Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [176]
In a derisive account of Vietnamese “laments” over the failure of the United States to improve relations with them, Barbara Crossette reports their “continuing exaggeration of Vietnam’s importance to Americans” under the headline: “For Vietnamese, Realism Is in Short Supply.” The Vietnamese do not comprehend their “irrelevance,” she explains with proper imperial contempt. U.S. interest in Vietnam, she continues, is limited to the natural American outrage over Hanoi’s invasion of Cambodia (to overthrow our current ally Pol Pot), and its failure to be sufficiently forthcoming “on the issue of American servicemen missing since the end of the war.” She cites a Pentagon statement noting that Vietnam “has agreed to return the remains of 20 more servicemen” and expressing the hope that the Communists will proceed “to resolve this long-standing humanitarian issue.” She quotes an “Asian official” as saying that “We all know they have the bones somewhere . . . If Hanoi’s leaders are serious about building their country, the Vietnamese will have to deal fairly with the United States.” When a Vietnamese official suggested that the U.S. send food aid to regions where starving villagers are being asked to spend their time and energy searching for the remains of American pilots killed while destroying their country, State Department spokeswoman Phyllis Oakley reacted with great anger: “We are outraged at any suggestion of linking food assistance with the return of remains,” she declaimed. So profound is the U.S. commitment to humanitarian imperatives and moral values that it cannot permit these lofty ideals to be tainted by associating them with such trivial concerns and indecent requests.166 It is difficult to know how to react to a cultural climate in which such words can be spoken, evoking no reaction.
According to standard state and media doctrine, South Vietnam (i.e., the client regime that we established) lost the war to North Vietnam—the official enemy, since the U.S. attack against the South cannot be conceded. “North Vietnam, not the Vietcong, was always the enemy,” John Corry proclaims in reporting the basic message of an NBC white paper on the war,167 a stance that is conventional in the mainstream. Corry is indignant that anyone should question this higher truth. As proof of the absurdity of such “liberal mythology,” he cites the battle of la Drang Valley in November 1965:
It was clear then that North Vietnam was in the war. Nonetheless, liberal mythology insisted that the war was being waged only by the Vietcong, mostly righteous peasants.
Corry presents no example of liberals who described the Viet Cong as “righteous peasants,” there being none, and no example of anyone who denied that North Vietnamese troops had entered the South by November 1965, since, again, there were none. Furthermore, opponents of the war at that time and for several years after included few representatives of mainstream liberalism. Corry’s argument for North Vietnamese aggression, however, is as impressive as any that have been presented.
The NBC white paper was one of a rash of retrospectives on the tenth anniversary of the war’s end, devoted to “The War that Went Wrong, The Lessons It Taught.”168 These retrospective assessments provide considerable insight into the prevailing intellectual culture. Their most striking feature is what is missing: the American wars in Indochina. It is a classic example of Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. Apart from a few scattered sentences, the rare allusions to the war in these lengthy presentations—as in postwar commentary rather generally, including cinema and literature as well as the media—are devoted to the suffering of the American invaders. The Wall Street Journal, for example, refers to “the