Vietnam: The Fruits of Blindness
H., I.
Pursue a disastrous policy long enough, and the outcome is inevitable. Politics is a ruthless discipline; error and stupidity exact a cruel price. Supporting the authoritarian Diem in the...
...If there were elements still forceful and willing to take risks against the Government—and there are— they were unsure of American intentions, after the years of lavish American praise for the reigning Government...
...The genuine options available seven or eight years ago have shrunk...
...to be used for special warfare at border crossings and for commando raids...
...issued a hostile paragraph...
...That would mean pouring millions down the drain, wasting American lives, causing further misery to the Vietnamese, incurring still more unpopularity in Asia — and moving straight to defeat, an American Dien Bien Phu...
...And it remains that whether put forward by De Gaulle, Ho Chi Minh, Ngo Dinh Nhu, or American liberals...
...It was a piece of chauvinist folly, however, to assume that Diem would fail just because the U.S...
...the North Vietnamese did not indicate they would be willing to abandon Communism for the sake of unity...
...An elaborate grievance setup, if properly policed by union stewards, ought to put an end once and for all to the system of petty tyranny often exercised by principals, administrators and school superintendents...
...I. H...
...government protests the jailings...
...The Government listened, approved and then used the unit for its own purposes as a loyal political arm of the military to control the regular army and the people...
...And surely the State Department should have had enough intelligence to realize that after years of discouraging and disregarding the opposition in South Vietnam, it could not suddenly present it with power through a press release...
...And how shall we designate this policy...
...What more need be said...
...policy will veer between the first two possibilities, but New York's public school teachers, by a show of militancy, unity and determination, scored a striking victory in early September...
...The scope of the teachers' victory ought not to be underestimated...
...On the contrary...
...military men in South Vietnam said it too...
...Such a proposal, which is being toyed with in France, Vietnam and the United States, is almost certain to signify a factitious "neutralism,' leading to the absorption of the whole of Vietnam by the Northern Communists...
...Not at all...
...Only to the political dimwits and reactionaries who have set U.S...
...that a policy of giving total support to this narrow-spirited clique and excluding all other Vietnamese anti-Communists would lead to defeat...
...Only this: that if, as Halberstam correctly says, the Americans were partners to "the police aspect of the regime," it is manifestly incorrect to say they were confined to "a helpless watch" of its increasing authoritarianism...
...After the round-up of the Buddhist priests, the U.S...
...That a school principal must now sit down once a month with the union representative will have a healthy effect in curbing injustices...
...The U.S...
...Was it merely radicals who said this, or starry-eyed liberals...
...Whether this can in fact still be done, is an open question...
...Probably, U.S...
...You cannot go along year after year ignoring elementary truths without ending in a fiasco...
...Years too late the U.S...
...helped spawn the odious Nhus, which in turn makes more likely the eventual victory of the Communist Ho Chi Minh...
...The regime is unsavory, detested, without social perspective...
...Their jailors are an elite special force subsidized from CIA funds...
...More important even than the substantial money package of over $25 million in salaries is the fact that henceforth the 43,000 teachers, represented by their United Federation of Teachers, are a power to be reckoned with...
...A policy of combining military opposition to Communist guerrillas with popular social reforms might well have rallied the population in 1955...
...Is all this surprising...
...that it ruled by sheer force, without the assent of the people...
...formally acknowledges that the Diem clique, brutal and authoritarian, is unable to rally the people against Communist guerrillas...
...the CIA continues to pay the jailors...
...A second possibility is to try more carefully to arrange the overthrow or serious modification of the regime in the coming months and to replace it with a popular "national rally...
...policy these last eight years...
...Apolitical specialists, scholars, even some U.S...
...Meanwhile, the choices in Vietnam are grim...
...the Americans had been partners to the constant growth of the police aspects of this regime...
...tried to upset the Diem-Nhu regime...
...The American people may not know, but surely the State Department does, that some 20,000 political prisoners rot in Diem's camps—some of them anti-Communist nationalists in the penal colony of Paule Condore, where they were first imprisoned by the French, then the Japanese, then the French again, and finally by Diem, the creature of Eisenhower-Kennedy...
...Pursue a disastrous policy long enough, and the outcome is inevitable...
...As a collaboration between Republican and Democrat, Eisenhower and Kennedy, Old Troglodyte and New Frontier...
...To the point of boredom, the State Department was told over and over again that the Diem regime was a disaster...
...Will the Vietnamese, so long harassed and betrayed, respond to any politics, except that of immediate peace...
...can reluctantly and with embarrassment stick by the Diem-Nhu clique...
...Times correspondent, David Halberstam, writes from Saigon (August 8, 1965): Year after year [the Nhus and the Government], under the helpless watch of their American partners, had systematically cut down the elements of the nation that might prove rivals to them — removing men of independence and daring, leaving an opposition latent but without rallying points...
...The Diem-Nhu regime is essentially an American creation, the joint and proud achievement of Eisenhower and Kennedy...
...The U.S...
...It should oe recognized for what it is: a device for surrender...
...The brilliant minds in Washington who preach to us dayin and day-out on the need for political realism, now thought to manage a coup—by a public statement from the President...
...That is what is known in political science as separation of powers...
...error and stupidity exact a cruel price...
...Americans suggested the possibility of an elite Special Forces unit of the best and toughest troops...
...Reliable sources here are reported to have explained to French diplomats in Hanoi that a unified Vietnam, able to meet her food requirements from the rice-growing south, could then reduce her economic and political dependence on China...
...The brilliant N.Y...
...by now, given the weariness and disillusion of the Vietnamese, who have suffered 22 years of unceasing civil strife, it may all be too late...
...More, their victory pushed open new doors through which the declining labor movement could easily march if its leadership would have the imagination to grasp this opportunity...
...The bitter, up-to-the-end re in such a way as to render both of them ineffectual and then be left with no choice but the third...
...Supporting the authoritarian Diem in the name of anti-Communism, the U.S...
...The third possibility is indicated in a dispatch from Hong Kong printed in the London Observer (August 1, 1963): North Vietnamese leaders have suggested discreetly that France might play a role in the eventual reunification of Vietnam...
...The American people may not know, but surely the State Department does, that in the last—rigged—South Vietnam election, 35% of the Saigon voters repudiated the regime...
...Kennedy and his predecessor had made certain over the years that the Diem regime would amass such a concentration of public power, it could resist even the disapproval of its creators...
...Yesterday hailed by the State Department as an indispensable ally, today Ngo Dinh Nhu mumbles audibly about a deal with Ho Chi Minh...
...And that is precisely where the Eisenhower-Kennedy policy has ended...
...Priests, university students, highschool girls are packed into jail...
...But to no avail...
Vol. 10 • September 1963 • No. 4
