Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [174]
The primary task facing the ideological institutions in the postwar period was to convince the errant public that the war was “less a moral crime than the thunderously stupid military blunder of throwing half a million ground troops into an unwinnable war,” as the respected New York Times war correspondent Homer Bigart explained, while chastising Gloria Emerson for her unwillingness to adopt this properly moderate view.158 The “purpose of the war” must be perceived as “preventing North Vietnam from subjugating South Vietnam” (John Midgley), “the real enemy, of course, [being] North Vietnam, supplied and sustained by the Soviet Union and China” (Drew Middleton)159—all in defiance of the plain facts. The primary issue was the cost to the United States in its noble endeavor; thus Robert Nisbet describes the “intellectual pleasure” he derived from “a truly distinguished work of history” with a chapter covering the 1960s, “with emphasis on the Vietnam War and its devastating impact upon Americans,” obviously the only victims worthy of concern.160 To persuade elite opinion was never much of a problem, since these were the reigning conceptions throughout, and clearly privilege, along with media access, accrues to those who follow this path. But the public has nevertheless remained corrupted.
An ancillary task has been to keep the devastation that the United States left as its legacy in Indochina hidden from public view. Indeed, one finds only scattered reference to this not entirely trivial matter in the U.S. media—a remarkable achievement, given the agency of destruction and its scale. Keeping just to Vietnam, the death toll may have passed three million. In an article entitled “Studies Show Vietnam Raids Failed,” Charles Mohr observes that the CIA estimated deaths from bombing of the North at well over 30,000 a year by 1967, “heavily weighted with civilians.”161 Cropdestruction programs from 1961 had a devastating impact, including aerial destruction by chemicals, ground operations to destroy orchards and dikes, and land clearing by giant tractors (Rome plows) that “obliterated agricultural lands, often including extensive systems of paddy dikes, and entire rural residential areas and farming hamlets,” leaving the soil “bare, gray and lifeless,” in the words of an official report cited by Arthur Westing, who compares the operations to the “less efficient” destruction of Carthage during the Punic Wars. “The combined ecological, economic, and social consequences of the wartime defoliation operations have been vast and will take several generations to reverse”; in the “empty landscapes” of South Vietnam, recovery will be long delayed, if possible at all, and there is no way to estimate the human effects of the chemical poison dioxin at levels “300 to 400% greater than the average levels obtaining among exposed groups in North America.”162
In the South, 9,000 out of 15,000 hamlets were damaged or destroyed, along with some twenty-five million acres of farmland and twelve million acres of forest. One-and-a-half million cattle were killed, and the war left a million widows and some 800,000 orphans. In the North, all six industrial cities were damaged (three razed to the ground) along with twenty-eight of thirty provincial towns (twelve completely destroyed), ninety-six of 116 district towns, and 4,000 of some 5,800 communes. Four hundred thousand cattle were killed and over a million acres of farmland were damaged. Much of the land is a moonscape, where people live on the edge of famine, with rice rations lower than those in Bangladesh. Reviewing the environmental effects, the Swedish peace-research institute SIPRI concludes that “the ecological debilitation from such attack is likely to be of long duration.” The respected Swiss-based environmental group IUCN