4  Vietnam

In the preceding chapter, we discussed the highly selective concern over the plight of refugees, many of whom are first or second order victims of Western intervention (“modernization” or pacification). Deep concern is also voiced for those unfortunates who have not yet succeeded in fleeing from the rigors of Communism. True, things are perhaps a shade better than was predicted by those who invoked the near certainty of a massive bloodbath as justification for their support for continued U.S. intervention;1 and now that we have looked briefly at a few moments of Western history, under circumstances incomparably more mild and favorable and with much less cause for revenge, one can perhaps begin to perceive the basis for such expectations.

One of those who confidently predicted a mass slaughter in Vietnam was the noted expert Patrick Honey, friend and adviser of Diem, former Reuters Saigon correspondent and Foreign Editor of the Economist, author of a book on North Vietnam published by the Center for International Studies at MIT, and a respected commentator on Vietnamese affairs—also a self-styled “pacifist” who urged such measures as bombing the dikes in North Vietnam as early as 1965. One of his more perspicuous insights was that after a Communist victory

All believed to pose a threat, real or potential, to the Communist regime will be killed at once, and some of the remainder may be permitted to postpone execution as long as they continue to work as unpaid slave labourers. Calculated on the basis of past Communist deeds, and given the size of South Vietnam’s population, the minimum number of those to be butchered will exceed one million and could rise to several times that figure.2

In fact, the predictions of Honey and other comparable experts have not been fulfilled. There has been no credible evidence of mass executions in Vietnam, certainly nothing similar to what happened in France or perhaps even Japan after World War II, to cite two examples discussed above where the provocation was far less. But some of the measures enacted by the victors have nevertheless been invoked to demonstrate both Communist perfidy and the “double standards” of those who opposed the war. One example which provides a good insight into the practices of the Free Press is a front-page story in the New York Times by their Asia specialist Fox Butterfield, which includes the following “information.”

The Communists say they have also forced 260,000 Montagnards, the nomadic hill tribesmen in the south, to settle down in the last three years. Similar efforts by South Vietnamese regimes before 1975 drew angry protests from Americans opposed to the war.3

Since it seemed to us unlikely that the Communists would say that they had “forced” montagnards to resettle, and since we recall no “angry protests” over earlier resettlement of montagnards, we wrote Mr. Butterfield to inquire as to the source of his information. He was kind enough to respond (which is unusual; most efforts to track down the source of what appears in the press are unavailing). In a letter of 12 June 1978 from Hong Kong, Butterfield cites as his source a 19 March report by the Vietnam News Agency which he quotes as follows:

300,000 former nomads in the central highlands provinces of Gia Lai—Cong Tum, Dac Lac and Lam Dong have now settled and together with soldiers and pioneers from the plains, cleared hundreds of thousands of acres of virgin lands and built hundreds of new economic zones.

He also cites “a Tass dispatch on 25 January giving figures for both north and south, with the specific figures of 260,000 for the south.”4 Note the way this information has been transmuted into a “forced” resettlement as it becomes a feature story in the New York Times.5

With regard to the protests by Americans, Butterfield writes: “I can only tell you that during more than two years as a correspondent in Vietnam, I often received letters from American friends suggesting I write articles detailing U.S. and South Vietnamese measures to compel the montagnards to settle down…In fairness, if such a standard was applied to [the actions of the Diem, Khanh, Ky and Thieu governments], it should be maintained now for a communist regime.”

This response gives an interesting indication of the kind of thinking that informs the news columns—not to speak of the editorials—in the Free Press. First, we may ask whether letters from friends are correctly described as “angry protests from Americans opposed to the war” and provide a sufficient evidentiary basis for characterizing and defaming a mass popular movement. Second, note the assumption—based on no cited evidence—that the Communists have compelled the montagnards to resettle. Note finally the belief that fairness requires that “Americans opposed to the war” now direct “angry protests” against the Vietnamese Communists.

Even if Butterfield had some factual basis for his assertions, consider the standards he invokes in his news column. The Vietnamese have resettled 300,000 montagnards by means that he does not know. In comparison, the U.S.-imposed government claimed to have moved no less than one third of its population to “strategic hamlets” by the summer of 1962 to “protect” them from the Communists, who, according to U.S. officials, had the support of about half the population while the U.S.-imposed regime could claim only minimal popular support. This was undoubtedly a forced relocation, as contemporary reports and later studies make very clear.6 The montagnards were particularly hard hit by the forced relocation programs. Dennis Duncanson of the British Advisory Mission, a passionate supporter of the U.S. intervention and now a widely respected commentator on Indochina, reports without critical comment that the policy of random bombardment of villages in “open zones” was the “principal cause of a huge migration of tribesmen in the summer of 1962,” citing estimates from 125,000 to 300,000.7 The Pentagon Papers cite intelligence reports on “indiscriminate bombing in the countryside” which is “forcing innocent or wavering peasants toward the Viet Cong” and on the flight of 100,000 montagnards from Viet-Cong controlled areas “due principally to Viet Cong excesses and the general intensification of the fighting in the highlands,” noting again “the extensive use of artillery and aerial bombardment and other apparently excessive and indiscriminate measures by GVN military and security forces…”—a more plausible cause for the flight than “Viet Cong excesses,” a phrase that was very possibly added as a reflex in the typical ideological style of intelligence reports. A CIA report of July, 1962 mentions “extensive relocation Montagnards” allegedly resulting from fear of Viet Cong “and new found respect for power GVN has manifested bombing attacks and use helicopters.”8 Recall that U.S. pilots were flying some 30% of bombing missions by 1962 and that all the equipment of course was supplied by the United States to the forces it trained and organized.

The impact of these murderous programs on the montagnards then and in subsequent years was severe. Gerald Hickey, who worked with montagnards in close association with U.S. government agencies for many years, wrote in 1973 that “in the past decade at least 85 per cent of these [montagnard] villages for one reason or another have been relocated, and whole ethnic groups have been moved out of their traditional territories.” While he is a bit coy about the reasons, other sources, such as those just mentioned, make them clear enough. He reports, that according to Saigon officials in the Ministry of Ethnic Minorities, 200,000 of 900,000 montagnards perished during this grim decade. And at least 120,000 “are crammed into dreary and inadequate refugee centers” where they are shattered and demoralized. Most of their territories were then under NLF-NVA control “and the South Vietnamese out of fear of losing control of population prefer that relocated montagnards remain where they are,” in the refugee centers. Hickey concludes that “there may be a glint of hope in reports that in some of the Communist controlled areas montagnard refugees are being returned to their former sites to rebuild villages. If this is so it could mean the salvation of the montagnard way of life, particularly a restoration of their self-sufficiency and with it their dignity.”9

Other Americans have also observed their fate. Earl Martin describes the situation of hundreds of montagnards swept up along with 7,000 Vietnamese farmers in OPERATION MALHEUR, sent to a camp where “camp life for the tribal people looked less like integration than genocide.” In fact, “gradually they started to die off,” pleading in vain to be permitted to return to their hills, even though these areas were being subjected to constant U.S. bombardment.10

Contrary to the statement of the Times correspondent, there were, regrettably, few if any “angry protests” at the time of these programs by Americans opposed to the war.11 During the early programs, which were among the most savage, there was no visible peace movement at all. But even if there had been angry protests, as the facts certainly demanded, would it be proper to accuse such protestors of a double standard for failing to protest the current relocation of montagnards? Does fairness require that when a Vietnamese government relocates 300,000 montagnards (by means that are unknown), U.S. citizens must protest exactly as they did (rather, should have done) when the U.S. government and a regime that it forcefully imposed, armed and trained, bombed hundreds of thousands of montagnards into “protected areas” or drove a third of the population of South Vietnam into virtual concentration camps, surrounded with barbed wire and controlled by police? That is an odd standard of fairness. By honest and moral standards, protest by U.S. citizens would be directed primarily against the United States and its clients, even if there were some remote degree of parity in the measures undertaken, for reasons that we have already discussed (cf. Volume I, chapter 1, section 16).

In fact, there is a clear case of “double standards” illustrated here, quite apart from the falsification of evidence in the Times story. The Times did not protest, either editorially or in its constant editorializing in news reports, when the United States and its client regime drove hundreds of thousands of montagnards from their homes by “random bombardment” or conducted the forced resettlement programs of 1962-1963, or even when it later carried out its massive programs of “forced draft urbanization” by bombs and artillery. Occasionally the Times would complain that the programs were not efficacious or well-designed, but we recall no principled protest over this or other aspects of U.S. aggression in Indochina. And as we have seen, at the war’s end not only the Times editorial writers but also their most outspoken doves saw the war only as a blunder. In his news report and the attitudes that lie behind it, Butterfield exemplifies once again the typical hypocrisy of the media, raising a moral issue which takes the form of a criticism of alleged double standards on the part of others, but quite incapable of perceiving the real double standard to which the Times consistently adheres; or better, the single standard of service to the basic principles of the state propaganda system.

In the same news story Butterfield reports that Vietnam plans to resettle 10 million people, one-fifth of the population, in the next 20 years. “In its scope and severity, Hanoi’s plan dwarfs the forced evacuation of refugees during the Vietnam war.” He criticizes a Vietnamese spokesman for having “made no reference to the cost in human terms of moving 10 million people from one part of the country to another and from their accustomed lives in the city to uncleared land in the countryside.”

Assuming that in this case the Times has some evidence for what it reports, consider the judgments expressed in this news story. Would the resettlement of 10 million people in 20 years dwarf in scope and severity the U.S. program of bombing approximately the same number of people into U.S.-controlled urban concentrations during the 1960s? It is quite important to recall that contrary to much current propaganda, these programs of forced relocation, which in fact displaced some 10 million people in the South according to the representative of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (see below, p. 82), were consciously designed to drive the rural population to the U.S.-controlled cities, a fact obvious enough from their predictable effect, and in fact were explicitly recommended for this purpose.12 Furthermore, as we have already noted, all competent authorities agree that a program of resettlement is an absolute necessity if the country is to survive, a point to which we will return. What evidence does Butterfield adduce, or have, that the specific program to which he objects is an improper one, given the clear necessity for massive resettlement? The comparison to violent relocation by a foreign invader in an effort to undercut the social base of a popular resistance movement is truly astonishing.

What of the failure to refer to “the cost in human terms” of moving people from “their accustomed lives in the city” to

“uncleared land in the countryside”? Butterfield evidently wants us to assume that the Communists, with their customary cruelty, are simply dismantling the cities where people live in comfort and sending them to uncleared land (in preference to the cleared land that otherwise awaits them?). He himself acknowledges factors that make this utter nonsense.13 The “accustomed lives in the city” were sheer hell for vast numbers of victims of U.S. savagery, while those more favored could hardly maintain their “accustomed lives” after the collapse of the totally artificial foreign-based economy and must turn to productive work, unless there is to be mass starvation. That much is elementary. Nor is there any reason to suppose that the Vietnamese are purposely sending urban residents to “uncleared land” out of some peculiar form of malice. Such evidence as exists, quite apart from mere common sense, suggests that they will attempt to create a viable economy self-sufficient in agriculture. All of this is obvious, except to correspondent-editorialists in the U.S. propaganda institutions.14

It is interesting to compare the Times analysis with that of Nayan Chanda (see footnote 4), based on long familiarity with the region and a recent visit. Like the New York Times, Chanda discusses the 50,000 “functionaries and political personalities of the former regime, civil and military” in reeducation camps,15 the sometimes troubled accommodation of the bitterly anti-Communist Catholics to the new regime and the conflicts between certain segments of the Buddhist community and the Communist authorities, the discontent and suffering of urban residents of the South who blame the Communists for the radical decline in living standards for the bourgeoisie when the U.S.-based economy collapsed with the U.S. withdrawal, and the problems of corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency. As distinct from the Times and other U.S. media, he also outlines the background and context of what is happening in Vietnam and discusses in some detail the careful and “progressive” measures that are being taken by the regime to try to deal with the awesome problems of “reconstructing the socio-economic structures ravaged by two decades of separation and war.”

In the South, Chanda writes, the security situation is “much improved” over 1976, with no armed military patrols in Saigon and no military in evidence on the road leading to the Mekong Delta or on bridges. Nevertheless, armed resistance reportedly continues in parts of the country, and he finds plausible the official explanation that “the principal reason” for detaining elements of the U.S.-backed regime “corresponds to the imperatives of security, the government wishing to assure itself, before freeing them, that those detained will have no opportunity to cause harm.”16 He reports the testimony of a recently released Thieu government functionary who says that most of his detention was spent farming or in political discussions after a three month study of “the history of the revolution and the causes of the American defeat.” The liberation of those with a “serious criminal past” will be delayed beyond the expected three years, Chanda believes, while bureaucratic inefficiency may delay the release of others.

There are 1.5 million unemployed in the South, according to officials whom Chanda quotes, including 300,000 in Saigon, most of whom had enjoyed, “thanks to the massive influx of American dollars, an easy life and a standard of living absolutely without relation to the level of economic development of the country.” According to a confidential report of the World Bank, the worst threat of famine in the South was overcome by imports from the North and external assistance. Far from draining the South of resources, as the editors of the New York Times have claimed (see chapter 1, footnote 13), the Vietnamese authorities appear “concerned to avoid the collapse of normal living standards in Saigon” and continue to divert essential products to the South, including even gasoline for thousands of private vehicles, “to the degree that the standard of living in [Saigon] is higher than anywhere else in Vietnam.”

Chanda gives a sympathetic account of the efforts to residents of overcrowded urban areas to “new economic zones,” prepared for settlement by army units, groups of young villagers, volunteer students, and members of the Young Communist League. There were admitted errors in the early stages of the settling of Saigonese in inadequately prepared new economic zones, leading to rumors of “new Siberias,” but these appear to have been overcome, Chanda reports. He describes the significant improvements in a region that he had visited in 1976, then “an arid plain without trees” and now a flourishing state farm, with schools, nurseries, tractors, and bulldozers. The cited World Bank report praises the new economic zones and urges international aid, while the U.S. press, in contrast, prefers to deplore the cruel evacuation of the Saigonese from their “accustomed lives in the city to uncleared land in the countryside.”

Chanda also describes the slow and careful moves that the government is making to encourage cooperation among the individualistic peasants of the Mekong Delta and to increase food production, the introduction of double harvests, and “impressive projects” to improve the land as well as efforts to develop small-scale industry to offer needed goods to the peasants so that they will agree to send the agricultural surplus to the cities. As for the corruption, described with much glee by Western journals,17 he writes that it is “in a way an inevitable phenomenon after thirty years of sacrifice and privations,” particularly in Saigon where substantial quantities of imported consumer goods are still to be found, though the government, which has quite openly discussed the problem, is taking measures to overcome it not overlooking the severe temptations for a soldier who has been fighting in the jungle for ten years and would now like to send a small present to his wife at home.

This description, while not sparing in criticism, is radically different in character from the bulk of what is presented in the U.S. press in an effort to demonstrate Communist depravity. It even suggests that the United States might have some lessons to learn—lessons that might be applied in its Latin American domains for example—from people who entirely lack the resources of the world’s richest country and who are facing problems immeasurably more severe than those in the U.S. satellites.18 Or perhaps the lessons might be applied in the outright U.S. colonies such as Guam, where, according to a report by Butterfield, Asian workers “have been systematically underpaid, physically abused and intimidated by threats of deportation if they complain—often, apparently, with the complicity of United States government officials”—the situation is “like slavery in the South before the Civil War,” says a Department of Labor official who adds that his life was threatened when he was sent here to investigate the situation.19

One might even be so naive, perhaps, as to imagine that the facts that Chanda reports might lead the New York Times editors, who are presumably aware of them, to reconsider their high-minded belief that “our Vietnam duty is not over,” referring solely to the “horror” of the refugees,20 and to conceive of this lingering debt as encompassing also a response to the appeal of the Comsymps in the World Bank for international assistance for the resettlement projects within Vietnam.

The World Bank is not alone in recommending resettlement. “A vast resettlement of Vietnamese, away from the cities and back to the countryside, is likely to get under way soon—probably aided by United Nations-sponsored funds.”21 A UN report describes such mass population movement as a “top priority” if Vietnamese agricultural production is to recover. The head of the UN aid mission that visited Vietnam for a month in March, 1976 told a news conference at the UN in New York that “I am satisfied in light of my experience that coercion is not exercised.” He also expressed his opinion that those who crowded into the cities of the South during the war did not want to stay in the cities. In the North, he observed, “some villages have been totally erased from the earth—you have some cities without a house left standing.” He added that the Vietnamese had shown a “very friendly, constructive attitude” towards the UN mission and permitted them to travel freely. He urged an international aid program, to which Sweden and some other Western countries have already begun to contribute—but those who erased the villages from the earth have banned aid to the victims, or even trade.

The representative of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Alexander Casella, now a senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment, gave his impressions of 18 months in postwar Vietnam in Foreign Policy, Spring 1978. This detailed report is rather similar in tone to Chanda’s, and again radically different from the stream of invective in the nation’s press. Casella concludes that “if one considers the material problems the country faces and the hatreds accumulated by 30 years of war, the potential for a major economic and human catastrophe [after the war] was enormous. The least credit that the leadership deserves is for having averted that catastrophe.” When the war ended, there was an “administrative vacuum” in the South, and “northern officials had to be rushed to the south” along with “doctors, technicians, medical supplies, and fuel.” The reason for the administrative vacuum is simple: “The Saigon administration had dissolved, and the PRG did not have the manpower to take over.” In the early 1960s about half of the party members were in the South; by 1976, the proportion was less than one in six. Why had the proportion changed?

A major reason for the imbalance is the Phoenix program—the American euphemism for the system of assassinating South Vietnamese Communists—which, according to official Vietnamese sources, had about 100,000 victims. They were not merely party members, but in most cases experienced functionaries. In other words, the local administrative structure of the PRG was for all practical purposes eradicated, and in the last years of the war the operating life-expectancy of a Communist party cell leader in Saigon was not more than four months.22

The Western press generally prefers a different interpretation of the northern takeover, as we have seen: “As soon as the war was over the NLF was discarded,” Martin Woollacott explains.23 “In retrospect, it is clear that the NLF was never a true coalition of Communist and non-Communist forces, nor was it ever an independent southern entity.” His evidence is that the Communist Party revealed in internal documents that it hoped to control the Front, and the judgment of “most authorities” that “by 1966 the majority of key cadres were northerners” (that is, after ten years of savage repression, 4 years of U.S. bombing, and a year of full-scale military invasion with its awesome concomitants). Without a word on the methods that were used to destroy the NLF and the peasant society it had organized, Woollacott observes that the “revolutionary theory” of the NLF “in the end turned out to be wrong”: there was no general uprising or “negotiated coalition government” (which is true, given the U.S. refusal to implement the 1973 agreements; see chapter 1, section 1) but rather the war ended “by a massive conventional military campaign” (in response to U.S.-Saigon military actions, as is noted by every reputable observer) and now the Front “has been ceremonially laid to rest in Saigon” (having been decimated by U.S. terror). The omissions, here parenthesized, are revealing.

Casella goes on to describe the “shattered economy” of the South, an artificial U.S. creation, as well as “an exhausted North Vietnam, whose economy was just marginally self-supporting” having been reduced to the production level of 1955, and “now required to divert some of its functionaries to help govern the south, and to prop it up economically as well. The south, or what was left of it, had little to offer the north.”

Discussing the impact of the war, Casella writes that “between 1965 and 1975, some 10 million people were at one time or another displaced” in South Vietnam. By the summer of 1975, he writes, “it was clear that there was no economic alternative but to return to the countryside for the five million displaced persons who had sought refuge in the cities and were now mostly unemployed.” Of these, two million were fortunate enough to be able to return to their original villages; “of the other three million, many had seen their villages destroyed and the land wasted.” These “would have to be resettled in ‘new economic zones’ (NEZs).” As for the resettlement program, “both for individuals and for the nation, there is no alternative.”

Early efforts at resettlement in NEZs were ill-prepared: “Hence, the NEZs unjustly acquired the reputation of an Asian Gulag, especially among the petty bourgeoisie from Saigon, who had always looked down on manual labor.” By the fall of 1975, he writes, the situation had been reassessed and a “pattern of resettlement established,” news of which had not reached the New York Times desk in Hong Kong, whereby the army corps of engineers first clears land, disposes of mines, builds access roads, some simple housing, and health facilities before settlers are brought in. Casella then describes some successful examples in extremely poor areas.

Is there coercion involved? “If forcing means at gun point, then the answer is an emphatic no. But it would also be incorrect to say that there is no pressure on the unemployed people of Saigon to leave for the countryside.” Explaining these pressures, he describes what Butterfield calls “the accustomed lives in the city” for the poor, who rarely arouse the compassion that beats so strongly in the hearts of Western commentators for middle and upper class collaborators with the imperial venture. Saigon’s fourth precinct “is one of the poorest areas in the city, one into which few foreigners ever ventured.” Situated in a swamp, “it is a maze of alleys in a jungle of dilapidated shacks made of corrugated iron and the leftovers from plywood packing cases.” Its population rose from 60,000 in 1960 to 200,000 by the war’s end, about half unemployed. “Resettlement of the displaced persons in the fourth precinct was given priority, and by the summer of 1977, 60,000 had already been moved to new economic zones in Long An24 and Tay Ninh, the areas most had come from.” He quotes a member of “the people’s committee of the fourth precinct and a survivor of seven years in prison on Con Son island,” who claims “that we have more people who volunteered for resettlement than we can handle.”

The problem of resettlement also exists in the North, where “most of the populated areas along Route One [south from Thanh Hoa to the 17th parallel] looked like a lunar landscape, pitted with bomb craters for mile after mile;” some 2 million people were displaced in the North, he estimates, mostly from regions that were among the poorest in Vietnam.25

The food crisis is severe because of the war. The land area under cultivation declined by almost two-and-a-half million acres “due to the exodus of the population” from 1965 to 1975. Furthermore, “Cratering also had a long-lasting effect on agriculture,” since the explosion compresses the earth so that the huge craters left have no excess soil for fill on the perimeter. As U.S.-financed fertilizer imports abruptly ended, new strains of “miracle rice” could no longer be used, leading to “a drop in productivity”—generally attributed in the U.S. press to Communist mismanagement and peasant discontent. Unusually severe weather has further hampered plans to achieve agricultural self-sufficiency by 1980, although the area under cultivation in the South has increased. Since Casella wrote, the worst floods in many decades have caused further devastation and misery.

Casella also discusses the “re-education camps,” which are “obviously not vacation spots” though “it has yet to be proved that they are as bad as the old prisons of the Saigon regime.” As for the men now returning from them, “considering the length of the war and the bitterness it engendered, they could hardly have hoped for better.” The incompetent U.S. evacuation effort, described in detail by CIA analyst Frank Snepp,26 failed to evacuate “endangered Vietnamese” to the United States, “a solution that both they and the Communists would surely have found less burdensome.” The Hanoi leadership, Casella writes, “concluded that retribution per se carried no redeeming value” for the 1.5 million members of the Saigon army and civilians of the Saigon regime. For the rank and file, “re-education…usually meant only one or two days of lectures,” though “problems arose with what had been the hard core of the Saigon regime—the officer corps, police officials, and the like;” for example, those engaged in the U.S.-sponsored assassination campaigns, whose names were no doubt known to the victors because of the failure to destroy U.S. intelligence files (see Snepp). “For the former ruling elite, re-education became a far more complex and time-consuming process.” While trials “have a certain appeal to the Western mind, anyone familiar with Vietnam instinctively realizes that the last thing the individuals concerned would have wanted was a trial, which would have narrowed down responsibility and probably led to far heavier sentences” as opposed to the three to five year detention (approximately) specified by “official decrees.” It is likely that since Casella wrote, a combination of natural disasters and serious international complications involving China and Cambodia, and perhaps other factors, have seriously aggravated the internal situation.

Despite the rigors of the war, the regime “did manage to attain some significant, tangible achievements.” “Illiteracy was practically wiped out, and North Vietnam today probably has the most comprehensive primary education system and rural health program in continental Asia,”27 as well as “one of the most decentralized of the Communist economies, one in which considerable leeway is left to local authorities.” The current trend “is to try to duplicate this pattern at the level of industrial management,” with involvement of trade union and party representatives in a “search for an original type of Socialist management.” It will take a full decade, he believes, before Vietnam reaches “a point from which an economic take-off appears feasible” and the material and social damage of the war is repaired. “A full assessment of where Vietnam stands will have to wait until that day”—a day that could be advanced were the United States not bent on retribution.

Casella’s account, like Chanda’s, is supported by much direct evidence provided by Western visitors and analysts who have spent long periods in Vietnam, including postwar Vietnam in some cases; for example, the detailed and ignored study by Jean and Simonne Lacouture in 1976.28 The most extensive and by far the most serious report of a visit by a U.S. reporter, Richard Dudman’s ten-part series in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, reaches quite similar conclusions: “After 30 years of war and only 2½ years of peace, Vietnam appears to have made a remarkable start at tackling the problems of peace.” He confirms that “the South appears to be a burden rather than a prize for Hanoi” and reports the view of “some of the best informed Western diplomats in Hanoi” that the shortage of Communist cadres as a result of Operation Phoenix and other U.S. terrorist programs remains a major problem in the South. Western diplomats report a net rice transfer from North to South in 1975 and 1976, but probably not 1977. The new Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) “probably is better for many factory employees and others now known as ‘workers,’” but “worse, at least economically, for much of the middle class and for many of the self-employed”—which is not very surprising, given the collapse of the artificial economy that was based on a foreign dole. For the time being, “South Vietnam has something of the feel of an occupied country,” Dudman writes. Unlike most U.S. journalists, Dudman describes the social and economic development programs undertaken to overcome the effects of the war and reports interviews with Ngo Cong Duc and other well-known non-Communist intellectuals who support the new regime, and are therefore blanked out of the U.S. press (see below). All in all, his report, with its professional character and integrity, stands in striking contrast to the exclusive search for negatives that is labelled “news about Indochina” in the nation’s press.29

The liberal weekly Newsweek depicts events in postwar Vietnam in its issue of May 23, 1977. In the index we read:

Two years after the fall of Saigon, the unified Socialist Republic of Vietnam is still no worker’s paradise. Nearly 100,000 former South Vietnamese soldiers and officials are suffering in ‘reeducation camps’ from which many of them may never emerge. With the economy in bad shape, hordes of city folk have been moved to ‘new economic zones’ in the countryside, which lack nearly all the comforts of home.

—such as the comforts of the fourth precinct in Saigon or the villages that have been erased from the map in the war always supported (sometimes with timid reservations) by Newsweek editors. The accompanying article gives no insight into why the economy is in bad shape; nor has Newsweek been noted for its sarcasm about the “workers’ paradise” in, say, the Philippines, South Korea, Guam, or much of Latin America, to mention a few cases where U.S. influence and control extends beyond two years and where instead of B-52 treatment the United States is supposedly aiding the population (see Volume I, chapter 4, however, for a discussion of the de facto impact of this “aid”).

The journal than presents a discussion of “Life in the New Vietnam,” revealing that two years after the Communist victory, there are still beggars, prostitutes, and black marketeers in Saigon; sure proof of Communist iniquity as compared with the benevolent humanitarianism of the United States, which would never tolerate such a scene in Saigon, Manila, Guam, or Santo Domingo—or Harlem. “Western intelligence reports and the tales told by refugees and foreign travelers paint a dreary picture of life in Vietnam.” They quote a Frenchman returning from Vietnam who reports the feeling in the country that “two years after the war is really too long for this sort of thing to go on,” referring to the reeducation camps but failing to offer a comparison to the warm and sympathetic treatment of collaborators by the French, or the British and U.S. reeducation camps and forced labor for POWs up to three years after the German defeat. (See chapter 2, section 2.)

Newsweek also describes the new economic zones to which city dwellers have been removed, deprived of “all the comforts of home”: “Many of these zones have already become rural slums of shabby huts inhabited by dispirited city people trying to coax crops out of marginal farm land. In many cases, the government has failed to provide the new farmers with seeds and tools.” In its sole reference to the war, Newsweek writes that “the war has left Vietnam’s economy in a dreadful state.” “The North Vietnamese, some residents of Saigon believe, are intent on leveling the economy of the once-prosperous south ‘to punish us’”—which is true; some residents of Saigon do believe this, in defiance of the facts cited above that are nowhere mentioned by Newsweek. Nor is there mention of the fact that the “once-prosperous south” (needless to say, the fourth precinct and its counterparts throughout the country deserve no mention) “was an entirely external, artificially induced phenomenon” (Casella) created as a service economy (complete with hundreds of thousands of prostitutes, drug addicts, beggars and servants) for the benefit of the U.S. invaders and their local clients, which disappeared when “the economic crutch that had supported South Vietnam for the previous 15 years collapsed” in April, 1975 (Casella). The article also discusses Hanoi’s admission of serious managerial errors, corruption, black marketeering, and resistance. There is no mitigating word, not a mention of the past or continuing U.S. role.

Three accompanying pictures enliven the account. One is captioned “Lecture at a ‘re-education camp.’ Two years after the fall of Saigon, routine scores are still being settled” (so different from the U.S. practice, discussed in chapter 2, section 2). A second is captioned “Camp officers relax: Don’t spare the rod” (no rod is visible). The third picture shows rather well-dressed children holding agricultural implements under a red flag—for all we know, it might be a picnic. The caption reads: “‘New economic zone’: Hardship post for city folk.”

Small wonder that the same issue of Newsweek contains a letter from a reader defending Nixon, with the following comment: “We forgave the British, the Germans, and the Japanese, and are currently in the process of forgiving the Vietnamese. Doesn’t Richard Nixon deserve the same consideration?” Nothing could reveal the power of the U.S. propaganda system more persuasively than the fact that readers who gain their picture of reality from Newsweek and similar specimens of the Free Press can speak of our “forgiving the Vietnamese” for their sins against us. Perhaps there are also enlightened Germans who are in the process of forgiving the Jews.30

A few weeks earlier the New York Times presented its lengthy feature analysis of the “painful problems of peace” in Vietnam, once again by Fox Butterfield.31 While “some progress has been made by the new Communist leaders in improving the lot of the 50 million Vietnamese,” nevertheless the general picture is one of unrelieved dreariness and oppression. “Northern soldiers and officials in Saigon have bought up or confiscated vast amounts of desirable goods and shipped them home,” one indication of how “the northern Vietnamese have tended to treat the formerly more prosperous South like conquered territory.” Another indication is that Hanoi has sent tens of thousands of teachers and officials to the South and has assigned a “virtual monopoly on key policy-making posts in the unified government” to northerners.32 No mention is made of the reasons for the shortage of skilled personnel from the resistance forces of the South, though it has long been obvious that these consequences followed directly from the success of the Phoenix mass murder program and Westmoreland’s killing-machine.33 Nor does Butterfield take note of the efforts of the North to divert scarce and precious resources to the South to maintain the artificial living standards of those Saigonese who benefited materially from their association with the U.S. invaders.

The careful reader, however, will notice that something is amiss in Butterfield’s account of how the North is treating “the formerly more prosperous South like conquered territory.” An accompanying AP dispatch from Saigon reporting “a recent 1,000 mile trip from Hanoi to Saigon by road and air disclosed a still-spartan way of life in the North and a relatively affluent one in the South.” From Hanoi southward down Highway 1 “the scene is one of furious activity” as “men and women work until after dark, bringing in produce or laboring in construction gangs building canals and dikes” or repairing roads and bridges (“Every bridge along the way was destroyed by United States bombing”):

In the North, where factories and brick kilns work around the clock, effort seems concentrated on industrial construction. In the South the real business is in the cities; Saigon, in particular, appears to be almost as active as it was before the Communist victory two years ago. While the bicycle prevails in Hanoi, which seems in some ways like a country town, motor scooters and cars still buzz through Saigon which still boasts bars and hotels as well as freewheeling markets…The people of Hanoi still live in a do-it-yourself society where nothing seems to be wasted, least of all time.34

Returning to Butterfield’s survey, he next turns to the “new economic zones” and the population transfers. Curiously, in this May 1977 article he gives exactly the same figures and projections (700,000 Saigonese relocated and 10 million to be transferred in the coming years, including montagnards) that inspired him to such denunciation and scorn in his May, 1978 article, discussed above. He writes that “700,000 people from Saigon, many born there, have been moved to ‘new economic zones’ to clear scrub jungle or uncultivated land.” Compare the accounts by Chanda, the World Bank and UN officials, cited above. Butterfield states that “the Communists have defended the population transfers as natural and necessary since Saigon and other southern cities, in their view, were always artificial products of American military spending and aid.” He fails to add that this was not only the Communist view, but the universal view among people with the slightest familiarity with the situation—and surely is his view too—nor does he note that Saigon and other cities were not just artificial products of “American military spending and aid,” but also of programs of “urbanization” by massive bombardment and destructive ground sweeps designed to force refugees to urban areas, a fact worth mentioning in this connection, one might think. He cites Communist sources who claim that “almost everyone in…[Saigon]…was in an unproductive service industry,” again failing to note that this is not simply a pretense of Communist officials, but an unquestioned fact. Casella estimates that “70 per cent of the economic activity in Saigon was service-oriented and only 7 per cent industrial”—he is presumably not including the hundreds of thousands of prostitutes in South Vietnam, another product of “American military spending and aid,” nor those engaged in the drug traffic which had devastating effects in South Vietnam as a direct consequence of the U.S. intervention (by all accounts the drug problem was extremely limited before).

Butterfield goes on to say that “the Communists defend the sharp drop in Saigon’s standard of living as a progressive development, bringing its residents back to earth after a decadent flirtation with the luxuries of American consumer society.” Recall the facts: there was a sharp drop in standard of living for some Saigonese. Hardly all, but as Casella notes, U.S. reporters rarely entered the massive urban slums of South Vietnam where refugees and others lived in swamps and tin huts. The drop was hardly a matter of Communist “choice.” Rather, it was an immediate consequence of the withdrawal of the U.S. crutch that had created an artificial economy in the South at the same time that U.S. force was inexorably destroying its agriculture and village life. Unless the U.S. taxpayer decides to continue flooding Saigon “with the luxuries of American consumer society,” a possibility that Butterfield does not explore and that has yet to be advocated editorially in the Times, it is a matter of dire necessity, as all serious observers recognize, to resettle the “urbanized” population on the land and turn them to productive effort. But of this there is no word in the Times retrospective analysis of “conditions in Indochina two years after the end of the war there.” Rather, all of the problems are the result of Communist policy.

Butterfield was a Times war correspondent in Vietnam and is certainly aware, as are the editors of the Times, that something more than Communist decision is involved in causing a situation in which “many Southerners feel a sense of hardship.” In an article of some 2,500 words, Butterfield scatters a phrase here and there that might recall to the reader some of the other factors. He speaks of the “substantial tracts of land made fallow by the war”—a phrase that would have made Orwell gasp. He reminds us that 80% of the population are farmers, which may stir some memories about U.S. programs undertaken to defeat the rural-based insurgency by eliminating its base, “urbanizing” the rural population. He notes that “large numbers of urban residents” are being resettled in the countryside, permitting a person familiar with elementary school arithmetic to conclude that large numbers of former farmers are being returned (or perhaps, perish the thought, allowed to return) to farms—to their own villages, where these still exist.

Butterfield informs us that “Saigonese, with a few exceptions, did not support the Communists during the long war.” Surely Butterfield knows virtually nothing about the attitudes of most Saigonese; for example, those driven into Saigon by U.S. military action from neighboring Long An province, where, as Jeffrey Race’s study shows, the Communists had gained the support of the mass of the population by 1965. As we have noted, U.S. officials in the early 1960s estimated that about half the population of the South supported the NLF. A substantial part of that population was driven to Saigon and other urban areas. Did they still support the NLF? Is the estimate of U.S. officials, which we would expect to be on the low side, an accurate one? To answer these questions one would have to pay some attention to Vietnamese who were not associated with the U.S. effort. This, reporters generally failed to do,35 though again there were noteworthy exceptions. The real source for Butterfield’s judgment is suggested by the accompanying analysis, where he illustrates the attitudes of the “Saigonese” with a single example: the family of a colonel in the Saigon army, one of whose sons had been a major in the army medical corps and another a lawyer in Saigon, and whose daughter had been a “low-ranking employee in the Ministry of the Interior.” It is perhaps less than obvious that an account of this “family’s woes” serves adequately to illustrate the attitudes of “Saigonese,” though it is not untypical of the Western concept of “Saigonese.”

Butterfield notes the problems of writing about Vietnam, given the limited sources of information. Thus “there is little verifiable information on the new economic zones—no full-time American correspondents have been admitted since the war.”36 His conclusions about the “problems of peace” are therefore based on reports by “diplomats, refugees and letters from Vietnam.” The same complaint appears in a more exaggerated form in an article a few months later by the Times’ Pulitzer Prize winner Henry Kamm, who writes that “southern Vietnam has become virtually impenetrable by foreigners and only the Hanoi Government’s picture of life in the reunited country is presented to the world” so that refugees “are the principal source of critical first-hand information.”37 While the pretense is useful for Times ideologues, it is far from true. As the editors could have informed their correspondents, the New York Times requested a report on a trip to Vietnam from the distinguished U.S. historian Gabriel Kolko, but refused to print it, and indeed refused to permit Asahi (Tokyo) to print it, presumably on grounds of its ideological inadequacies from their point of view.38 Furthermore, while sources of information are no doubt restricted, there has been plenty of first-hand material in the public record since the end of the war. For example, there is the book by Jean and Simonne Lacouture, already cited, which appeared in 1976, and much else to which we return.39 If Times correspondents choose to limit themselves to reports by refugees and selected diplomats, they merely reveal again their ideological bias, not the factual contingencies.

A look at the book by the Lacoutures (which, as noted, is far from uncritical) explains why they have been consigned to oblivion—on this matter; not in reference to Cambodia, as we shall see in chapter 6. They report that “the capitalist economy of the South was unable to solve the [agricultural] problems that socialist planning, with many more natural handicaps, has just about overcome in the North,” and they provide information and insight into the partially successful efforts made to change the society that was called “irremediably miserable” by the French specialist Pierre Gourou.40 They also describe what Butterfield calls “the tracts of land made fallow by the war”—to be more accurate, in their words, the land with “its bridges destroyed, its trees mutilated, its leprous earth, its vegetation rendered anemic by defoliants, it is the antechamber of desolation,” deprived of its population “fleeing combat or forced by the Americans to abandon the countryside to be regrouped in strategic hamlets or the vicinity of the cities” (95, 195). Like all other competent observers, but unlike the U.S. journalists who enlighten the public here, the Lacoutures point out that “it was absolutely urgent to reinstall the peasants on their land,” referring to an estimated 8 million displaced by the war in the South (197). They visited several villages in new economic zones and spoke to inhabitants, for example, in the region of Cu Chi, “scalped by the war,” where “it is for the most part the former peasants who have returned” (200). Their conclusions are relatively optimistic: “the method seems progressive, based on voluntarism, taking account of the ravages provoked by malaria” (202). True, they are not “full-time American correspondents,” but it is unclear why their direct testimony lies beyond the pale, given Jean Lacouture’s long experience and distinguished record as a historian and journalist in Vietnam—or rather, it is quite clear.

The refusal to concede the existence of direct eye-witness reports from Vietnam enabled the New York Times and its colleagues to evade the question of the consequences of the U.S. war and the problems of reconstruction that face the survivors. It enabled them to avoid the thoughts aroused by such passages as the following:

The traveller returning to the South a year after liberation cannot fail to be surprised at the transformation of the countryside. The thousands of young volunteers and peasants who are busy constructing dikes in the villages of Song-My (where the My Lai massacre took place) to the sound of revolutionary music from loudspeakers, well symbolize the new epoch.41

Though one can imagine how brainwashed U.S. reporters would convey this scene, even if they were to concede its existence.

On the rare occasions when the devastating consequences of the war are noted, care is taken to sanitize the reports so as to eliminate the U.S. role. The New York Times, for example, carried an AP report from Manila (21 March 1976) on a World Health Organization study, describing South Vietnam as “a land of widespread malaria, bubonic plague, leprosy, tuberculosis, venereal disease and 300,000 prostitutes…one of the few places on earth where leprosy was spreading and bubonic plague was still taking lives.” The WHO report states that “if the bomb-shattered fields are to be made fertile again, and the socio-economic conditions of the people improved, freedom from malaria will have to be first insured,” while in the North the main health problem is to reconstruct the 533 community health centers, 94 district hospitals, 28 provincial hospitals and 24 research institutes and specialized hospitals that “were destroyed during the war”—by some unknown hand. The sole mention of the United States in this grisly report is the statement that the United States has been invited to a meeting “to consider helping the two countries”—the “two countries” being North and South Vietnam; while the Times recognized the integration of East Timor into Indonesia in 1976 it had not yet recognized the unification of the “two countries” of Vietnam.

Since we owe the Vietnamese “no debt” because “the destruction was mutual,” as Mr. Human Rights has explained to his admiring audience,42 no help will be forthcoming from the United States to reconstruct the hospitals so mysteriously destroyed or to deal with the half-million drug addicts, the 80,000 to 160,000 cases of leprosy in the South, the estimated 5,000 cases of bubonic plague annually, or the rampant epidemics of tuberculosis and venereal disease reported by the W.H.Q.43 Congress, as noted, has banned aid to Vietnam for its “human rights violations,” which so offend the U.S. conscience.44 The United States was the only country out of 141 that refused to endorse a UN resolution urging “priority economic assistance” to Vietnam.45 A request from Vietnam to the Asian Development Bank for assistance might take “quite a long time” to consider, according to the Bank’s President Taroichi Yoshida, representative of another country well-known for its “blundering efforts to do good” (see chapter 1, p. 17) in Southeast Asia. “Observers believed that Mr. Yoshida’s caution stemmed, in major part, from the reluctance of the United States to extend economic assistance to Vietnam until the political relationship between the two countries has been put on a normal peacetime footing”46—a process allegedly impeded by Vietnamese cruelty in refusing to settle the problem of MIAs, the sole outstanding issue between the two countries.47

So stern is U.S. moralism that even recipients of U.S. “Food for Peace” aid must refrain from assisting the errant Vietnamese. The government of India wanted to send 100 buffaloes to Vietnam to help replenish the herds decimated by the same mysterious hand that destroyed the hospitals, left the land “fallow,” and made Vietnam into a land of widespread disease and suffering, but it was compelled to channel the gift through the Indian Red Cross to avoid U.S. retribution, since Food for Peace (Public Law 480) prohibits assistance to “any exporter which is engaging in, or in the six months immediately preceding the application for such financing has engaged in, any sales, trade or commerce with North Vietnam or with any resident thereof …” while another clause bars “any nation which sells or furnishes or permits ships or aircraft under its registry to transport to or from Cuba and North Vietnam any equipment, materials, or commodities so long as they are governed by a communist regime.”48

Returning to the pretense of the New York Times specialists that “southern Vietnam has become virtually impenetrable by foreigners and only the Hanoi Government’s picture of life in the reunited country is presented to the world,” there had been many other unnoticed observers who had visited Vietnam, beyond those already mentioned. For example, in an account of a visit by Inder Malhotra of the independent Times of India,49 he notes that his plane to Hanoi was “packed with travelers of many nationalities—from Cuban to Japanese,” including one U.S. citizen leading a delegation sent to Vietnam by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, and a number of Dutch journalists. But a look at Malhotra’s report of his visit quickly explains why it too, like those of the Lacoutures and others, must be consigned to oblivion. Malhotra emphasizes “the whore-like, parasitic mentality that the American years bred even among those South Vietnamese who had nothing whatever to do with the prostitutes and their pimps” (of whom there still remain “a staggering number,” though the Communists, he reports, are making impressive efforts to rehabilitate them and to cure the many dope addicts, preponderantly young boys and girls). “Most Saigonese would rather ‘make money’ than earn it. To them work is a dirty word; they would rather ‘do business.’” He reports that “the new regime, very sensibly, has decided not to use the big stick to combat this mentality.” Saigonese men and women who openly announce their opposition to the new regime also “confirm, on cross-examination, that despite their known dislike for the regime no one is hounding them out of the city.” He also contrasts the spartan existence in the North (where “there are no pavement dwellers…and no beggars” and there is general tranquility—“Late at night it is not unusual to see a lone girl or several reading under a street lamp in front of darkened houses,” just like New York) with the imported and artificial affluence of Saigon: “the contrast between the lifestyle of Hanoi and Saigon is so great that to go from the Northern metropolis to the Southern one is like leaving a monastery and plunging headlong into Hamburg’s red light district.” He also reports the ravages of the U.S. war.

Better, no doubt, to pretend that no foreigners can enter Vietnam.

The same considerations explain the nonexistence of Hugues Tertrais, who reported on his stay in Saigon where he was working “as a ‘cooperant,’ (a sort of French Peace Corps worker).”50 Like all other direct observers, he discusses what he calls “the war’s most crippling legacy,” the artificial consumer-oriented “urban society based on ‘services’ and consisting largely of shanty towns,” which must be radically transformed and returned to productivity if the society is to survive. He reports that there is “complete religious freedom” and discusses the efforts to reconstruct the stagnated economy and the resettlement in new economic zones (“the system now seems to be running smoothly, in spite of a slight sluggishness resulting from the nonauthoritarian nature of the operation”), where “young volunteers accompany the migrants to give them a hand with the preliminary work, and the people’s army often makes lodgings available.” He quotes Mme. Ngo Ba Thanh, a courageous U.S.-educated non-Communist dissident who was well-known to Americans in Saigon, who explains the effort “to promote ‘revolution in production relationships,’ ‘ideological and cultural revolution,’ and ‘scientific and technical revolution,’ which has a key role to play.”

Among others who have escaped the keen and inquiring eyes of the analysts of the New York Times, searching for every scrap of evidence about Vietnam, are several Canadian Vietnamese who have visited their native country. Father Tran Tam Tinh and Professor Tran Dinh Khuong of Laval University (Quebec), both officials of Fraternité Vietnam, reported on their visit to Vietnam in the summer of 1976 in Le Soleil (Quebec), January 7, 1977.51 Their impressions are rather like those of other direct observers, though in some respects more detailed. They describe the functioning of “solidarity cells” (social welfare groups in their view, though regularly described as agencies of state surveillance and coercion by the U.S. press); “solidarity workshops” organized by Catholic and Buddhist intellectuals in such regions as the “Iron Triangle,” devastated by U.S. terrorists, who say that they are volunteers; schools that engage the youth in communal activism and cultural events (which they witnessed); and so on. Fraternité Vietnam has also circulated a detailed report by Professor Tran Dinh Khuong on his seven-week tour, which included visits to industrial and artisans cooperatives, schools, hospitals, Catholic journals directed by priests and lay Catholics, churches,52 etc., in both North and South Vietnam, where he spoke with many functionaries, doctors, journalists, and so on. The major concern of his visit was to prepare for humanitarian assistance from abroad, and he ends his report by saying that “we will be happy to furnish additional information and explanations to aid organizations that would like to participate in these programs.” Presumably he would also be pleased to offer further information to U.S. journalists concerned with fact rather than service to the state propaganda system, but the opportunity has evidently not arisen.

In a letter published in the Toronto Globe and Mail (5 April 1977), the two Canadian Vietnamese visitors report that they were “each living with our own families” and “we wandered through the streets of Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) and met with people of all social categories,” engaging in “discussion with many average and ordinary Vietnamese.” The fact is significant, given allegations featured in the Free Press to which we return.

Actually, even the careful reader of the New York Times will be able to ascertain that other sources of information do exist beyond those to which the Times analysts choose to restrict themselves,53 and that they often give a picture that differs substantially from the dreary and dismal scene of oppression and misery that the Times specialists construct from their carefully selected sources. Kathleen Teltsch reported from the UN in New York that “Westerners who visited Vietnam almost two years after the end of the war report that agricultural recovery is progressing although rice rationing continues in both North and South,” referring to “separate groups of Mennonites and Quakers,” UN officials, and “a World Bank mission that spent four weeks assessing the economic situation.”54 In paragraph 12, five lines are devoted to the report by the UN coordinator for rehabilitation assistance to Vietnam who “has said that significant progress has already been made but that reconstruction requirements remain vast.” In paragraph 7, Max Ediger, “a Mennonite social worker from Kansas who lived in Vietnam from 1971 to 1976,” is reported as saying that on his return to Vietnam “he was struck by the greening of the countryside, with areas once burned to the ground already turned into crop land.” The reader who may be interested in further details will not find them in the New York Times.

More attention is given to the failure of these Western observers to ask to see reeducation centers where “it has been alleged, the authorities have interned tens of thousands, including soldiers and supporters of the American backed Government,” posing a “human-rights issue” which “could loom large in President Carter’s consideration of relations with Hanoi,” the latter comment, typical Western cynicism. The response of the Quaker group to this charge is taken up under the heading: “Issue of Repression Bypassed.” The sole contents, under this heading, is a series of comments by Wallace Collett, a businessman who headed the Quaker mission. He reports that after travelling widely and “talking freely with Roman Catholic and Buddhist leaders, with intellectuals and with Vietnamese ‘known over the years as people whose accounts were reliable,’” his group was convinced that accusations of widespread repression are untrue, though, as he said, “the Vietnamese make no apologies for holding some [former officers or officials of the Thieu government] and tell us they do so for offenses we’d consider treason.” Though the Times does not mention the fact, the group contained Vietnamese-speaking members who had lived and worked in Vietnam and met with non-Communist Vietnamese who had long been known for principled resistance to oppression.

It is interesting that this denial of repression by a group that specifically investigated it,55 apparently relying on sources that seem reasonable enough, should appear under the heading “Issue of Repression Bypassed.” The explanation for this anomaly, surely, is that the conclusions reached by the visitors did not conform to the doctrinal assumptions that guide “news reporting” in the Free Press. Consequently, the editors simply lied about the contents of the story in the subheading and reporters made no further effort to determine to whom the delegation spoke and what these informants said—a matter of some interest, as we shall see—just as their account of general conditions has had no impact on reporting and analysis in the press and receives no more than passing mention in a context that suggests that it can be dismissed, in contrast to material that Times ideologues find more to their taste.

Since the United States is a Free Society, it is possible for the assiduous investigator to determine what the Mennonite and Quaker visitors discovered on their visit. Max Ediger of the Mennonite Central Committee, who worked in Vietnam for 5 years and remained for 13 months after the war, reported on his two-week visit in January, 1977 at a February 9 private conference that included members of the Senate and House.56 Since the war’s end, this was the third Mennonite delegation to visit Vietnam, where the Mennonites had worked for 23 years. Ediger discussed the vast improvement in the educational system, in which he had been involved during his years in Vietnam, the efforts to find employment for urban refugees and their return “to their old villages in the countryside,” where “they continue to face many hardships.” It is not the “human cost” of the return to the land, which so preoccupies New York Times analysts, that Ediger reports, but rather the fact that “unexploded mines and other munitions litter their fields. Well trained military units first sweep the fields to try to clean them, but the farmers are still being killed.” In a letter of May 11, 1977 to Worldview magazine, Ediger reports that “an elderly member of a small congregation I occasionally attended returned to his farm after many years of living as a refugee” and “was instantly killed” when “he had only begun to turn over the fallow soil…[and]…his hoe hit an M79 grenade.” Ediger heard many reports of similar deaths, and asks, reasonably it would seem: “If we produced the munitions, and put them there, do we not have a moral responsibility to take them out so the farmers can live?” The editors of the New York Times have yet to recognize such a responsibility, when they remind us that “Our Vietnam Duty is Not Over.”57

Another problem that Ediger discusses in his testimony is “the vast destruction of soil and facilities inflicted by the past war,” a problem aggravated by the termination of U.S. aid (particularly fertilizers) and the necessity to do all work by hand. The church, he reports, “continues to function freely and normally,” and the government “has helped the Protestant church rebuild five of their structures destroyed by bombing in Da Nang. “Saigon is still suffering from major over-population and other war-related problems,” but “one can sense a certain feeling of relaxation among the people which was not there during the war.”

In his letter to Worldview Ediger adds further information. He visited a Buddhist seminary that had recently opened in Hanoi to train monks “for service in the numerous pagodas throughout the country,” where Buddhist scriptures were being translated from Sanskrit to Vietnamese “so that it will be available to all Vietnamese.” He also “met several old friends who, because they were officers in the old army, spent nine months in re-education camps. They made no mention of torture and mistreatment” but “rather talked about learning how to work with their hands” and said that they had learned “about the new economic and social system they were living under. One young doctor, after completing his reeducation course, was made director of a drug rehabilitation center near Saigon.” A Protestant church rebuilt with the assistance of the government was dedicated on Christmas day; it had “received a direct hit from an American bomber in 1971 which resulted in the death of 80 Christians who had taken refuge there.” He also visited badly-needed development projects in the countryside and “programs set up to help former prostitutes and drug addicts receive training so that they could re-enter society as productive members of that society rather than as outcasts.”

Ediger does not doubt that there are serious human rights violations in Vietnam, and is aware that his tour undoubtedly was restricted. But he rather gently makes some important points: “Unless we accept the fact that we too are violating rights in Vietnam, and strive to correct that, we lose our basis for speaking about others’ possible violation of human rights…Is it not the right of a human being to be able to return to his/her farm and till the soil without the threat of being blown to bits by an M79 grenade or a claymore mine?…If we helped destroy [hospitals and schools], are we not violating the rights of the Vietnamese people if we refuse to help them rebuild those structures?” These questions are foreign to moralists in the Free Press.

Beneficiaries of the Freedom of the Press can also learn about the Quaker visit that was so quickly dismissed by the Times (see p. 100 above), which included two members fluent in Vietnamese, Louis Kubicka (on the staff at AFSC’s Quang Ngai Rehabilitation Center from 1967-1971 and then AFSC representative in Laos) and Sophie Quinn-Judge (AFSC Saigon Representative for 1973-1975 and then co-director of the Southeast Asia Seminar Program).58 The Quaker group travelled by road from Da Nang to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). The “most ambitious single reconstruction effort” they visited was a dam and dike near Quang Ngai, destroyed by the United States in an area that was later subjected to some of the most brutal operations in the war.59 In Hanoi they met Jean-Pierre Debris, a Frenchman who had spent two years in Saigon’s Chi Hoa prison (his effort to reach the U.S. public in a subsequent tour here was virtually blanked out by the press) and now works with Catherine Debris at the Foreign Languages Publishing House in Hanoi. In the South they had discussions with many of the best-known leaders of the non-Communist opposition under the U.S.-backed regimes and renewed acquaintances with staff at the AFSC Quang Ngai clinic. Their account of a country rebuilding under the miserable conditions left by the United States is similar in tone and content to other eyewitness reports that we have discussed, so we will not proceed to review it.

Recall that the Times did report that the Quaker delegation had met well-known non-Communists in the South who had denied reports of widespread repression, but made no effort to discover the contents of these discussions; nor did other mainstream journalists to our knowledge, despite (or more accurately because of) the obvious significance of this material for anyone concerned with the facts. Ly Chanh Trung, who had been a leading spokesman for the non-Communist opposition under the Thieu regime, took pains to deny reports of repression, asking the Quaker delegation to convey a personal message to antiwar activists whom he knew in the United States:

We here are among the people who have been struggling for human rights in Saigon. If a violation of human rights occurs, we ourselves will raise our voices. We will not wait for our friends from abroad to raise theirs. When we were struggling for human rights here we saw that all the so-called human rights related to basic rights—not personal rights, but national rights: independence and freedom of the nation. If you don’t have these rights, you don’t have any rights whatsoever…Socialism can guarantee the most basic of human rights, and guarantee them for everyone. These are the right to live, the right to have work to do, the right of health protection service, the right to education, the right to build a better future, not for myself alone, but for all the people. These rights are not guaranteed by a capitalist society.60

He went on to deny that the reeducation camps “have the purpose of revenging or killing [officers or high-ranking servants of the old regime] gradually.” Both he and Ngo Cong Duc emphasized that there was much bitterness after 30 years of war and that “now the problem is how to have people live with one another, be reconciled to one another, and to understand one another.”61

It is conceivable that these courageous human rights activists, non-Communists who were well-known to Americans in Saigon (the press included) and who struggled and suffered for many years, are now so ignorant or so terrorized by the new regime that their reaction can be dismissed. Or it may be that their voice is as important now as it was under the regime of U.S.-imposed subfascism. A free and honest press would present the evidence, permitting readers to come to their own conclusions. But the U.S. press reacts quite differently. There is no mention of the views of the leading non-Communist oppositionists, and even a passing reference to the fact that they had been in contact with Americans who had known them in the past appears only under the heading “Issue of Repression Bypassed.”

The Third Force leader who was best-known in the West was Mme. Ngo Ba Thanh, who had attended Columbia Law School and was the founder of the Women’s Movement for the Right to Life, was imprisoned and tortured by Thieu for her courageous opposition to his despotism and released only after a widespread international protest, and is now a Member of Parliament. She met with a Swedish delegation led by Birgitta Dahl, a Social Democrat MP, on February 15, 1977.62 In this statement she reiterates that “I am not a communist” (her emphasis) and recalls the brutality and repression under the U.S.-imposed regime, which had jailed her four times for a period of about 5 years. She too strongly denies the charges of violation of human rights and “the attacks coming from the U.S. imperialists through the naive actions of good people,” referring to a petition signed by former antiwar activists that was featured in the New York Times.63

She asserts that:

The great majority of the people who were forced to serve the puppet regime are considered by the revolutionary government only as victims. But if these people are to live in peace and true democracy, we could not tolerate traitors who committed monstrous crimes and still continue to be the instruments of imperialism—and we give this small minority no opportunity whatsoever to sabotage the wise policy of reconciliation and the huge task of reconstruction after so many years of a war we never wanted.

She calls upon people who have protested human rights violations in Vietnam to recognize that U.S. leaders “need to invent all kinds of stories to destroy trust” and “to support our post-war struggle, for our legitimate right to be a member of the United Nations, to take up the new challenge of our times.”

Again, her reaction would seem to be of some significance in the light of her long and courageous struggle as a leader of the non-Communist opposition to the client regime imposed by U.S. force. Perhaps she too has been intimidated or deluded. Readers of the U.S. press might judge for themselves, given the opportunity.

To be precise, Mme. Ngo Ba Thanh has received some press coverage. A report by George McArthur, formerly a war correspondent in South Vietnam, was devoted to an article of hers that was carried by Hanoi Radio in March, 1977.64 The topic of the report is the scope of imprisonment in re-education camps. “The strongest hint about the numbers of South Vietnamese in camps indicated a minimum figure of about 110,000,” McArthur writes, adding that “in the view of refugees coming from the South, this estimate is ridiculously low.” How does McArthur arrive at this figure? His source is the article by Ngo Ba Thanh, who, he writes, was “the most persuasive spokeman advanced by North Vietnam” in their response to criticism from the United States (in which they follow “the Moscow line in attacking Carter’s internationalist approach to human rights,” which this correspondent, like most of his colleagues, does not perceive as something less than “internationalist”). She was, he adds, “in the forefront of antigovernment demonstrations in the South” and is now “one of the few Southerners who have attained or maintained influence with the Communist regime since Saigon’s fall.” In her article, she “extolled Hanoi’s lenient attitudes and went on to say,

Before returning to normal life, prolonged reeducation will be necessary for some 5 percent of utterly degraded former members of the puppet army and administration, such as members of the Green Berets, the Rangers, the paratroopers, marines, policemen, prison guards, district officials, village chiefs, and secret agents who were trained by the United States.”

McArthur interprets the alleged comments as implying that 5 percent of the 1.1 million man army and police forces and the 100,000 civil servants will “be held for a ‘prolonged period’”—namely 110,000 people. (We take no responsibility for the arithmetic.)

The Quakers, Mennonites, reporters from the international press, Canadian Vietnamese Catholics, relief workers, UN officials, and others cited are not the only people who have been able to penetrate the “virtually impenetrable” barriers placed by the Hanoi government around southern Vietnam, compelling the New York Times to restrict itself to reports of refugees and selected diplomats. Well before Henry Kamm’s complaints, an extensive report was published of a visit by a Friendshipment delegation concerned with humanitarian aid to the South,65 again reporting meetings with Ngo Ba Thanh and other Third Force leaders, and focusing primarily on economic and social reconstruction. Granted that these issues do not appeal to the U.S. press, still their report might have been noted for the record.

A moderately enterprising reporter could have discovered numerous other sources. Consider for example James Klassen, who was engaged in relief and social services for the Mennonite Central Committee from October, 1972 until April, 1976, and who speaks, reads and writes Vietnamese fluently.66 A devout Christian, he comments that “while not involved with business interests like so many French missionaries before them, American Protestant missionaries—except for a precious few—generally supported the U.S. political and military involvement in Vietnam.”67 Klassen taught Bible classes throughout 1975. Contrary to many fears, he writes, “The government in Vietnam adopted a policy of religious tolerance and based on my experience I do not feel that there was any systematic repression of religion by the government.” Some churches are “dynamic and growing”; “The Evangical Church of Vietnam (Protestant) continues to offer Bible correspondence courses and in fact advertised them in the Tin Sang newspaper,” a “rather independent daily newspaper” with the Catholic Ngo Cong Duc as head of its editorial staff. Former Mennonite schools continue to operate as before with basically the same personnel and the government now paying salaries that were formerly contributed by North American Mennonites. “Although the government in Vietnam has adopted a tolerant policy toward religion, there has been a de-centralization of power so that people down at the local level have quite a bit of control, more like the typical structure used to be,” so there may be considerable variation from place to place. Church attendance is high and religious books are widely available. A Buddhist nun and a (relatively conservative) Catholic priest were elected to represent Saigon in the National Assembly. Religious training centers maintain high enrollment. “Young people in Vietnam are typically full of idealism and enthusiasm, and now on their days off this is being channeled into constructive projects to help build their homeland, including digging canals and working alongside the farmers so that the country’s economy can be based solidly on agriculture once again.” Vietnamese Christians are coming to recognize that if the church is to survive, “we’ve got to make our religion attractive by the way we live” (a Vietnamese pastor in Saigon). A young Vietnamese-Protestant medical doctor, addressing “the young people who packed the large Tran Cao Van Church in Saigon” in February, 1976 as part of the lunar New Year festivities said that “Christians need to support and participate in the worthwhile programs of the government—building a new society, rebuilding our country, helping our people …”68

Or consider an Italian missionary priest, now in Hong Kong, who circulated privately an account of his 15 months after liberation in Vietnam where he lived in a small village in the suburbs of Saigon with a small group of Christians called “the Missionaries of Vietnam.”69 He felt “that what I was witnessing was the last stage of a real revolution, a long revolution that has freed the country first from the French and then from the Americans. This revolution was liberating the Vietnamese people from the control of foreigners and from all the problems they had brought along to Vietnam.” He explains why, with considerable personal detail. As for refugees, he expresses sympathy and compassion:

one must admit that those who are unwilling to live in a certain system have the right to be welcomed in other countries, of a type more suited to their taste. It is, nevertheless, terribly dishonest to make these refugees say, in the countries that have received them, those things that the welcoming countries strongly wish to hear.

A warning that is supported by the historical record; see the discussion of the Bryce Report, chapter 2, section 1. It is still more dishonest to proclaim that there is no information apart from the reports of refugees.

Many more examples may be added.70 It is quite true that information regarding Vietnam is limited, and that much of what is available (apart from refugees), though by no means all, is derived from “guided tours.” But the limitations on the press are to a significant extent self-imposed, reflecting ideological constraints rather than the exigencies of reporting under difficult conditions.

The professional literature has also succeeded in escaping the unfortunate limitations on evidence that are bewailed in the press. For example, in the Canadian journal Pacific Affairs, Professor William S. Turley of Southern Illinois University, one of the small group of U.S. academic specialists on Vietnam,71 contributed a study of postwar Vietnam in which he made use of Vietnamese sources among others.72 The victors faced numerous problems, among them, “a near famine condition among the poor,” the collapse of the economy, and urban over-population. The war, he writes, “grossly enlarged the service sector of the economy, encouraged private consumption without corresponding development of productive capacity, exacerbated inequalities, and eroded social discipline.” He compares PRG and postwar programs with those attempted by the Thieu regime, concluding that the former have been far more successful and that “progress already made under the new regime must be considered all the more remarkable and the ultimate goal, if reached, an astonishing achievement.” He comments on the “even handed pragmatism” of the PRG and current programs, the “massive extension of popular participation, and maximum feasible reliance on voluntary compliance to bring about major social and demographic changes” including campaigns to assist the poor and in general ensure that “social values henceforth would be redistributed downward” through the efforts of popular organizations “under the guidance of party cadres,” which he describes in some detail. Prominent anti-Thieu non-Communists, such as Mme. Ngo Ba Thanh, have appeared in a leadership role in these efforts:

The principal reasons for so quickly developing these forms of popular participation were to build a social base where the revolution had had only latent or secret support, to gain access to the urban population in order to instruct it in the values and perspectives of the new order, to obtain popular assistance in the implementation of certain practical measures, and to isolate close associates or unrepentant supporters of the previous regime by organizing those who had been ignored or disenfranchised by it. In this mobilization of the urban population, the PRG has been successful to a degree that its predecessor, whose leaders assumed the cities were ‘secure,’ had never attempted to achieve. RVN governments had been preoccupied with the military conflict in rural areas and had neglected the cities, while the elitist and fractious opposition groups seldom engaged in urban ward-heeling. Ironically, many city-dwellers, probably the vast majority, now have experienced political participation and have been called upon to show active support for their government for the first time in their lives.73

The urgently needed redistribution of population has achieved “notable results” though difficulties remain. “The primary candidates for resettlement were people who had been forced to evacuate their homes by US-RVN military strategy.” Turley stresses the voluntarism of the program that is “urbanizing the countryside as it decongests the cities,” a program “best understood not as a reversal of war-time flow of peasants to the cities (though this is one element) but as a movement of poor and unemployed city dwellers, some semi-urbanized peasants, from the city to the country,” escaping the “wretched living conditions” of many urban areas (“less prevalent in Saigon,” where “the proportion of war-time growth accounted for by in-migration was smaller than in other cities”). Interpretations such as this rarely find their way to a general audience.

What the press wants to hear, and hence publicizes widely, is such testimony as that of Nguyen Cong Hoan, to whom one full session of the June-July, 1977 congressional hearings (see note 70) was devoted. Hoan was a member of the National Assembly representing a South Vietnamese province before his escape in March, 1977, and is described in the hearings as a former member of the Saigon Assembly who “was known for his opposition to Thieu’s government.”74 He gives a grisly account of “the suffering of millions of my countrymen,” and says that “given the new rule, many like myself come to better appreciate the U.S. involvement in Vietnam.” “All the basic rights are suppressed,” he reports. Specifically, all religions “are under intense persecution…There is almost no religious life left in the country…Most of the churches have been destroyed or requisitioned by the state and the few that are still standing are attended on Sunday by only a few older people…In the South the training to become monk or priest is expressly forbidden…Every religious library has been confiscated and the contents burned…All religious mass organizations are proclaimed to be illegal and forbidden to meet or carry out activities…the Protestants in Vietnam also are persecuted and all the pastors are considered CIA agents.”

Furthermore, “individuals and political parties once involved in the preservation of democratic liberties in South Vietnam, even those closely allied with the National Liberation Front and the Provisional Revolutionary Government are behind bars.” A few “former so-called Third Force elements were voted into the National Assembly, for instance, Mrs. Ngo Ba Thanh or Professor Ly Chanh Trung, but these were elected more to deceive world opinion rather than anything else” and “they are totally helpless.” Similarly, Tran Quoc Buu, former head of the Vietnamese Federation of Labor, is considered by the Communists to be “one of the CIA bosses in Saigon”; whereas “formerly, all the [union] leaders were elected by the workers,” now the union “is totally created by the Communists.”

“No Vietnamese dares to talk to a foreigner unless he is given permission to do so.” Furthermore, “eliminations and killings have occurred on a widespread scale and under many forms, some so subtle that no outside observers can possibly detect,” including some 700 killed in his own province (see p. 118 below). Some people were buried alive or “eliminated after extremely atrocious tortures” while others “died in concentration camps.” The number of political prisoners is 200,000 at a minimum.75

As for the New Economic Zones, they “are no better than prison camps…lands of exile that no one in his right mind would choose to go unless forced to do so.” They are far worse than the “agrovilles” or “New Life Hamlets” of Presidents Diem and Thieu (“people were never afraid to go there even during the war where there was still a good measure of insecurity involved”).

Hoan escaped when “I realized that their main policy was for the impoverishment of everybody so that they can use a Communist leverage on the people and try to dominate their thinking.” The government also plans “to exterminate land owners” either by “physical elimination” or imprisonment.76

In the North, suffering is even worse than in the South. “Through my contacts with the people of North Vietnam I realized that they are also very dissatisfied with the Communist regime…many people in the North are trying now to flee to the South so that they can live under not so much fear in a society which is freer than in the North.” He urges that the United States “refrain from giving aid”—all kinds—to Vietnam. Thus, no food, no medical assistance, etc.

Turning to foreign policy, Hoan alleges that North Vietnam is supporting Communist insurgents in Thailand and Malaysia and “Vietnam also sells arms worth some $2 billion to other nations.”77

Some of what Hoan reports is no doubt accurate, particularly concerning severe restrictions on personal freedom, including freedom of expression and travel. How credible is his testimony in general? His account of religious persecution is expressly contradicted by direct observation of Westerners and Vietnamese who lived in or visited Vietnam, including those already cited.78 Either we must assume that the visitors who report having attended church services and observed ongoing religious activities are all lying and that the religious leaders they spoke to (including those who travelled in Europe) are also Communist agents or are too intimidated to speak, or we must conclude that Hoan is hardly a reliable observer, on these grounds alone. The same is true of his reference to the Third Force activists, who expressly reject his account of their situation and activities, though one could not know this from the U.S. press. As for Tran Quoc Buu, he is not simply considered by the Communists to have been “one of the CIA bosses in Saigon”; he was one. Frank Snepp refers to him as a “CIA client,” “the noted labor leader who had long been a CIA collaborator.” He was the “pride of the Station [CIA] in the fall of 1972,” having been turned into a “collaborator” a year earlier and since used by the CIA “quite profitably, as an instrument for keeping the unions loyal to Thieu and for channeling pro-government propaganda to labor organizations around the world.” He was even suggested by the CIA chief as “a token opposition candidate” so as to avoid “the embarrassment of a one-man contest” for Thieu.79 No doubt unions are now agencies of the state, but it is far from clear that workers have less of a role in them than hitherto.80

Hoan’s account of the New Economic Zones does not conform to that of direct observers, including those cited above (he reports no direct experience). It seems hardly more credible than his reference to the forced resettlement programs under Diem81 or the Thieu programs.82 It is difficult to see why the leadership in Hanoi, which has certainly been dedicated to economic development (whatever one may think of its politics), should try to resettle the population in “prison camps” or dedicate itself to general impoverishment as Hoan asserts without evidence. Hoan’s claim that no one dares to talk to foreigners without permission is difficult to reconcile with what is reported by visitors with long experience in Vietnam, e.g., visiting Vietnamese who lived with their families, the Mennonite and Quaker visitors or Don Luce, all of whom report personal meetings with friends and former associates, or with reports of relief workers who stayed in Vietnam for a long period after the end of the war.83 Either the many visitors and Westerners living in Vietnam who expressly contradict his claims are, once again, lying, or a charade of astonishing proportions is being enacted—or, more plausibly, Hoan is simply not a reliable commentator.

Hoan’s plea that no aid, even humanitarian, be offered to Vietnam contrasts strikingly with the recommendation of the Pope, for example, in his meeting with visiting church dignitaries from Vietnam (see note 68), and again might cause some raised eyebrows, along with his report of northerners fleeing to the South or Vietnam’s foreign involvements.84

In short, a reporter of any integrity would be quite cautious in relying on Hoan’s testimony, though it would be a mistake to disregard it.

In dramatic contrast to the authentic leaders of the non-Communist opposition to the U.S.-imposed regimes (see, e.g., those listed in note 74), who have vainly attempted to reach a U.S. audience through the medium of the many visitors whose existence is ignored or denied by the Free Press, Hoan has been granted considerable publicity and no questions have been raised about the reliability of what he has reported, despite the substantial evidence that contradicts it. On his arrival in Tokyo, he was interviewed by representatives of the international press. The London Economist (7 May 1977) reported Hoan’s statement that there is extensive food rationing, “not because of shortages but as a ‘communist ruse to break down all possible resistance’” (the Economist added that “there are also genuine shortages” because of bad weather; our emphasis), and that Bishop Nguyen Van Thuan is rumored to have been killed.85 Hoan and two other South Vietnamese politicians who escaped with him said, according to the Economist, “that, in retrospect, they believe the American intervention in the Vietnam war was right.” The Economist speculates that “the government may be clamping down on the remnants of the ‘third force.’” It does not report, and to our knowledge has never reported, what well-known Third Force leaders have told to visitors.

Hoan’s charges were also reported by David Tharp from Tokyo.86 Tharp describes him as “an anti-American leader of the ‘peace bloc’ under the regime of President Nguyen Van Thieu,” which is untrue so far as we can determine, but adds some spice to the story. Hoan “described the lack of food not as a matter of shortages but as a means of breaking down resistance.” “Ordinary Vietnamese” who meet journalists are required to “speak through an official interpreter, even though the Vietnamese may be fluent in the language used by the newsman, said Mr. Hoan.”87 “Mr. Hoan said he now thinks many Vietnamese are prepared to accept another war to sweep out the Communists.” He is quoted as saying: “The American intervention was right. Just the manner was wrong. They supported a weak government.” He also requested “weapons, food, and medical supplies for anti-Communist guerrilla bands.”

Henry Kamm also reported from Japan on an interview with Hoan,88 repeating similar charges. Hoan and his fellow-escapees “said that their disenchantment with Communist rule was shared by all the prominent persons from the old anti-Government organization still in Vietnam, from its best known leaders to the few who still hold public positions.” Like his colleagues, Kamm has never reported the views expressed by these former Third Force leaders and does not inquire into the credibility of Hoan’s report of their views, contradicting their own repeated expression of support for the regime to visitors and friends. Finally, Kamm reports that “so far, the Japanese Government has effectively confined them [Hoan and his fellow-escapees] to this fishing town about 100 miles from Tokyo, where their access to the world public is limited.” He does not compare the “limited access” of Hoan to the U.S. and world press with that of people who actually were courageous leaders of the non-Communist opposition.89

Kamm returned to the same theme a few weeks later.90 Hoan and his friends from “what used to be the pro-peace opposition in the Saigon parliament” now “find themselves prevented from giving their testimony or the world unwilling to listen.” “People are indifferent,” Hoan told him, “not only the Japanese but even the Vietnamese who have been here for a longer time.” It is quite true that members of the pro-peace opposition to the Thieu regime have been prevented from giving their testimony; Henry Kamm is a well-placed example of those who have refused to allow such testimony to be heard. But Hoan is the only former member of this group who has succeeded in gaining an international audience, despite his insignificant role. The pretense by those who dominate the press that they cannot get their message through is a common device that has often proven useful for propaganda purposes. It is a constant complaint of businessmen, for example. We return to other examples of this useful gambit, which nicely supplements the constant lament that the media are “anti-government” and ’’fiercely independent.” We have already discussed the ways in which Kamm and his colleagues in the Free Press dealt with the defection of a highly-placed collaborator with the Indonesian government in Timor (see Volume I, chapter 3, section 4.4, note 208 and text), contrasting their silence in that case with the publicity afforded to Hoan, coupled, typically, with the pretense that Hoan is being silenced.

Theodore Jacqueney, who worked with USAID in Vietnam until 1971 when he resigned in disagreement with U.S. support for Thieu and has since become a leading and very well-publicized critic of human rights violations in Vietnam, reported on Hoan’s congressional testimony in the pro-war AFL-CIO Free Trade Union News, claiming that it confirms “steady refugee reports of Vietnam’s Gulag Archipelago.”91 He describes Hoan as “a radical Buddhist peace advocate in South Vietnam’s legislature,” a judgment that may well reflect the assessment of Jacqueney’s U.S. government associates at the time, who commonly interpreted even the mildest dissent as “radical.” Jacqueney then reports on a series of interviews with Hoan in which he elaborated on his congressional testimony. Hoan’s information about 500 people allegedly executed in his native province derives from a dismissed Communist province chief. Jacqueney reports Hoan’s account of what this man told him as follows:

He explained that during the first days after the war they had to eliminate dangerous elements to provide an example and to satisfy desires for revenge. Some people killed were police officials under Thieu who had imprisoned and tortured revolutionaries. Some were simply civilian officials, or just members of political parties. Even ordinary people were killed for personal revenge.

As we have noted before, only by humanitarian standards that are completely foreign to the history and culture of the industrial democracies is it an atrocity to take revenge on torturers. Yet such standards are selectively invoked in the West in the case of a country that has recently freed itself from a century of Western oppression culminating in an explosion of unprecedented barbarism. They are invoked by someone who loyally served those responsible for the rule of the torturers through the worst and most vicious period of their attack on victims who are now denounced for their violation of human rights, in the journal of an organization that not only supported this endeavor but has a long record of support for policies that involve hideous atrocities elsewhere in U.S. domains. Quite apart from these not entirely irrelevant facts, note that if Jacqueney’s account of this second-hand report from a highly unreliable source concerning revenge against torturers or even personal revenge against completely innocent people demonstrates that Hanoi has imposed a “Gulag Archipelago,” then we will need some new and as yet uninvented phrase, expressing vastly greater levels of horror and indignation, to describe the period of U.S. civil-military administration in France or the behavior of U.S. military and civilian authorities in Asia after World War II, not to speak of the reality of life under the U.S. aegis in Guatemala, Uruguay, and a long list of other subfascist states. But such elementary observations as these have no place in the current phase of Western ideology.

Continuing with Jacqueney’s article, he writes that according to Hoan, the worst treatment in the prisons “was reserved for members of political parties who opposed the Communists, even if they also opposed Saigon dictatorships.” Jacqueney then proceeds to report some authentic cases of political repression (e.g., the imprisonment of Tran Van Tuyen, who died in confinement), and others that are more questionable, for example, the arrest of Father Tran Huu Thanh whom Jacqueney describes as “a popular Catholic priest who led mammoth demonstrations against Thieu regime repression and corruption…[preaching]…a vivid gospel of social justice comparable to that of Martin Luther King, Jr.” Father Thanh was arrested after the quelling of the armed rebellion centered in the Vinh Son Church (see note 68). In fact, he was a psychological warfare specialist who trained ARVN officers at the Central School of Psychological Warfare. Before that, he had been an adviser to Diem, and came to oppose Thieu as ineffective in the war against Communism. He described himself in December, 1974 as belonging to the First Force (with Thieu): “So from the beginning we thought only of replacing the leader and maintaining everything in the structure of the regime.” His anti-Thieu movement called for “clean government” so that the Communists “have to accept to come and live with us as a minority,” the standard U.S. government line at the time. Authentic opponents of the U.S.-imposed regime suspected him of operating with U.S. assistance, and there is supporting evidence. In short, hardly a Martin Luther King.92

As this review indicates, the exposure that the press offers to non-Communist dissidents in Vietnam is not a function of their prominence, their demonstrated courage and reliability, or the credibility of what they have to say as compared with the direct testimony of others. Rather, it is determined by a simple principle: the more negative their report, the more prominently it is featured. This principle, while occasionally violated, serves rather well as a first approximation and falls under the general theory of the Free Press as an agency of the state propaganda system, which, as we have seen throughout these two volumes, is quite well confirmed.

The same principle applies in the case of Western visitors or residents in Vietnam. As we have noted, there have been many, and quite a few of them have excellent credentials for reliability and long experience in the country; in some cases, in postwar Vietnam. But their reports, often critical though sympathetic, have been almost entirely ignored by the Free Press. There has, however, been a glaring exception to the general disregard for testimony by Westerners who remained in Vietnam for a considerable period after the war’s end, or who have returned to the country where they worked and lived; namely, the case of Father André Gelinas, a Canadian Jesuit who spent 15 months in Vietnam after the war’s end. An interview he gave to the Paris L’Express (amplified by a telephone interview) was reported in the New York Times (16 December 1976), in an AP report from Paris. The L’Express article was translated in the New York Review of Books (17 March 1977) and excerpted in the Washington Post (13 March 1977), and was the subject of editorials in the New York Times (21 March 1977) and the Wall Street Journal (21 April 1977). A similar article appeared in the Sunday Telegraph (London) and was reprinted in the Globe and Mail (Toronto, 23-24 March 1977). It has also appeared and been the subject of comment elsewhere in the English-language press. This exposure contrasts strikingly with that afforded to reports of others who had spent roughly the same period in Vietnam, or, for example, to the book by the Lacoutures, which, as we have noted, was unable to find an American publisher and was not reviewed in the United States, to our knowledge.93

Not coincidentally, Gelinas’s account is the most harshly critical among eyewitness reports by Westerners with comparable experience.

Though Gelinas had spent many years in Vietnam,94 he was quite unknown in the West prior to the fall of 1976, and appears to have made no public statement during his 13, or 19, or 28 years in Vietnam concerning the U.S. war—of which, as we shall see, he was and remains a firm supporter.

The initial reaction to Gelinas was tinged with skepticism, for good reasons. The report in the Times (December 16), headed “Priest, Back from Saigon Speaks of Mass Suicides,” dealt only with Gelinas’s most sensational charge, namely, his claim that “15,000 to 20,000 Vietnamese have committed suicide rather than live under Communism.” How did Gelinas find out this alleged fact? He is quoted as saying that his estimate was “based on conversations with hospital officials and some of the would-be suicides themselves.” In the original AP dispatch, not included in the Times account, he is reported to have said that he calculated the estimate of suicides “from figures he got from dozens of hospital officials.”95 Further information about the alleged wave of suicides appears in the L’Express-New York Review article.96 Here he provides a date: the “epidemic of suicides” in which “thousands of ruined and desperate Vietnamese put an end to themselves” followed a September 1975 announcement that each family had the right to only about 1,000 French francs. “Entire families killed themselves with revolvers,” including a police officer who shot his ten children, wife and mother-in-law and then himself and a father who distributed poisoned soup to his family. “A young woman told me that she had awakened in a hospital corridor piled with hundreds of bodies. Those who were still living had their stomachs pumped out. Group suicides went on for several weeks.”

So, in summary, Gelinas is claiming that in September-October, following the announcement of currency reform, 15-20,000 Vietnamese committed suicide, as he learned from discussions with hospital officials, would-be suicides, figures provided by dozens of hospital officials, and other sources.

In his congressional testimony of June 16, 1977 (see note 70), Gelinas did not repeat the story of mass suicides, which was featured in the earlier news report and article and which had originally brought him to public notice in the United States. Two likely reasons for this curious omission come to mind. The first is that one of the witnesses in the same session was Julia B. Forsythe of the AFSC, who lived two blocks from the Alexandre-de-Rhodes Center through October, 1975, and would therefore have been in a position to know something about such a wave of suicides.97 A second reason is the unfortunate experience that Gelinas had had with these charges. The December, 1976 AP dispatch, citing his charges of mass suicides, reports that “there was no independent confirmation of the estimate…Western diplomatic sources said, ‘we cannot verify these rather startling figures.”’ 98 The Times article of December 16, 1976, after reporting Gelinas’s headlined charges, turns to a denial of these claims by Richard Hughes, “head of the Shoeshine Boy Foundation, which sheltered and nurtured homeless children in Vietnam,” who remained in Vietnam until a month after Gelinas’s departure, living and working with poor Vietnamese (see note 83). Hughes denied the report, saying “Absolutely impossible that I wouldn’t have heard about it. I was out in the neighborhoods and there were all kinds of people in contact with me, not only from the city, but coming from Da Nang and Hue and the delta. If 40 people in one place had committed suicide it would not have gotten past me.”

Shortly after the sensational charge which introduced Gelinas to the U.S. (in fact Western) public, the following incident took place:

Two or three days later [after the December 16 New York Times story], Amy Hirsch, producer of the “Good Morning, America” show on ABC called Father Gelinas for a possible interview on the air. She sat him down with Dick Hughes and listened to the two argue and discuss for over two hours. She decided there was not enough to his story to even put Gelinas on the air. “He wouldn’t name the hospitals…he was very sweet, but he just hadn’t seen very much. There wasn’t enough substance to put him on.” During their conversation in the studio, confirmed by both Hirsch and Hughes, Fr. Gelinas explained the “15-20,000 suicides.” He told the story of a young woman, an attempted suicide, who woke up in a hospital corridor surrounded by “hundreds of bodies.” As it turned out, according to his source, these were attempted suicides, too, though it was unclear why she claimed the bodies were “piled.” In any case, Gelinas explained, “From that, I took the number of hospitals in Saigon…I multiplied it times the number of hospitals…” Thus, the mass suicides in Vietnam turn out to be, after all, an extrapolation of attempted suicides from a single source in a hospital that Fr. Gelinas would not name.99

Gone are the figures provided by dozens of hospital officials, the entire families that killed themselves with revolvers, etc. This extrapolation merits comparison with that of Hoang Van Chi, for years the primary source on alleged North Vietnamese atrocities of the 1950s.100

Hughes has provided us with a detailed report of his several hours of conversation with Gelinas (to which we return), which reveals many more examples of his apparent ignorance of events in South Vietnam and his willingness to frame the most implausible charges against the new regime (see note 106). Hughes, who was known to U.S. reporters and others as a very reliable observer with intimate knowledge—rare among Americans—of the life of the impoverished mass of the population, sent a letter to the New York Times (31 March 1977) commenting on the Times editorial of March 21 on Gelinas. In this letter he discusses his “probing, three-hour conversation with Father Gelinas” and his failure to unearth any direct evidence for his charges, which appear to illustrate how “second-hand information fed rumor, and bitterness bias” for a foreigner who was one of the many who ’’could spend literally decades in Indochina and still remain within a small, isolated world,” not an unusual phenomenon in colonial history—one recalls how commonly Western settlers, slave owners, and the like have been shocked to discover the feelings of their charges when insurrection and dissidence arise. The Times editorial, Hughes wrote, was “a tragic disservice to both the American and Vietnamese peoples, and to the healing process which has only just begun”—and has since aborted, thanks in part to the dissemination of Gelinas’s charges in the New York Review and Washington Post, which appear to have been influential among liberal Congressmen101 and certainly were so in the press and among the public. In contrast, the responses to Gelinas have been generally ignored.

Recall that the events of December, 1976 took place well before Gelinas received substantial publicity in the national media. Hirsch’s scruples in investigating the “startling” charges by an unknown commentator, unverifiable by Western diplomatic sources and contradicted by others present in Vietnam at the time to which they refer, were not observed by many of her colleagues.102

While Gelinas appears to have abandoned the story about the mass suicides, his other comments do not exactly heighten his credibility. He is quoted as saying that the Vietnamese expelled him because “they do not want embarrassing witnesses”103—which is curious, since many other witnesses who could prove no less “embarrassing” have since been admitted—adding that “I was not treated badly for the regime had strict orders from Moscow not to make martyrs.”104 How could Gelinas have known about these “strict orders”? The question too does not seem to have been raised by the journals that printed this or other “information” provided by Gelinas without inquiry or comment.

In an interview in the Montreal Star, Gelinas said:

People in South Vietnam today are praying for war…the way people in France were praying for it in 1942. They want to be invaded…I could hardly believe it when I heard people talking about war. They’d been at war for 20 years [sic]. But I actually had people say to me, “why don’t the Americans send us the atomic bomb? It’s the only way we’ll get rid of the Communists.”105

Some skepticism is perhaps in order when we read that South Vietnamese are praying for an invasion and plead for atomic bombing, even apart from the direct testimony of many Western visitors and residents who have received a rather different impression.

Gelinas goes on to say that “the new cadres (North Vietnamese officials) lived like kings. They were almost the only fat people in Saigon and their children were driven to school in limousines (usually Chevrolets captured from the Americans).” Again, this claim is in dramatic contrast to the reports of Western observers about the general behavior of the North Vietnamese, apart from cases of corruption that have been discussed by the Vietnamese themselves. Braid notes that this claim is rejected by Father Tran Tam Tinh, who “denies that the cadres live rich lives” and says: “I’ve visited them where they live and they live in poverty, like the rest of the people.” But, Braid continues, “Father Gelinas does not seem troubled by such criticism. He says his critics are repeating what the government has told them to say…”—knowledge derived from the same source, perhaps, as the “fact” that he was well-treated by orders from Moscow. Presumably those under government orders include also the journalists, visitors and long-time Western residents who have reported the poverty and dedication of the cadres, as well as his many critics.

Gelinas’s widely publicized interview in the New York Review elicited a response, dated March 16, 1977, from Earl Martin, who worked with the Mennonite Central Committee from 1966 through 1969 and again from 1973 until the end of the war. It contains a response to Gelinas’s major charges, based on eyewitness testimony, which is so detailed and specific that it seems unnecessary to review the charges and their refutation here.106 Martin’s response appeared on May 12, 1977, with no accompanying response from Gelinas, contrary to standard (virtually invariable) practice. The long delay and the lack of response suggests that the New York Review was unable to obtain a response to Martin’s point-by-point refutation of Gelinas’s charges.

Gelinas’s further claims, which are hardly plausible in themselves, are entirely inconsistent with eyewitness reports by journalists and others cited above: e.g., his claim that “the official line that the girls [prostitutes] have been sent away for ‘re-education’ is simply propaganda,” that “one of the first aims of the Vietnamese Communists was to empty the cities,” or that “the economy is also impoverished by the exactions of the North,” etc.107 Gelinas offers no evidence beyond what he claims to have seen and heard. Anyone who reads through his series of charges and contrasts them with other sources, and who compares the reliability of Gelinas and those who have explicitly denied his claims or others who have presented substantial evidence to the contrary, can scarcely fail to agree with Earl Martin’s conclusion that “André Gelinas has seriously eroded any basis he might have had for serving as a credible witness.”

Nevertheless, it is Gelinas’s story that has remained “the truth” for the Free Press. In an editorial,108 the Times conveys without any question “the picture that Father Gelinas paints of South Vietnam”—overlooking, for example, the doubts raised in their own news report of December 16, 1976. This is entirely appropriate—since Gelinas’s account is very critical of an official enemy, its truthfulness is irrelevant and no further analysis is required. There is no need, for example, to assess his reliability, to weigh the testimony of other witnesses with a different view, or to consider the evidence of his critics. The Times editorial focuses on the “bitter and inescapable ironies” contained in Father Gelinas’s report “for those who opposed the war.”

Suppose, contrary to fact, that Gelinas’s report was credible. In what respect would it then pose “bitter and inescapable ironies” for people who are opposed in principle to aggression and massacre? That question the Times editors do not discuss, and undoubtedly could not comprehend, so mired are they in official ideology, which does not permit this principle to be expressed with reference to the United States. Rather, in the official version to which the Times is committed, questions of principle do not arise: one may either support the policies of the United States or back its enemies, “look[ing] to the Communists as saviors of that unhappy land.” The latter phrase is the standard Times straw man concerning those who opposed U.S. aggression in Vietnam on grounds of principle instead of inefficacy; recall that such views do not enter the spectrum of debate, as defined by Times ideologists.109 The Times argues that “the Vietnam experience was always more complex than ideologues of either side could allow. America may have played a villain’s role there, but the heroes of that tragedy were never easy to discern.” The “heroes” of the German war against the Jews would be equally hard for mildly critical ex-Nazis to discern, and one can imagine a German super-patriot pointing to Israeli abuse of the Palestinians as somehow relevant to evaluating the “complexities” of the “final solution.” Incapable of conceiving of the possibility that its own state was guilty of unprovoked aggression and massacre of innocents that could be condemned in and of itself, the Times is compelled to suppose that attitudes towards the war were restricted to its own chauvinism or to comparable blind loyalty to some other regime.

Referring to that “minority, small but vehement, that looked to the Communists as saviors of that unhappy land,” the editorial continues:

One organ of this celebration was The New York Review of Books, and so it comes as a surprise—a welcome one—to find reprinted in a recent issue an article from the French journal L’Express by André Gelinas, a French-Canadian Catholic priest and Chinese scholar who settled in Vietnam in 1948 and was expelled in July, 1976.110

This extends further the Times’ false portrayal of opponents of the war; the reader can easily determine, by turning back to the articles on the war that appeared in the New York Review of Books, that it never was an “organ of celebration” for the Communists as “saviors” of Vietnam, although it did publish articles documenting the atrocities and outrages that the Times supported, with its occasional whispers of complaint about blunders and failures and its suppression of evidence on many of the worst of these atrocities. What is more, the Times editors surely know that while the New York Review was unusual in that it was open to the peace movement and the U.S. left for several years (though hardly restricted to such circles), that tendency had come to an end years before, as the Review rejoined the mainstream of American liberalism. But for the state propaganda institutions that masquerade as the “independent press,” the pretense is a useful one, as is the further pretense that Gelinas’s picture is utterly definitive and beyond question.

The Wall Street Journal, as might be anticipated, took up the same theme.111 Like their colleagues on the Times, the Journal editors describe the “national debate” over the war between those who supported the U.S. effort and those who claimed that President Johnson’s “picture of Communism was a paranoid fiction” and argued that Communism could hardly be “worse than the repressive South Vietnamese regime that the Americans were already supporting.” It is incomprehensible to the editors of the Wall Street Journal, as to other true believers in the state religion, that people might oppose U.S. aggression on grounds of principle, while holding quite a range of views (including total condemnation) or simply taking no stand on the merits of the Vietnamese resistance per se or relative to the elements placed in power by U.S. force, but rather guided by the odd notion that the Vietnamese should be allowed to solve their problems in their own way without the benefit of U.S. tutelage by bombs, artillery, murderous search-and-destroy missions, assassination teams, “population control,” or subversion.

Returning to the “national debate,” the editors observe that “for better or for worse, history has given us the opportunity to judge the debate”—we now see that “Mr. Johnson’s prediction was not so paranoid after all.” As proof, they refer to the interview with Andre Gelin [sic][112](../Text/Notes.html#Chapter4-FN112) who “had lived and worked there for 28 years,” reprinted “without editorial comment” in the New York Review of Books, a most “remarkable” fact since this journal “had printed some of the most violent of the opposition to the American anti-Communist effort in Vietnam.” They recount without editorial comment “Gelin’s” picture of life in South Vietnam—since it accords with the doctrines of their faith, it must be true, regardless of the facts, so that any serious check on its contents is beside the point—and they demonstrate no awareness of the actual nature of the criticism of the U.S. war that appeared in the New York Review during the years when it was open to the peace movement and American left.

The “embarrassment” of former antiwar protestors, the Wall Street Journal continues, “is richly deserved.” Anyone who was acquainted with the history of Communism could not “have trusted this experience and at the same time reviled America and American motives in Vietnam as the antiwar movement came to do.” If the editors were not propagandists quite uninterested in fact, they would know that the criticisms of the U.S. war in Vietnam that appeared in the New York Review were written for the most part by people who were long-time anti-Communists. Furthermore, if the editors were capable of rationality on these matters, they might understand that criticism of acts and “motives” of the U.S. government is logically quite independent of one’s attitude toward Communism, exactly as one may “revile Russia and Russian motives in Eastern Europe” without thereby committing oneself to “trust the experience” of the exercise of U.S. power. But these points, however obvious, are of little concern to editors whose ideological commitment is total.

Father Gelinas has also been welcomed by the more fanatical wing of British scholarship. Patrick Honey, the pacifist advocate of dike bombing (see above, p. 69) who (with Dennis Duncanson of the British mission to Vietnam) had long been one of the more passionate advocates of U.S. aggression, chaired a meeting Gelinas at the School for Oriental and African Studies in November, 1976.113 One can see why. Imagine a man of the cloth who was able to live for 13 (or 19, or 28) years in Vietnam through the worst barbarism of the U.S. war, never raising a peep of protest so far as is known, then inventing mass suicides and North Vietnamese coups to order for an admiring international audience.

Gelinas’s description of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam and the regime it imposed would have sufficed for anyone with a minimal acquaintance with the history of the past years to reveal that he is hardly to be trusted, a fact that appears to have been of no concern to those who published his reports or commented editorially on them.114 In the widely-cited interview that made his fame, he writes that the North Vietnamese troops who conquered the South115 “discovered a country with freedoms, and a rich one, a real Ali Baba’s cave.” It takes either supreme cynicism or the kind of classical colonialist ignorance that comes from hobnobbing solely with the rich to depict South Vietnam simply as a land of freedom and wealth. Gelinas evidently did not know or care about the rotting urban slums to which the peasants had been driven by U.S. bombardment, or the lunar landscapes of central Vietnam, or the beggars, prostitutes, drug addicts, wounded and tortured prisoners of the Ali Baba’s cave in Saigon; and he seems unable to comprehend the nature of the riches of the South and their relation to the colonialist enterprise of which he was a willing part.116 The most that he can bring himself to say about the Western contribution is that “the old regime and the Westerners also did great harm and made many errors”—and even this criticism is more than he was able to bring himself to express in public during the years when an honest witness might have mattered. He insists, in his congressional testimony, that “this people is now in a terrible state, not because of American presence in the past, for my conviction, but because of the oppressive rule of the government” (43)—a statement that is truly shocking in its cynicism, even if we were to believe every word of his claims about the postwar period, or worse. The United States, he continues, “has done so much, spent so much, and given so much of its blood for Vietnam,” which is “not just any other country” but rather “a country that has been fighting alongside this country [the U.S.]” (45). Vietnam has been fighting alongside the United States; the United States has done so much for Vietnam. No wonder that such a man can tell us that Vietnamese pray to be invaded with atom bombs so that they can regain their past freedom and wealth, to the applause of his Western admirers.

The most severe condemnation of the regime in Vietnam yet to appear from a serious source is that of R.-P. Paringaux of Le Monde (5 October 1978). Paringaux writes from Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) that the new regime has come to resemble its predecessor, the U.S. client regime in Saigon, with “systematic recourse to repression, preventive arrest on simple suspicion, denunciation, making informing on others a duty and allowing all those who do not conform to the new model to stagnate in camps, aggravating their hatred and hopelessness.” He cites figures of 80,000 former collaborators still under detention, noting that refugee sources in Paris give figures ten times that high supported by documentary evidence. Few have been released, Paringaux maintains, apart from doctors, technicians and teachers whose services are needed. He quotes official sources which claim that 95% of the prisoners have been released. Paringaux writes that “known [non-Communist] activists who were courageously devoted to defense of political prisoners under the former regime have now become silent.” He indicates that the former prisons are once again full, perhaps even more than before. He does not suggest that the current regime, however repressive, is practicing the hideous tortures characteristic of its U.S.-imposed predecessor.

Shortly after Paringaux and other French reporters wrote their critical reports about Vietnam, after their 10-day visit, John Fraser of the Toronto Globe and Mail spent four weeks travelling through the country with, he writes, “more access and freedom to roam independently throughout Vietnam (seven provinces and the two principal cities) than any western journalist since 1975.” He was specifically interested in verifying the observations and conclusions of the French journalists. Fraser is very critical of the regime for slowly compelling the bourgeoisie to become farmers (though he appreciates the economic motives) and for its repression of critics and opposition. But he came to the conclusion that the reports of the French journalists were vastly exaggerated. He explains why in considerable detail, relating his own much more extensive experiences, including many discussions with Vietnamese who were highly critical of the regime, and considering the social and economic conditions of the country as well as official policy.117 A detailed analysis of the report by Paringaux in Vietnam South East Asia International (Oct.-Dec. 1978), also points out that the source of the 800,000 figure that Paringaux cites, and that has been uncritically repeated in the Western media, is a document by a group of Indochinese emigres in Paris which includes in the figure for prisoners “not only those alleged to be in detention but also those who have left the cities for new economic zones, for which a figure of 750,000 was given in early 1978.” Thus the 800,000 figure is consistent ’’for security reasons.” As we have noted, independent observers do not confirm the allegation that those who have been moved to the New Economic Zones were forcibly deported to a form of “imprisonment;” and these observers generally agree that such a move to the countryside was essential for Vietnam’s survival.

Paringaux’s report and the accompanying editorial condemnation (“Crimes de paix”) in Le Monde received immediate attention in the national media in the United States. They were reported the same day on radio, television and the press.118 It is entirely appropriate for the national media in the United States to feature this report from a respected foreign journal.119 One’s admiration for the professionalism of the U.S. media is quickly dissipated, however, by their virtual disregard of Fraser’s different view and their uncritical acceptance of “worst view” interpretations of matters such as the New Economic Zones. We may also recall media behavior on other occasions when Le Monde published far more sensational reports, which are, furthermore, incomparably more significant in the United States. For example, in July 1968, the distinguished Southeast Asia correspondent for Le Monde, Jacques Decornoy, published eyewitness reports of the devastating American “secret bombing” of northern Laos.120 Over a year later, the New York Times finally became willing to publish the fact that, as Decornoy had reported, the U.S. Air Force was trying to destroy “the rebel economy and social fabric” (with no editorial comment on the significance of this fact).121 In the interim, considerable efforts were made to convince the New York Times, Time-Life, and other major journals in the United States merely to report the facts, which were not in doubt. They refused. To take another case, the Latin American correspondent of Le Monde, Marcel Niedergang, reported in January, 1968 that the vice president of Guatemala stated in a public speech that “American planes based in Panama take part in military operations in Guatemala” in which “napalm is frequently used in zones suspected of serving as refuge for the rebels.”122 The same speech was cited in the British press by Hugh O’Shaughnessy, who went on to say that “similar things are happening in Nicaragua, which is virtually a U.S. colony and where guerrilla warfare broke out this year.”123 Whether the official Guatemalan claim was true or not, the very fact that a high official of a client state announces that U.S. planes are carrying out bombing raids with napalm in “zones suspected of serving as refuge for the rebels” (zones of civilian settlement, presumably) is quite sensational news, or would be, in a country with a free press. But this information too was suppressed by the Free Press, though in this case as well, it was repeatedly brought to their attention.124

Reports of U.S. bombing of the economy and social fabric of countries with which the United States is not at war are incomparably more significant than the report on Vietnam that was so quickly publicized by the national media in the United States in October, 1978. Not only are the atrocities far more severe, but they are also more important to know about in the United States, for the obvious reason that public opinion might be effective in bringing them to a halt, which is, plainly, not the case in Vietnam, whatever the situation may be there. We see once again how remarkably analogous the Free Press is in its behavior to the media that operate under state control in totalitarian societies. It would come as no surprise at all to discover that Pravda quickly discovers and features Le Monde stories on U.S. atrocities (perhaps describing Le Monde as the “rightwing French journal”),125 though we would be surprised indeed to see a Le Monde report in Pravda on the invasion of Hungary or Czechoslovakia.

In this discussion we have not attempted to give a systematic portrayal of the nature of the Communist regime in Vietnam or to portray the society that is arising from the wreckage of the U.S. war. Rather, our concern has been to show how the Free Press selects evidence from what is available to paint a picture that conforms to the requirements of state propaganda in the post-Vietnam War era. The media have not been entirely uniform in this respect, as we have noted, and ideologists still must face the problem of dealing with the fact that many millions of Americans participated actively in a popular movement to bring the war to an end. Though this opposition is being quickly written out of history by contemporary ideologues, memories remain and the brain-washing process still has a long way to go before it is successful. But successful it will be, in the absence of any continuing mass movement that creates its own organs of expression outside of the conformist media, and its own modes of organization and action to constrain the violence of the state and to change the social structures that engender and support it.