Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [141]
With peaceful settlement successfully deterred, the United States and its client regime turned to the task of internal repression, killing tens of thousands and imprisoning tens of thousands more.54 Diem supporter and adviser Joseph Buttinger describes “massive expeditions” in 1956 that destroyed villages, with hundreds or thousands of peasants killed and tens of thousands arrested by soldiers in regions “controlled by the Communists without the slightest use of force,” facts that “were kept secret from the American people”—and still are.55
The main target of the repression was the anti-French resistance, the Viet Minh, which was virtually decimated by the late 1950s. The reasons for the resort to violence were simple and have been amply documented.56 Recourse to violence was the only feasible response to the successes of the Viet Minh, reconstituted as the National Liberation Front (NLF), in organizing the peasantry, which left the United States only one option: to shift the struggle away from the political arena, where it was weak, to the arena of violence, where it was strong. Despite the U.S.-organized terror, the Communist party continued to advocate political action. The outline of strategy for the coming year sent to the South in late 1958 still called for political struggle without the use of arms.57 As Jeffrey Race documents, when the Communist party finally authorized the use of violence in self-defense in 1959 in response to pleas from the southern Viet Minh, the slaughter could no longer proceed unimpeded, and government authority quickly collapsed. Nevertheless, “. . . the government terrorized far more than did the revolutionary movement—for example, by liquidations of former Vietminh by artillery and ground attacks on ‘communist villages,’ and by roundups of ‘communist sympathizers.’”
The fundamental source of strength for the revolutionary movement, Race continues, was the appeal of its constructive programs—for example, the land-reform program, which “achieved a far broader distribution of land than did the government program, and without the killing and terror which is associated in the minds of Western readers with communist practices in land reform.” On the contrary, “the principal violence was brought about not by the Party but by the government, in its attempts to reinstall the land-lords”—the usual pattern, in fact, although not “in the minds of Western readers.” The lowest economic strata benefited the most from the redistributive policies implemented. Authority was decentralized and placed in the hands of local people, in contrast to the rule of the U.S. client regime, perceived as “outside forces” by major segments of the local population: “what attracted people to the revolutionary movement was that it represented a new society in which there would be an individual redistribution of values, including power and status as well as material possessions.” In Long An province, near Saigon, which Race studied intensively, the NLF had become dominant in the early 1960s, while the government apparatus and its armed forces dissolved without violent conflict, undermined by NLF organizing and propaganda. By late 1964, parts of the province were declared a free-strike zone, and by early 1965, “revolutionary forces had gained victory in nearly all the rural areas of Long An.”58
The first units of the “North Vietnamese aggressors” entered the province at the time of the 1968 Tet offensive. In fact, up to summer 1969, when the post-Tet accelerated pacification campaign had succeeded in decimating the indigenous resistance, U.S. sources reported about eight hundred North Vietnamese “against an estimated total of 49,000 Vietcong soldiers and support troops” in the entire Mekong Delta.59
This picture and what it entails was essentially invisible to the American public, and