Inside the Vietcong

...With a reasonable knowledge of the economic, social, and political situa­tion in which the NLF is operating, one can derive much information from the important quotations from NLF documents and the factual sum­mary sections...

...The major political benefits will accrue to this elite rather than to the duped peasant masses who have been so well organized...

...Despite its analytical weaknesses, Pike's work is an important document...

...He neg­lects the growth of the Communist Party before the war, as Vietnamese increasingly turned to it to satisfy their nationalist feelings and interest in so­cial and economic reforms which no other political groups at the time were dealing with...

...The thesis of the book is simple, if erroneous...

...International Studies Library...

...Pike, a foreign service officer with the U.S...

...Pike's approach enables him to es­cape the fact that Communist struc­ture and organizing techniques, where used successfully in the underdeveloped world, show a complete dependence on a program which responds to na­tural grievances such as those which still exist in South Vietnam...

...Through the development of sophisticated techniques of political communication and organizing, de­scribed in great detail by Pike, a de­termined Communist elite has been able to enlist substantial sections of the population into a campaign to create a monolithic totalitarian dicta­torship...

...He also neglects the repres­sive political conditions which pre­vailed in Vietnam during the Diem years and the bias of the regime to­wards the landlord class, the Catholic minority, and northern emigres...

...The major weakness of Pike's anal­ysis involves his use of these docu­ments...

...Pike has isolated the documents from their social, political, and eco­nomic background and then proceeded to make them support conclusions which would be obviously unwar­ranted had the proper background been provided...

...Pike apparently feels that there are no conditions which can justify the rise of such a movement...

...He thus pictures the NLF as nothing more than a highly manipulative, sinister front for a political conspiracy...

...Despite major analyti­cal weaknesses, the book is the first serious attempt by an American writer to give a face to the faceless enemy of the warriors in Washington...

...A valuable con­cluding section contains information on the mass struggle movements and biographies of leading NLF members...

...He leaves out for all practical purposes any dis­cussion of the long-standing problems of land reform and rural poverty which have plagued Vietnam right up to the present...

...Pike minimizes the importance of economic and social change to the NLF and their predecessors...

...Few will survive the test of time...

...The quota­tions come from diverse papers rang­ing from secret military memoranda, cadre training documents, self-criticism documents of local NLF peasant groups, propaganda leaflets directed at Saigon armed forces, education pro­gram booklets, and biographies of lead­ing Communist and non-Communist nationalists...

...The lengthy quota­tions and summaries from these docu­ments make the book worthwhile read­ing for the non-expert...

...One has only to beware of Pike's repetitive tendency to make his valuable source material support conclusions it cannot...

...Information Agency, has taken an invaluable collection of cap­tured National Liberation Front docu­ments, some 800 in all, and attempted to reconstruct, from the outside, a pic­ture of a highly complex political movement...

...Inside the Vietcong VIET GONG: THE ORGANIZATION AND TECHNIQUES OF THE NATIONAL LIBER­ATION FRONT OF SOUTH VIETNAM., by Douglas Pike...

...Viet Cong by Douglas Pike, however, will remain an essential work on Vietnam for many years to come...

...Yet he gives no indication of how genuine, not tokenistic, socio-economic revolution and national independence can be won in the face of the kind of violent resistance which was faced by progressive Vietnamese nationalists in the colonial period and faced by pro­gressive Vietnamese in the south today...

...Viet Cong includes chapters on the pre-1960 background, the ori­gins of the National Liberation Front, and the NLF's internal structure, pro­gram, administration, foreign relations, goals, and mystique...

...What Pike implicitly is arguing is that America has a special moral bur­den to oppose socio-economic revolu­tion if its form is not to our liking, even if it means uprooting a major indigenous movement or taking sides in a civil war to do so...

...Reviewed by Adam Schesch HPH E REGENT flood of books on Viet­ ••• nam must be regarded as a highly dubious blessing to the ordinary citizen...

...More than forty titles now vie for his attention and pocketbook...

...All these problems were the basis for the formation of the NLF...

...In particular, in the far too brief discussion of the Diem regime, he minimizes the land problem which Diem's regime actually worsened...

...This thesis is supported, supposedly, by the content of the 800 documents now held in the M.I.T...

...A major defect, for example, is Pike's failure to acknowledge the na­tive Vietnamese origins of the revolu­tionary nationalist movement in which the Communists have played an in­tegral role since the Twenties...

...A major question Americans must face today concerns the agreement or disagreement with the necessity for the sometimes "undemocratic" and some­times violent aspects of the elite mass movements usually created by Com­munist parties in underdeveloped countries...