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take back territory which it lost in 1972,” and giving many examples, as did others.149 The U.S. government informed Congress cheerily that “the GVN has fared well during the post–cease-fire maneuvering,” adding “770 hamlets to the list of those over which it has dominant control” after the agreements—and in violation of them, a fact that passed without notice. The GVN thus added one million people to the areas of its control, while expending sixteen times as much ammunition as the enemy and using the newly provided U.S. equipment, as intended, for massive military operations, including extensive bombardment of PRG areas to prevent refugees from returning to them as provided by the agreements.150 The media either blamed the Communists, or sometimes the GVN as well, but not the United States, which had announced at once its intention to disrupt the agreements and now publicly expressed its pleasure in the military actions that successfully achieved this objective.

When the North Vietnamese finally responded to U.S.-GVN violence, the GVN quickly collapsed, leading to outrage in the U.S. government and media—which still persists—over this dramatic demonstration of Communist iniquity, which proves that their intentions all along were to destroy the free and independent government of South Vietnam and to reduce its people to Communist tyranny, thus further entrenching the principle that “Communists cannot be trusted.”

This useful lesson, firmly established by media complicity in transparent government deceit, has, not surprisingly, been applied in subsequent efforts by the U.S. government to gain its ends by violence. One dramatic example was featured in the media in August 1987, when the Central American presidents confounded Washington strategy by adopting a political settlement that undermined the familiar U.S. reliance on force to compensate for its political weakness. As part of its immediate efforts to sabotage this agreement, the State Department called the Latin American ambassadors to Washington, where they were presented with “a copy of the 1973 Paris peace agreement that was negotiated to end the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War,” the Wall Street Journal reported, adding that “the agreement was subsequently ignored by North Vietnam.” The Journal explained that this unfortunate “Vietnam experience,” which proved that agreements with Communists are not worth the paper they are printed on, is one factor in administration “skepticism” about the Central American agreement. Copies of the 1973 Paris Agreements were distributed to the envoys “as a case study of how an agreement with ambiguous provisions could be exploited and even ignored by a Communist government,” Neil Lewis reported in the lead story in the New York Times, adding: “In violation of the 1973 accord, North Vietnam overran South Vietnam and united the two parts of Vietnam under its banner in 1975.”151 The utility of a carefully crafted historical record, designed by the loyal media to serve the needs of state power, is revealed here with much clarity.

Surveying these events, we reach essentially the same conclusions as before, although once again the performance of the media—at the peak period of their alleged “independence” and “adversarial stance”—goes well beyond the predictions of the propaganda model, exceeding the expected norm of obedience to the state authorities and reaching the level that one finds in totalitarian states. As before, the servility of the media made a significant contribution to ensuring that the slaughter in Indochina would continue and that the U.S. government would be able to exploit its “Vietnam experience,” as filtered through the media, for later exercises in international terrorism. The remarkable performance of the media also laid the basis for the postwar interpretation of “what the war was all about” and why the United States failed to attain its ends, a matter to which we turn in the next section.

5.6. THE VIETNAM WAR IN RETROSPECT

In April 1975, the war came to an end, and the thirty-year conflict entered a new