Recently, Tariq Ali wrote a long piece in The Guardian, “Where Has All the Rage Gone?” glorifying the worldwide Socialist demonstrations that occurred in 1968. The gist of his Guardian piece is that the key to the worldwide demonstrations was the 1968 Tet Offensive in Saigon, which prompted what came later in the year. Granted 40 years is a long time, but Tariq recalls a battle that never was. He wrote of the Tet Offensive, “The grand finale was the sight of Vietnamese guerrillas occupying the US embassy in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) and raising their flag from its roof”. Good story but put simply, never happened. In fact, never came close to happening.
In point of fact, before they were killed the sappers who attacked the compound breached the outer wall but never even made it as far as the inner breaches of the embassy let alone raising their flag above the embassy. The truth is the military impact of the Tet Offensive was a failure for the North Vietnamese, even by their own historical recall. It was the unanticipated political impact on American citizenry that gave it the power it had. Watching sappers fight Marines at the gates of the U.S. Embassy was not something Americans wanted to watch on television after hearing the U.S. had been winning the war. That’s what made the Tet Offensive the beginning of the end, not some romantic scene out of fiction.
Ali, a well-known Leftist whose public profile began to grow during the Vietnam War, has engaged in debates against the war with such figures as Henry Kissinger and Michael Stewart. 1968 was a critical year fpr him personally and professionally in that he joined a Trotskyist party, the International Marxist Group (IMG) in 1968. He was recruited to the leadership of the IMG and became a member of the International Executive Committee of the (reunified) Fourth International. Flling out all those membership forms must not have left him enough time to get the facts straight on what really happened in a critical moment in the Vietnam War.
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