No More Learning

These conclusions concerning media conformism are accepted in part by mainstream critics of the media. Thus Leonard Sussman, of Freedom House, observes that "U. S. intervention in 1965 enjoyed near- total . . . editorial support. "s The "intervention" in 1965 included the deployment of U. S. combat forces in Vietnam, the regular bombing of North Vietnam, and the bombing of South Vietnam at triple the scale in a program of "unlimited aerial warfare inside the country at the price of literally pounding the place to bits. "9 It is a highly significant fact that neither then, nor before, was there any detectable questioning of the righteousness of the American cause in Vietnam, or of the necessity to proceed to full-scale "intervention. " By that time, of course, only questions of tactics and costs remained open, and further discussion in the mainstream media was largely limited to these narrow issues. While dissent and domestic controversy became a focus of media coverage from 1965, the actual views of dissidents and resisters were virtually excluded. These individuals were presented primarily as a threat to
order, and while their tactics might be discussed, their views were not: "The antiwar movement stood at the bottom of the media's hierarchy of legitimate political actors," Daniel Hallin concludes from his survey of television coverage (the print media were hardly different), "and its access to the news and influence over it were still more . i. imited. "Io All exactly as the propaganda model predicts.
As the war progressed, elite opinion gradually shifted to the belief that the U. S. intervention was a "tragic mistake" that was proving too costly, thus enlarging the domain ofdebate to include a range oftactical questions hitherto excluded. Expressible opinion in the media broad-
ened to accommodate these judgments, but the righteousness of the cause and nobility of intent were rarely subject to question. Rather, editorials explained that the "idealistic motives" of "the political and military commands" who "conceive[d] their role quite honestly as that of liberators and allies in the cause of freedom . . . had little chance to prevail against local leaders skilled in the art of manipulating their foreign protectors. "ll "Our Vietnamese" were too corrupt and we were too weak and too naive to resist their manipulations, while "their Viet- namese" were too wily and vicious. How could American idealism cope
THE ll"DOCHINA WARS (I): VIET~AM 173
with such unfavorable conditions? At the war's end, the liberal media could voice the lament that "the high hopes and wishful idealism with which the American nation had been born . . . had been chastened by the failure of America to work its will in Indochina. "12 But no conflict can be perceived between "wishful idealism" and the commitment to "work our will" in foreign lands, a comment that holds of "the culture" more broadly.
As for direct reporting, the major charge of the influential Freedom House study of the Tet offensive, echoed by others who condemn the media for their overly "adversarial" stance, is that reporting was too "pessimistic. " We return to the facts, but consideration of the logic of the charge shows that even if accurate, it would be quite consistent with a propaganda model. There was, no doubt, increased pessimism within the German general staff after Stalingrad. Similarly, Soviet elites openly expressed concern over the wisdom of "the defense of Afghanis- tan" and its costs, and some might have been "overly pessimistic" about the likelihood of success in this endeavor. But in neither case do we interpret these reactions as a departure from service to the national cause as defined by the state authorities. The Freedom House charge tacitly but clearly presupposes that the media must not only accept the framework of government propaganda, but must be upbeat and enthu- siastic about the prospects for success in a cause that is assumed with-
out discussion to be honorable and just.
This basic assumption endures throughout, and provides the basic
framework for discussion and news reports. The harshest critics within the mainstream media, as well as what Corry calls "the culture," held that the war began with "blundering efforts to do good," although "by 196<)" (that is, a year after corporate America had largely concluded that this enterprise should be liquidated) it had become "clear to most of the world-and most Americans-that the intervention had been a disastrous mistake," and that it was a "delusion" to attempt to build "a nation on the American model in South Vietnam"; the argument against the war "was that the United States had misunderstood the cultural and political forces at work in Indochina-that it was in a position where it could not impose a solution except at a price too costly to itself' (Anthony Lewis). B Stanley Karnow's highly praised companion vol- ume to the PBS television series describes the American war as "a failed crusade" undertaken for aims that were "noble" although "illusory" and "motivated by the loftiest intentions": specifically, the commitment
"to defend South Vietnam's independence. "14
Within "the culture," it would be difficult to find harsher critics of
U. S. Asia policy than John King Fairbank, the dean of American China
174 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
scholarship. or Harvard government professor Stanley Hoffmann. or Dissent editor Irving Howe. In his presidential address to the American Historical Association in December 1968, Fairbank characterized the U. S. involvement, which he termed a "disaster," as the result of "an excess of righteousness and disinterested benevolence," an "error" based on misunderstanding. Howe explained that "we opposed the war because we believed, as Stanley Hoffman [sic] has written, that 'Wash- ington could "save" the people of South Vietnam and Cambodia from Communism only at a cost that made a mockery of the word "save. " , " Hoffmann explains later that our efforts in "supporting the South Viet- namese" were "undermined" by the way the war was fought, while the means adopted to "deter the North Vietnamese from further infiltra- tion" were "never sufficient"; and sufficient means, "had the United States been willing to commit them, would have created for the United States real external dangers with potential adversaries and in relations with allies. " Again, we find not the slightest recognition that the familiar pieties of state propaganda might be subject to some question. IS
In its 1985 tenth-anniversary retrospective on the Vietnam war, For- eign Affairs presents both the hawk and the dove positions. Represent- ing the more dovish view, David Fromkin and James Chace assert without argument that "the American decision to intervene in Indo- china was predicated on the view that the United States has a duty to look beyond its purely national interests. " and that, pursuant to its "global responsibilities," the United States must "serve the interests of mankind. " "As a moral matter we were right to choose the lesser of two evils" and to oppose "communist aggression" by the Vietnamese in Vietnam, but on the "practical side" it was "wrong" because "our side was likely to lose. " The moral imperatives of our service "to the inter- ests of mankind" do not. however. require that we intervene to over- throw governments that are slaughtering their own populations, such as the Indonesian government we supported in 1965, or our Guatemalan and Salvadoran clients of the 1980s. On the contrary, they observe, the success of our Indonesian allies in destroying the domestic political opposition by violence in 1965 was a respectable achievement that should have led us to reconsider our Vietnam policy. They cite Lyndon Johnson's national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, who feels in retrospect that "our effort" in Vietnam was "excessive" after 1965, when "a new anti-communist government took power in Indonesia and destroyed the communist party [the only mass-based political party] in that country . . . ? " incidentally slaughtering several hundred thousand people, mostly landless peasants, and thus "securing" Indonesia in
t
THE INDOCHINA WARS (I): VIETNAM 175
accord with our "global responsibilities" and "serving the interests of mankind. "16
Fromkin and Chace define "opponents of the war"-meaning. pre- sumably, critics whose views merit serious consideration-as those who "did not believe that 'whipping' the enemy [North Vietnam] was enough, so long as the enemy refused to submit or surrender. " The media, they say, "brought home to the American people how little effective control over the population had been purchased by all of General Westmoreland's victories," thus strengthening the "opponents of the war," dissatisfied by our inability to gain "effective control over the population. " "The media cannot be blamed for pointing out the problem. and if General Westmoreland knew the answer to it. perhaps he should have revealed it to the public. "
Outside of those committed to "the cause," although possibly skepti- cal about its feasibility or the means employed, there are only those whom McGeorge Bundy once described as "wild men in the wings," referring to people who dared to question the decisions of the "first team" that was determining U. S. policy in VietnamY
Quite generally, insofar as the debate over the war could reach the mainstream during the war or since. it was bounded on the one side by the "hawks," who felt that with sufficient dedication the United States could succeed in "defending South Vietnam," "controlling the popula- tion," and thus establishing "American-style democracy" there,18 and on the other side by the "doves," who doubted that success could be achieved in these noble aims at reasonable costI9-later, there arrived the "owls. " who observed the proceedings judiciously without suc- cumbing to the illusions of either extreme of this wrenching contro- versy. Reporting and interpretation of the facts were framed in accordance with these principles.
5. 2. "THE WILD MEN IN THE WINGS"
As the elite consensus eroded in the late I960s, criticism of the "noble cause" on grounds of its lack of success became more acceptable, and the category of "wild men in the wings" narrowed to those who opposed the war on grounds of principle-the same grounds on which they opposed the Soviet invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and, later, Afghanistan. Let us consider how superpower intervention would be
176 MA~UFACTURING CONSENT
presented from a point ofview that permits aggression to be understood as aggression.
In the case of Soviet intervention, there is no serious controversy.
True, the Soviet Union has security concerns in Eastern Europe, in-
cluding states that collaborated with the Nazis in an attack on the
Soviet Union that practically destroyed it a generation ago and now
serve as a buffer to a rearmed West Germany that is part of a hostile
and threatening military alliance. True, Afghanistan borders areas of
the Soviet Union where the population could be inflamed by a radical
Islamic fundamentalist revival, and the rebels, openly supported by
bitter enemies of the Soviet Union, are undoubtedly terrorists commit- 4 ted to harsh oppression <lnd religious fanaticism who carry out violent
acts inside the Soviet Union itself and have been attacking Afghanistan
from Pakistani bases since 1973, six years before the Soviet invasion. 20 :. But none of these complexities bear on the fact that the Soviet Union
invaded Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Afghanistan, holds Poland in a
firm grip, etc. True, the Russians were invited into Afghanistan in 1979,
but as the London Economist accurately observed, "an invader is an
invader unless invited in by a government with some claim to legiti- macy,"21 and the government that the Soviet Union installed to invite
it in plainly lacked any such claim.
None of these matters elicit serious controversy, nor should they. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, like earlier cases of Soviet inter- vention in the region occupied by the Red Army as it drove out the Nazis during World War II, are described as aggression, and the facts are reported in these terms. The United Nations has repeatedly con- demned the Soviet aggression in Afghanistan and regularly investigates and denounces the crimes they have committed. Western reporters cover the war from the standpoint of (he rebels defending their country from foreign attack, entering Afghanistan with them from their Pakis- tani sanctuaries. Official Soviet pronouncements are treated not merely with skepticism but with disdain.
In the case ofthe U. S. intervention in Indochina, no such interpreta- tion has ever been conceivable, apart from "the wild men in the wings," although it is at least as well grounded as the standard, and obviously correct, interpretation of the Soviet aggression in Afghanistan. Further- more, the reporting practice of journalists and commentators is also radically different in the two cases. We put off for a moment the more significant issue of how the war is understood, focusing first on the narrower question of journalistic practice.
In sharp contrast to the Soviet aggression, it was standard practice throughout the Indochina war for journalists to report Washington
THE INDOCHINA WARS (I): VIETNAM 177
pronouncements as fact, even in the extreme case when official state- ments were knOwn to be false. Furthermore, this practice persisted through the period when the media had allegedly had become "a nota- ble new source of national power" threatening government authority. To mention only one typical case from the year in which, we are to understand, this status had been definitively attained (see p. 170), in March 1970 the media reported a North Vietnamese invasion of Laos on the basis of a speech by President Nixon announcing that North Vietnamese forces in Laos had suddenly risen from 50,000 to 67,000. Nixon's comment came immediately after the U. S. military attache in Vientiane had presented his standard briefing citing the lower figure-a source of much private amusement among the press corps in Vientiane, as one of us witnessed at first hand-but the presidential fabrication was reported as fact. The lower figure was also fraudulent, although this fact was never reported. 22 Throughout the Indochina wars, when offi- cial statements were questioned, it was generally on the basis of U. S. military sources in the field, so that reporting and analysis remained well within the bounds set by U. S. power. 23
Only very rarely did U. S. reporters make any effort to see the war from the point of view of "the enemy"-the peasants of South Vietnam, Laos, or later Cambodia--or to accompany the military forces of "the enemy" resisting the U. S. assault. Such evidence as was available was ignored or dismissed. In reporting the war in Afghanistan, it is consid- ered essencial and proper to observe it from the standpoint of the victims. In the case of Indochina, it was the American invaders who were regarded as the victims of the "aggression" of the Vietnamese, and the war was reported from their point of view, just as subsequent commentary, including cinema, views the war from this perspective.
Refugee testimony, which could have provided much insight into the nature of the war, was also regularly ignored. The enemy of the U. S. government was the enemy of the press, which could not even refer to them by their own name: they were the "Viet Cong," a derogatory term of U. S. -Saigon propaganda, not the National Liberation Front, a phrase "never used without quotation marks" by American reporters,~4 who regularly referred to "Communist aggression" (E. W. Kenworthy) by the South Vietnamese in South Vietnam and Communist efforts "to subvert this country" (David Halberstam)2S-their country, then under the rule of a U. S. -imposed client regime.
To a substantial extent, the war was reported from Washington. In late 1970, when the process of elite defection was well under way, Los A ngeles Times Washington correspondent Jules Witcover described the Washington scene during the earlier years:
178 MANUFACTURING CONSEST
While the press corps in those years diligently reported what the government said about Vietnam, and questioned the inconsisten- cies as they arose, too few sought out opposing viewpoints and expertise until too late, when events and the prominence of the Vietnam dissent could no longer be ignored. In coverage of the war, the press corps' job narrowed down to three basic tasks- reporting what the government ~aid, finding out whether it was true, and assessing whether the policy enunciated worked. The group did a highly professional job on the first task. But it fell down on the second and third, and there is strong evidence the reason is too many reporters sought the answers in all three cate- gories from the same basic source-the government. 26
The search for "opposing viewpoints" as things went wrong was also extremely narrow, limited to the domain of tactics-that is, limited to the question of "whether the policy enunciated worked," viewed en- tirely from the standpoint of U. S. interests, and with official premises taken as given.
Furthermore, the U. S. war was openly supported by U. S. allies, some of whom sent combat forces (Australia, Thailand, South Korea), while others enriched themselves through their participation in the destruc- tion of Indochina. For Japan and South Korea, this participation con- tributed significantly to their "take-off" to the status of major economic powers, while Canada and Western Europe also profited from their support for the U. S. operations. In contrast to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the United Nations never condemned the U. S. "interven- tion," nor did it investigate or denounce the crimes committed in the course of U. S. military operations, a reflection of U. S. world power and influence. These facts notwithstanding, it is common practice to de- nounce the UN and world opinion for its "double standard" in con- demning the U. S. "intervention" in defense of South Vietnam while ignoring the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, regularly described as
"genocidal," a term never used in the mainstream media with regard to the United States in Indochina.
At the time of the full~scale U. S. invasion of Vietnam, in 1965, when there was as yer no debate over the righteousness of the already massive "intervention," the United States had not yet succeeded in establishing a government able or willing to "invite it in. " It appears that the United States simply moved in without even the formalities of request or acquiescence by a supposedly sovereign government. Nevertheless, at the dovish extreme of U. S. journalism, Tom Wicker, explaining his view that "the United States has no historic or God-given mission to
THE INDOCHINA WARS (I): VIETNAM 179
bring democracy to other nations," observes that the matter is different in the case of the "maintenance of freedom" where it already exists:
u. s. support for a democratic regime that is being attacked or subverted by repressive forces of the left or right might well be justified if invited~although,as in Vietnam, the "freedom" being defended may be minimal and the cost may be astronomica1. 27
As a dissident commentator, Wicker recognizes that the "freedom" we were defending in Vietnam was minimal and that the cost proved too high. But the doctrine that we were "invited in" remains sacrosanct, and the idea that we were "defending" nothing beyond our right to impose our will by violence is completely beyond the range of the thinkable. We might ask how we would characterize the Soviet media if the harshest condemnation of the war in Afghanistan that could be expressed in the year 2000 is that Soviet support for the democratic regime in Afghanistan that invited the Russians in might be justified, although the "freedom" that the Soviets were defending was perhaps minimal and the cost was far too high.
Let us now turn to "the wild men in the wings" who adopt the principles universally accepted in the case of Soviet aggression when they approach the V. S. wars in Indochina. The basic facts are not in doubt. By the late 1940s, V. S. authorities took for granted that in backing France's effort to reconquer its Indochina colonies after World War II, they were opposing the forces of Vietnamese nationalism repre- sented by the Viet Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh. In 1947, the State Department noted that Ho had established himself as "the symbol of nationalism and the struggle for freedom to the overwhelming majority ofthe population. "2s By September 1948, the department deplored "our inability to suggest any practicable solution of the Indochina problem" in the light of "the unpleasant fact that Communist Ho Chi Minh is the strongest and perhaps the ablest figure in Indochina and that any
suggested solution which excludes him is an expedient of uncertain outcome," the Communists under Ho having "capture[d] control of the nationalist movement," while the U. S. "long-term objective" was "to eliminate so far as possible Communist influence in Indochina. "29 Nonetheless, the United States supported the cause of France against Vietnam, covering some 80 percent of the cost of the war at the end and contemplating a direct U. S. attack, had France agreed.
When the French withdrew, in 1954, the United States at once turned to the task of subverting the Geneva agreements that laid the ground- work for unification of Vietnam with countrywide elections by 1956,
ISO MA~UFACTURI/liG CONSENT
establishing a client state in South Vietnam (the GVN) that controlled its population with substantial violence and rejected the terms of the Geneva political settlement, with U. S. support. State terrorism evoked renewed resistance, and by 1959, Viet Minh cadres in the South, who were being decimated by U. S. -organized state terror, received authori- zation to use violence in self-defense, threatening the quick collapse of the U. S. -imposed regime, which by then had killed tens of thousands of people and alienated much of the peasantry as well as urban elites. The Vietnam correspondent for the London Times and the Economist, David Hotham, wrote in 1959 that the Diem regime imposed by the United States
has crushed all opposition of every kind) however anti-Commu- nist it might be. He has been able to do this, simply and solely because of the massive dollar aid he has had from across the Pacific, which kept in power a man who, by all the laws of human and political affairs, would long ago have fallen. Diem's main supporters are to be found in North America, not in Free Vietnam. . . . 30
The leading U. S. government specialist on Vietnamese Communism, Douglas Pike, whose denunciations of the "Viet Cong" often reached the level of hysteria, conceded that the NLF "maintained that its contest with the GVN and the United States should be fought out at the political level and that the use of massed military might was in itself illegitimate," until forced by the United States and its clients "to use counterforce to survive. "31
The Kennedy administration escalated the war in South Vietnam, engaging U. S. military forces directly in bombing, defoliation, and "advising" combat troops from 1961 to 1962 as part of an effort to drive several million people into concentration camps ("strategic hamlets") in which they could be "protected" behind barbed wire and armed guard from the guerrillas whom, the United States conceded, they were willingly supporting.
Douglas Pike assessed indigenous support for the NLF at about 50 percent of the population at the time-which is more than George Washington could have claimed-while the United States could rally virtually no indigenous support. He explained that political options were hopeless) since the NLF was the only "truly mass-based political party in South Vietnam," and no one, "with the possible exception ofthe Buddhists, thought themselves equal in size and power to risk entering a coalition, fearing that if they did the whale [the NLF] would swallow the minnow. " As for the Buddhists, the United States
THE INDOCHINA WARS (I): VIETNAM 181
regarded them "as eq'Uivalent to card-carrying Communists" (Ambas- sador Henry Cabot Lodge), and later backed the use of force to destroy their pOlitical movement, to ensure that no independent political force would remain, since no such force could be controlled. 32 In a highly regarded military history and moral tract in justification of the Ameri- can war, Guenter Lewy describes the purpose ofthe U. S. air operations of the early 1960s, which involved "indiscriminate killing" and "took a heavy toll of essentially innocent men, women and children," in a manner that Orwell would have appreciated: villages in "open zones" were "subjected to random bombardment by artillery and aircraft so as to drive the inhabitants into the safety of the strategic hamlets. "33
It was conceded on all sides that the government imposed by the United States lacked any significant popular support. The experienced U. S. pacification chief John Paul Vann, widely regarded as the U. S.
official most knowledgeable about the situation in South Vietnam, wrote in 1965 that
A popular political base for the Government of South Vietnam does not now exist. . . . The existing government is oriented toward the exploitation of the rural and lower class urban popula- tions. It is, in fact, a continuation of the French colonial system of government with upper class Vietnamese replacing the French. . . . The dissatisfaction of the agrarian population . . . is expressed largely through alliance with the NLF. 34
Virtually all parties concerned, apart from the United States, were making serious efforts in the early 1960s to avoid an impending war by neutralizing South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia-the official stand of the National Liberation Front, the "Viet Cong" of U. S. propaganda, essentially the southern branch of the Viet Minh. But the United States was committed to preventing any political settlement.
Unable to develop any political base in the south, the U. S. govern- ment proceeded to expand the war. It was able to do this by continually manipulating the political scene in South Vietnam to assure the attain- ment of its objective: continued fighting until an anti-Communist re- gime, susceptible to American will, was established in the South. Amba~~ador Lodge observed in January 1964 that "It is obvious that the generals are all we have got. "3~ And we would keep replacing them until we got the right ones, "right" meaning that they were willing to follow orders and fight, not negotiate. One of Diem's early replacements told newsmen that he found out that he was going to be the next head of state only when his U. S. adviser "told me that a coup d'etat was planned
182 MAl<iUFACTURING CONSENT
in Saigon and that I was to become President. . . . " General Maxwell Taylor spoke quite frankly about the need of "establishing some rea- sonably satisfactory government," replacing it if we are not satisfied, either with civilians, or with "a military dictatorship. "36
It should be noted in this connection that after the long-standing U. S. manipulation of governments in its client state had finally suc- ceeded in its aim, and the United States had placed in power two former French collaborators, Ky and Thieu, whose sole qualification for rule was that they met the U. S. condition of willingness to fight and evade political settlement, the U. S. media continued to pretend that the gov- ernment of South Vietnam was a free choice of the South Vietnamese peopleY Thus the New York Times commented editorially on June 4, 1966, that "Washington cannot shape the political future in Saigon, but it can continue to urge a search for unity among all the South Viet- namese political factions pending the September elections. " In fact, the rulers at the moment had been imposed by the United States, the
election was a U. S. idea, and-needless to say-the South Vietnamese who constituted the only "truly mass-based political party in South Vietnam" (Pike, referring to the NLF) were not considered one of the "South Vietnamese political factions. " As for the "unity" sought by the United States, it was intended solely to provide a base for prosecution ofthe U. S. war. As that goal could be accomplished only by suppression of all popular movements, later in 1966 the military junta, with U. S. approval and direct assistance, crushed by force the largest non-Com- munist group, the organized Buddhists, thereby clearing the ground for durable rule by Thieu and Ky. Despite all of this, the U. S. media did not point out that any basis for a free election had been destroyed, and that the unelected government was maintained in power solely because its aims were identical to those of the U. S. administration-that is, that it was a classic example of a puppet govemment. 38 On the contrary, the junta never ceased to be the leaders of free and independent South Vietnam, the word "puppet" being reserved for agents of enemy states.
Returning to the expanding U. S. war, efforts to obtain congressional support succeeded with the August 7, 1964 resolution, after the Tonkin Gulf incident, authorizing the president "to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression" by the Vietnamese in Vietnam, "a virtual blank check in waging the war for the Administration. "39
The United States invaded outright in early 1965, also initiating the regular bombing of North Vietnam in the hope that Hanoi would use its influence to call off the southern resistance, and to justify the escala- tion of the attack against the South, which required something beyond
THE INDOCHINA WARS (I): VIETI'AM 183
the "internal aggression" by the NLF within South Vietnam that UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson identified as the problem we faced. 4<I By the time ofthe U. S. land invasion in 1965, over IS0,000 people had been killed in South Vietnam, according to figures cited by Bernard Fall, most of them "under the crushing weight of American armor, napalm, jet bombers and finally vomiting gases," or victims of the state terrorism of the U. S. -installed regimes. 41 From January 1965, the United States also employed Korean mercenaries, some 300,000 in all, who carried out brutal atrocities in the South. The first regular North Vietnamese unit, a four-hundred-man battalion, was thought to have been detected in border areas of the south in late April 1965; until the T et offensive in January 1968, according to Pentagon sources, North Vietnamese units, mainly drawing U. S. forces away from populated centers, were at about the level of Korean and Thai mercenaries who were terrorizing South Vietnam, all vastly outnumbered by the U. S. forces.
By 1967, the war had reached such a level of devastation that, in Fall's words, "Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity . . . is threatened with extinction . . . [as] . . . the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size. "42 The strategy of destroying South Vietnam was generally considered a success. Harvard professor and government adviser Samuel Hunting- ton concluded that "In an absent-minded way the United States in Vietnam may well have stumbled upon the answer to 'wars of national liberation,' " namely, "forced-draft urbanization and mobilization" by violence so extreme as "to produce a massive migration from country- side to city," thus "undercutting" the Maoist strategy of organizing the peasant population (over 80 percent of the population when these techniques were initiated) and undermining the Viet Cong, "a powerful force which cannot be dislodged from its constituency so long as the constituency continues to exist. "43
The Tet offensive of January 1968, conducted almost entirely by South Vietnamese NLF forces in cities and towns throughout the country, convinced U. S. elites that the war was proving roo costly to the United States, and that strategy should shift toward a more "capi- tal-intensive" operation with reliance on an indigenous mercenary army (in the technical sense of the phrase) and gradual withdrawal of the U. S. forces, which were by then suffering a severe loss of morale, a maner of growing concern to military authorities. U. S. forces under- took a post-Tet "accelerated pacification campaign," in actuality a mass-murder operation that demolished the NLF and much of what was left of the peasant society while killing tens of thousands and extending the destruction of the country. Much of North Vietnam,
,84 MANUFACTURING CO:SSENT
particularly the southern region, was turned into a moonscape, and Laos was battered under the heaviest bombing in history, including the peasant society of northern Laos where, the U. S. government conceded, the bombing had no relation to its war in South Vietnam. The United States bombed and invaded Cambodia, destroying much of the countryside and mobilizing embittered peasants to the cause of the Khmer Rouge, previously a marginal force. By the war's end, the death toll in Indochina may have reached four million or more," and the land and societies were utterly devastated. Subsequent U. S. policy has sought to prevent any recovery from this cataclysm by refusing repara- tions, aid, and trade, and blocking assistance from other sources- although not all aid: U. S. aid to the Khmer Rouge in the 1980s appears to have run to many millions. 45
Applying the principles that we rightly adopt in the case of Soviet aggression, the conclusion seems obvious. The United States attacked South Vietnam, arguably by 1962 and unquestionably by 1965, expand- ing its aggression to all of Indochina with lethal and long-term effects. Media coverage or other commentary on these events that does not begin by recognizing these essential facts is mere apologetics for terror- ism and murderous aggression. The United States was "defending South Vietnam" in the same sense in which the Soviet Union is "de- fending Afghanistan. "
But from the point of view of the media, or "the culture," there is no such event in history as the U. S. attack against South Vietnam and the rest of Indochina. One would be hard put to find even an single reference within the mainstream to any such event, or any recognition that history could possibly be viewed from this perspective-just as Pravda~ presumably, records no such event as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, only the defense of Afghanistan against "bandits" sup- ported by the CIA. Even at the peak period of peace-movement activ- ism there was virtually no opposition to the war within the intellectual culture on the grounds that aggression is wrong46-the grounds univer-
sally adopted in the case of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968-for a very simple reason: the fact of U. S. aggression was unrecog- nized. There was much debate during the war over whether the North Vietnamese were guilty of aggression in Vietnam, and as we have seen, even the South Vietnamese were condemned for "internal aggression" (Adlai Stevenson); but there was no discussion of whether the United States was guilty of aggression in its direct attack against South Viet- nam, then all of Indochina. These intriguing facts reflect the over- whelming dominance of the state propaganda system and its ability to set the terms of thought and discussion, even fOr those who believe
THE INDOCHINA WARS (I): VIED/AM I8S
themselves to be taking an "adversarial stance. " As for the media, departures from these doctrinal principles were negligible; indeed, they may well have been literally zero in the vast coverage and commentary on the war, while it was in progress or since.
In a revealing article entitled "Lessons of Running Viets' War," published in August 1987, Stanley Karnow, a veteran Asia correspond- ent and author of a highly regarded liberal history of the Vietnam War, argues that the United States erred in Viernam because it allowed the Vietnamese people to depend too heavily on US. 47 Reciprocally, the South Vietnamese people also "allowed themselves to be lulled into a complacent sense of dependency on the United States," thinking we wouldn't back down, not realizing that small clients are expendable. The South Viernamese people who fought the U. S. invasion are never mentioned, or considered to be "South Vietnamese" within Karnow's patriotic frame, although they constituted the majority of the popula- tion and the only serious political force, according to U. S. specialists and officials on the scene, and despite the fact that the U. S. -selected faction repeatedly stressed that "Frankly, we are not strong enough now to compete with the communists on a purely political basis. "48 A Soviet Karnow would no doubt express similar concern in retrospect that the Soviet Union allowed the "Afghans" to rely too heavily on Soviet power.
By the standards we rightly apply to the actions of the Soviet Union or other official enemies, there is nothing further that need be said about the media and Indochina. Any further discussion is on a par with the minor question of whether Pravda reports facts accurately about "the Soviet defense of Afghanistan. " Adopting the Freedom House- Trilateral Commission perspective, a Communist party functionary might criticize Pravda for excessive pessimism or for too adversarial a stance, contributing to the eventual loss of the war and the takeover of Afghanistan by feudalist elements committed to terrorism, horrifying repression of women, religious fanaticism, plans to "march on Jerusa- lem," etc. Or if he found that the reporting was sufficiently upbeat and not too distorted, he might laud Pravda for its accuracy and objectivity. But all of this would be nonsense, whatever is discovered; serious evaluation of the media is effectively over when we discover that the basic principle of state propaganda-the principle that the USSR is defending Afghanistan from terrorist attack-is adopted as the unques- tioned framework for further reporting and discussion. The same is true in the case of U. S. aggression in Indochina.
We cannot quite say that the propaganda model is verified in the case of the Indochina wars, since it fails to predict such extraordinary,
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far-reaching, and exceptionless subservience to the state propaganda system. The fact that this judgment is correct-as it plainly is-is startling enough. Even more revealing with regard to Western intellec- tual culture is that the simple facts cannot be perceived, and their import lies far beyond the bounds of the thinkable.
Nevertheless, let us pursue the narrow question of media coverage of Indochina, bearing in mind that we are now turning to relatively minor matters, having taken note of a central and quite devastating criticism: the media's pervasive, docile, and unthinking acceptance of a set of patriotic assumptions at such a level as to make further com- mentary of secondary significance, at best.
5. 3. THE EARLY STAGES: A CLOSER LOOK
The "first Indochina war," fought by the French and their client forces and largely supplied by the United States, came to an end with the Geneva Accords of 1954, which established a partition at the 17th parallel pending reunification through elections within two years. The United States pledged not to obstruct these arrangements.
The Geneva settlement was quickly undermined by the United States and its client regime because it was taken for granted on all sides that elections would lead to a unified Vietnam under Viet Minh rule. "American intelligence sources were unanimous that Diem [the U. S. - imposed client] would lose any national election," George Kahin con- cludes from a close inspection of the available record. The Viet Minh had agreed to the Geneva decision for regroupment of its forces well to the north of territories it controlled on the basis of "the assurance that the struggle for the control of Vietnam would be transferred from the military to the political level, a realm in which the Vietminh leaders knew their superiority over the French and their Vietnamese collabora-
tors was even greater than it was militarily. . . . For the Vietminh, this was the heart of the Geneva Agreements. "49
The secret U. S. response to the perceived disaster of Geneva was a plan to resort to military action (including attacks on China if deemed necessary) in the event of "local Communist subversion or rebellion not constituting armed attack," in explicit violation of the UN Charter, which limits the use of force to self-defense in the event of "armed attack" until the UN Security Council is able to respond. This crucial
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decision, misrepresented beyond recogmtlOn in the Pentagon Papers history and generally ignored, also recommended operations against China, "covert operations on a large and effective scale" throughout Indochina (including North Vietnam), remilitarization of Japan, devel- opment of Thailand "as the focal point for U. S. covert and psychologi- cal operations in Southeast Asia," etc. 50 Defense Secretary Robert McNamara observed in a memorandum for President Johnson that "Only the U. S. presence after 1954 held the south together . . . and enabled Diem to refuse to go through with the 1954 provision calling for nationwide free elections in 1956. "51
Surveying the media during this period, Howard Elterman observes that "during a six-month period in 1955 and 1956, there was virtually no news coverage" about the U. S. policy of undermining the Geneva Accords in the New York Times and the three newsweeklies. Commu- nist charges to this effect were occasionally mentioned on back pages but dismissed as propaganda-accurate propaganda, in fact. When the evasion of elections was conceded, it was justified on the basis of Communist terror and regimentation. The Times (June 2, 1956) de- scribed Vietnam as a country "divided into the Communist regime in the north and a democratic government in the south"-namely, the murderous and corrupt Diem dictatorship. Newsweek denounced the "wide infiltration in South Vietnam" in support of the "implacable purpose" of the Viet Minh, while U. S. News & World Report con- demned Ho Chi Minh for "plouing new Red aggression in Southeast Asia. "52
More generally, through 1956 "the press insured that the reading public: would view the war as a struggle between Communism and the Free World," Susan Welch observes on the basis of her survey of several leading journals. Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh were pre- sented as "merely agents of Moscow and Peking whose primary means of gaining support was through terror and force (although occasional mention was made of their nationalist appeal)," while France was "a gallant ally . . . fighting alongside the United States to preserve liberty and justice in Asia," a cause carried on by the United States alone after Geneva. State doctrine was "never challenged" by editors or colum- nists. The liberal press showed particular enthusiasm for the cause, and "News stories also reinforced the preconceptions of the Administra- tion," because "the press relied almost completely on Administration sources for information which was reported. " Although coverage of Indochina was limited, apart from a peak in 1954, and faded still further afterwards, "the terms of the future debate over U. S. policy were being hardened into usage by the press. "53
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With peaceful settlement successfully deterred, the United States and its client regime turned to the task of internal repression, killing tens of thousands and imprisoning tens of thousands more. 54 Diem supporter and adviser Joseph Buttinger describes "massive expedi- tions" in 1956 that destroyed villages, with hundreds or thousands of peasants killed and tens of thousands arrested by soldiers in regions "controlled by the Communists without the slightest use offorce," facts that "were kept secret from the American people"-and still are. 55
The main target of the repression was the anti-French resistance, the Viet Minh, which was virtually decimated by the late 1950s. The rea- sons for the resort to violence were simple and have been amply docu- mented. 56 Recourse to violence was the only feasible response to the successes of the Viet Minh, reconstituted as the National Liberation Front (NLF), in organizing the peasantry, which left the United States only one option: to shift the struggle away from the political arena, where it was weak, to the arena ofviolence, where it was strong. Despite the U. S. -organized terror, the Communist party continued to advocate political action. The outline of strategy for the coming year sent to the South in late 1958 still called for political struggle without the use of armsY As Jeffrey Race documents, when the Communist parry finally authorized the use of violence in self-defense in 1959 in response to pleas from the southern Viet Minh, the slaughter could no longer proceed unimpeded, and government authority quickly collapsed. Nevertheless, ". . . the government terrorized far more than did the revolutionary movement-for example, by liquidations of former Viet- minh by artillery and ground attacks on 'communist villages,' and by roundups of 'communist sympathizers.