Media, Propaganda and Vietnam
The 'official' or commonly accepted version of how and why the U.S. was involved in Vietnam sort of goes along
the following lines:
- Non-communist South Vietnam was invaded by communist North Vietnam
- The United States came to the aid of the regime in the South.
- The regime in the South was democratic
Yet, it turns out that this is untrue, and it required massive propaganda to create this standard and accepted
image.
A lot of the following is a summary of part of journalist John Pilger's book, Heroes, (Jonathan
Cape 1986, Vintage 2001), mainly chapters 15 and 20, mostly written in the 1980s (and reprinted in 2001, from which
the citations are taken. Where page numbers are cited in parenthesis, it is from this book unless indicated
otherwise). He was in Vietnam many times, during the war, and returned on various occassions as well. He received
a number of awards for his Vietnam reporting. He has generally been quite critical in his writings about power and
authority.
Pilger described some studies in the 1980s where some people by then had already forgotten some of the reasons
for the Vietnam war, and that "More than a third could not say which side American had supported and some
believed that North Vietnam had been 'our allies'" (p. 178.) He describes why this 'historical amnesia' might
occur:
This 'historical amnesia' is not accidental; if anything it demonstrates the insidious power of the dominant
propaganda of the Vietnam war. The constant American government line was that the war was essentially a conflict
of Vietnamese against Vietnamese, in which Americans became 'involved', mistakenly and honourably. This assumption
was shared both by 'hawks' and 'doves'; it permeated the media coverage during the war and has been the overriding
theme of numerous retrospectives since the war. It is a false and frequently dishonest assumption. The longest
war this century was a war waged by America against Vietnam, North and South. It was an attack on the
people of Vietnam, communist and non-communist, by American forces. It was an invasion of their homeland and their
lives, just as the current presence in Afghanistan of Soviet forces is an invasion. Neither began as a mistake.
-- John Pilger,Heroes,(Jonathan Cape 1986, Vintage 2001), p.178 (Emphasis is original)
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Many have claimed that the media contributed to the U.S. losing the war, because the media was generally
against the war. Further below, we will look at this as well, but first a look at the war itself.
On this page are the following sub-sections:
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The Vietnam War
The context in which Vietnam appeared to fall under Soviet influence is critical. Vietnam had actually approached
the U.S. for assistance in building a nation in the wake of the Second world war and particularly from French
imperialism both of which had taken their toll on this region. (President Roosevelt for example, had "already
vilified France which, he said, had 'milked' Vietnam for a hundred years. 'The people of Indo-China are entitled
to something better, ' the President had said, and the United States supported their 'independence and
self-determination.'" (p.181).) The communist leader, Ho Chi Minh liked Americans, and enjoyed 'the openness
of Americans' (p.181).
Yet, having been turned down a number of times by the U.S., they turned to the other superpower at that time,
the Soviet Union, even though they had shown a preference to the U.S. model of democracy:
Ho Chi Minh was the antithesis of other emerging communist leaders in one respect: he wanted his people to open
themselves out to other societies, communist, capitalist and non-aligned. Like Tito in Yugoslavia, he knew that
this was the only way his people could survive as a national entity. Indeed, so anxious was Ho for American
support for his fledgling republic that he addressed twelve separate appeals to President Roosevelt, to his
Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, and to the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. Major Patti [a U.S. government
liaison officer, working for the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA] later wrote that Ho
'pleaded not for military or economic aid',
...but for understanding, for moral support, for a voice in the forum of western democracies. But the United
States would not read his mail because, as I was informed, the DRV Government was not recognised by the United
States and it would be 'improper' for the President or anyone in authority to acknowledge such correspondence.
[DRV stood for Democratic Republic of Vietnam, later known colloquially by the Americans as 'North Vietnam'.]
...As for relations with the Soviet Union, Ho had spent fifteen years in Moscow and expressed himself well
aware of the tenuous and highly conditional nature of Soviet 'friendship'. He told Patti, 'I place more reliance
on the United States to support Vietnam's independence, before I could expecet help from USSR.'
-- John Pilger,Heroes,(Jonathan Cape 1986, Vintage 2001), pp.180 - 181 (Emphasis Added)
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(Side Note: J.W. Smith (cited below) suggests it was 6 times, that Ho Chi Minh sent
letters to the U.S. government. I don't know if what Pilger calls 'appeals' is the same as the letters J.W. Smith
refers to, but the point is, there were many appeals to the U.S.)
As the U.S. clumped Northern Vietnam into the same bracket as Communist China and Soviet Union, Minh felt no
choice but to turn to them.
The immediate post World War II era for Vietnam was crucial:
- As with other parts of the world, previous imperial rulers had carved up Vietnam as well.
- The French had divided Vietnam into three, all sub-divisions of its colony in Indo-China.
- The Allies divided it between two military commands headquartered in China and South-East Asia.
- British colonial officer, Major-General Douglas Gracey, took surrender of the Japanese in September 1945,
in Saigon, but "immediately rearmed them and ordered them to put down the Vietminh, who had already
formed an administration in the South. Like the Vietminh of the North, they were a popular movement of
Catholics, Buddhists, small businessmen, communists and farmers who looked to Ho Chi Minh as the
'father of the nation'." (p.181)
- By 1947, thanks to the British and Gracey, the French were back in power in Saigon.
Needing to get the French out of their country, Ho Chi Minh was still hoping for a U.S. alliance and he
...appealed again to President Truman while insisting to Patti that he was 'not a communist in the American
sense'. Although he had lived and worked in Moscow, Ho considered himself a free agent; but he warned that he
'would have to find allies if any were to be found; otherwise the Vietnamese would have to go it alone.' And alone
they went until 1950 when Ho Chi Minh believed he could no longer delay accepting the formal ties and material
assistance under offer from the Soviet Union and especially from China. It was the success of the Chinese
revolution in 1949 that was to give the Vietminh the means to defeat the French: military training, arms and
sanctuary across an open frontier.
-- John Pilger,Heroes,(Jonathan Cape 1986, Vintage 2001), pp.181 - 182 (Emphasis Added)
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As J.W. Smith summarizes:
During World War II, while working directly with American agents to rescue downed U.S. pilots, Ho Chi Minh sent
six letters to the U.S. government asking for support and stating that the Vietnamese wished to pattern their
constitution after America's. Only after America refused to recognize and support their freedom, and
instead supported the French suppression of their freedom, were the Vietnamese forced to turn to China and the
Soviet Union. It is said that America lost in Vietnam but three million people were slaughtered (four million if
one included the previous twenty years of French suppression), millions of acres of forest poisoned with herbicides
were destroyed, rice fields were pockmarked with bomb craters and, after winning its freedom, Vietnam was further
decimated by embargoes. Vietnamese resources are now available to intact imperial-centers-of-capital. That makes
that war a success. After all, control of resources to feed the industries of imperial centers is what these wars
are all about.
-- J.W. Smith,Suppressing the Former Colonial World's Break for Economic Freedom,, pp.159 - 160 (Emphasis is original)
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As Pilger adds, the root of American concern was imperial in nature, which, citing Noam Chomsky,
...was over strategic resources of Southeast Asia and their significance for the global system that the US was
then constructing, incorporating western Europe and Japan. It was feared that successful independent development
under a radical nationalist leadership might 'cause the rot to spread', gradually eroding US dominance in the
region and ultimately causing Japan, the largest domino, to join in a closed system from which the US would be
excluded... The idea that US global planners had national imperialist motives is intolerable to the doctrinal
system, so this topic must be avoided in any history directed to a popular audience.
-- Noam Chomsky,The Vietnam War in an Age of Orwell,Race and Class, Spring 1984, p.44. Quoted by John Pilger, Heroes, (Jonathan Cape 1986, Vintage 2001).
p.182.
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Side note about Chomsky's mention of 'domino':
Chomsky's reference to domino is regarding the "domino theory" put forth by Dwight D. Eisenhower
in 1954, highlighting concerns about nations one by one falling out of the sphere of influence of the west.
- The concerns raised by political leaders of the west was that nations breaking free of decades, or even
centuries of imperial and colonial rule, would instead fall into the Soviet sphere of influence and be
lost to communism.
- Others, such as the authors cited above, suggest given the larger historical context, this was a
continuation of a struggle for powers to try and maintain dominance and continued access to the historic
sources of imperial power and wealth: the third world's resources. Successful independent development
(often not tied to Soviet influence or sphere) would mean a possible loss of wealth and power. Hence,
the reference to the imperialist motives.
- See also the following for more details on this aspect:
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Summarizing mostly from Pilger again, the political background to the buildup of the Vietnam war is worth
highlighting here:
The scale of propaganda needed to pull all this off was immense. The official version which most are familiar
with, is quite different to the above. Pilger comments on this difference:
This was not how propaganda in the United States explained the origins of the war. Neither is it how many
people remember the war today. In the opinion poll quoted at the beginning of this chapter, in which more than a
third of those questioned expressed confusion as to who were 'our allies', almost two-thirds said they were aware
that the United States had 'sided with South Vietnam'. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, this is the equivalent of
being aware that Nazi Germany sided with France in 1940 and the Soviet Union now sides with Afghanistan.
The accredited version of events has not changed. It is that non-communist South Vietnam was invaded by
communist North Vietnam and that the United States came to the aid of the 'democratic' regime in the South. This
of course is untrue, as documentation I have touched upon makes clear. That Ho Chi Minh waited so long before
sending a regular force to assist the American attacks seems, in retrospect, extraordinary; or perhaps it was a
testament to the strength and morale of those South Vietnamese who had taken up arms in defence of their villages
and their homeland. In 1965 the American counter-insurgency adviser, John Paul Vann, wrote in a memorandum
addressed to his superiors in Washington that a 'popular political base for Government of South Vietnam does not
now exist' and the majority of the people in South Vietnam 'primarily identified' with the National Liberation
Front.
-- John Pilger,Heroes,(Jonathan Cape 1986, Vintage 2001), p.189
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That the end result was costly is an understatement:
During those years the United States dispatched its greatest ever land army to Vietnam, and dropped the greatest
tonnage of bombs in the history of warfare, and pursued a military strategy deliberately designed to force millions
of people to abandon their homes, and used chemicals in a manner which profoundly changed the environmental and
genetic order, leaving a once bountiful land petrified. At least 1,300,000 people were killed and many more were
maimed and otherwise ruined; 58,022 of these were Americans and the rest were Vietnamese. President Reagan has
called this a 'noble cause'.
-- John Pilger,Heroes,(Jonathan Cape 1986, Vintage 2001), p.190
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And as Noam Chomsky adds, with slightly updated numbers:
As the 20th anniversary approached, the government of Vietnam released new figures on casualties, generally
accepted here and conforming to earlier estimates. Hanoi reported that 2 million civilians had been killed, the
overwhelming majority in the south, along with 1.1 million North Vietnamese and southern resistance fighters
("Viet Cong," in the terminology of U.S. propaganda). It listed an additional 300,000 missing in action.
Washington reports 225,000 killed in the army of its client regime ("South Vietnam"). The CIA estimates 600,000
Cambodians killed during the U.S. phase of what the one independent governmental inquiry (Finland) calls the
"Decade of Genocide" in Cambodia: 1969 through 1978. Tens if not hundreds of thousands more were killed in Laos,
mainly by U.S. attacks that were in large part unrelated to the war in Vietnam, Washington conceded.
-- Noam Chomsky,Memories,ZMagazine, July/August 1995
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As J.W. Smith and Noam Chomsky, cited above, described, one of the core aspects of this war and the cold war
ideology in general was to try and contain the breaks for freedom of various nations and to ensure successful
independent development was minimized, for fear of what Eisenhower had called the 'domino' effect. William Blum,
who worked at the State Department in the 1960s, and is now an investigative journalist summarizes the effect of
the Vietnam war:
Most people believe that the US lost the war. But by destroying Vietnam to its core, by poisoning the earth,
the water and the gene pool for generations, Washington had in fact achieved its primary purpose: preventing what
might have been the rise of a good development option for Asia.
-- William Blum,Rogue State,(Common Courage Press, 2000) pp.87 - 88
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To further demonstrate that Vietnam did not wish to pursue a communist ideology for its country, consider
what happened after the war: it tried to look to the west, and to open up for foreign investment:
As soon as the war was over the Hanoi leadership began to extricate Vietnam from the embrace of the Soviet
Union and to look to the West. They rejected both the Soviet view that ASEAN (the Association of South East Asian
Nations) was an 'imperialist creation' and Moscow's offer of a 'treaty of collective security'. Much to the
Soviet's chagrin the Vietnamese also resisted joining COMECON, the Eastern bloc economic alliance, and instead
Hanoi took the Saigon regime's seat in two pre-eminent capitalist institutions, the World Bank and the Asian
Development Bank. To underline its independence the Vietnamese barred Soviet ships from using port facilities at
the former American base at Cam Ranh Bay. To those who see the world in 'blocs' and small countries as 'dominoes'
Vietnam's stance must have seemed puzzling; the Soviet Union, after all, had been Hanoi's principal weapons
supplier. But communism was no more than a tool of Vietnamese nationalism and the rejection of one communist ally
in favour of overtures to the West was entirely consistent with Vietnam's past. Once again they were unravelling
themselves from somebody else's quarrel which, in the 1970s, was the war of attrition between China and the Soviet
Union.
-- John Pilger,Heroes,(Jonathan Cape 1986, Vintage 2001), p.190
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Side Note about Pol Pot and his Support from China and the U.S.:
Mentioned above was China's later support for Pol Pot. After the Vietnam war was over, Vietnam was still faced
with various conflicts.
- For years, the Khmer Rouge had been attacking ethnic Vietnamese in neighboring Cambodia and in
cross-border raids into Vietnam itself.
- In 1979 Vietnam invaded what is now known as Kampuchea, overthrew Pol Pot's government and installed a
government friendly to Vietnam.
- Khmer Rouge forces retreated to the western end of Cambodia, near Thailand, and some set up camp in
Thailand eventually, as well.
As well as China's support for the murderous and genocidal Pol Pot, the U.S. also provided support. William
Blum, mentioned earlier, describes:
Washington's reaction [to Vietnam stopping Pol Pot] was not any kind of elation that the Cambodian nightmare
had come to an end, but rather undisguised displeasure that the hated Vietnamese were in control and credited
with ousting the Khmer Rouge. For years afterwards, the United States condemned Vietnam's actions as "illegal".
...Thus it was that American policy took root -- to provide the Khmer Rouge with food, financial aid and
military aid beginning soon after their ouster. The aim, in conjunction with China and long-time American client
state Thailand, was to restore Pol Pot's troops to military capability as the only force which could make the
Vietnamese withdraw their army, leading to the overthrow of the Cambodian government.
President Carter's National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brezinski, has stated that in the spring of 1979:
"I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. I encouraged the Thai to help the [Khmer Rouge]. The question
was how to help the Cambodian people.[sic] Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him, but China
could."
-- William Blum,Rogue State,(Common Courage Press, 2000) pp.87 - 88
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Support for the Khmer Rouge lasted well into the 80s and 90s, as Blum details (see chapter 10 from the above
book by Blum for more). Support waned in the later part of the 90s as some of this came to light in the mainstream.
Expanding on the U.S. and China relationship, given that one was for democracy and capitalism while the other
for communism: China and the Soviet Union were never ideal partners, and the U.S. saw an opportunity to have
China as a powerful Cold War ally against the Soviet Union. As John Pilger details:
The 'question of Cambodia' [that the U.S. had raised as an issue with Vietnam as an obstacle to normalizing
relations] meant the increasing attacks mounted by the Pol Pot regime on Vietnam and the Vietnamese counter
attack in December [1978], which lead to the retreat of the Khmer Rouge and an end to the genocide in Cambodia.
But to the Americans, this was really 'a question of China' for the American romance with Peking was deepening.
That China happened to be underwriting Asia's Hitler, Pol Pot, was one of those unfortunate impediments one
tolerates in a bridge of such promise.... [The Carter Administration] viewed 'normalization' with China as a new
and potent cold-war weapon against the Soviet Union. When, in Summer 1978, Den Xiaoping visited the United States
he informed the Americans of Peking's intention to teach Vietnam a lesson and sought Washington's tacit approval
of a Chinese invasion of Vietnam. He got it.
On February 18, 1979, more than 600,000 Chinese troops -- more than the Americans ever had in Vietnam --
attacked Vietnam from the North.
-- John Pilger,Heroes,(Jonathan Cape 1986, Vintage 2001), pp.247 - 248
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As part of the agreement to end war and rebuild, the Nixon
administration offered $3.25 billion of grant aid over 5 years for U.S.
contribution to postwar reconstruction, though Vietnam wanted
"reparation" money not "reconstruction" money. It was never paid,
because Vietnam apparently did not reveal all the prisoners of war that
was part of the deal for the aid. This itself is a tragic and thorny
issue for those Americans who for long periods have been unaware of the
fate of their loved ones. Yet, for Vietnam, it was though they had to
pay in turn for a war largely created by the U.S. as William Blum
describes, almost cynically:
However -- deep breadth here -- Vietnam has been compensating the United States. In 1997 it began to pay off
about $145 million in debts left by the defeated South Vietnamese government for American food and infrastructure
aid. Thus, Hanoi is reimbursing the United States for part of the cost of the war waged against it.
How can this be? The proper legal term is "extortion". The enforcers employed by Washington include
the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and Export-Import Bank, the Paris Club and the rest of the
international financial mafia.[sic]
... At the Vietnamese embassy in Washington ... the First Secretary for Press Affairs, Mr. Le Dzung, told the
author in 1997 that this matter, as well as Nixon's unpaid billions, are rather emotional issues in Vietnam, but
the government is powerless to change the way the world works.
-- William Blum,Rogue State,(Common Courage Press, 2000) pp.87 - 88
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Media and the War
Media reporting and the general attitudes about the media on the whole, as well as how segments of society
interpreted the events of Vietnam is interesting and important.
"The media 'lost' the war for America"
Common themes about why the U.S. 'lost' the war include criticisms of the media. John Pilger describes two
influential 'myths' about the media:
The first is that the Americans 'lost' the war because the media coverage in the United States, notably on
television, undermined the military and political effort. The second is that most journalists and broadcasters
opposed the war. Neither is true. Indeed the truth may well be the opposite ... that on the whole the American
media, while questioning the way in which the war was being fought, supported what Stanley Karnow, formerly of
the New York Times, has since called 'a failed crusade'.
In his classic study of war correspondents, Phillip Knightley described the reporting from Vietnam during the
early 1960s as
... not questioning the American intervention itself, but only its effectiveness. Most correspondents, despite
what Washington thought about them, were just as interested in seeing the United States win the war as was the
Pentagon. What the correspondents questioned was not American policy, but the tactics used to implement that
policy...
-- John Pilger,Heroes,(Jonathan Cape 1986, Vintage 2001), p.254
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An article from the French paper, Le Monde Diplomatique, titled
"Show us the Truth about Vietnam",
(April 2000), highlighted that the Vietnam war was the most covered topic in the US than any other issue. Yet that
coverage was extremely one-sided. For example, just 3% of coverage was on "enemy" viewpoint.
Though eventually many stories about atrocities came out, initially they were rarely reported. "Atrocities
were neither isolated nor aberrations", Pilger continues (p.256). "It was the nature of war
that was atrocious; this was the 'big story' of the war, but it was seldom judged to be 'news' and therefore
seldom told, except in fragments." Perhaps because it would have been so difficult for a nation to come to
terms with what their leaders may have been doing, contrary to what they were saying, "Atrocities were
reported as 'mistakes' which were 'blundered into'. Behind this acceptable version appalling events could proceed
as part of a deliberate and often efficiently executed strategy, contrary to the popular misconception of
'blundering' generals and policy-makers."
Reflecting on the Events
But there was also difficulty in conceptualizing some of the main facets of the geopolitical makeup, because
of the propaganda behind it, as Pilger details:
[Some of the war atrocities that had come to light] represented ... the war itself: an all-out assault on the
Vietnamese people, regardless of whether they were communist or non-communist. But the war was not presented in
this way, rather as teams: 'good' teams and 'bad' teams. The Americans were on the side of the good team, the
South Vietnamese, who were defending themselves from against 'aggression' by several bad teams of 'communists'.
Not surprisingly, this version exclusded the fact that the Americans had killed tens of thousands of their South
Vietnamese 'allies' and had destroyed their homes and crops, levelled their forests, poisoned their water and
forced them into 'refugee programs'. The propaganda version also excluded what American intelligence had known
from the beginning: that the regime America had installed in Saigon, complete with the machinery of mass terror,
had no popular base.
The standard version never satisfactorily came to terms with exactly who the 'communists' were. If the NLF, or
Vietcong, were South Vietnamese how could they possibly 'invade' their own country? Words had to be found to
describe what were, in effect, the actions of people defending their country against an invasion by the United
States. The words chosen were 'internal aggression'. The propaganda also had difficulty with the 'North Vietnamese'
who were said to be attacking the South. There had been no North Vietnam and no South Vietnam until the Geneva
conference on Indo-China in 1954 'temporarily' divided the country to await national elections in 1956, which the
Americans refused to allow, knowing the Ho Chi Minh would win hands down. Not only was Vietnam one country but
there were southerners in Hanoi leadership in the North and northerners in the southern-based NLF. The first
units sent south by Ho Chi Minh to support those resisting the foreign invaders were composed entirely of
southerners. So once again, the South Vietnamese were 'invading' their own country!
This was confusing to reporters (myself included) ... The easiest way was to adopt the jargon, euphemisms,
acronyms, the whole language of propaganda on which, sadly, so much bad reporting was based. Criticism of events,
individuals and even policies was not uncommon but this dissidence rarely exposed the false assumptions which
underpinned the American war. Moreover, criticism which did not go 'too far' and which remained 'objective' and
'unemotional' and incorporated the principles of the official line served to strengthen the impression that the
war was being reported vigorously and entirely free of censorship. General Sidle told me, 'Two delegations
of bureau chiefs called on me in 1968, asking me to please impose censorship. They were getting confused about
what they could do, what they could say and what they couldn't say.'
-- John Pilger,Heroes,(Jonathan Cape 1986, Vintage 2001), pp.257 - 258
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Famous atrocity stories such as the My Lai massacre only emerged after, or towards the end of the war. Pilger
is worth quoting once again:
Death squads, which were to prove so effective in Central America, were expertly organised in Vietnam. An
estimated 50,000 South Vietnamese were systematically murdered by assassins working for the CIA's 'Phoenix
Programme'. The most decorated American soldier of the war, Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Herbert, wrote in his
book, Soldier, 'They wanted me to take charge of execution teams that wiped out entire families and
tried to make it look as though the VC themselves had done the killing.' Like Agent Orange, the Phoenix Programme
was not a 'story' until the war was ending. Like Operation Speedy Express [an atrocity where the US Ninth Infantry
Division had killed 11,000 people, 5,000 of whom were 'non-combatants'], the massacre of between 90 and 130 men,
women and children at the village of My Lai on March 16, 1968, was not a story until long after it had happened.
For more than a year a soldier who had heard about the My Lai massacre tried to interest Newsweek and
others, without success. Finally, the story was 'broken', not by any of the 600 reporters in Vietnam, but by a
freelance in the United States, Seymour Hersh... Only then did the correspondents in Vietnam tell their own
atrocity stories. There was a cataract of them. Everybody, it seemed, knew about or had witnessed at least one;
and everyone had either not reported it or pleased that their office had 'spiked' the story they had sent.
-- John Pilger,Heroes,(Jonathan Cape 1986, Vintage 2001), pp.258 - 259
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But some documentaries were very powerful and did highlight some of the earlier atrocities:
"Disaffection provided the key theme of the poignant Winter Soldier, a collective documentary in which
Vietnam veterans spoke about the atrocities that they themselves had committed in Vietnam "in the name of
Western civilisation". Of all the anti-war documentaries, this one had the most impact on public opinion.
The films shows young "veterans" (20-27) returning from the war. They realise they have been taking
part in an act of butchery, and that they have been conditioned, dehumanised and turned into criminal
"Terminators". They also realise that there will never be an international criminal tribunal to look
into the Vietnam war: the politicians and generals responsible for the massacres, the use of napalm, the bombing
of civilians, the mass executions in prisons and the ecological disasters resulting from the use of chemical
defoliants will never be tried for their crimes against humanity."
-- Ignacio Ramonet,Show us the Truth about Vietnam,Le Monde Diplomatique, April 2000
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But the way the American establishment tried to come to terms with these, which could no longer escape the
mainstream and the public, was to try and reflect on a 'tragedy'. As Pilger continued from the above, "The
My Lai massacre eventually made the cover of Newsweek under the banner headline 'AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY',
which invited sympathy for the invader and deflected from the truth that the atrocities were, above all,
a Vietnamese tragedy." (p.259, Emphasis is original.)
Noam Chomky also highlights this, that regardless of mainstream political persuasion, left or right, American
elite typically regarded the Vietnam as a 'mistake' or tragedy. He commented heavily on the former U.S. Defense
Secretary, Robert McNamara's influential memoirs, In Retrospect:
Scholarship is hardly different [than the mainstream media]. Thus in a critique of U.S. ideology from the
liberal left, Michael Hunt describes Reaganite "neo-conservatives" as "unexpectedly obtuse," rejecting "the notion
that the Vietnam commitment was a fundamental mistake" and insisting that "the United States should defend freedom
around the world whatever the price." The price to whom? To the peasants massacred as we defended their freedom in
the Mekong Delta and Quang Ngai province? But McNamara was better than most: "To his credit, McNamara recognized
earlier than most of his colleagues that the war was not winnable," a leading historian of the Vietnam war, George
Herring, observes, departing from the norm by at least mentioning that the American "failure" was "far more" of a
tragedy "for Vietnam than for America."
... McNamara's goal [in his memoirs] is to explain how such "vigorous, intelligent, well-meaning, patriotic
servants of the United States" ... came "to get it wrong on Vietnam." We "acted according to what we thought were
the principles and traditions of this nation," he writes. What they thought was correct, at least if "principles
and traditions" are illustrated by historical fact, as in the clearing of the continent, the conquest of the
Philippines, Wilson's Caribbean exploits, and much else. These well-meaning planners were "wrong," McNamara
concludes, but it was "an error not of values and intentions but of judgments and capabilities" -- remarks that
are superfluous in a cultural environment that lacks the concept of wrong-doing. The worst of the "mistakes,"
McNamara writes, was the failure to see the Communist movement in Vietnam as a "nationalist movement," as it
appears "in hindsight": "We totally underestimated the nationalist aspect of Ho Chi Minh's movement."
McNamara's regretful account of this "mistake" has been accepted with much respect. It is utter nonsense. Even
from the Pentagon Papers that he commissioned, McNamara and those who repeat his words could have learned that in
1948 the State Department understood perfectly well that the Communists under Ho Chi Minh had "captur[ed] control
of the nationalist movement" -- by implication, illegitimately.
... McNamara assumes that the U.S. war was a "failure" and a "defeat," a judgment that is widely shared. But
these conclusions again reflect the narrowness of his vision. That the major U.S. war aims had been achieved was
clear enough 25 years ago, and was recognized by the business press not long after.
-- Noam Chomsky,Memories,ZMagazine, July/August 1995
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Note also Chomsky's point about winning or losing the war. It is commonly believed, and depending how you look
at it, that America 'lost' the war in Vietnam. Yet, while they may have lost militarily, the damage they caused
and from looking at the end goal, of containment and preventing independent development, commentators such as
Chomsky and others point out that the result was a success. (See also the J.W. Smith citation above.)
Mainstream history has often been quite in favor of the official lines, as Pilger describes, even as far back
as the mid-1980s:
Legacy of [what President Reagan described as] a 'noble war' ... is gaining certain currency as revisionists
work quickly, ... demanding a change in perspective, when the old facts remain at bay, in shadow, unheeded. This
is known as the 'new Vietnam scholarship'. 'New' Vietnam scholars include the familiar, discredited faces and the
'new' facts they present are familiar, discredited lies.
...The epitome of the 'new scholarship' is a 700-page history of Vietnam which ['new' scholar at Berkely,
Douglas] Pike has described as 'more objective' than earlier 'angry' works. This is Stanley Karnow's Vietnam:
a history ... His readers are told that the war was a 'failed crusade' conducted for the 'loftiest of
intentions', that the communists were 'terrorists' who were 'merciless' and 'brutal' in contrast to the Americans
who were 'sincere' and 'earnest' and whose 'instincts were liberal'.
-- John Pilger,Heroes,(Jonathan Cape 1986, Vintage 2001), pp. 266, 267-268
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Television
Television news in particular was said to have helped America 'lose' the war. Yet, television news coverage
was arguably poor, and full of news-bites, rather than detailed documentaries, thus not providing sufficient
context:
Images usurped the judgements of experienced reporters who affected the roles of innocent bystander and caption
writer. Public attitudes follow from perspectives; by allowing the false 'neutrality' of television images to
dominate the coverage of war, journalists allowed misconceptions to become received truths. The first casualties
were truth and context; bang-bang and contemporary history were deemed not to blend on the screen. That the
Geneva peace conference in 1954 had been undermined by Washington, that communist China was no friend of communist
Vietnam, that the NLF had sought the establishment of a non-communist, neutral coalition in South Vietnam --
these truths went unremembered and unconnected.
-- John Pilger,Heroes,(Jonathan Cape 1986, Vintage 2001), p.260
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Various Hollywood movies involving Vietnam have since been released. Yet, hardly any connect the global
politics at the time, and instead concentrate Indo-China in isolation. Nor do they really explore the suffering
of the Vietnamese at the hands of Americans, or Chinese, for example, but are more contemplating about their own
soldier's actions. (see pp. 268 - 274 for more discussion on this aspect.)
In 1998 there was lot of hype in the mainstream about CNN having to retract a story about the US military's
use of Nerve Gas in the Vietnam War. The impression CNN and other media tried to portray in this incident was that
the media institutions take such issues seriously. Those who saw this may recall how often this issue was bought
up on CNN. However, as media watchdog, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting suggests, it seems that a lot of the
news reports during that war (and others) was fabricated,
especially claims about the actions of the enemy. But none of those were ever retracted.
At the time of the war, there was pressure to conform, else a reporter could risk losing their career. In other
cases, criticism or unacctepable portryal would be met with accusations of being anti-American, communist,
unpatriotic, or some other derogatory term. This pressure even came from high government officials:
So rare were those like [former CBS news correspondent, Morely] Safer, who would describe in his reports what
he saw as well as the camera saw, that he was accused of being 'anti-American': the catch-all tag for
those who stepped even briefly outside the consensus view. When in 1965 Safer's CBS crew filmed marines burning
down a village with Zippo cigarette lighters, President Johnson himself intervened. David Halberstam related what
happened, in his book, The Powers That Be:
'Frank,' said the early-morning wake-up call, 'are you trying to fuck me?' [Frank Stanton was then the
president of CBS.]
'Who is this?' said the still sleepy Stanton.
'Frank, this is your President, and yesterday your boys shat on the American flag,' Lyndon Johnson said, and
then administered a tongue lashing: how could CBS employ a Communist like Safer, how could they be so unpatriotic
as to put on enemy film like this? Johnson was furious. ... (Johnson was insisting that Safer was a Communist, and
when aides said no [after also getting to check him out in depth], he was simply a Canadian, the President said,
'Well, I knew he wasn't an American.')
... Safer's 'crime' had been to give a mass American audience a glimpse of the real war. When British journalist
James Cameron and cameraman Malcolm Aird raised their own finance to make a filmed report from Hanoi in 1965, they
were castigated as communist dupes a charge Cameron later told me, he relished. 'Only when they call you a dupe,
not a communist outright, but a dupe,' he said, 'did you know you'd broken the great mould that covered the
reporting of the Vietnam war and that maybe you'd got it right!'
-- John Pilger,Heroes,(Jonathan Cape 1986, Vintage 2001), pp.262 - 263
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Journalism
Philip Knightley, who was cited above by John Pilger, wrote what has been regarded a classic on war reporting.
His book The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker From the Crimea to Kosovo
(Prion Books, 2000) is an updated version of the one that Pilger cited from. In it, he provides immense details
of war journalism from the various wars in recent decades. His chapters on Vietnam (pp. 409 - 469) give a detailed
account and insight of the field of journalism and how it was affected by the Vietnam war, and how it reported
the war. It would be futile to try and cite all the examples he has shown, including some very, very gruesome
details of atrocities, but some of the summaries he made are worth highlighting:
- In reporting on the bombing campaigns, even though the intensified carpet bombing of Cambodia, Laos and
North Vietnam wasn't always known in detail, "correspondents did their best" given the
circumstances they were in (p. 464).
- However, "the surge in the air war in Indo-China remained poorly reported, and what was revealed
passed with amazingly little outcry." (p. 464). It was at this time of increased bombing, and in
neighboring countries, plus the creation of a huge number of refugees (some 3 million), that news
reporting was actually declining:
At a time when the most damage of the was was being inflicted on Indo-China, the news coverage was at
its worst, because editors and producers had decided that the ground war was virtually over and that,
with the steady withdrawal of U.S. troops underway, public interest had declined. The second unfortunate
result was that those editors and producers decided that there was no further interest in American
atrocity stories.
-- Phillip Knightley,The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker From the Crimea to Kosovo,(Prion Books, 2000), p. 438
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- But Knightley also highlighted that "American reaction might well have been different if the same
attention that had been paid to the ground conflict in Vietnam had been given to the air war, if the
reader had been told graphically and at the time about the bombing of Indo-China. In the face of official
obstruction -- at one state the surge in the war, the military authorities imposed an embargo on the news
and then an embargo on the embargo -- how could this have been achieved?" (p. 469)
- Knightley conceded that the war reporting was better than in previous wars, but also noted that
"this is not saying a lot." (p. 465) Even though war correspondents were generally free to
move around and there was no official censorship, "as journalist Murray Kempton has reminded us,
with a million-dollar corps of correspondents in Vietnam the war in Cambodia was kept hidden for a
year." (p. 465)
Knightley also detailed the racism that accompanied the war (as with all wars):
As all governments realise that to wage war successfully their troops must learn to dehumanise the enemy. The
simplest way to achieve this is to inflame nationalistic or racist feelings, or both. This, American racism, which
had first been aroused on a national scale in the Second World War and then revived in Korea, reached a peak in
Vietnam. But Vietnam was an insurgency war. The enemy was physically indistinguishable from the ally. Racist hate
directed at Charlie Cong the enemy made no provisions for exempting those Vietnamese that the United States had
intervened to save. In motivating the GI to fight by appealing to his racist feelings, the United States military
discovered that it had liberated an emotion over which it was to lose control.
-- Phillip Knightley,The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker From the Crimea to Kosovo,(Prion Books, 2000), pp. 424
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Many of the gruesome attrocities that Knightley described, including the killing of civilians was partly due
to this racial sentiment. Knightley continued:
In Vietnam, racism became a patriotic virtue ... All Vietnamese became 'dinks', 'slopes', 'slants',
or 'gooks', and the only good one was a dead one. So the Americans killed them when it was clear that they were
Vietcong.... And they killed them when it was clear they were not Vietcong."
It was the racist nature of the fighting, the treating of the Vietnamese "like animals," that
inevitably led to My Lai, and it was the reluctance of correspondents to report this racist and atrocious nature
of the war that caused the My Lai story to be revealed not by a war correspondent, but by an alert newpaper
reporter back in the United States -- a major indictment of the coverage of the war.
-- Phillip Knightley,The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker From the Crimea to Kosovo,(Prion Books, 2000), pp. 424, 428 (Emphasis is original)
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Yet, in other cases, Knightley highlighted how journalists faced pressured to dumb down or struggled to find
outlets to publish their harrowing accounts:
No newspaper in the United States would publish the series of articles [by Miss Gellhorn detailing some of the
details of the war]. "Everywhere I was told that they were too tough for American reader." Eventually,
the St. Louis Post-Dispatch took the two mildest ones. Miss Gellhorn had to turn to Britain to get all
five published. They appeared in the Guardian, and ended Miss Gellhorn's career as a war correspondent
in Vietnam. When she applied for a visa to return there, her request was refused. She tried over the years since
then, applying to various South Vietnamese embassies around the world, and was refused every time.
...Philip Jones Griffiths, one of the few photographers to concentrate on portraying what the war did to
Vietnamese civilians, had great difficulty in find an outlet for his work in the United States. "I was told
time after time that my photographs were too harrowing for the American market." When, eventually, a book of
his photographs, Vietnam Inc., was published in the United States, the South Vietnamese government banned
his return to Saigon.
-- Phillip Knightley,The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker From the Crimea to Kosovo,(Prion Books, 2000), pp. 424, 428 (Emphasis is original)
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And as Knightley concluded:
So in the reporting of Vietnam each day's news was swiftly consumed by the next day's. Too few correspondents
looked back and tried to see what it added up to, too few probed beyond the official version of events to expose
the lies and half-truths, too few tried to analyse what it all meant. There were language problems: few
correspondents spoke French, much less Vietnemese. There were time problems: Kevin Buckley's investigation into
"Operation Speedy Express" took two men two and a half months. And there were cultural problems: apart
from Bernard Fall's and Frances FitzGerald's, there were no serious attempts to explain to Americans something
about the people they were fighting. On the whole, writers for non-daily publications came out better than most
of their colleagues because, free from the tyranny of pressing deadlines, they could look at the war in greater
depth.
-- Phillip Knightley,The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker From the Crimea to Kosovo,(Prion Books, 2000), pp. 466 - 467
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The Vietnam experience highlights a multitude of factors that contributed to what can only be termed as
propaganda for Cold War ideological battles.
- A mixture of ideological goals, geopolitical and military goals, and issues to do with the nature of
reporting and the structure of the media and how it worked, combined with cultural norms, all impacted
the way that things were reported, not reported, portrayed, or misrepresented.
- This ultimately provided legitimacy for a war that saw millions killed.
- That the war need not have happened in the first place is almost never discussed now, and it is more of a
'tragedy' or 'bad mistake' for the sole superpower to come to terms with; good intentions carried out
poorly.
- The 'good intentions' are rarely questioned.
More Information
The above may be considered long for a web page, but it really isn't much detail at all. In addition, many
other important aspects have not been touched upon here such as the huge anti-war protest movements in the 1960s;
the issue of those missing in action; the details of the devastation of Indo-China; Vietnam's attempts at
development after the wars, amidst trade and aid embargoes; the various sociopolitical, environmental and economic
consequences up to today; the 'Vietnam syndrome'; the impact Vietnam has had on American culture, on the attitude
to sending military troops abroad, etc etc.
For more details on various aspects, discussed here, and not discussed, consider the following, which is by no
means anywhere near a comprehensive list, but will be added to over time:
- Covering Vietnam from the Media
Channel provides various articles about the media on Vietnam.
- Asia articles from media watch-dog, Fairness
and Accuracy in Reporting.
- The books cited above are listed here (they themselves list many more sources):
- John Pilger, Heroes, (Jonathan Cape 1986, Vintage 2001), especially part IV, chapters 14
to 23. (John Pilger's web site also includes a lot of
articles on Vietnam.)
- Phillip Knightly, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker From the
Crimea to Kosovo, (Prion Books, 2000), especially chapters 16 and 17
- Works by J.W. Smith from the Institute for Economic Democracy.
At his web site you can find on line books, in full, for free. These detail in far more breadth
and depth, the context in which Vietnam occurred.
- Works from Noam Chomsky. His web site contains numerous
articles, interviews, speeches, and books on all sorts of aspects of U.S. foreign policy, and like
Smith, details the wider context as well.
- William Blum, Rogue State, (Common Courage Press, 2000)
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