Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [177]
There is an occasional glimpse of reality. Time opens its inquiry by recalling the trauma of the American soldiers, facing an enemy that
dissolved by day into the villages, into the other Vietnamese. They maddened the Americans with the mystery of who they were—the unseen man who shot from the tree line, or laid a wire across the trail with a Claymore mine at the other end, the mama-san who did the wash, the child concealing a grenade.
No doubt one could find similar complaints in the Nazi press about the Balkans.
The meaning of these facts is almost never perceived. Time goes so far as to claim that the “subversion” was “orchestrated” by Moscow, so that the United States had to send troops to “defend” South Vietnam, echoing the fantasies concocted in scholarship—for example, by Walt Rostow, who maintains that in his effort “to gain the balance of power in Eurasia,” Stalin turned “to the East, to back Mao and to enflame the North Korean and Indochinese Communists.”170
Throughout the war, elite groups remained loyal to the cause, apart from expressing qualms about the bombing of North Vietnam, which was regarded as problematic since it might lead to a broader conflict, drawing in China and the USSR, from which the United States might not be immune. This was the “toughest” question, according to the McNamara memo cited earlier, and the only serious question among “respectable” critics of the war. The massacre of innocents is a problem only among emotional or irresponsible types, or among the “aging adolescents on college faculties who found it rejuvenating to play ‘revolution.’”171 Decent and respectable people remain silent and obedient, devoting themselves to personal gain, concerned only that we too might ultimately face unacceptable threat—a stance not without historical precedent. In contrast to the war protestors, two commentators explain, “decent, patriotic Americans demanded—and in the person of Ronald Reagan have apparently achieved—a return to pride and patriotism, a reaffirmation of the values and virtues that had been trampled upon by the Vietnam-spawned counterculture”172—most crucially, the virtues of marching in parades chanting praises for their leaders as they conduct their necessary chores, as in Indochina and El Salvador.
The extent of this servility is revealed throughout the tenth-anniversary retrospectives, not only by the omission of the war itself but also by the interpretation provided. The New York Times writes sardonically of the “ignorance” of the American people, only 60 percent of whom are aware that the United States “sided with South Vietnam”—as Nazi Germany sided with France, as the USSR now sides with Afghanistan. Given that we were engaged in “a defense of freedom” in South Vietnam (Charles Krauthammer), it must be that the critics of this noble if flawed enterprise sided with Hanoi, and that is indeed what standard doctrine maintains; the fact that opposition to American aggression in South Vietnam, or even against the North, entails no such support, just as opposition to Soviet aggression entails no support for either the feudalist forces of the Afghan resistance or Pakistan or the United States, is an elementary point that inevitably escapes the mind of the well-indoctrinated intellectual. The Times retrospective alleges that North Vietnam was “portrayed by some American intellectuals as the repository of moral rectitude.” No examples are given, nor is evidence presented to support these charges, and the actual record is, as always, scrupulously ignored. Critics of the peace movement are quoted expounding on its “moral failure of terrifying proportions,” and several “former peace activists who had leaped across the ideological divide” and now “are taking their stand with conservative Christians” of the Reaganite variety are quoted at length.