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Title: After Pinkville Author: Noam Chomsky Date: 1 January 1971 Language: en Topics: anti-war Source: Retrieved on 30th October 2020 from https://chomsky.info/1971____02/ Notes: Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal on Vietnam, 1971. This essay appeared in the 1 January 1970 issue of the New York Review of Books.
On 15 October 1965, an estimated 70,000 people took part in large-scale
anti-war demonstrations. The demonstrators heard pleas for an end to the
bombing of North Vietnam and for a serious commitment to negotiations,
in response to the negotiation offers from North Vietnam and UN efforts
to settle the war. To be more precise, this is what they heard if they
heard anything at all. On the Boston Common, for example, they heard not
a word from the speakers, who were drowned out by hecklers and
counter-demonstrators.
On the Senate floor, Senator Mansfield denounced the ‘sense of utter
irresponsibility’ shown by the demonstrators, while Everett Dirksen said
the demonstrations were ‘enough to make any person loyal to his country
weep’. Richard Nixon wrote, in a letter to the New York Times, that ‘…
victory for the Viet Cong… would mean ultimately the destruction of
freedom of speech for all men for all time not only in Asia, but in the
United States as well’ – nothing less.
In a sense, Senator Mansfield was right in speaking of the sense of
utter irresponsibility shown by demonstrators. They should have been
demanding not an end to the bombing of North Vietnam and negotiations,
but a complete and immediate withdrawal of all American troops and
matériel – an end to any forceful interference in the internal affairs
of Vietnam or any other nation. They should have been demanding not
merely that the US adhere to international law and its own treaty
obligations – thus removing itself forthwith from Vietnam; but they
should also have exercised their right and duty to resist the violence
of the state, which was as vicious in practice as it was illegal in
principle.
In October 1967 there were, once again, mass demonstrations against the
war, this time in Washington and at the Pentagon. A few months earlier,
still larger, though less militant, demonstrations had taken place in
New York. The Tet offensive, shortly after, revealed that American
military strategy was ‘foolish to the point of insanity’.[1] It also
revealed to the public that government propaganda was either an illusion
or a fraud. Moreover, an international monetary crisis threatened,
attributable in part to Vietnam.
In retrospect, it seems possible that the war could have been ended if
popular pressure had been maintained. But many radicals felt that the
war was over, that it had become, in any case, a ‘liberal issue’, and
they turned to other concerns. Those who had demanded no more than an
end to the bombing of North Vietnam and a commitment to negotiations saw
their demands being realized, and lapsed into silence.
These demands, however, had always been beside the point. As to
negotiations, there is, in fact, very little to negotiate. As long as an
American army of occupation remains in Vietnam, the war will continue.
Withdrawal of American troops must be a unilateral act, as the invasion
of Vietnam by the American government was a unilateral act in the first
place. Those who had been calling for ‘negotiations now’ were deluding
themselves and others, just as those who now call for a cease-fire that
will leave an American expeditionary force in Vietnam are not facing
reality.
As to the bombing of North Vietnam, this had always been a side-show, in
large measure a propaganda cover for the American invasion of the South.
The US government could not admit that it was invading South Vietnam to
protect from its own population a government that we had installed.
Therefore it was rescuing the South Vietnamese from ‘aggression’. But
then surely it must strike at the ‘source of aggression’. Hence the
bombing of North Vietnam. This, at least, seems the most rational
explanation for the bombing of North Vietnam in February 1965, at a time
when no North Vietnamese troops were in the South, so far as was known,
and there was a bare trickle of supplies.
To be sure, those who are ‘in the know’ have different explanations for
the bombing of North Vietnam. Consider, for example, the explanation
offered by Sir Robert Thompson, the British counter-insurgency expert
who has been for many years a close adviser of the American army in
South Vietnam – a man who is, incidentally, much admired by American
social scientists who like to consider themselves ‘tough minded,
hard-nosed realists’, no doubt because of his utter contempt for
democracy and his relatively pure colonialist attitudes. In the Guardian
of 19 May 1969, his views are explained as follows:
He also condemns the bombing of the North. The US Air Force in 1965 was
having great budgetary problems, because the army was the only one that
had a war on its hands and was thus getting all the money. ‘So the Air
Force had to get in, and you had the bombing of North Vietnam … the
budgetary problems of the Air Force were then solved.’
In his No Exit From Vietnam (1969), he explains more graphically the
attractiveness of air power:
One can so easily imagine the commander of the Strategic Air Command
striding up and down his operations room wondering how he could get in
on the act. With all that power available and an enormous investment
doing nothing, it is not surprising that reasons and means had to be
found for their engagement. The war was therefore waged in a manner
which enabled this massive air armada to be used round the clock. … In
this way the war could be fought as an American war without the previous
frustrations of cooperating with the Vietnamese.
Or consider the explanation for the bombing of the North offered by Adam
Yarmolinsky, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for
International Security Affairs, 1965–6, previously Special Assistant to
the Secretary of Defense. According to his analysis, the strategic
bombing of North Vietnam ‘produced no military advantages except for its
putative favourable impact on morale in the south. But [this step] was
taken, at least in part, because it was one of the things that the US
military forces were best prepared to do.’[2]
So North Vietnam was flattened and impelled to send troops to the South,
as it did a few months after the bombing began, if the Department of
Defense can be believed.
Since the bombing of North Vietnam ‘produced no military advantages’ and
was extremely costly, it could be stopped with little difficulty and
little effect on the American war in South Vietnam. And so it was, in
two steps: on 1 April 1968, when the regular bombing was restricted to
the southern part of North Vietnam, and on 1 November, when it was
halted. At the same time, the total American bombing, now restricted to
Laos and South Vietnam, was increased in April and increased again in
November. By March 1969 the total level of bombardment had reached
130,000 tons a month – nearly two Hiroshimas a week in South Vietnam and
Laos, defenceless countries. And Melvin Laird’s projection for the next
twelve to eighteen months was the same.[3] The redistribution (and
intensification) of bombing and the largely empty negotiations stilled
domestic protest for a time and permitted the war to go on as before.
We can now look back over the failure of the ‘peace movement’ to sustain
and intensify its protest over the past four years. By now, defoliation
has been carried out over an area the size of Massachusetts, with what
effect no one has any real idea. The bombardment of Vietnam far exceeds
the bombardment of Korea or anything in the Second World War. The number
of Vietnamese killed or driven from their homes cannot be seriously
estimated.
It is important to understand that the massacre of the rural population
of Vietnam and their forced evacuation is not an accidental by-product
of the war. Rather it is of the very essence of American strategy. The
theory behind it has been explained with great clarity and explicitness,
for example by Professor Samuel Huntington, Chairman of the Government
Department at Harvard and at the time (1968) Chairman of the Council on
Vietnamese Studies of the Southeast Asia Development Advisory Group,
ultimately responsible to the State Department. Writing in Foreign
Affairs, he explains that the Viet Cong is ‘a powerful force which
cannot be dislodged from its constituency so long as the constituency
continues to exist’. The conclusion is obvious, and he does not shrink
from it. ‘We can ensure that the constituency ceases to exist by “direct
application of mechanical and conventional power”… on such a massive
scale as to produce a massive migration from countryside to city’, where
the Viet Cong constituency – the rural population – can, it is hoped, be
controlled in refugee camps and suburban slums around Saigon.
Technically, the process is known as ‘urbanization’ or ‘modernization’.
It is described, with the proper contempt, by Daniel Ellsberg, a
Department of Defense consultant on pacification in South Vietnam, who
concludes, from his extensive on-the-spot observations, that ‘we have,
of course, demolished the society of Vietnam’, that ‘the bombing of the
South has gone on long enough to disrupt the society of South Vietnam
enormously and probably permanently’; he speaks of the ‘people who have
been driven to Saigon by what Huntington regards as our “modernizing
instruments” in Vietnam, bombs and artillery’.[4] Reporters have long
been aware of the nature of these tactics, aware that ‘by now the sheer
weight of years of firepower, massive sweeps, and grand forced
population shifts have reduced the population base of the …...’[5] so
that conceivably, by brute force, we may still hope to ‘win’.
One thing is clear: so long as an organized social life can be
maintained in South Vietnam, the NLF will be a powerful, probably
dominant, force. This is the dilemma which has always plagued American
policy, and which has made it impossible for us to permit even the most
rudimentary democratic institutions in South Vietnam. For these reasons
we have been forced to the solution outlined by Professor Huntington: to
crush the people’s war, we must eliminate the people.
A second thing is tolerably clear: there has been no modification in
this policy. Once again, as two years ago, there is mounting popular
protest against the war. Once again, a tactical adjustment is being
devised that will permit Washington to pursue its dual goal, to pacify
the people of South Vietnam while pacifying the American people also.
The first of these tasks has not been accomplished too well. The second,
to our shame, has been managed quite successfully, for the most part.
Now, we hear that the burden of fighting the war is to be shifted away
from the American infantry to the B52s and fighter-bombers and a
mercenary force of Vietnamese. Only a token force, of between 200,000
and 300,000 men, backed by the Pacific Naval and Air command, will be
retained, indefinitely, to ensure that the Vietnamese have the right of
self-determination.
At a recent press conference, Averell Harriman explained that the North
Vietnamese cannot believe that we really intend to abandon the huge
military bases we have constructed in Vietnam, such as the one at Cam
Ranh Bay (Village Voice, 27 November 1969). Knowledgeable American
observers have found it equally difficult to believe this. For example,
as long ago as 27 August 1965, James Reston wrote in the New York Times:
US bases and supply areas are being constructed on a scale far larger
than is necessary to care for the present level of American forces in
fact, the US base at Cam Ranh … is being developed into another Okinawa,
not merely for the purposes of this war, but as a major power complex
from which American officials hope a wider alliance of Asian nations,
with the help of the US, will eventually be able to contain the
expansion of China.
The phrase ‘contain the expansion of China’ must be understood as code
for the unpronounceable expression: ‘repress movements for national
independence and social reconstruction in Southeast Asia’.
Premier Eisaku Sato, in a speech described by American officials as part
of a joint Japanese-American policy statement, announced that we are
entering a ‘new Pacific age’ in which ‘a new order will be created by
Japan and the United States’ (New York Times, 22 November 1969). His
words, one must assume, were chosen advisedly. To perpetuate this new
order we will need military bases such as that at Cam Ranh Bay, which
can play the role of the Canal Zone in the western hemisphere. There we
can base our own forces and train those of our loyal dependencies.
We will no doubt soon proceed to construct an ‘inter-Asian’ army that
can protect helpless governments from their own populations, much as the
Brazilians were called in to legitimize our Dominican intervention.
Where popular rebellion is in progress, these forces can gain valuable
experience. Thus a senior American officer at Camp Bearcat in South
Vietnam, where Thai units are based, explains that ‘they are infusing
their army with experience they could never get in their own homeland….
They are coordinating their own piece of real estate’. And a Thai
colonel adds: ‘If my country ever has the same subversion, I’ll have to
fight there. I want to practice here’ (New York Times, 3 December 1969).
Surely Reston was right in 1965 in speculating about our long-range
plans for the South Vietnamese bases, from which our ‘token force’ of a
quarter of a million men will operate in the 1970s.[6]
Who can complain about a quarter of a million men, a force that can be
compared, let us say, with the Japanese army of 160,000 which invaded
North China in 1937, in an act of aggression that scandalized the
civilized world and set the stage for the Pacific phase of the Second
World War? In fact, counterinsurgency experts like Sir Robert Thompson
have long argued that the American forces were far too large to be
effective, and have advocated a ‘low-cost, long-haul strategy’ of a sort
which will now very likely be adopted by the Nixon administration, if,
once again, the American people will trust their leaders and settle into
passivity.
As American combat troops are withdrawn, their place, it is hoped, will
be taken by a more effective force of Vietnamese – just as
Czechoslovakia is controlled, it is reported, by fewer than 100,000
Russian troops. Meanwhile, the war will no doubt be escalated
technologically. It will become more ‘capital intensive’.[7] Some of the
prospects were revealed in a speech by Chief of Staff William
Westmoreland, reported in the Christian Science Monitor (25–7 October
1969) under the heading: ‘Technologically the Vietnam war has been a
great success.’ General Westmoreland ‘sees machines carrying more and
more of the burden’. He says:
I see an army built into and around an integrated area control system
that exploits the advanced technology of communications, sensors, fire
direction, and the required automatic data processing – a system that is
sensitive to the dynamics of the ever-changing battlefield – a system
that materially assists the tactical commander in making sound and
timely decisions.
Further details are presented by Leonard Sullivan, Deputy Director of
Research and Development for South-east Asian Matters:[8]
These developments open up some very exciting horizons as to what we can
do five or ten years from now. When one realizes that we can detect
anything that perspires, moves, carries metal, makes a noise, or is
hotter or colder than its surroundings, one begins to see the potential.
This is the beginning of instrumentation of the entire battlefield.
Eventually, we will be able to tell when anybody shoots, what he is
shooting at, and where he was shooting from. You begin to get a ‘Year
2000’ vision of an electronic map with little lights that flash for
different kinds of activity. This is what we require for this ‘porous’
war, where the friendly and the enemy are all mixed together.
Note the time scale that is projected for Vietnam. News reports reveal
some of the early stages of these exciting developments. The New York
Times, 22 November 1969, reports a plan to use remote-controlled
unmanned aircraft as supply transports for combat areas. On 1 October
1969 the New York Times explains that:
The landscape of Vietnam and the border regions are studded with
electronic sensors that beep information into the banks of computers.
Radar, cameras, infrared detectors and a growing array of more exotic
devices contribute to the mass of information. Not long ago
reconnaissance planes began carrying television cameras.
The data go into the Combined Intelligence Center near Tansonnhut Air
Base: ‘Day and night in its antiseptic interior a family of blinking,
whirring computers devours, digests and spews out a Gargantuan diet of
information about the enemy’, the better to serve the ‘conglomerate of
allied civil and military organizations that work together to destroy
the Vietcong’s underground government’ – freely admitted to have been
the most authentic popular social structure in South Vietnam prior to
the American effort to demolish the society of Vietnam. One can
understand the gloating of Douglas Pike: ‘The tactics that delivered
victory in the Viet Minh war, however impressive once, had been
relegated by science to the military history textbook.’[9]
What this means is, to put it simply, that we intend to turn the land of
Vietnam into an automated murder machine. The techniques of which
Westmoreland, Sullivan and Pike are so proud are, of course, designed
for use against a special kind of enemy: one who is too weak to
retaliate, whose land can be occupied. These ‘Year 2000’ devices, which
Westmoreland describes as a quantum jump in warfare, are fit only for
colonial wars. There is surely an element of lunacy in this technocratic
nightmare. And if we are still at all capable of honesty, we will, with
little difficulty, identify its antecedents.
Our science may yet succeed in bringing to reality the fears of Bernard
Fall – no alarmist, and fundamentally in favour of the war during its
early years – who wrote in one of his last essays that ‘Vietnam as a
cultural and historic entity … is threatened with extinction … the
countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military
machine ever unleashed on an area of this size’. The South Vietnamese
Minister of Information wrote in 1968 that ordinary Vietnamese would
continue ‘to be horrified and embittered at the way the Americans fight
their war…. Our peasants will remember their cratered rice fields and
defoliated forests, devastated by an alien air force that seems at war
with the very land of Vietnam’.[10]
American reporters have told us the same thing so often that it is
almost superfluous to quote. Tom Buckley – to mention only the most
recent – describes the delta and the central lowlands:
… bomb craters beyond counting, the dead gray and black fields, forests
that have been defoliated and scorched by napalm, land that has been
ploughed flat to destroy Vietcong hiding places. And everywhere can be
seen the piles of ashes forming the outlines of huts and houses, to show
where hamlets once stood.[11]
The truth about defoliants is only beginning to emerge, with the
discovery that one of the two primary agents used is ‘potentially
dangerous, but needing further study’ while the other causes cancer and
birth defects, and probably mental retardation. Both will continue to be
used in Vietnam against enemy ‘training and regroupment centres’ – i.e.
anywhere we please, throughout the countryside.[12]
Of course it may be argued that the American government did not know, in
1961, that these agents were so dangerous. That is true. It was merely
an experiment. Virtually nothing was known about what the effects might
be. Perhaps there would be no ill effects, or perhaps – at the other
extreme – Vietnam would become unfit for human life, or a race of
mutants and mental retardates would be created. How could we know,
without trying? In such ways ‘the tactics that delivered victory in the
Viet Minh war, however impressive once, had been relegated by science to
the military history textbook’.
To see what may lie ahead, I’d like to turn away from Vietnam to a less
familiar case. It has been claimed that Vietnam is the second most
heavily bombarded country in history. The most intensively bombarded, so
it seems, is Laos. According to Le Monde, ‘North Vietnam was more
heavily bombed than Korea; Laos is now being bombed even more than North
Vietnam. And this battering has been going on for over five years. … The
US Air Force carries out more than 12,500 raids a month.’[13] On the
same day, 1 October 1969, the New York Times announced its discovery
that in Laos, ‘the rebel economy and social fabric’ are now the main
target of the American bombardment, which is claimed to be a success:
Refugees from the Plaine des Jarres area say that during recent months
most open spaces have been evacuated. Both civilians and soldiers have
retreated into the forests or hills and frequently spend most of the
daylight hours in caves or tunnels. Refugees said they could only plough
their fields at night because they were unsafe during the day. ‘So long
as the US bombing continues at its new level,’ a European diplomat said
here this week, ‘so-called Communist territory is little but a shooting
range….’ The bombing, by creating refugees, deprives the Communists of
their chief source of food and transport. The population of the Pathet
Lao zone has been declining for several years and the Pathet Lao find it
increasingly difficult to fight a ‘people’s war’ with fewer and fewer
people.
The world’s most advanced society has found the answer to people’s war:
eliminate the people.
It is, incidentally, remarkable that the New York Times can so blandly
announce that the rebel economy and social fabric are the main target of
the American bombardment. It is remarkable that this claim, which, if
correct, sets American policy at the moral level of Nazi Germany, can be
merely noted in a casual comment, with – so far as I know – no public
reaction of horror and indignation.
Still, it is good that the American press has discovered that the rebel
economy and social fabric are the target of the American bombardment of
Laos. Perhaps we will be spared the pretence that our targets are steel
and concrete, or that the bombing is ‘the most restrained in modern
warfare’ (as McGeorge Bundy so elegantly put it at the time when
virtually every structure in North Vietnam, outside of the centres of
Hanoi and Haiphong, was being demolished).
The discovery has been mysteriously delayed. For example, in July 1968,
the south-east Asia expert of Le Monde, Jacques Decornoy, published
detailed reports of his visits to the liberated areas of Laos: ‘a world
without noise, for the surrounding villages have disappeared, the
inhabitants themselves living hidden in the mountains … it is dangerous
to lean out at any time of the night or day’ because of the ceaseless
bombardment which leads to ‘the scientific destruction of the areas held
by the enemy’. ‘The Americans are trying to “break” the Laotian Left,
both psychologically and if possible, physically.’ The nature of their
relentless attack ‘can only be explained if the target is the central
administration of the Neo Lao Haksat’ – the political organization that
won handily in 1958 in the only unrigged election in Laos. This
electoral victory inspired the American effort at subversion that led to
the Laotian crisis in the early sixties, which still persists.
Decornoy describes ‘the motionless ruins and deserted houses’ of the
central town of Sam-Neua district:
The first real raid against the population centre itself was launched on
19 February 1965. Very serious attacks were made on it quite recently on
17 and 19 March 1968…. The two ends of the town were razed to the
ground. The old ruins of 1965 have disappeared, those of March 1968 were
still ‘smoking’ when we visited them. Branches of trees lay all along
the length of the river, houses were totally burned out (phosphorus had
been used). At the other end of Sam-Neua, the sight was even more
painful. Everywhere enormous craters, the church and many houses were
demolished. In order to reach the people who might be living there, the
Americans dropped their all-too-famous fragmentation bombs. Here lay a
‘mother bomb’ disembowelled, by the side of the road. All round, over a
dozen metres, the earth was covered with ‘daughter bombs’, little
machines that the Vietnamese know well, unexploded and hiding hundreds
of steel splinters. … One of the officials of Sam-Neua district told us
that between February 1965 and March 1968, 65 villages had been
destroyed. A number impossible to verify in a short report, but it is a
fact that between Sam-Neua and a place about 30 kilometres away where we
stayed, no house in the villages and hamlets had been spared. Bridges
had been destroyed, fields up to the rivers were holed with bomb
craters.
Decornoy reports that ‘American raids on “liberated Laos” began in May
1964, therefore well before the Gulf of Tonkin incident (August 1964)
and the policy of escalation to North Vietnam (spring 1965). For this
reason, Laos has, in some ways, served as a testing ground or
experimental site’. He describes the amazing persistence of the Laotians
in maintaining and advancing the social revolution in the face of this
attack, their ‘virulent nationalism’ and refusal to follow foreign
models, the schools and factories in caves, the prosperity of the rare
villages that have still, for unknown reasons, escaped destruction.
Finally he quotes an American diplomat in Vientiane who says: ‘To make
progress in this country, it is necessary to level everything. The
inhabitants must go back to zero, lose their traditional culture, for it
blocks everything.’ And Decornoy comments: ‘The Americans accuse the
North Vietnamese of intervening militarily in the country, but it is
they who talk of reducing Laos to zero, while the Pathet Lao exalts the
national culture and national independence.’
No doubt Laos is still serving as a testing ground or experimental site
for the next stage of the Vietnam war, for our new long-haul, low-cost
policy. If the American people will only trust their leaders, perhaps
there is still a chance to crush the people’s war in South Vietnam by
methods that will be as well concealed as have been those of the Laotian
war.
The secret can be kept. Americans know virtually nothing about the
bombing of South Vietnam. To my knowledge, there has been only one
pro-Western correspondent who has spent time in the liberated zones of
South Vietnam, Katsuichi Honda – and I am sure that his reports in Asahi
in the fall of 1967 are known to very few Americans.[14] He describes,
for example, the incessant attacks on undefended villages by gunboats in
the Mekong river and by helicopter gunships ‘firing away at random at
farmhouses’
They seemed to fire whimsically and in passing even though they were not
being shot at from the ground nor could they identify the people as NLF.
They did it impulsively for fun, 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.
He is speaking, notice, of the Mekong Delta, where few North Vietnamese
soldiers were identified until several months after the Tet offensive,
where, according to American intelligence, there were 800 North
Vietnamese troops before last summer;[15] and which contained some forty
per cent of the population of South Vietnam prior to the American
assault.
Occasionally such material finds its way to the American press. Consider
again the Mekong Delta. ‘In March [1969] alone, the United States 9^(th)
Infantry Division reported that it killed 3,504 Viet Cong troops and
sympathizers in the northern delta [and] senior officers confidently
forecast that they will continue to kill at least 100 a day well into
the summer.’ The ‘conflagration … is tearing the social fabric apart’.
In ‘free-fire zones, the Americans could bring to bear at any time the
enormous firepower available from helicopter gunships, bombers and
artillery … fighter bombers and artillery pound the enemy positions into
the grey porridge that the green delta land becomes when pulverized by
high explosives’.[16]
Apparently the performance of the 9^(th) Division was not entirely
satisfactory, however: ‘… . in the Mekong Delta, US military advisers at
My Tho told a UPI correspondent, Robert Kaylor, that the government’s
pacification programme was still being hampered by the effects of
indiscriminate killing of civilians by US 9^(th) Infantry Division
troops recently withdrawn from the area. “You can’t exactly expect
people who have had parts of their family blown away by the 9^(th) to be
wholeheartedly on our side,” said the US source, a member of a
pacification team.’[17]
In the Monitor, 14 October 1969, there is a front page story reviewing
such efforts. It explains that ‘the proportion of the country “pacified”
has risen with the flow of peasants to resettlement and refugee areas’,
although the Viet Cong ‘currently are intensifying their campaign to
drive peasants back to their home areas where [they] have a better
chance of controlling them’. The picture is clear. We, in our
magnanimity, are using our modernizing instruments, bombs and artillery,
to lead the suffering peasants to the promised land of resettlement and
refugee areas. while the ferocious Viet Cong – mere ‘village thugs’, as
the MIT political scientist, Ithiel Pool, explains in the journal of the
Gandhi Peace Foundation – cruelly drive them back to their homes. The
Monitor article also notes that ‘despite years of thought and effort,
officials here are still not agreed on how best to pacify a troubled
land. In those years, pacification has advanced from being a theoretical
ideal – though inconvenient – to the more important but second-class
status of being “the other war”’ – and a proper theoretical exercise for
American scientists and scholars.
The New York Times, 24 September 1969, presents an example of how
pacification proceeds. North-west of Saigon, 700 soldiers encircled a
village, killing twenty-two and arresting fifty-three. It was the fourth
such operation in this village in fifteen months. As for the villagers:
‘The Viet Cong are everywhere, they say, and will be back when the
Americans leave.’ An American junior officer, looking at the deserted
central market, had this to say:
‘They say this village is 80 per cent VC supporters. By the time we
finish this it will be 95 per cent.’ Such reports are hardly more
newsworthy than a small item of 27 September which notes ‘that United
States Army helicopter gunships mistakenly attacked a group of
Vietnamese civilians 25 miles west of Tamky Tuesday, killing 14
civilians. … United States helicopter gunships killed 7 unarmed
civilians and wounded 17 others in a similar incident 16 September in
the Mekong delta.’ It is not easy to avoid such accidents as we try to
ensure that the Viet Cong constituency ceases to exist.
In Look magazine, 18 November 1969, Foreign Editor Robert Moskin
describes his visit to a refugee camp, which ‘tells part of the story of
Vietnam’s hopelessness’. Its 3,125 refugees (240 men) were transferred
to this ‘desolate sand-dune camp’ in a military sweep last summer from
an island that was regarded as a VC stronghold: ‘The rest of the men are
still hiding with the VC in the tall grass.’ This is in Quang Nam
province, where even the American officials in charge admit that the
battle was lost ‘to Viet Cong forces recruited for the most part from
within the province’.[18] With an honesty that others would do well to
emulate, Moskin states that in Vietnam ‘America’s historic
westward-driving wave has crested’.
With justice, ‘a staff major [of the American 1^(st) Division in Chulai]
said: “We are at war with the 10-year-old children. It may not be
humanitarian, but that’s what it’s like.” ’[19]
And now there is Song My ‘Pinkville’. More than two decades of
indoctrination and counter-revolutionary interventions have created the
possibility of a name like ‘Pinkville’ – and the acts that may be done
in a place so named. Orville and Jonathan Schell have pointed out[20]
what any literate person should realize, that this was no isolated
atrocity, but the logical consequence of a virtual war of extermination
directed against helpless peasants: ‘enemies’, ‘reds’, ‘dinks’. But
there are, perhaps, still deeper roots. Some time ago, I read with a
slight shock the statement by Eqbal Ahmad that ‘America has
institutionalized even its genocide’, referring to the fact that the
extermination of the Indians ‘has become the object of public
entertainment and children’s games’.[21] Shortly after, I was thumbing
through my daughter’s fourth-grade social science reader.[22] The
protagonist, Robert, is told the story of the extermination of the
Pequot tribe by Captain John Mason:
His little army attacked in the morning before it was light and took the
Pequots by surprise. The soldiers broke down the stockade with their
axes, rushed inside, and set fire to the wigwams. They killed nearly all
the braves, squaws, and children, and burned their corn and other food.
There were no Pequots left to make more trouble. When the other Indian
tribes saw what good fighters the white men were, they kept the peace
for many years.
I wish I were a man and had been there,’ thought Robert.
Nowhere does Robert express, or hear, second thoughts about the matter.
The text omits some other pertinent remarks: for example, by Cotton
Mather, who said that ‘it was supposed that no less than six hundred
Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day.’[23] Is it an
exaggeration to suggest that our history of extermination and racism is
reaching its climax in Vietnam today? It is not a question that
Americans can easily put aside.
The revelation of the Song My atrocity to a wide public appears to have
been a by-product of the November mobilization. As Richard L. Strout
wrote in the Monitor:
American press self-censorship thwarted Mr Ridenhour’s disclosures for a
year. ‘No one wanted to go into it,’ his agent said of telegrams sent to
Life, Look, and Newsweek magazines outlining allegations.
Except for the recent antiwar march in Washington the event might not
have been publicized. In connexion with the march a news offshoot
(Dispatch News Service) of the left-wing Institute of Policy Studies of
this city aggressively told and marketed the story to approximately 30
US and Canadian newspapers.[24]
Apart from this, it probably would have disappeared from history, along
with who knows what else.
The first investigation by the Pentagon ‘reported that the carnage was
due to artillery fire. Civilian casualties by artillery fire among
hostile villages are so common that this explanation ended the
inquiry’.[25] But the murdered Vietnamese were not the victims of
artillery fire. Since the soldiers looked into the faces of their
victims, the inquiry must continue, despite the difficulties. Henry Kamm
reported in the New York Times that:
The task of the investigators is complicated by the fact that last
January, most of the inhabitants of the peninsula were forcibly
evacuated by American and South Vietnamese troops in the course of a
drive to clear the area of Viet Cong. More than 12,000 persons were
removed from Batangan Peninsula by helicopters and taken to a processing
camp near this provincial capital. Heavy American bombing and artillery
and naval shelling had destroyed many of the houses and forced them to
live in caves and bunkers for many months before the evacuation. … An
elaborate interrogation and screening procedure, in which American
intelligence agents were said to have taken an important part, yielded
only a hundred or so active Viet Cong suspects. Most of the people were
sent to a newly established refugee camp. … Despite the extensive
movement of the population and the military operation, the Viet Cong
remain active in the area.[26]
On 22 November, Kamm adds the further information that ‘the number of
refugees “generated” – the term for the people forcibly dislocated in
this process – exceeded intelligence estimates fourfold’. ‘The 12,000,
instead of being scattered in many hamlets where it would be difficult
to keep out the Viet Cong, are now concentrated in six guarded,
camp-like settlements.’
It is perhaps remarkable that none of this appears to occasion much
concern. It is only the acts of a company of half-crazed GIs that are
regarded as a scandal, a disgrace to America. It will, indeed, be a
still greater national scandal – if we assume that to be possible – if
they alone are subjected to criminal prosecution, but not those who have
created and accepted the long-term atrocity to which they contributed
one detail – merely a few hundred more murdered Vietnamese.
Recently, a study of American public opinion about Vietnam concluded
with this speculation: ‘… . little reaction to the war is based on
humanitarian or moral considerations. Americans are not now rejecting
“war”, they merely wish to see this current conflict ended. To achieve
this goal, most Americans would pursue a more militant policy and ignore
resultant atrocities.’[27] We may soon discover whether this speculation
is correct. Of course, there is sure to be a segment of American society
that will not ‘ignore resultant atrocities’ – namely, the irresponsible,
loudmouth vocal minority, or those who are described so nicely by
Colonel Joseph Bellas, commanding officer of a hospital in Vietnam where
soldiers boycotted Thanksgiving dinner in protest against the war:
‘They’re young, they’re idealistic and don’t like man’s inhumanity to
man. As they get older they will become wiser and more tolerant.’[28] If
a majority of the American people will, indeed, ignore resultant
atrocities and support Nixon’s policy of pursuing a war without
discernible end, then this segment of American society may be subjected
to domestic repression of a sort that is not without precedent in
American history; we seem to be seeing the early signs today with the
savage repression of the Panthers, the conspiracy trial in Chicago, and
other incidents.
The fact that repression may be attempted does not imply that it must
succeed. Surely the possibility exists, today, to create a broad-based
movement of opposition to war and repression that might stave off such
an attack. It is now even imaginable, as a few years ago it was not,
that a significant American left may emerge that will be a voice in
national affairs, and even, perhaps, a potential force for radical
social change. There has been a remarkable shift in popular attitudes
over the past months, an openness to radical political thinking of a
sort that I do not recall for many years. To let these opportunities
pass is to condemn many others to the fate of Vietnam.
Is there an ‘honourable’ way out of Vietnam – meaning by that a way that
might be tolerable to the present state of American opinion? The
question is important, for if the answer is negative, it may well be
that the threat of extinction that Fall recognized will in fact be
realized. It is important to stress this possibility, in view of the
present mood in certain ‘movement’ circles where it is a criterion of
one’s radicalism to believe that America has been defeated and that the
Vietnamese will win. On the contrary, a serious person will follow
Gramsci’s maxim: pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will.
There is not much doubt that the United States has the power to deny
victory, or even continued existence, to the people of Vietnam. No one
knows whether the present strategy of capital-intensive war can reduce
the level of organized social life in Vietnam to the point where an
American-imposed solution may, in its terms, be successful.
There surely is an ‘honourable’ way of ending the war. The PRG and DRV
delegations in Paris have proposed such a way, repeatedly. It is a
measure of the Government’s contempt for the American people that Nixon
was willing to publish Ho Chi Minh’s conciliatory letter, with the
statement that it signified – in Nixon’s phrase – ‘the other side’s
absolute refusal to show the least willingness to join in seeking
peace’. It seems that the intermediary in the Ho-Nixon exchange was Jean
Sainteny. He was interviewed by Joseph Kraft, who writes:
I saw Sainteny at the end of September, just after his return from the
funeral of Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi. He had had a long talk with Premier
Pham Van Dong. He was persuaded that the other side was prepared to
accept a settlement that would include an independent and non-Communist
South Vietnam set in a neutralist Southeast Asia. The obstacle to
agreement in his view was that Hanoi did not have any faith in Mr
Nixon’s claim that he wanted an agreement. On the contrary, the North
Vietnamese thought the United States was still trying to impose on
Saigon, by military means, a pro-American government hostile to Hanoi.
M. Sainteny felt – and his feelings were made known to the President –
that the United States could dispel Hanoi’s doubts in two ways. One
would be a formal statement that the United States recognized the
principle of total withdrawal of American troops from South Vietnam at
some unstipulated date. The other would be by broadening the present
regime in Saigon to include some political figures who were not die-hard
anti-Communists.[29]
Corroboratory evidence appears in an article by Philippe Devillers in
L’Actualité, 24 October 1969, and Averell Harriman has publicly stated
that Kraft’s report is consistent with his understanding of the
situation.[30] Subsequent statements by Xuan Thuy and Mme Binh in Paris
provide further confirmation of the possibilities for a reasonable
settlement.
Since 1960, the NLF has demanded that a neutralized South Vietnam be
governed by a coalition in which they would have a fair representation.
It is this demand that we have consistently opposed – not surprisingly,
in view of the judgement of the American mission at the time, and since,
on the political power of the NLF relative to that of the succession of
puppets we have installed. When the full-scale American invasion began,
Bernard Fall cited a remark to George Chaffard of Le Monde by a
‘high-ranking spokesman of the Front’: ‘We have not fought all these
years simply to end up by installing one set of dictators in place of
the old.’ Fall added: ‘One does not fight for eight long years, under
the crushing weight of American armour, napalm, jet bombers and,
finally, vomiting gases, for the sheer joy of handing over what one
fights for to some bureaucrat in Hanoi, merely on the say-so of a
faraway party apparatus.’[31] Despite the intensive American effort
since 1965 to destroy social life in Vietnam, there is no reason to
believe that the situation is fundamentally different today.
Nixon’s speech of 3 November 1969 must be understood as a rejection of
these possibilities for an ‘honourable’ settlement, one that should be
acceptable to a large, I should think overwhelming, segment of the
American public. Nixon denied the existence of the PRG-DRV initiatives,
and made it clear that we have no intention of withdrawing our
expeditionary force or broadening the Saigon regime. The present Saigon
regime, which exists solely by the force of American arms, is not an
acceptable partner in a coalition with the PRG and would no doubt
collapse were a realistic effort to resolve the conflict seriously
contemplated.
Under these conditions, it is important to take note of recent political
developments in Saigon. President Thieu has apparently abandoned any
effort to construct a significant political base. Elizabeth Pond reports
from Saigon that his new party ‘should be very similar to the Can Lao
Party [virtually, a branch of Diem’s secret police], as it is being
directed by old Diemists, several of whom were Can Lao members’. Thieu
has been able to find no political base apart from the generals and the
northern Catholics – essentially a reconstruction of the Diem
regime.[32] One of the Hoa Hao factions recently left Thieu’s party in
protest ‘against the intensification of military control of the
government in recent months – and the President’s continuing refusal to
deal seriously even with the member groups of his own alliance’. Its
leader asserted that the President’s coalition ‘cannot do anything good
for the country’.[33] A report on the non-Communist opposition in South
Vietnam quotes Pham Ba Cam, a Hoa Hao leader: ‘It’s not very healthy to
be in the opposition in Vietnam. If you want to learn about the status
of the non-Communist opposition, go to Con Son [offshore prison island].
That’s where you’ll find the largest gathering.’[34] As Pond reports,
‘President Thieu’s decision to organize an Army/Catholic party – at this
time and in this manner – sets the course for increasing isolation of
the Saigon regime’. It is a decision ‘to maintain the narrow interests
and power of the existing military oligarchy as long as possible’.
This narrowing of the base of the Saigon regime reflects the political
realities of South Vietnam. It also reflects a rational political
judgement on the part of General Thieu:
As Vietnamese sources analyse President Thieu’s thinking, he is
calculating that the US cannot afford to lose the war and is therefore
stuck here almost no matter what Saigon does. The US might dare, it is
reasoned, to abandon the Thieu regime within a year or so, but it would
never dare to destroy the South Vietnamese Army. If President Thieu
links his destiny inextricably to that of the Army, then, he may figure
that the US cannot depose him.[35]
Thus the current political developments confirm, once again, the failure
of the American military to create a workable Quisling regime in the
manner of the Russians in Czechoslovakia or the Germans in much of
occupied Europe. The consequences of this situation are summarized
adequately by Jacques Decornoy:
‘Under these conditions, a military solution may be a task for several
decades, supposing, that is, that there still remain Vietnamese to fight
and Americans to accept a conflict without end and without hope.’[36]
Twenty years ago the People’s Republic of China was founded. Just a few
months earlier, Dean Acheson had formed a committee to reassess American
policy in Asia, now that China was ‘lost’. The committee was to operate
under this instruction: ‘You will please take it as your assumption that
it is a fundamental decision of American policy that the United States
does not intend to permit further extension of Communist domination on
the continent of Asia or in the south-east Asia area… ’[37] Acheson made
his thoughts more precise, shortly afterwards, when writing on the
Soviet threat: ‘It is not only the threat of direct military attack
which must be considered, but also that of conquest by default, by
pressure, by persuasion, by subversion, by “neutralism”’[38]
In May 1950, Acheson announced that economic aid and military equipment
would be sent to the French in Indochina ‘in order to assist them in
restoring stability’. Not long after, the State Department explained our
support for French imperialism in Indochina in these terms: ‘... the
fall of Indochina … would be taken by many as a sign that the force of
communism is irresistible and would lead to an attitude of defeatism….
Communist forces there must be decisively conquered down to the last
pocket of resistance’ – in the name of French imperialism
The ‘much-needed rice, rubber, and tin’ were also cited as a
justification for our support for the French in their ill-fated effort
to reconquer their former colony. Upon their failure, we took over
management of the enterprise directly.
In 1955 the Communist threat was defined, very perceptively, in an
extensive study of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and the National
Planning Association, The Political Economy of American Foreign Policy,
a study that involved a representative segment of the tiny élite that
largely determines foreign policy, whoever is technically in office. The
primary threat of Communism is the economic transformation of the
Communist powers ‘in ways which reduce their willingness and ability to
complement the industrial economies of the West’. Communism, in short,
reduces the ‘willingness and ability’ of underdeveloped countries to
function in the world capitalist economy in the manner of the
Philippines – to take a classic Asian example – where:
Their economy has for nearly half a century been deliberately geared
into that of the United States to an extent which caused Mr McNutt, in
testifying as High Commissioner, to say that ‘our businessmen and our
statesmen in past years allowed the Philippines to become a complete
economic dependency of the United States to a greater degree than any
single State of the Union is economically dependent on the rest of the
United States.’[39]
Since then, there has been little substantive change in what UN
Ambassador Salvador Lopez called the classic colonial economy of the
Philippines. To be sure, we have bequeathed them the blessings of
democracy. As Tillman Durdin accurately describes this legacy of half a
century of colonial domination: ‘Filipinos view elections as a
confirmation of the power of the wealthy business and landed interests
who back both parties but usually pick the winners before Election Day
and quietly give them the most support. In this case they picked
President Marcos.’[40] And in gratitude, the Filipinos have helped us in
our war in Vietnam, in the manner explained in a recent report of the
Symington subcommittee. William Selover summarized this report in a
recent Monitor:
The hearings showed, for example, that the US taxpayer has been paying
for the Philippine troop commitment in Vietnam. It has also shown that,
without this payment, the Philippines would not have sent a single man
to help the US in Vietnam. … Administration officials admitted paying
the Philippines some $40 million to send the troops to Vietnam.[41]
Still more revealing is the stated purpose of the US military commitment
to the Philippines. Selover reports Lieutenant-General Robert H.
Warren’s admission that the commitment was designed partly ‘to maintain
internal security and stability and, thereby, make our own activities
over there more secure’. Senator Symington put it succinctly, with
General Warren’s reluctant assent: ‘In other words we are paying the
Philippine Government to protect us from the Philippine people who do
not agree with the policies of the government or do not like Americans.’
Pentagon officials admitted in the hearings that ‘the only real threat
that the Philippines faces ... [is] ... internal subversion’. The threat
is related, perhaps, to the fact that, for most of the population,
living standards have not materially changed since the Spanish
occupation.
It is this ‘Communist threat’ that we have been combating in Vietnam,
where, as has frequently been noted, Vietnamese communism threatens the
new order that we have been trying to construct in Asia with Japan as
junior partner, linked to Asia by essentially colonial relationships. As
President Eisenhower expressed it:
One of Japan’s greatest opportunities for increased trade lies in a free
and developing Southeast Asia.... The great need in one country is for
raw materials, in the other country for manufactured goods. The two
regions complement each other markedly. By strengthening of Vietnam and
helping ensure the safety of the South Pacific and Southeast Asia, we
gradually develop the great trade potential between this region … and
highly industrialized Japan to the benefit of both. In this way freedom
in the Western Pacific will be greatly strengthened.[42]
It remains to be seen how long Japan will be able to fend off economic
intervention of a sort that is increasingly turning Western Europe into
a dependency of American-based multi-national corporations, those ‘US
enterprises abroad [which] in the aggregate comprise the third largest
country … in the world – with a gross product greater than that of any
country except the United States and the Soviet Union’.[43]
It is not likely that the population of the empire – the ‘integrated
world economy’ dominated by American capital, to use the technical
euphemism – will remain quiescent, willing indefinitely to complement
the industrial economies of the West. Seventy-five years ago, shortly
before the American invasion of the Philippines in a war that was, apart
from scale, rather like our present war in Vietnam, the Philippine
nationalist José Rizal castigated his countrymen because they were ‘like
a slave who asked only for a bandage to wrap the chain so that it may
rattle less and not ulcerate the skin’. Those days are past. Those whom
Marx called ‘the slaves and drudges of the [bourgeois] order’ are no
longer satisfied with a bandage to wrap their chains, and their
discontent will lead to turmoil and violent repression, so long as we
consent.
What can we do to affect the events that are to come? First, we must not
make the mistake of placing trust in the government. The large upsurge
of anti-war sentiment can be an effective device for changing national
policy if it is sustained in continuing mass actions across the country.
Otherwise the administration can ride out the storm and continue as
before to systematically demolish the society of South Vietnam and Laos.
It is difficult week after week, month after month to sustain a high
level of protest against the war. As American society becomes more
polarized and the true, familiar Nixon emerges in the person of Mitchell
or Agnew, as the threat of repression becomes more real, it will be hard
to maintain the kinds of resistance and protest that the Vietnam
catastrophe demands. As the reports of massacres and automated murder
become routine, the impulse to respond by violence may become more
difficult to stifle, despite the realization that this can only have the
effect of bringing the mass of the population to ‘ignore resultant
atrocities’. Continued mass actions, patient explanation, principled
resistance can be boring, depressing. But those who programme the B52
attacks and the ‘pacification’ exercise are not bored, and as long as
they continue in their work, so must we.
[1] Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Warnke as quoted by Townsend
Hoopes, see New York Times, 28 September 1969.
[2] No More Vietnams?, R. Pfeffer (ed.) (Harper & Row, 1968).
[3] For detailed analysis based largely on Defense Department sources,
see Gabriel Kolko, London Bulletin, August 1969.
[4] No More Vietnams? For further discussion, see my article in the New
York Review, 2 January 1969 and my At War with Asia (Pantheon, 1970),
Chapter 1, Section 3.
[5] Elizabeth Pond, Christian Science Monitor, 8 November 1969.
[6] On 10 December 1969, after this article was written, Reston returned
to the question of Cam Ranh Bay, stating that it was now ‘an air and
naval base which is the best in Asia’, and that it has been a
‘fundamental question throughout the Paris negotiations’ whether the US
is willing to abandon it ‘and many other modern military bases’. He
raises the question whether the US would withdraw all troops or only all
‘combat forces’, a plan which ‘could leave a couple of hundred thousand
Americans in Vietnam to maintain and fly the planes and helicopter
gunships and continue to train and supply and help direct the
Vietnamese’.
There is no indication of any serious intention to withdraw all forces
or to abandon the bases. As Joseph Kraft has reported (see p. 49) the
American refusal to commit itself to the principle of complete
withdrawal is one of the factors blocking progress in Paris.
[7] In the apt phrase of E. Herman and R. Duboff, ‘How to coo like a
dove while fighting to win’, pamphlet of Philadelphia SANE, 20 S.
Street, Philadelphia, Penna. 19107.
[8] Congressional Record, 8 August 1969. Cited in the Bulletin of
Concerned Asian Scholars, October 1969 (1737 Cambridge Street,
Cambridge, Mass. – an important journal for those concerned with Asian
affairs).
[9] War, Peace, and the Viet Cong (MIT, 1969). He estimates that in 1963
‘perhaps half the population of South Vietnam at least tacitly supported
the NLF’. The same estimate was given by the US Mission in 1962.
Elsewhere, he has explained that in late 1964 it was impossible to
consider an apparently genuine offer of a coalition government, because
there was no force that could compete politically with the Viet Cong,
with the possible exception of the Buddhists, who were not long after
suppressed as a political force by Marshal Ky’s American-backed storm
troopers. The same difficulty has been noted, repeatedly, by spokesmen
for the American and Saigon governments and reporters. For some
examples, see Herman and Duboff, op. cit., or my American Power and the
New Mandarins (Chatto & Windus, 1969), Chapter 3.
[10] New York Times, 11 June 1968.
[11] New York Times Magazine, 23 November 1969.
[12] See Washington Post, 31 October 1969; Los Angeles Times, 31 October
1969; New York Post, 4 November 1969; Science, 7 November 1969. A
Vietnamese student in the United States, Ngo Vinh Long, has summarized
much of what is known, including his personal experience from 1959 to
1963 when he visited ‘virtually every hamlet and village in the country’
as a military map maker, in Thoi-Bao Ga, November 1969, 76a Pleasant
Street, Cambridge, Mass., a monthly publication of Vietnamese students
in the United States. He describes how defoliation has been used since
1961 to drive peasants into government-controlled camps, and from his
own experience and published records in Vietnam, he records some of the
effects: starvation, death, hideously deformed babies. He quotes the
head of the Agronomy Section of the Japan Science Council who claims
that by 1967 about half the arable land had been seriously affected. For
American estimates, see the report of the Daddario subcommittee of the
House Committee on Science and Astronautics, 8 August 1969. They
estimate the total area sprayed through 1968 as 6,600 square miles
(extrapolating through 1969 the figure would reach about 8,600 square
miles, about sixty per cent of this respraying – over ten per cent of it
crop destruction).
[13] Weekly selection, 1 October 1969.
[14] They have appeared in English, and can be obtained from the
Committee for the English publication of ‘Vietnam – a voice from the
villages’, do Mrs Reiko Ishida, 2-13-7, Nishikata, Bunyo-ku, Tokyo.
[15] ‘Before this summer, the enemy in the delta consisted mostly of
indigenous Vietcong units and guerrillas, many of whom worked during the
day in the rice fields and fought at night. The only North Vietnamese
were troops and officers who led some of the guerrilla units. They
numbered about 800 as against an estimated total of 49,000 Vietcong
soldiers and support troops.’ New York Times, 15 September 1969. On 16
September, The Times reports that ‘for the first time in the war, a
regular North Vietnamese army unit, the 18B Regiment, had attacked in
the delta’.
[16] New York Times, Peter Arnett, 15 April 1969. Arnett claims that
only ninety per cent of the enemy forces of 40,000 are recruited
locally, giving a far higher estimate of North Vietnamese than the
intelligence reports cited above, or others: e.g., Christian Science
Monitor, 16 September 1969, which reports that in the early fall of 1969
‘North Vietnamese troops in the delta doubled in number, to between
2,000 and 3,000 men.’
[17] Boston Globe, 1 December 1969.
[18] William Nighswonger, Rural Pacification in Vietnam (Praeger, 1967).
[19] Henry Kamm, New York Times, 1 December 1969.
[20] New York Times, 26 November 1969.
[21] In No More Vietnams? On the widely noted analogy between Vietnam
and the Indian wars see my American Power and the New Mandarins, Chapter
3, note 42.
[22] Harold B. Clifford, Exploring New England (Follett, 1961).
[23] See Howard Zinn, ‘Violence and social change’, Boston University
Graduate Journal, Fall 1968. When disease decimated the Indians, Mather
said: ‘The woods were almost cleared of those pernicious creatures, to
make room for a better growth.’
[24] On 24 November 1969. Attention Mr Agnew.
[25] ibid., 29 November 1969.
[26] Henry Kamm, New York Times, 15 November 1969.
[27]
J. Robinson and S. G. Jacobson, in Vietnam: Issues and Alternatives
(Shenkman, 1968), a symposium of the Peace Research Society
(International). This organization, following a script by Orwell, is
concerned with a special kind of peace research: the question of
‘how pacification can be achieved in turbulent village societies’,
along lines that we have been pioneering in Vietnam, for example.
The editor explains that the United States is one ‘participant in
the game of world domination’. It might be asked why scholars should
assist the Government in this game. The answer is that the foreign
policy of the US has been characterized ‘by good-intentioned leaders
and policy makers’, so the problem, presumably, does not arise. But
even the Peace Research Society (International) is not monolithic.
It would be unfair to assume that the conclusion of the cited study
is mere wishful thinking. It has to be taken seriously.
[28] Reuters, Boston Globe, 27 November 1969.
[29] Boston Globe, 10 November 1969.
[30] In a panel at Johns Hopkins University, 14 November 1969
[31] New Society, 22 April 1965, reprinted in Fall and Raskin, Vietnam
Reader. Those who speak so glibly of ‘bloodbaths’ might note his report
that from 1957 through April 1965, ‘over 160,000 South Vietnamese
[overwhelmingly Viet Cong] have thus far been killed in this war’. Note
the date.
[32] Monitor, 6, 8, 14 November 1969. Miss Pond has been one of the few
correspondents, over the years, to give any serious attention to
Vietnamese political and social life. In the past, her analyses have
proven quite accurate. For additional corroboratory information, see D.
Gareth Porter, ‘The Diemist restoration’, Commonweal, 11 July 1969.
[33] John Woodruff, Baltimore Sun, 25 October 1969.
[34] Terence Smith, New York Times, dateline 24 October 1969. The scale
and character of forceful repression of dissent in South Vietnam have
been amply reported. See, for example, Herman and Duboff, op. cit., and
references therein.
[35] Pond, 6 November 1969.
[36] Le Monde diplomatique, November.
[37] Memorandum from Acheson to Philip Jessup, cited by Gabriel Kolko,
Roots of American Foreign Policy (Beacon Press, 1969), p. 95 (see note
10, p. 82 below).
[38] Cited by Walter LaFeber, America, Russia and the Cold War 1945–1966
(Wiley, 1968), p.102.
[39] Rupert Emerson, in J. C. Vincent (ed.), America’s Future in the
Pacific, 1947.
[40] Commenting on the recent elections, New York Times, 16 November
1969. For some discussion of Philippine politics, see Onofre Corpuz, The
Philippines (Prentice-Hall, 1966).
[41] 28 November 1969: ‘From the hearings it is learned that the US paid
South Korea and Thailand as well to send their troops to Vietnam in a
show of solidarity.’ This was somewhat more expensive. According to The
Times, 1 December, the bribe to Thailand amounted to a billion dollars.
[42] 4 April 1959, quoted in Harry Magdoff, The Age of Imperialism
(Monthly Review Press, 1969). On early American post-war policy in this
area, see John Dower, ‘Occupied Japan and the American Lake’, in
America’s Asia, M. Seldon and E. Friedman (eds.), (Pantheon, 1970). He
presents material in support of the analysis of ‘critical Japanese
commentators’ that ‘Japan was to be developed not only as a military
base against China and the Soviet Union, but also as an industrial base
supporting the counter-revolutionary cause in Southeast Asia’, a policy
that was opposed not only by Russia but also by virtually all the
members of the Far Eastern Commission. See also his essay on the
US-Japan military relationship in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian
Scholars, October 1969 (see note 8 above). For still earlier background,
see Gabriel Kolko, Politics of War (Random House, 1968).
[43] Leo Model, Foreign Affair, July 1967, quoted in Magdoff, op. cit.