Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [179]
While proceeding to extirpate the “rot” of successful independent development in Indochina, the United States moved forcefully to buttress the second line of defense. In 1965, the United States backed a military coup in Indonesia (the most important “domino,” short of Japan), while American liberals and Freedom House lauded the “dramatic changes” that took place there—the most dramatic being the massacre of hundreds of thousands of landless peasants and the destruction of the only mass-based political party—as a proof that we were right to defend South Vietnam by demolishing it, thus encouraging the Indonesian generals to prevent any rot from spreading there. In 1972, the United States backed the overthrow of Philippine democracy, thus averting the threat of national capitalism there with a terror-and-torture state on the preferred Latin American model. A move toward democracy in Thailand in 1973 evoked some concern, prompting a reduction in economic aid and increase in military aid in preparation for the military coup that took place with U.S. support in 1976. Thailand has had a particularly important role in the U.S. regional system since 1954, when the National Security Council laid out a plan for subversion and eventual aggression throughout Southeast Asia, in response to the Geneva Accords, with Thailand serving as its “focal point” and, subsequently, as a major base for the U.S. attacks on Vietnam and Laos.178 In his personal Times retrospective, Pentagon Papers director Leslie Gelb observes that ten years after the war ended, “the position of the United States in Asia is stronger” than at any time since World War II, despite “the defeat of South Vietnam,” quoting “policy analysts” from government and scholarship who observe that “Thailand and Indonesia . . . were able to get themselves together politically, economically and militarily to beat down Communist insurgencies,” in the manner just indicated, as were the Philippines and South Korea, also graced with a U.S.-backed military coup in 1972.179 The business press had drawn the same conclusions years earlier, during the latter stages of the war.180
In short, the United States won a regional victory, and even a substantial local victory in Indochina, left in ruins. The U.S. victory was particularly significant within South Vietnam, where the peasant-based revolutionary forces were decimated and the rural society was demolished. “One hardcore revolutionary district just outside Saigon, Cu Chi,” Paul Quinn-Judge observes, “sent 16,000 men and women to fight for the National Liberation Front. Some 9,900 did not return.” Much the same was true throughout the South. “The deaths left a major political gap for the new regime,” he adds. “The south was stripped of the trained, disciplined and presumably committed young cadres who would have formed the backbone of the present administration. In many areas the losses were near complete . . . And the casualties put further strains on the state’s limited financial and organisation capacities.”181 The U.S. victory over the overwhelmingly rural society of South Vietnam, always the primary enemy, laid the basis for the takeover by North Vietnam (as anticipated years earlier in the much-derided peacemovement literature),182 allowing American hypocrites to “prove” that this predictable consequence of the war they supported shows that it was a just “defense of South Vietnam” against northern aggressors. In the cities, swollen with millions of refugees, the lucky and the more corrupt survived on an American dole at a level that had no relation to the now-demolished productive capacity of the country, leaving another near-insoluble problem