No More Learning

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,
186 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
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
THE INDOCHINA WARS (I): VIETNAM 187
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
188 M A N U F A C T U R IN G C O N S E N T
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. ' "
The fundamental source of strength for the revolutionary move- ment, Race continues, was the appeal of its constructive programs-for example, the land-reform program, which "achieved a far broader distribution of land than did the government program, and without the killing and terror which is associated in the minds of Western readers with communist practices in land reform. " On the contrary, "the princi- pal violence was brought about not by the Party but by the government, in its attempts to reinstall the landlords"-the usual pattern, in fact, although not "in the minds of Western readers. " The lowest economic strata benefited the most from the redistributive policies implemented. Authority was decentralized and placed in the hands of local people, in contrast to the rule of the U. S. client regime, perceived as "outside forces" by major segments of the local population: "what attracted people to the revolutionary movement was that it represented a new society in which there would be an individu,al redistribution. of values,
THE lNDOCHINA WARS (I); VIETNAM 189
including power and status as well as material possessions. " In Long An province, near Saigon, which Race studied intensively, the NLF had become dominant in the early 1960s, while the government apparatus and its armed forces dissolved without violent conflict, undermined by NLF organizing and propaganda. By late 1964, parts of the province were declared a free-strike zone, and by early 1965, "revolutionary forces had gained victory in nearly all the rural areas of Long An. "58
The first units of the "North Vietnamese aggressors" entered the province at the time of the 1968 Tet offensive. In fact, up to summer 1969, when the post-Tet accelerated pacification campaign had suc- ceeded in decimating the indigenous resistance, U. S. sources reported about eight hundred North Vietnamese "against an estimated total of 49,000 Vietcong soldiers and support troops" in the entire Mekong Delta. 59
This picture and what it entails was essentially . invisible to the American public, and it is so remote from news coverage that sampling of the record is beside the point. The same remains true today outside of the specialist and dissident literature.
The context of McNamara's observation cited earlier on the crucial U. S. role in blocking the election and unification provisions after Ge- neva was the "growth of antiwar and neutralist sentiment in the Saigon- controlled areas" in 1964. This came at a time when virtually all Vietnamese factions, along with international opinion generally, were seeking a political solution among Vietnamese that would head off the impending war to which the United States was committed because of its recognition that it had no political base in South Vietnam. 60
The United States overturned the Diem regime in 1963 because of its ineptitude in conducting the war, as well as because of fears that it was moving toward a negotiated settlement with the NLF. There were few illusions about popular support for the U. S. efforts to maintain and extend the military struggle. As for the generals, who are "all we have got," as Ambassador Lodge recognized in January 1964, U. S. policy- makers knew little about them. William Bundy, soon to become assist- ant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, later commented that "Actually no one on our side knew what the new people were thinking at all. . . . Our requirements were really very simple-we wanted any government which would continue to fight. " The generals, however, did not want to continue to fight. Rather, along with the prime minister installed as a civilian cover for the military regime, they "wanted to move as rapidly as possible towards transferring the struggle for power in the South from the military to the political level," leading to "a negotiated agreement among the Vietnamese parties themselves, with-
190 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
out American intervention. " They saw the NLF "as preponderantly noncommunist in membership" and largely independent of Hanoi's control, and regarded a political settlement among South Vietnamese as feasible in essential agreement with the official NLF program. 61
But none of this was acceptable to the United States. President Johnson explained to Ambassador Lodge that his mission was "knock- ing down the idea of neutralization wherever it rears its ugly head," because neutralism, as Ambassador Maxwell Taylor observed, "ap- peared to mean throwing the internal political situation open and thus inviting Communist participation" in a democratic process, here-as always-intolerable to the United States unless the right outcome is first determined by establishing a proper distribution offorce. 62 Ambas- sador Taylor feared as the worst outcome a government that would "continue to seek a broadened consensus" and would thus "become susceptible to an accommodation with the liberation front. " After the war ended, senior Pentagon legal adviser Paul Warnke observed criti- cally in retrospect that "For the United States to 'compromise' and permit the indigenous forces of Vietnam to work their own way would be to condone the demise of the anti-Communist regime we had sup- ported in Saigon for twenty years. "
UN Secretary-General U Thant initiated a negotiation effort in the fall of 1964, with the support of Moscow and Hanoi and in accord with the consensus of Vietnamese as well as others, but it was rebuffed by Washington. As for the media, "It was not until after the die had been cast-not until March 9, 1965, after the United States had mounted its sustained air war against the North and landed the first U. S. ground forces in Vietnam-that The New York Times reported U Thant's 1964 efforts. "63
The U. S. position throughout was that "after, but only after, we have established a clear pattern of pressure," could peaceful means be con- sidered (William Bundy, Aug. II, 1964; his emphasis). First violence, then-perhaps-recourse to the peaceful means required by interna- tionallaw and the supreme law of the land. The elections provision of the Geneva Accords had been officially described in a 1961 State De- partment white paper as "a well-laid trap" that the United States had skillfully evaded, and planners were in no mood to fall into such a "trap" in 1964, until the use of violence had secured their objectives. 64 Increasingly, U. S. planners turned to the policy of expanding the war to the North in the hope that this would compensate for their political weakness.
No such conception of the evolving events, and their meaning, was ever made accessible through the mainstream media, which kept to the
THE INI>OCHINA W ARS (I): VIE1:NAM 191
official line that the United States was pursuing limited measures "to strengthen South Vietnam against attack by the Communists," support- ing South Vietnam "against Communist aggression. "65
In the New York Times version, the United States was leading "the free world's fight to contain aggressive Communism" (Robert Trum- bull), defending South Vietnam "against the proxy armies of Soviet Russia-North and South Vietnamese guerrillas" (Hanson Baldwin), just as the French had fought "a seven-and-a-half-year struggle" against "foreign-inspired and supplied Communists. " In early 1965, President Johnson decided "to step up resistance to Vietcong infiltra- tion in South Vietnam" (Tom Wicker); the Vietcong "infiltrate" in their own country, while we "resist" this aggression. Since the South Viet- namese guerrillas were "trying to subvert this country" (David Halber- stam), it was natural that the Times supported the strategic-hamlet program as necessary despite the coercion and brutality; it was "con- ducted as humanely as possible" to offer the peasants "better protection against the Communists" (Halberstam, Homer Bigan). The peasant
support for the South Vietnamese "aggressors" and the reasons for it were ignored. Hallin comments that in the entire New York Times coverage from 1961 through September 1963, he found two "extremely brief" references to land tenure. f>6
While the print media did on occasion reflect the perceptions and opinions of American military officers in the field, arousing much irate condemnation thereby for their anti-Americanism and "negative re- poning," television was more obedient. Thus "the head of the Penta- gon's public-affairs office was able to assure Kennedy that the [NBC] network had been persuaded that it would be 'against the interest ofthe United States' to show its coverage of 'rough treatment by South Vietnamese soldiers to Viet-Cong prisoners, with a U. S. Army captain appearing in this sequence. ' NBC's news director undertook to with- hold this film's scheduled appearance on the Huntley-Brinkley show, and to keep it on the shelf so far as any other programs were con- cerned. "61
Until the expansion of the war in 1965 began to provoke some con- cern, the NLF and DRV were "treated almost exclusively as an arm of international Communism," Hallin found in his analysis of the Times's coverage. "The term civil war began to be used in 1965" and "the term aggression began to appear sometimes in quotation marks"- referring, of course, to Vietnamese aggression in Vietnam, the concept of American aggression being unimaginable, then or since. But concern over Vietnamese "aggression" never abated, as when James Reston discussed "the main point": "How, then, is this aggression by subver-
192 MANUFACTURll'G CONSENT
sion to be stopped? "-referring to aggression by Vietnamese against the American invaders and their clients. Similarly, on television, even more conformist than the print media, Peter Jennings, showing Pentagon films on U. S. air attacks, commented that "This is the shape of things to come for Communist aggression in Vietnam," while NBC's Jack Perkins, reporting an air-force attack that wiped out a "village una- bashedly advertising itself with signs and flags as a Vietcong village," justified the attack as necessary: "The whole village had turned on the Americans, so the whole village was being destroyed. " It is taken for granted that the Americans had every right to be marauding in a region of Vietnam where "Everything in this area for years was Vietcong. " A television report on Operation Attleboro described the fighting as rag- ing "once again to preserve democracy. "68
Summarizing, from the late 1940s, the United States supported the French war of conquest; overturned the political settlement arranged at Geneva in 1954; established a terrorist client regime in the southern section of the country divided by foreign (i. e. , U. S. ) force; moved on to open aggression against South Vietnam by 1962 and worked desper- ately to prevent the political settlement sought by Vietnamese on all sides; and then invaded outright in 1965, initiating an air and ground war that devastated Indochina. Throughout this period, the media presented the U. S. intervention entirely within the framework pre- dicted by a propaganda model.
There are, of course, those who demand still higher standards of loyalty to the state, and for them, the fact that critical perceptions of American military officers in the field sometimes reached public atten- tion is an intolerable "adversarial stance" reflecting the left-wing pro- clivities of "the culture. " Putting this interesting perspective to the side, as far as this period is concerned we may dismiss the conception that the media "lost the war," although it would be quite accurate to con- clude that they encouraged the United States to enter and pursue a war of aggression, which they later were to regard as "a tragedy," or "a blunder," while never acknowledging their fundamental contribution to rallying public support for the policies that they were ultimately to deplore. Given the conformism and obedience of the media during this crucial period, when the basis for U. S. aggression was firmly and irrevo- cably laid, it is small wonder that public concern was so slight, and that opposition was so negligible as to be entirely without significance. Only the most ardent researcher could have developed a moderately clear understanding of what was taking place in Indochina.
Public attitudes after the bombing of Norch Vietnam in February ?
"'-
THE I:-1DOCHINA W ARS (I): VIETNAM 193
1965, in "reprisal" for an attack on U. S. military installations by the "Viet Cong," are therefore hardly surprising. Asked "Who do you think is behind the attacks by the Viet Cong? " 53 percent blamed the Chinese Communists and 26 percent blamed North Vietnam, while 7 percent said, "Civil war. "69 In no identifiable sector of American opinion would it have been possible even to ask the obvious question that would receive an easy and accurate answer in the case of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan: "Why do you think the southern resistance is attacking U. S. military installations in South Vietnam? " In fact, even at the peak of peace-movement activities-or today, many years later, when it should be possible to observe the plain facts with some detachment-it would be quite impossible to raise this simple and obvious question, or to answer it, within the mainstream media and most of "the culture. "
In this dismal record we see very clearly the consequences of mind- less media obedience in a state with enormous resources of violence.
5. 4. REPORTING ON THE WAR
As the U. S. invasion mounted in scale and intensity, Indochina was flooded with war correspondents, many of whom reported what they saw and heard with honesty and courage. With rare exceptions, how- ever, they gave an account of the war as perceived by the U. S. military on the ground or as offered in press briefings. In the home offices, Washington's version preva. iled until elite divisions within the United States expanded the range of tactical debate.
Reporters often did not conceal atrocities committed by the U. S. military forces, although they did not appear to perceive them as atroci- ties and surely did not express the horror and outrage that would have been manifest if others were the perpetrators, and the United States or its clients the victims. 70 Malcolm Browne quotes a U. S. official who describes B-52 strikes . in the South as "the most lucrative raids made at any time during the war";
Every single bomb crater is surrounded with bodies, wrecked equipment and dazed and bleeding people. At one such hole there were 40 or 50 men, all in green North Vietnamese uniforms but without their weapons, lying around in an obvious state of shock. We sent in helicopter gunships, which quickly put them out of their misery. 7I
I94 MA~UFACTURI~G CONSENT
The Geneva conventions require that "members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely"; and there are no limits to the horror expressed, until today, over Communist treatment of U. S. pilots captured during the air operations that leveled much of North Vietnam. But the victims that the New York Times is describing are Vietnamese carrying out aggression against Americans in Vietnam, so no such scruples are in order, and none were expressed.
Similarly, there was little reaction when B-52 raids in "the populous [Mekong] delta" were reported in 1965, with unknown numbers of civilian casualties and hordes of refugees fleeing to government-con- trolled areas "because they could no longer bear the continuous bomb- ings. "72 The victims fell under the category of "the unfortunate accidental loss of life incurred by the efforts of American military forces to help the South Vietnamese repel the incursion of North Vietnam and its partisans," as explained by Sidney Hook while condemning Bertrand Russell because he "plays up" these meritorious actions "as deliberate
American atrocities. "73 No doubt one can find similar remarks today in Pravda in commentary on Afghanistan by other commissars who are much admired as leading humanitarians because they courageously condemn the crimes of the United States and its allies in Soviet journals.
Not only was there no reaction to these and subsequent atrocities, but there was also no attempt to place them in the context of what had immediately preceded-that is, to make them intelligible. Indeed, there was little awareness of the background, because the media were so closely wedded to U. S. government goals and perceptions that they never sought to learn the facts. As the war progressed, ample evidence became available from U. S. government sources to explain why the United States had been forced to resort to violence in "the populous delta," as elsewhere, as we described in the preceding section. But such materials, inconsistent with the preferred image of the United States defending South Vietnam from Communist terror and aggression, had little impact on news reporting or commentary, except for occasional illustration of the difficulties faced by the United States in pursuing its noble cause.
The reason for the U. S. resort to violence was overwhelmingly clear by the time of the outright U. S. invasion in 1965, and would have been no less clear before had any serious effort been made to determine the facts. As noted above, the United States was compelled by the political and social successes of the southern Viet Minh (NLF, "Viet Cong") to
THE INDOCHINA WARS (I): VIETNAM I95
shift the struggle away from the political arena, where it was weak, to the arena of violence, where it was strong, a typical response to a classic dilemma.
It is in this context that we can understand the resort to B-S2 raids in "the populous delta" and elsewhere to destroy the civilian base of the indigenous enemy, expanding the failed efforts of the strategic- hamlet program and earlier terror. The U. s. media continued to report the subsequent atrocities, but from the standpoint of the aggressors. One had to turn to the foreign press to find reports from zones held by the South Vietnamese enemy-for example, those of the pro-Western correspondent Katsuichi Honda, who reported in the Japanese press in the fall of 1967 from the Mekong Delta, describing attacks against undefended villages by gunboats in the Mekong River and helicopter gunships "firing away at random at farmhouses," "using the farmers for targets as if in a hunting mood": "They are hunting Asians. . . . This whimsical firing would explain the reason why the surgical wards in every hospital in the towns of the Mekong delta were full of wounded. " His reports were available only to readers of antiwar literature, not the "objective" media, which had no interest in how the war might appear from the standpoint of the Vietnamese victims of the attack by the United States and the local forces it established. 74
The media continued to observe and discuss atrocities blandly, not considering them as controversial or as raising any moral issue-in fact, not regarding them as atrocities at all, although we detect no such reserve with regard to the violence of official enemies. The respected columnist Joseph Harsch describes the frustrations of an American pilot dropping bombs "into a leafy jungle" with "no visible result" and without "the satisfaction of knowing what he achieved":
A hit on a big hydroelectric dam is another matter. There is a huge explosion visible from anywhere above. The dam can be seen to fall. The water can be seen to pour through the breach and drown out huge areas offarm land, and villages, in its path. The pilot who takes out a hydroelectric dam gets back home with a feeling of accomplishment. Novels are written and films are made of such exploits. . . . The bombing which takes out the dam will flood villages, drown people, destroy crops, and knock out some electric power. . . . Bombing the dam would hurt people. 75
Nevertheless, it is better to bomb trucks, he concludes, although there would plainly be no moral barrier to the much more satisfying alterna- tive rejected on tactical grounds.
196 MANUFACTURING CONSENT
In the South, bombing of dikes and virtually limitless destruction was an uncontroversial tactic, as in the Batangan Peninsula, where 12,000 peasants (including, it appears, the remnants of the My Lai massacre) were forced from their homes in an American ground sweep in January 1969 and shipped off to a waterless camp near Quang Ngai over which floated a banner saying: "We thank you for liberating US from Communist terror. " The Times reported that the refugees had lived "in caves and bunkers for many months" because "heavy Ameri- can bombing and artillery and naval shelling" had destroyed their homes, as well as a dike that was "blasted by American jets to deprive the North Vietnamese [sic] of a food supply. " It was left unrepaired,
so that two years later "the salt water of the South China Sea continues to submerge the fields where rice once grew. " The reason, according to an American official, is that the people "were written off as commu- nists," and for the same reason the region was left in ruins: "the hills that overlook the flooded paddies, once scattered with huts, are . . . filled with bomb fragments, mines and unexploded artillery shells," and "B-52 craters nearly 20 feet deep pock the hills. "76
Bombing of dikes in the North, occasionally reported,? 7 was contro- versial, as was the bombing of North Vietnam generally. The reason is that the cost to the United States might be high because of a potential Chinese or Soviet response, regarded as a serious and dangerous possi- bility, or because of the impact on international opinion. 78 But these questions did not arise in the case of U. S.