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By 1967, the war had reached such a level of devastation that, in Fall’s words, “Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity . . . is threatened with extinction . . . [as] . . . the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size.”42 The strategy of destroying South Vietnam was generally considered a success. Harvard professor and government adviser Samuel Huntington concluded that “In an absent-minded way the United States in Vietnam may well have stumbled upon the answer to ‘wars of national liberation,’” namely, “forced-draft urbanization and mobilization” by violence so extreme as “to produce a massive migration from countryside to city,” thus “undercutting” the Maoist strategy of organizing the peasant population (over 80 percent of the population when these techniques were initiated) and undermining the Viet Cong, “a powerful force which cannot be dislodged from its constituency so long as the constituency continues to exist.”43

The Tet offensive of January 1968, conducted almost entirely by South Vietnamese NLF forces in cities and towns throughout the country, convinced U.S. elites that the war was proving too costly to the United States, and that strategy should shift toward a more “capital-intensive” operation with reliance on an indigenous mercenary army (in the technical sense of the phrase) and gradual withdrawal of the U.S. forces, which were by then suffering a severe loss of morale, a matter of growing concern to military authorities. U.S. forces undertook a post-Tet “accelerated pacification campaign,” in actuality a mass-murder operation that demolished the NLF and much of what was left of the peasant society while killing tens of thousands and extending the destruction of the country. Much of North Vietnam, particularly the southern region, was turned into a moonscape, and Laos was battered under the heaviest bombing in history, including the peasant society of northern Laos where, the U.S. government conceded, the bombing had no relation to its war in South Vietnam. The United States bombed and invaded Cambodia, destroying much of the countryside and mobilizing embittered peasants to the cause of the Khmer Rouge, previously a marginal force. By the war’s end, the death toll in Indochina may have reached four million or more,44 and the land and societies were utterly devastated. Subsequent U.S. policy has sought to prevent any recovery from this cataclysm by refusing reparations, aid, and trade, and blocking assistance from other sources—although not all aid: U.S. aid to the Khmer Rouge in the 1980s appears to have run to many millions.45

Applying the principles that we rightly adopt in the case of Soviet aggression, the conclusion seems obvious. The United States attacked South Vietnam, arguably by 1962 and unquestionably by 1965, expanding its aggression to all of Indochina with lethal and long-term effects. Media coverage or other commentary on these events that does not begin by recognizing these essential facts is mere apologetics for terrorism and murderous aggression. The United States was “defending South Vietnam” in the same sense in which the Soviet Union is “defending Afghanistan.”

But from the point of view of the media, or “the culture,” there is no such event in history as the U.S. attack against South Vietnam and the rest of Indochina. One would be hard put to find even an single reference within the mainstream to any such event, or any recognition that history could possibly be viewed from this perspective—just as Pravda, presumably, records no such event as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, only the defense of Afghanistan against “bandits” supported by the CIA. Even at the peak period of peace-movement activism there was virtually no opposition to the war within the intellectual culture on the grounds that aggression is wrong46—the grounds universally adopted in the case of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968—for a very simple reason: the fact of U.S. aggression was unrecognized. There was