The Vietnam War in the age of Orwell - Noam Chomsky.pdf - Teksty - Politologia i stosunki międzynarodowe - kundereczka

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The Vietnam War in the age of Orwell

Noam Chomsky

Race Class

1984; 25; 41

DOI: 10.1177/030639688402500404

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NOAM CHOMSKY

The Vietnam War in the age

of Orwell

Whatever its merits as history, Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: a history* is

an important cultural event. The book is identified as ’a Companion to

the PBS Television Series’ intended for the schools as well as the

general public. It has been praised as ’more objective’ than the ’angry’

and ’dogmatic’ earlier work of partisans (Douglas Pike) and as a

’dispassionate and fair-minded’ analysis by ’a critic of the war’ (Leslie

Gelb); and its reliance on ’new scholarship’ and interviews is alleged to

have produced ’surprising new facts and interpretations’ that under-

mine the arguments of ’antiwar writers’ (Fox Butterfield, who regards

Pike as one of the major figures in the ’new scholarships Its influence

is guaranteed.

The enthusiastic reception also provides some insight into the cur-

rent ideological scene. For many Americans, the Vietnam experience

challenged familiar precepts about American benevolence and com-

mitment to self-determination and justice. The erosion of this theology

is a threat to the freedom of the state to engage in subversion, violence

and terror, and cannot be countenanced. It was always obvious that

the actual history would have to be reshaped so that the state could ex-

ercise its essential functions without the impediment of a dissident

public. Karnow’s Companion volume and its reception deserves

careful scrutiny for what it reveals concerning the progress of this

enterprise.

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and

author most recently of The Fateful Triangle (Boston, South End Press 1982; London,

Pluto Press, 1984).

*Stanley Karnow, Vietnam a history (New York, Viking Press, 1983).

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The ideal history will depict the US war as a failed crusade, inspired

by ’an excess of righteousness and disinterested benevolence’, to bor-

row the words of John K. Fairbank in his December 1968 presidential

address to the American Historical Society, referring to the Vietnam

‘disaster’.2 It will depict the war as a defence of South Vietnam against

aggression from the North backed by the Soviet Union - China having

lost its former role as ’the more aggressive of the Communist powers’,

as Henry Kissinger regarded it in 1969, with characteristic insight. It

will denounce communist barbarism and American errors; French col-

onialism is also a legitimate target and the practices of the Saigon

regime (corruption, torture, etc.) may also be condemned as il-

lustrating Asian values, so different from our own. The domestic op-

position to the war must be characterised as emotional, extremist, and

also as having impeded the search for peace by far-sighted and respon-

sible leaders; nothing is more dangerous than to leave in place the

understanding that a disobedient public can play a role in decision-

making, often, by posing a domestic threat to power and privilege. In

particular, resistance to the war on the part of the young must be

denigrated. In pursuit of these ends, this ideal history must avoid any

serious discussion of what actually happened to the peasant societies of

Indochina, particularly South Vietnam, the prime object of our

solicitude. It must also strictly avoid the documentary record, for ob-

vious reasons.

This ideal history should, however, take a critical stance towards US

policy and practices while abiding by the principles just outlined. A

sophisticated propaganda system does not use the bludgeon to enforce

its doctrines. Rather, these become the presuppositions of debate

among right-thinking people. Once the terms are set, the most free and

critical discussion should be encouraged so as to entrench these prin-

ciples more deeply, and nothing is more helpful than a critical posture

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always incorporating the basic doctrines of the faith.

We learn a good deal about the ideological climate by asking how

closely Karnow’s widely-heralded history approximates to the ideal.

The critical acclaim is in part merited. Thus Pike is quite correct in

saying that Karnow avoids the hysterical ranting of some earlier work.

He does not wail about ’Cinderella and all the other fools [who] could

still believe there was magic in the mature world if one mumbled the

secret incantation: solidarity, union, concord’, or about the ’gullible,

misled people’ who were ’turning the countryside into a bedlam, toppl-

ing one Saigon government after another, confounding the

Americans’, with their absurd faith that ’the meek, at last, were to in-

herit the earth’ and that ’justice and virtue’ could triumph (Douglas

Pike, the leading government specialist on the ’Vietcong’, in 1966).3

However, the book leaves all serious questions unanswered, it contains

little that is ’new or surprising’, and that little is presented without

credible evidence. Karnow for the most part avoids both old and new

scholarship as well as the rich documentary record, and often

misrepresents the sources listed (there are no direct references). In fact,

these 700 pages skirt not only the issues but also the bare facts of the

American war in Indochina. After a survey of earlier history, the book

presents an impressionistic and superficial account of the American

war, framed within the assumptions of the US government propagan-

da system, though critical of American errors and occasional excesses

in a noble cause. It is, in short, exactly the kind of work that one would

expect to be canonised as ’objective history’, at least for the general

public.

In Orwell’s 1984, Winston Smith desperately attempts to hold on to

the truth that 2 + 2 = 4, and fails as he succumbs to Big Brother. In the

case of the Indochina war, 2 + 2 = 4 is the fact that, after taking over

from the French in 1954-5, the US undermined the political settlement

arranged at the Geneva conference and organised a violent campaign

of state terrorism against the anti-French resistance (the Vietminh,

relabelled with the pejorative term ’Vietcong’) in the south, virtually

decimating it. When the terror finally evoked resistance, the US client

regime faced collapse and in 1961-2 US military forces began their

direct attack against the rural society - some 85 per cent of the popula-

tion at the time - with extensive bombardment and defoliation. The

general plan, Karnow observes, ’was to corral peasants into armed

stockades, thereby depriving the Vietcong of their support’ (255). This

is what we correctly call ’aggression’ when it is conducted by an official

enemy, the Russians in Afghanistan, for example. Continuing to block

all attempts at peaceful settlement, including the offer of the NLF

(’Vietcong’) to neutralise South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, the US

then expanded the war in 1964, and in early 1965, finding no other way

to avoid political settlement, undertook a war of annihilation that

spread throughout Indochina, with South Vietnam always bearing the

major brunt of the American assault. An unprecedented popular pro-

test raised the domestic costs of the war. In January 1973, Nixon and

Kissinger were compelled to accept provisions similar to the NLF pro-

gramme of the early 1960s, though only formally, since they announc-

ed at once that the US would reject all the provisions of the scrap of

paper it had signed and continue the war to impose its rule over South

Vietnam, as it did, leading finally to a Communist response and the

collapse of the Saigon regime.

This much is 2 + 2 = 4. It is plainly unacceptable as history. The facts

are difficult to disguise, and one will find a few relevant ones scattered

through Karnow’s history (’In the south’, former chairman of the

Joint Chiefs Thomas Moorer explained, ’we had to cope with women

concealing grenades in their brassieres, or in their baby’s diapers’; the

’special tension’ of Vietnam was that ’every peasant might be a

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Vietcong terrorist’ - i.e., someone resisting US aggression; Karnow’s

closest friends in Vietnam turned out to be underground VC agents:

16, 26, 38). But the true story must not be known and is effectively

obscured here.

Still more must be obscured, namely, the fact that US support for

France and then direct aggression was motivated by concern over the

strategic resources of Southeast Asia and their significance for the

global system that the US was then constructing, incorporating western

Europe and Japan. It was feared that successful independent develop-

ment under a radical nationalist leadership in Vietnam might ’cause the

rot to spread’, gradually eroding US dominance in the region and

ultimately causing Japan, the largest domino, to join in a closed system

from which the US would be excluded. Documentation concerning this

matter is by now extensive, and it has been widely discussed since the

issue was raised by the well-known American historian Walter LaFeber

in 1968, both in the critical literature on the war and in mainstream

professional journals.4 The idea that US global planners had national

imperialist motives is intolerable to the doctrinal system, so this topic

must be avoided in any history directed to a popular audience, and the

documentation now available must be suppressed, for example, the

early and critically important National Security memoranda.5 Kar-

now’s ’history’ also satisfies these conditions, and in fact offers no

plausible account of the background for US policy, and no evidence

for the more tolerable version he favours.

For Karnow, the American war was ’a failed crusade’ undertaken

for motives that were ’noble’ though ’illusory’, and with ’the loftiest

intentions’ (9, 439). While orating in this style, Karnow gives a very

partial review of the evidence that the Diem regime was simply our

’surrogate’ (214) in Vietnam (and its successors, merely a fig leaf for

aggression) while the majority of the South Vietnamese population was

the target of our attack. Disregarding these facts, he concludes that we

were, throughout, fighting ’to defend South Vietnam’s independence’

(650); President Johnson, Karnow assures us, pursued the search of

Eisenhower and Kennedy for ’an independent South Vietnam’ (377).

By similar logic, the Russians are now fighting to defend the in-

dependence of Afghanistan against terrorists supported from abroad.

This conception makes perfect sense if we understand ’independent’

to mean ’dependent on the US’. In the interests of such independence,

the US had to undermine the 1954 Geneva agreement and block all

subsequent proposals for neutralisation or political settlement, and to

ensure that there would be no political participation on the part of

what even Pike conceded to be the only ’mass-based political party’ in

South Vietnam, the NLF, or the only other organised political force,

the Buddhists, who were not ’acting in the interests of the Nation’

(General Westmoreland) and were ’equivalent to card-carrying

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The Vietnam War in the age of Orwell - Noam Chomsky.pdf

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