ON 'HELPING' SOUTH VIETNAM:
Herman, Edward S
ON HELPING' SOUTH VIETNAM EDWARD S. HERMAN $300 million more? In each period of expanding American intervention in Indochina a virtually identical set of rationalizations, cliches and...
...And it tortures more people more systematically than any regime of modern times...
...In 1968 public health outlays in Vietnam by AID totaled $28 million, while overall expenditures on Vietnam were at least $28 billion-a ratio of one to a thousand...
...and installed in power by Americans, and his successors have been chosen by or "cleared" with Americans...
...Helping South Vietnam" for Gerald Ford is helping Thieu and his colleagues stay afloat...
...In sum, when Gerald Ford asks for $300 million to "help South Vietnam," we must translate as follows: the minority faction in Saigon that we put into power, and whose bills we still pay (85 percent of the Saigon budget), is unable to survive without still more...
...direct combat forces...
...had more troops in South Vietnam than the Soviet Union found necessary in Czechoslovakia to keep its preferred faction in power...
...That which is not, however, has a negative value for the majority of South Vietnamese, as it sustains a long-term and cruel effort to control them by force and compel them to submit to a faction agreeable to an outside party...
...Self-determination, n. The right of a people to select a government acceptable to us...
...Syn.-Preference...
...Congressmen and the media have difficulty with these phrases, since to challenge them would be to question our very ends, not merely the cost effectiveness and probability of success of our means...
...6) The Thieu government "represents" at most 15 percent of the population, consisting mainly of a rapidly diminishing part of the small Catholic minority, plus a congeries of mainly parasitic elements that have grown up on the basis of war and U.S...
...In Indochina, also, it is doubtful that U.S...
...Witness the positive support given to military dictators in preference to going democracies in Chile, Guatemala, Greece, Brazil and the Dominican Republic...
...The late John Paul Vann, in an internal Army memo of 1965, stated that "a popular political base for the Government of South Vietnam does not now exist," and that the Saigon regime "is, in fact, a continuation of the French colonial system of government with upper-class Vietnamese replacing the French...
...A great deal of military and economic aid to South Vietnam is stolen...
...Help, v. See "Save...
...In the Pentagon Papers, which were not intended for public view, the discussions of the reasons for intervening in Vietnam show that democracy in South Vietnam as well as the lives and welfare of the Vietnamese population were entirely irrelevant to U.S...
...military intervention...
...For most of the period 1968-74, the U.S...
...See "Satellite...
...Once again, as in 1954-1964, the North Vietnamese and PRG are alleged to be "flagrantly" violating the relevant Agreements, although even a moderately attentive reader of the newspapers knows that neither Thieu nor Kissinger took the Agreements seriously, or intended to follow through on them, except for implementing the exchange of American POWs for withdrawal of U.S...
...Douglas Pike, in his book Vietcong, makes the bald statement that the NLF was the only "truly mass-based political party" in South Vietnam...
...Diem was imported from the U.S...
...And its investment there is so great that it must argue on all levels-we are not merely pursuing our (increasingly obscure) self-interest there, we are really "helping South Vietnam...
...As in, "It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it...
...The points summarized below indicate that helping Thieu should be considered synonymous with "inflicting damage on South Vietnam...
...2, article 4...
...South Vietnam" sounds like a country or people, not a Southeast Asian mafia, and the request to "help" has a superficially humanitarian touch, especially when tied in with related cliches on "aggression" and our solemn "commitments...
...This is even more valid today as a description of the support base of the Thieu regime...
...Whatever the security benefits* of this tradeoff, it is not easy to argue that we were, for example, "helping Greece" when we gave consistent support to Papadopo-lous and his torturers between 1967 and 1973...
...And the earlier rationale of inherent Chinese expansionism and implacable hostility is now widely recognized to have been partly ideological clap-trap, partly a cover for a simple desire to dominate...
...2) The Saigon authorities have admitted time and again that they are unable to compete with the PRG on a purely political basis, and therefore need continued U.S...
...official expert on the NLF (PRG) and also by the most famous and experienced of American pacification officers...
...But Thieu is our choice and will do our bidding...
...Once again we are being urged to honor our commitments and come to the aid of an alleged victim of aggression, although we have been and still are the only non-Vietnamese direct participant in the Indochina fighting...
...5) The Saigon faction supported by the U.S...
...1) The Saigon government has never been selected by the South Vietnamese people in a meaningful free election, or by force resting on an indigenous base...
...If we stop funding him now, we- that is, the war party in Washington-will have lost control in South Vietnam, and power in Saigon will be returned to the Vietnamese...
...At the very time of his signing the Agreements, Thieu made it clear that he would not allow the promised freedom of expression, political organization and movement of people within South Vietnam, and for two years his violations have been consistent and comprehensive...
...dollars-military officers, military contractors, bureaucrats, pimps and speculators...
...A top Saigon general told George Kahin in 1967, "Frankly, we are not strong enough now to compete with the Communists on a purely political basis...
...and although our client, Thieu, has quite openly refused to abide by the peaceful means of reconciliation laid out in the Agreements, in exact repetition of Diem's behavior from 1954 on...
...A large compilation of such statements was published by me in American Report, May 7, 1971...
...war party is one of the most corrupt and brutal in modern history...
...Save, v. Destroy...
...The Thieu regime survives because it represents the American war party...
...Outlays for Vietnamese police and prisons have been consistently larger than those for schools-more than 20 times as great in fiscal 1974...
...Since the ceasefire, also, continued intervention in Indochina has cost the American taxpayer a staggering $8.2 billion, but once again it is claimed that only a little more aid will do the trick...
...This situation is hardly confined to South Vietnam...
...For 25 years there has always been a "light at the end of the tunnel," but always some billions of dollars away...
...in this case it is referred to as a "solemn commitment...
...A crucial question, never discussed in the mass media and rarely in debates in Congress, has always been: "Why do we and our Saigon ally have to 'pacify' a people supposedly being victimized by somebody else's 'aggression...
...8) It has long been a part of the intervention rationale that we are opposing prospective tyranny and keeping open the door to freedom...
...The war party in Washington, however, actually appears to prefer tyrannies-right-wing ones-as more manageable and consistent with our interest...
...Commitment, n. Among the multitude of promises made and obligations incurred in the past, the one consistent with the line of action now planned...
...The position of the Left is stronger now in Cambodia and Laos than it was in 1964...
...It is the last word in the police state, as is well documented in the NARMIC/VRC publication After the Signing of the Paris Agreements: Documents on South Vietnam's Political Prisoners (1973), and Holmes Brown and Don Luce, Hostages of War: Saigon's Political Prisoners (AFSC, 1973...
...The American war party may or may not like democracy in the U.S., but externally it clearly finds it an obstacle to its designs...
...security interests were helped one iota by our immense and costly 25-year intervention...
...This is usually rationalized on the grounds of our "security interests"- the friendly fascists will be friendly to us, and allow us to use them for our purposes, if we will allow them to be unfriendly to ("control" and milk) their own populations...
...They would have to deal with the painful fact (spelled out below) that we are backing an unrepresentative and venal clique who survive only by our largesse and force (past and threatened), and who are actually the enemy of the South Vietnamese majority...
...In the words of Senator Edward Kennedy, reflecting on the evidence of Thieu's unconcern for refugees: "In the field of refugee care and in many other fields the Government of South Vietnam has been engaged in the systematic looting of its own people...
...Our faction in Vietnam is more dependent on external sustenance than ever...
...The following selections show that seven years later these Or-wellisms are as applicable as ever: Aggression, n. Providing aid and comfort to the side that we oppose...
...It holds more political prisoners than the vast Soviet Union-a recent calculation shows that per 10,000 population there are 50 political prisoners in South Vietnam, four in Indonesia and 0.4 in the USSR...
...This is still the de facto role of "aid" to Saigon and the Ford-Pentagon version of "helping South Vietnam...
...The Congressional Record of June 16, 1967, contains a powerful letter written by "a hard-charging Marine 2nd Lieutenant" who found very quickly that instead of fighting Communist aggressors "90 percent of the time our military actions were directed against the people of South Vietnam," and that his mission as a soldier was "to pound a people into submission to a government that has little or no popular support among the real people of Vietnam...
...The Orwellian (or Biercian) quality of these cliches has been so striking that in 1968 I could not resist putting some of them into a Great Society Dictionary...
...President Ford now tells us that we need an additional $300 million, fast, to "help South Vietnam...
...Free elections were rejected by our faction while they were still feasible (1956-1960), and they were not possible after 1965 because South Vietnam was subject to foreign occupation...
...It is true that it steals and tortures on an unprecedented scale, and treats its citizenry as a hostile population to be repressed by violence...
...In early 1975, President Ford and Defense Secretary Schlesinger have been repeating these now traditional routines, and once again the mass media report them without comment as "news," thus serving once again as propaganda instruments for the war party, still firmly in control of the executive branch of government...
...Even worse, Lyndon, Dick, Henry and Gerald will now go down in the historical record, finally and conclusively, as not merely responsible for profoundly immoral acts, but also as having failed badly even in the pursuit of their own narrow version of America's self-interest...
...As far back as 1959 David Hothham, describing how Diem "has crushed all opposition of every kind, however anti-Communist it might be," with the resources provided him by the U.S., concluded that "Diem's main supporters are to be found in North America, not in Free Vietnam...
...3) This minority status-and dependence on external force-was confirmed by the chief U.S...
...See, "Assistance...
...It was and is a small urban and military elite that has always regarded the peasantry-80 percent of the population prior to "urbanization" by violence, and still a majority-as a hostile mass needing to be "controlled" and "pacified.'' This is why massive defoliation of the countryside, the forced transfer of vast numbers of peasants (10.4 million, or a majority of the entire population, according to the Senate Subcommittee on Refugees), the systematic bombing and burning of hamlets, was participated in and accepted by the Saigon junta...
...It is by no means clear in that case, or others as well, that we were even helping our "security interests...
...The American war party (Gerald Ford a long-standing member) has gravitated toward a regular sponsorship of "friendly fascists" in the Third World...
...Independent, a. Aligned with us...
...In each period of expanding American intervention in Indochina a virtually identical set of rationalizations, cliches and fabrications is set forth to justify the renewed effort to maintain in power Washington's chosen instruments of rule...
...4) Vann referred to our faction as "intrinsically opposed to the social revolution in progress...
...It stands in an actively hostile relationship to at least 85 percent of the population...
...policy-makers...
...The fact that we have been supporting a tyranny all along has caused some muting of this claim, although we are still alleged to be interested in freedom in Vietnam "at some future date...
...But the American war party hangs on in its dogged effort to determine who rules South Vietnam...
...But there is no positive relationship between Thieu and "South Vietnam," if South Vietnam means either "the majority of South Vietnamese" or the interests of this majority as they perceive those interests...
...7) A very large fraction of American "aid" and "help" to South Vietnam has been used to forcibly "pacify" the rural population of South Vietnam...
...The war party in Washington has contributed trivial and tokenistic amounts for matters like health and education, but fantastic sums for killing...
...The most basic of all the cliches, however, and the only one that I want to consider more fully, is that we are "helping South Vietnam...
...Sometimes a purely hypothetical obligation, self-imposed to lend moral sanction to actions decided . upon today...
...Syn.-Help...
...although we committed ourselves in the Paris Agreements to non-intervention in the internal affairs of South Vietnam (chap...
Vol. 101 • February 1975 • No. 14
