"Wars are all based on lies, could not be fought without lies" — Charles M. Young.

“All war in history has been hatched by governments, independent of the people’s interests, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful” ~ Leo Tolstoy

Now that the Spectator archive is online again, here is the quotation I wanted to post;

Notwithstanding the presence of half a million American troops and after three years of full-scale war waged with all the most sophisticated conventional weapons in the American armoury North Vietnamese guerrillas were able this week to mount a major assault on the centre of Saigon and other supposedly 'secure' cities of South Vietnam; and while it may be possible for the Americans (assisted, perhaps, by the Russians) to recover the crew of the 'Pueblo' from Korean custody —and then, surely, to put the captain on trial for incompetence—their chances of recovering the ship itself do not look good. It may be true that the spectacular Vietcong raids on Saigon and other Vietnamese cities were no more than a manoeuvre designed to deflect American attention—and American troops —from the main assault on Khe Sanh near the border with North Vietnam; and that this in turn is in the nature of an Ardennes offensive intended to strengthen the Viet- cong's hand in advance of negotiations. But such optimistic interpretations of the course of the Vietnam war have been made in Washington and Saigon too often before to carry conviction. There is no evidence to show that South Vietnam is more secure today than it was in 1964.

archive.spectator.co.uk...

February 8 – American civil rights movement: A civil rights protest staged at a white-only bowling alley in Orangeburg, South Carolina is broken up by highway patrolmen; 3 college students are killed.

en.wikipedia.org...

Had my first interview with a USMC recruiter fifty years ago this week. We talked about the 120-day program. ( I would later sign up for it with August as the target date.) A good friend of mine came home from the war last week, wounded. We were alike in a way, as we both wanted to go to college after graduating from high school. ( He was a year ahead of me.) But realistically, it was financially impossible for either one of us. There are no jobs around town that have any kind of a future. Don't want to turn into an unemployed bum and have all my fellow classmates lose respect for me, so I guess the military is a viable way out. Hope it opens some doors for me.

a reply to: SIEGE
Thank you for that memory. It's all part of the story of the year.

I can remember listening to Buffalo Springfield's "For What Its Worth", a song that had come out the year before, while watching the evening news and the civil rights protesters. The words described exactly what was happening.

"There's something happening here,
but what it is ain't exactly clear,
there's a man with a gun over there,
telling me I got to beware . . ."

"Everybody look - what's going down ?"

I was 14 in 68'.

Protests, NASA, riots and assassinations.

Woodstock, summer of love was over.

High School, hot cars and hippie chics.

If only I could do it all over again...

So who knows where the time goes...

a reply to: burgerbuddy
I was 16, but across the Atlantic from all that.

Trust me, Woodstock was still to come.

And the love.

From the BBC news this day;
Khe Sanh base in Vietnam coming under heavy attack. Viet-cong using tanks for the first time in the war.

An independent (Governor Wallace, I assume) declares his candidacy for the Presidential election.
In retrospect, I suppose this move initiated the break-up of the historic Democrat coalition- Northern Radicals and Deep South. [I think of the British parallel- Joseph Chamberlain breaking up the Whig-Radical coalition of Gladstone's Liberal Party.]

The Olympic Committee had decided to allow South Africa to enter the next Olympic Games.
The Wiki page on 1968 takes no notice of this development, but it was a big deal at the time because people wanted South Africa to be a pariah state.
Countries began threatening to withdraw their own entries.

This weekend, the allies were re-capturing Hue from the VietCong.
Newspapers were calling Hue "the ancient capital of Vietnam".
But somebody pointed out that this was a mistranslation of the French "ANCIEN", meaning "former".

Protests at La Sapienza, the 650 year old university in Rome, became violent when Italian students fought with city police outside the university's Faculty of Agriculture building on the Via di Valle Giulia. According to one account, "Students threw stones and incendiary bombs against police armed with nightsticks and hoses," and hundreds of people were injured.

en.wikipedia.org...

Nelson Rockefeller heard "the call of his country" and declared his willingness to run for office as President.
(This information comes from the television news. I haven't been able to confirm it from other sources.)

The Presidium of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia voted to dismantle censorship of the press, an unprecedented step in a Communist nation. At the end of the week, newspapers would begin printing demands that President (and former party chief) Antonin Novotny step down. The Central Publications Bureau, that had previously been charged with reviewing material before it was published, was removed from the jurisdiction of Czechoslovakia's Ministry of the Interior and suspended political censorship (although it still retained authority to enforce moral standards).

Exactly a month before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. announced the "Nonviolent Poor People's March on Washington", to take place on Monday, April 22, 1968 and to include impoverished Americans from all races. During the rest of the month, he would work toward preparing the event.

en.wikipedia.org...

March 6 – Un-recognized Rhodesia executes 3 black citizens, the first executions since UDI, prompting international condemnation.

en.wikipedia.org...
Some necessary explanations; "Rhodesia" had been "Southern Rhodesia", and is now Zimbabwe.
UDI means "Unilateral Declaration of Independance", which had been carried out a couple of years previously in defiance of the British government policy of NIBMAR- "No Independance Before Majority African Rule".
Harold Wilson had put his trust in sanctions, promising that they would bring results "in a matter of weeks rather than months". Our History teacher testified that sanctions never work, citing the precedent of what happened after Mussolini invaded Ethiopia. They did not work in this case either, because South Africa and the Portuguese colonies were not co-operating.
As for the three black prisoners, the Queen had been prompted to commute their death penalties to life imprisonment. This was an empty gesture, and the Rhodesian govenment ignored it.

On the subject of ongoing disputes in Africa, Biafra was still in secession from Nigeria.
I wonder how many people still remember the Biafran national anthem (which a squad of soldiers performed to a BBC news team);
"Bee-AFF-Rah!
Fighting for our nation!
Fighting for salvation!
We shall con-kar!"

Yeah doesn't seem real being 50 this year - i remember that being positively ancient, hell 30 was old

a reply to: johnb
So one of these days was your birthday. That's also part of what happened in 1968.

Age is relative. My parents used to look at the obituaries in the local paper and say "He was young. He was only sixty-five!"

a reply to: DISRAELI

Oh absolutely, you've got be in your 90's at least to be 'old' now and if i keep going it'll be over 100

For a better idea of which day - I was probably conceived about now TMI