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was confined to the South. One reason for this was that North Vietnam had a government with links to other countries, so that the use of these barbarous and illegal weapons against it would have been widely publicized. South Vietnam was occupied by the United States and its client regime, so that the victimized people of the South were voiceless and could be treated with unlimited savagery. This of course contradicted the claim that we were protecting them against aggression, but the media not only underplayed the savagery, they failed to call attention to the contradiction and its significance. New York Times journalist Barbara Crossette did report that the U.S. failure to get involved in studying the effects of chemical warfare in Vietnam had been unfortunate, because as this country had used it heavily in the South but not in the North, this made Vietnam a controlled experiment in the effects of dioxin on humans from which much could be learned of benefit to ourselves.71 But neither Crossette nor any other mainstream reporter had anything to say about the fact that the United States had used dioxin only on the ones it was allegedly protecting against aggression, nor did they suggest that this constituted a serious war crime, or that this country might have an obligation to help those it had victimized.

During the 1980s, the Reagan administration mounted a major propaganda campaign over alleged victims of “Yellow Rain” in Cambodia and Laos, claiming that chemical warfare had been employed there by the Soviet Union through its Vietnam proxy. This propaganda effort eventually collapsed following the U.S. Army’s own inability to confirm this warfare and, more important, the finding that the alleged Yellow Rain was bee feces, not chemicals.72 Nevertheless, this campaign received vastly more publicity than the real and large-scale chemical warfare carried out by the United States in Indochina. The Wall Street Journal, which had heavily featured Yellow Rain and expressed the greatest indignation at this display of Communist evil, never mentioned the U.S. employment of chemicals in that area during its Yellow Rain campaign. The Journal’s publisher, Peter Kann, eventually wrote that the Vietnam war record had clarified “who were the good guys and who were the bad guys,” definitively shown by “the poisoned fields of Laos” (his euphemism for Yellow Rain).73 In short, Kann places the massive real-world use of chemical warfare by the United States in Orwell’s black hole and demonstrates Communist evil by putting forward the discredited claim of Yellow Rain that his paper has still not admitted to be fraudulent.

But the more important facts are these: that with the help of the media, the Soviet Union was effectively linked to the use of this ugly weapon, based on false evidence; while by treating the real and large-scale use of chemical weapons in Indochina by the United States in very low key up to this very day, the media have helped convey the impression that this country is a moral force on this issue and opposes use of this terrible weaponry. U.S. leaders have opposed the use of chemical warfare—by enemy states—but it is a different matter when they choose to use such weaponry themselves, or when a client state does the same.74

REWRITING VIETNAM WAR HISTORY

There have been thousands of books written on the Vietnam War,75 and that war has been a brooding omnipresence in the U.S. culture since its end in 1975. For the dominant elite the war represents an era in which resistance to national policy and the associated rise of formerly apathetic sectors of society caused a “crisis of democracy.”76 Those unruly sectors and the dissidents are seen as having damaged the cultural and political framework and imposed unreasonable impediments to the use of force, the latter referred to as the “Vietnam syndrome.” Within the unruly sectors and among the dissidents, of course, the “Sixties” are viewed as an era of liberation, of cultural and moral advance, and a temporary surge of democratization.

The propaganda model would lead us to