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By Root 2909 0

much debate during the war over whether the North Vietnamese were guilty of aggression in Vietnam, and as we have seen, even the South Vietnamese were condemned for “internal aggression” (Adlai Stevenson); but there was no discussion of whether the United States was guilty of aggression in its direct attack against South Vietnam, then all of Indochina. These intriguing facts reflect the overwhelming dominance of the state propaganda system and its ability to set the terms of thought and discussion, even for those who believe themselves to be taking an “adversarial stance.” As for the media, departures from these doctrinal principles were negligible; indeed, they may well have been literally zero in the vast coverage and commentary on the war, while it was in progress or since.

In a revealing article entitled “Lessons of Running Viets’ War,” published in August 1987, Stanley Karnow, a veteran Asia correspondent and author of a highly regarded liberal history of the Vietnam War, argues that the United States erred in Vietnam because it allowed the Vietnamese people to depend too heavily on us.47 Reciprocally, the South Vietnamese people also “allowed themselves to be lulled into a complacent sense of dependency on the United States,” thinking we wouldn’t back down, not realizing that small clients are expendable. The South Vietnamese people who fought the U.S. invasion are never mentioned, or considered to be “South Vietnamese” within Karnow’s patriotic frame, although they constituted the majority of the population and the only serious political force, according to U.S. specialists and officials on the scene, and despite the fact that the U.S.-selected faction repeatedly stressed that “Frankly, we are not strong enough now to compete with the communists on a purely political basis.”48 A Soviet Karnow would no doubt express similar concern in retrospect that the Soviet Union allowed the “Afghans” to rely too heavily on Soviet power.

By the standards we rightly apply to the actions of the Soviet Union or other official enemies, there is nothing further that need be said about the media and Indochina. Any further discussion is on a par with the minor question of whether Pravda reports facts accurately about “the Soviet defense of Afghanistan.” Adopting the Freedom House–Trilateral Commission perspective, a Communist party functionary might criticize Pravda for excessive pessimism or for too adversarial a stance, contributing to the eventual loss of the war and the takeover of Afghanistan by feudalist elements committed to terrorism, horrifying repression of women, religious fanaticism, plans to “march on Jerusalem,” etc. Or if he found that the reporting was sufficiently upbeat and not too distorted, he might laud Pravda for its accuracy and objectivity. But all of this would be nonsense, whatever is discovered; serious evaluation of the media is effectively over when we discover that the basic principle of state propaganda—the principle that the USSR is defending Afghanistan from terrorist attack—is adopted as the unquestioned framework for further reporting and discussion. The same is true in the case of U.S. aggression in Indochina.

We cannot quite say that the propaganda model is verified in the case of the Indochina wars, since it fails to predict such extraordinary, far-reaching, and exceptionless subservience to the state propaganda system. The fact that this judgment is correct—as it plainly is—is startling enough. Even more revealing with regard to Western intellectual culture is that the simple facts cannot be perceived, and their import lies far beyond the bounds of the thinkable.

Nevertheless, let us pursue the narrow question of media coverage of Indochina, bearing in mind that we are now turning to relatively minor matters, having taken note of a central and quite devastating criticism: the media’s pervasive, docile, and unthinking acceptance of a set of patriotic assumptions at such a level as to make further commentary of secondary significance, at best.

5.3. THE EARLY STAGES: A CLOSER LOOK

The “first