Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [135]
U.S. support for a democratic regime that is being attacked or subverted by repressive forces of the left or right might well be justified if invited—although, as in Vietnam, the “freedom” being defended may be minimal and the cost may be astronomical.27
As a dissident commentator, Wicker recognizes that the “freedom” we were defending in Vietnam was minimal and that the cost proved too high. But the doctrine that we were “invited in” remains sacrosanct, and the idea that we were “defending” nothing beyond our right to impose our will by violence is completely beyond the range of the thinkable. We might ask how we would characterize the Soviet media if the harshest condemnation of the war in Afghanistan that could be expressed in the year 2000 is that Soviet support for the democratic regime in Afghanistan that invited the Russians in might be justified, although the “freedom” that the Soviets were defending was perhaps minimal and the cost was far too high.
Let us now turn to “the wild men in the wings” who adopt the principles universally accepted in the case of Soviet aggression when they approach the U.S. wars in Indochina. The basic facts are not in doubt. By the late 1940s, U.S. authorities took for granted that in backing France’s effort to reconquer its Indochina colonies after World War II, they were opposing the forces of Vietnamese nationalism represented by the Viet Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh. In 1947, the State Department noted that Ho had established himself as “the symbol of nationalism and the struggle for freedom to the overwhelming majority of the population.”28 By September 1948, the department deplored “our inability to suggest any practicable solution of the Indochina problem” in the light of “the unpleasant fact that Communist Ho Chi Minh is the strongest and perhaps the ablest figure in Indochina and that any suggested solution which excludes him is an expedient of uncertain outcome,” the Communists under Ho having “capture[d] control of the nationalist movement,” while the U.S. “long-term objective” was “to eliminate so far as possible Communist influence in Indochina.”29 Nonetheless, the United States supported the cause of France against Vietnam, covering some 80 percent of the cost of the war at the end and contemplating a direct U.S. attack, had France agreed.
When the French withdrew, in 1954, the United States at once turned to the task of subverting the Geneva agreements that laid the ground-work for unification of Vietnam with countrywide elections by 1956, establishing a client state in South Vietnam (the GVN) that controlled its population with substantial violence and rejected the terms of the Geneva political settlement, with U.S. support. State terrorism evoked renewed resistance, and by 1959, Viet Minh cadres in the South, who were being decimated by U.S.-organized state terror, received authorization to use violence in self-defense, threatening the quick collapse of the U.S.-imposed regime, which by then had killed tens of thousands of people and alienated much of the peasantry as well as urban elites. The Vietnam correspondent for the London Times and the Economist, David Hotham, wrote in 1959 that the Diem regime imposed by the United States
has crushed all opposition of every kind, however anti-Communist it might be. He has been able to do this, simply and solely because of the massive dollar aid he has had from across the Pacific, which kept in power a man who, by all the laws of human