Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [16]
One theme has been that the U.S. intervention was justified by the fact of “communism on the march” (editorial, Washington Post, April 30, 2000). It was argued from the beginning that the Communist advance in Vietnam was part of a global communist conspiracy, a position maintained in the face of the split and hostility between China and the Soviet Union, tension between China and North Vietnam, and the absence of any evidence that North Vietnam was anybody’s tool. In his book In Retrospect,77 former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara admits that he and his colleagues made a serious error on this point. But neither he nor the other establishment figures who have used this argument have ever questioned the U.S. right to intervene by force to stop the “march of communism” in a country where the Communists had led a nationalist revolution, were recognized by all official and nonofficial authorities to command the support of a large majority of the population, and where their defeat would require open aggression, mass killing, and the virtual destruction of a distant society.
Closely related was the theme that we were protecting “South Vietnam” and the “South Vietnamese,” who “let the Americans take over the fighting” (editorial, Washington Post, April 30, 1995). A subtheme of this line is that we “let down” the South Vietnamese. But as noted earlier, South Vietnam as a political entity was a U.S. concoction and the U.S. war managers recognized that most of the southern population supported the side the United States was fighting. This explains why the main thrust of U.S. violence was directed to the South, where napalm, B-52 bombing raids, chemical warfare, the institutionalized killing of civilians, and a scorched-earth policy were used to destroy the base of the popular movement.78 We also noted earlier that this ferocious U.S. assault on the South—which contradicted the claim that we were protecting South Vietnamese—remains invisible in the U.S. media.
Another important theme in the mainstream media for many years has been the notion that the United States was the victim in the Vietnam war, the Vietnamese the cruel villains. This remarkable inversion of reality has been accomplished by two processes: first, by a massive suppression of evidence on the consequences of the war for the Vietnamese; and second, by demonizing the victims, based in large measure on “the national beatification of POWs [prisoners of war] and the myth of POWs as martyrs still being tortured by Vietnam.”79
The only Vietnamese allowed modest attention in the media have been those mobilized to fight the U.S. war and who were “let down”;80 the vast numbers killed or damaged by the U.S. assault have been treated as “unworthy victims.” The overwhelming preoccupation of officials, journalists, pundits, and intellectuals with media outreach has been on U.S. victims and the effects of the war on this country. Robert McNamara’s widely publicized book, supposedly a mea culpa and moral tract, is notable for the fact that his notion of the war’s “high costs,” and the error and guilt he feels, extend only to U.S. lives and the effects of the war on “the political unity of our society.”81 He offers neither regrets, moral reflections, nor apologies for his country having invaded, mercilessly bombed, ravaged the land, and killed and wounded millions of innocent people in a small distant peasant society in pursuit of its own political ends.
In a remarkable cultural process, also, the victims have been turned into the villains. As we describe in chapter 5, in an attempt to prolong the war President Richard Nixon seized on the question of the adequacy of Vietnamese accounting for our