Social Research and Counterinsurgency -- The Science of Neocolonialism

...There was, after all, no status quo to be defended in Southeast Asia, but - in American eyes - a virgin territory far more susceptible to revolutionary (i.e., labor-intensive...

...And a survey of U.S...

...In these cases, the penetration and manipulation of traditional and/or hostile social structures was real and deliberate...

...Central to the concept of a "test case" war was the requirement that it be restricted to certain geographical, racial and geopolitical boundaries which were not indispensable to the security of either contending great power...

...import subsidy programs to underwrite the buying power and the allegience of the urban upper classes (Venezuela, Iran...

...What was once a strong communal society, characterized by a Confucian order of noblesse oblige toward the ill-favored, had become a ward of the French Empire...

...Improbable...

...an ambitious road-building project launched to enhance surveillance and control operations in the hinterland (Thailand, Peru...

...imperialism, and particularly U.S...

...and in every target culture, the development of "Nationbuilding" institutions - universities, communications systems, training programs - and the overhaul of centuries-old agricultural techniques and market systems...

...The "anti-communist nationalist solution," or, more precisely, the practice of neocolonialism, dictated that the Vietnamese provide - in the jargon of the day - a native "counterpart" for every mission in which the U.S...

...What the French colonial administration neglected - and what has driven the United States so deep into the mire of South Vietnam - is the attempt to reeducate an entire population to collaborate in its own oppression...

...By successfuly defeating a national liberation movement such as had developed in Vietnam, Kennedy hoped to prove to potential insurgents elsewhere that revolutionary warfare posed no threat to U.S...

...And when people resort to armed struggle to establish control over their national destiny, the U.S...

...what had been a highly literate population now boasted more jails than schools, and literacy actually disappeared from large parts of Vietnam...

...hegemony...

...Rhetorically they argued that the "rising tide of expectations" could be appeased through the stepped-up flow of American technical expertise, investment capital and "food for peace" shipments to the Third World...

...In Vietnam, it faces a people whose will to independence has survived - and drawn strength from - warfare against the occupying forces of four empires...

...It wasn't until Kennedy took office, however, that this policy won the support of the State Department and the Pentagon and thus secured the full and direct commitment of the U.S...

...Similarly, in China, English traders helped to develop a new mercantile class which saw its interests linked not to sovereign China but to the British Navy...

...goals...

...This is when every process accelerates - capital accumulation, foreign investment, development of labor skills and industrial technologies - and when powerful new resources are concentrated- in the hands of a new entreprenurial class whose authority over the development process is not always given traditional or political sanction...

...The social theory behind the Simulmatics project embraces most of the basic assumptions of contemporary American behavioral science...

...The priorities which have sustained the present intervention through so many humiliating defeats were formally enunciated early in the Kennedy Administration...

...But while the Vietnamese communist - or the ordinary peasant, for that matter - might laugh at some of the means to which the United States has resorted to impose its will on Vietnam, he would find nothing funny about the ends...

...Chinese woodcut: "Defend the fatherland to the last man...

...is here confronted with the spectacle of technologically primitive societies, still writhing under colonial wounds, underfed, over-populated, which have nevertheless provided a breeding-ground for a new economic system -- revolutionary socialism and a new system of alliances which remains politically independent of both Cold War blocs...

...government involvement...

...In its post-World War II drive to extend the "Free World" to encompass the destinies of the post-colonial world, the United States has had to contend with peoples who have learned - through centuries of colonial oppression - to struggle collectively for their own liberation...

...It is this improbable goal which sets American imperialism off by itself, and defines the essence of neocolonialism...

...Like Michigan State, "the Simulmatics Corporation would provide, as an independent behavioral science research agency, an additional 'cover' to avoid direct U.S...

...in the economic sphere, French planters wrecked one fo the world's oldest rural market economies, and French mining companies created a huge conscript army of coolie labor where12 before there had been none...

...aid, backed up by American administrative, police and paramilitary training programs, had only served to aggravate Diem's relations with every major political grouping in the South, and inflamed the insurgent struggle in the countryside...

...social science research community has been mobilized to assist in the task of investigating, manipulating, co-opting and controlling the societies which occupy the underdeveloped lands of the Third World.' Every imperial system has possessed some apparatus for penetrating and manipulating the social structure of its client and colonial territories...

...And so the professors devised an ingenious scheme for guaranteeing the participants' "security...

...At the heart of this campaign is a very different set of priorities than those which guided the French - whose empire, along with those of Britain and olland, the United States has inherited...

...missionaries" call for help from the counterinsurgency forces - just as the original missionaries received help from the imperial forces of the Motherland...

...Complementing and reinforcing these arguments was the growing influence of the new U.S...

...The U.S...

...The U.S...

...The fortunes of these interests were closely tied to an expansion of private investment and trade in the Pacific, which ultimately required the extension and enlargement of U.S...

...U.S...

...still worked feverishly to co-opt native institutions for the task of securing American interests in the area...

...The French in Vietnam managed to impose the most coercive institutions of France dOutre Mer...

...was engaged...

...when a country reaches self-sustaining growth - that is, when its own productive apparatus (whether foreign- or domestic-owned) begins to produce a value in surplus of capital and labor costs - no more "force-feeding" is necessary and the country is well on its way to modernization...

...military capabilities in the region...

...What has distinguished U.S...

...This is what the real revolutionary cadre means when he speaks out against American "neocolonialism...

...In this way it would not only be impossible for a hostile outsider to compile a full list of Saigon's new cadre, but their identity would be concealed from each other and from their own communities as well, thus assuring maximum secrecy for the project (and perfect laboratory conditions for transmission of U.S...

...counterinsurgency research tells us that he knows whereof he speaks: the entire U.S...

...In the United States - whose history,Ibf course, provides the model for the whole process -. this stage would have occurred in the mid-19th century...

...The function of these operations (which McNamara once referred to as "subliminal warfare") was to preclude the necessity for outright military intervention which the United States could ill afford...

...In fact, they devoted much more attention to the development of an airtight counterinsurgent apparatus capable of stemming that tide with force...

...but they never sought to implant an alien social order in the countryside...

...In it he argued that there were several discernible stages in the progress of a country from traditional, stagnant economic life to modern industrialism and high mass consumption...

...imperial operations in Latin America and the Pacific since the 1950s, is the fact that the wholesale Americanization of national societies has become an end in itself, as important to America's counterinsurgent mission in the Third World as the development of new markets is to the multinational corporations, or the extension of military alliances and bases is to the Armed Services...

...It is to counter such "resistance cultures" that the American social science establishment has been mobilized to form a Fourth Armed Service of the U.S...

...Southeast Asia clearly was such a zone...

...In Vietnam, the United States is fighting, and losing, the first battle in a postwar campaign to bring its global strategy of Containment around full circle in the East...

...The American instructors, to be recruited from the Peace Corps, would provide training in "Group dynamics and group leadership, organization building, methods of rural development...

...So begins a confidential proposal from the imaginative professors of the Simulmatics Corporation (a private think-tank in New York City) for a $2,497,000 Defense Department contract to train 100 citizens of South Vietnam to be "as loyal, as effective and as energetic as the Vietcong" in representing the interests of the Saigon regime...

...According to this approach, the growing synthesis of nationalist and communist movements in many parts of the Third World could be dissolved by the installation of new, pro-U.S...

...intervention in the Third World in its profoundest sense entails first the destruction of the indigenous social structures and the forced substitution of new ones responsive to the American model of development...

...An unambiguous commitment to the "defense" of South Vietnam, then, was seen as the basis for the buildup of an American military presence in Southeast Asia which would in turn guarantee U.S...

...War Machine...

...Thus in Rostow's scenario, the American pattern is judged inadequate and the stages reversed: instead of modernization and industrialization yielding stability, which in turn lays the groundwork for democracy, in the Third World stability - through armed pacification - lays the groundwork for modernization, and "democracy" may follow only when the new U.S.-tied entreprenurial class has gained full control of the economy and all other key national institutions...

...This was the strategic line for South Vietnam which Cold War liberals had successfully lobbied through the CIA and the United States Operations Mission (forerunner of the Agency for International Development) during the Eisenhower Administration...

...Nobody could be more sensitive to the dangerous contradictions which beset the American inheritance of the old European empires than men like Walt Rostow, McGeorge Bundy and Roger Hilsman...

...First they would be broken up into separate 5-man teams, and then each man would be allowed only limited contact with his own team...

...But the crucial stage before self-sustaining growth, and the one with particular relevance to American investment and to counterinsurgency planning, is what Rostow calls the "take-off stage...

...These are precisely the attributes of the "enemy" that military force alone cannot erase...

...initiated a massive strategic hamlet program which was intended to eliminate14 the peasantry as an independent political force, and place them under the direct military control of the government in Saigon...

...In this case it is the driving compulsion to substitute an artificial culture, subservient to American interests, in place of the indigenous one which has proved so hostile to the intrusions of so many great powers...

...Given these priorities, the rapid Americanization of almost every institutional feature of South Vietnam - from its governmental and military organizations to its "rural development" and "civic action" programs - was a necessary precondition for successful intervention...

...The take-off stage may be no longer than a decade or two (in some Latin American countries the United States has tried to jam it into a few years), but a society failing to pass through it remains unable to sustain its investments, much less to advance, and is therefore likely to be unstable and susceptible to popular insurgency...

...Perhaps the most appropriate guide for understanding contemporary American neocolonialism is the model which inspires its principal ideological tract: The Stages of Economic Growth, Walt Rostow's 1961 "non-communist manifesto" for the development of the Third World...

...To start this process of transition, a great deal of capital must be accumulated or poured in from the outside ("force-feeding...

...The pecuniary goals of previous imperial systems, in fact, limited social penetration to the particular classes whose allegiance and/or services were required for the material enrichment of the Motherland...

...In the eyes of the Kennedy Administration, success in attaining these three priorities would be dependent upon the prior achievement of a fourth: the successful demonstration of the "anti-communist, nationalist solution" to the problems of the "emerging nations" of the Third World...

...military and foreign aid bureaucracies have failed to do: "A three-year program would provide a cadre which could ultimately make South Vietnam the showcase of South-east Asia...

...Thus in Vietnam where the rural population was viewed as a hindrance to modernization, the U.S...

...They included, first of all, the fact that Kennedy saw Vietnam as a "test case" for the contest between national liberation movements and the new doctrine of counterinsurgency which was fast gaining ground in the Pentagon under Maxwell Taylor and in the State Department under Walt W. Rostow...

...The counterinsurgency strategists innocently believed that these "counterparts" would deceive the population into believing that programs conceived in Washington were the product of Vietnamese decision-making...

...The Special Group's answer'then was not to cut off aid to Diem, or halt the manifold rural resettlement programs, but rather to salvage the whole enterprise with a massive counterinsurgent intervention to restore the necessary climate of stability that would make further modernizing programs possible...

...Only in this instance is the language somewhat more unassuming than the usual academese, and here the half-baked social theory and rank hucksterism typical of America's new counterinsurgency establishment stands out in bold relief...

...A century ago in Indochina, French gunboats were preceded by Catholic missionaries who served the Empire by converting the native "heathen" to the faith of the Motherland...

...The second priority entailed the political and military encirclement of Communist China...

...This was, in fact, what preoccupied them: the very evident possibility that the revolutionary socialism which sustained an impoverished and war-torn North Vietnam, and inspired an indisputably popular and effective liberation movement in the South, might well appear exemplary to the underdeveloped countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America...

...That is not to say that the practice of colonialism left the native culture untouched: in Vietnam, the French developed a parallel governing apparatus which destroyed the autonomy and authority of the French mandarinate...

...LNS...

...In practice, the Americanization of the war turned the "counterparts" into dependencies - and ultimately into troublesome appendages - of the U.S...

...In practice, as we now know, the top government officials who met every Thursday in a "Special Group" to give intellectual and practical direction to American counterinsurgency and paramilitary operations, did not see Vietnam so much as a proxy confrontation with the Soviet Union or China, as a confrontation with a new13 revolutionary force genuinely indigenous to Southeast Asia...

...self-subsistent) models of development than those of the industrialized West...

...In the eyes of such ideologues, China was viewed as the organizer - and most certainly the beneficiary - of a successful unification of Vietnam under a revolutionary socialist regime...

...The results of these innovations were devastating...

...Accordingly, to defeat the NLF would be to deliver a decisive blow not only to Third World revolutionaries but to China itself...

...regimes that could not be identified with the old colonial overlords, but which would be committed to the "modernization" of their societies through acceptance of Free World aid, trade and military alliances...

...No more so than dozens of related projects underway at major American universities and research organizations...

...Since World War II, the United States has been confronted by the revolutionary wave which has surged through the old colonial territories and which today threatens to turn that "third" of the globe into a far more formidable antagonist to the imperial ambitions of the United States in the 1970s than any other adversary it has faced...

...military machine...

...The remainder of the population - so long as it did not interfere with the operation of colonial enterprises - was permitted to follow the traditional patterns of culture...

...Part 2, a Survey of Counterinsurgency Social Science Research, will appear in the March Newsletter...

...The ways in which the United States wages political, economic and cultural war on this front have become familiar enough: a favored regime catapulted into power and protected by enviable military and economic aid programs (Bolivia, Brazil...

...In South Vietnam, of course, the political line had already dissolved in contradiction with the primary military necessity of defending the neocolonial administration from encirclement and defeat by the rural liberation forces...

...The lesson of Vietnam was clear: Eisenhower's gift of $1 billion in U.S...

...Like the Catholic missionaries of past centuries, who sought to destroy native cultures they encountered, America's 20th century missionaries - the social scientists, foreign area specialists and technical advisors who accompany every U.S...

...access to the region's resources...

...the history and character of communism, the history and society of Vietnam, American goals and the democratic way of life...

...It appeared likely to Simulmatics that such a politically strategic project could expect to have "some secret Vietcong agents among the 100 trainees...

...At the same time, South Vietnam was seen as the key wedge in a Pacific trading system securely linked to the "Free World...

...has been stopped in Vietnam by a people whose real strength lies not in its technology which is inferior, not in its receipt of aid from abroad which is minimal, nor even in its military prowess which is considerable, but rather in its extraordinary cohesive social organization and a centuries-old culture which values above all else a common history of struggle against foreign domination...

...A resistance culture which has not been terrorized or bombed into submission after twelve years of American military intervention, is surely not now going to be bamboozled into place by a group of university professors free-lancing for the Pentagon...

...military-industrial conglomerates of the Southwest and California...

...The truth was, as we shall see, that even American development plans - which were real enough - required first a socio-political climate of guaranteed "stability...

...China represented a remarkably successful model for revolutionary development which could not be contained by military bases alone: it would have to be attacked on its own terms through the wholesale Americanization of the development process, through a command over Asian elites, and through a monopoly on capitalization and technical assistance...

...In the Third World, unlike the "New World" of North America, the obstacles to the approved sequence of development are viewed not so much as the absence of technical cadre and sources of capital (which are to be imported in any case), but the conservatism and strict communalism of rural societies, and the insurrectionary potential which such societies have demonstrated...

...For the chosen Vietnamese, the training program was to be "an intensive, all-consuming experience," which would be "embedded in the service of a higher purpose," providing "an individualized emotional experience involving positive loyalty to a human model" that would be "reinforced by a group...

...Simulmatics' hucksterism has a familiar ring for anyone who recalls how the Michigan State University Group (MSUG) under Professor Wesley Fischel ingratiated itself with the CIA in South Vietnam from 1956 to 1960...

...What is remarkable is that somehow, in spite of all this destruction, Vietnamese culture survived to sustain and nourish an indigenous independence movement led by the Vietminh which ultimately vanquished the French Army itself...

...If the raw materials and foodstuffs of Southeast Asia, so vital to Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, could not be guaranteed under Western auspices, then those countries - particularly Japan - would be driven to a more natural trading partner in Communist China, or perhaps even worse, to a neutral Southeast Asian bloc freely playing each of the great powers off against each other (much as the exemplary Prince Sihanouk has done in Cambodia...

...And like so many of the millenial projects which have emanated from America's think-tanks (the Strategic Hamlet Program, designed by Eugene Staley of the Stanford Research Institute, is another example), this one promises to do what the combined might of the U.S...

...What this meant to government ideologues sensitive to the ramifications of the Sino-Soviet split was not a static defense posture, but a more aggressive intervention in the "soft underbelly" of Asia...

...One can imagine the hilarity with which a political commissar from the "other side" might regard a captured enemy document such as this...

...aid program - seek to destroy existing economic and cultural institutions which do not conform to the approved "scenario" for the stages of economic development...

...However, in most of the countries where the Kennedy Administration's Special Group had programs underway (the Congo, Bolivia, Iran, Ecuador, Colombia, Thailand, Venezuela and Peru) the U.S...

...At that point, the whole process is sometimes crowned with "free elections" in which the populace is offered the chance to ratify the new status quo...