An Hour in Wonderland
LAMPERTI, JOHN
An Hour in Wonderland by JOHN LAMPERTI "The question is" said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Hump-ty Dumpty, "which is to be...
...JOHN LAMPERTI is a professor of mathematics at Dartmouth...
...But Mr...
...And yet it hardly seems possible...
...Wiesner, "the thing to realize is that there weren't any people down there...
...The speaker was Louis A. Wiesner, a twenty-year man in the State Department just back from two years in Vietnam...
...I am perplexed in a way which is quite different from my reaction to the President's Vietnam speech of last fall...
...In addition, there are perhaps two and one-half million more not so classified who have moved from rural areas to the cities for other reasons related to the war, such as inability to live and grow crops in the defoliated countryside...
...There is a brighter side to all this, the Dartmouth colloquium was told...
...Wiesner frightened me, for decent men capable of his kind of thinking can become capable of anything...
...upwards of 20,000 political prisoners guilty of such "crimes" as advocating neutralization or coalition to end the war...
...But," said Mr...
...One more question, please...
...there was no rebuttal...
...That picture was overwhelmingly contradicted by the content of Mr...
...Wiesner feel about that...
...The man from our State Department gave us some highly encouraging figures...
...The reply surprised me...
...Wiesner's behavior, on the other hand, resembles something George Orwell described in 1984: "Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them...
...As officially defined, a "refugee" is a person who has been forced to leave his home for one of three reasons: (1) to escape from the Vietcong...
...The next country it will be necessary to destroy "in order to save it" may well be our own...
...Wiesner...
...Therefore, "we must continue to help...
...I can't do justice to his answer, but some representative excerpts will give the flavor: "The Vietnamese [that is, those who support the Saigon Government] are determined to fight for their freedom...
...commitments...
...And finally there was this: "The United States has a long-standing national tradition to assist people fighting to win or preserve their freedom...
...Because of the publicity attending U.S...
...The provincial Pacification and Development Council takes over responsibility for reestablishing schools, clearing land, providing fertilizer, and the like...
...It is then no longer under the jurisdiction of the Social Welfare Ministry, and its people are, officially, no longer refugees...
...Did the Minister of Social Welfare ever take steps to try to prevent some of this...
...Any questions...
...The question is," said Hump-ty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all...
...That is something I wanted to believe...
...After some more flowers—the gardens at the palace of a government official, among others—we saw one aerial photograph of the "moonscape" created by B-52 raids at a river bend in the Mekong delta...
...He did not impress one as a fanatic, but as a well-meaning man telling us straightforwardly what he knew and believed...
...it appeared once again that a corner had been turned...
...We can scarcely conceive of the firepower of U.S...
...What can one make of those flower gardens in the country "little damaged by war...
...About four and one-half million people—more than a quarter of the population of South Vietnam—have become refugees under this definition...
...But wait a minute...
...I imagined that the audience of some twenty-five students and five or six faculty members stirred a little uneasily, but Mr...
...We are informed that after a site is "completed" it is turned into a hamlet and has its own local government...
...These were "category three" refugees...
...Perhaps all these things do get done, at least sometimes, though no evidence was presented on this point...
...To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary...
...Well, yes, there are one or two questions, but it's hard to know where to start...
...A student asks what sort of follow-up takes place after resettlement...
...But if we hang on a bit longer the good work will be brought to fruition...
...Wiesner has ever asked himself what the "enemy" people believe they are fighting for...
...So you can see for yourselves that it is a very beautiful country, relatively little damaged by war...
...By February, 1969, two-thirds of the four and one-half million refugees had been officially "resettled," and by September 20 so had half of the remainder...
...The time has come when we can and should reduce our physical presence...
...Has he put it to himself that perhaps they may think that they are the ones "fighting to win or preserve their freedom...
...perhaps I underestimate his capacity for self-deception, but in view of his political record I don't think so...
...We couldn't even ask the obvious question, "What freedom...
...The province chief was sentenced to death in that particular scandal...
...One Dartmouth faculty member present notes that the second category of refugees was composed largely of people fleeing U.S...
...Overall, the figures reveal that the problem is rapidly being solved...
...He did not say, and nothing in his talk hinted that such speculations have concerned him...
...Academic propriety prevailed...
...Vietnamization, however, is o.k...
...Late in 1967, Luce resigned his position and came home to work and speak against the war which he called "an overwhelming atrocity...
...or (3) to escape because our military operations have required his removal...
...Does this mean that some refugees are "resettled" not by relocation but just by shifting the government department which is responsible for them, while they go on living in the same refugee camp...
...Or do they just engage in their perpetual "burning and destroying"— and dying—through habit or sheer malice...
...Wiesner went smoothly on...
...Wiesner, the last three Ministers have all been "honest, able, and concerned...
...A fine applause line for a campaign speech, but Mr...
...He offered many facts and figures, some of which were new to me...
...Wiesner's own lecture...
...The refugee program is under the supervision of the Thieu government's Ministry of Social Welfare, which employs about 200 people in Saigon and some 2,000 in the provinces...
...These generalities, after all, were only to introduce the special topic of the afternoon, the situation of South Vietnam's refugees...
...Wiesner knows that President Eisenhower promised Ngo Dinh Diem only limited economic assistance—which was all he could do without violating our pledge to respect the 1954 Geneva accords...
...Apparently that pledge was not a "commitment...
...We Americans do not yet live in 1984, even though Orwell's imagination held no horrors surpassing those we have been willing to inflict on the Vietnamese in the name of "freedom...
...One wonders if Mr...
...Wiesner...
...rigid censorship of all newspapers, and so on...
...bombing or shelling...
...It still seems to me incredible and appalling to see the very face of the earth desecrated in this way...
...What are we to think of an "expert" who after two years in Vietnam can tell us with a smile that the civilian hospitals hold more victims of motor scooter accidents than war casualties...
...Perhaps that is psychologically naive...
...If the United States left, we would be "betraying our commitments," and condemning the people to "slavery or worse...
...In 1967 it was discovered that most of the 200,000 officially designated refugees in one province had received none of the benefits to which they were entitled...
...bombing...
...In view of the wholesale destruction of Vietnamese society, he felt that IVS aid to a few individuals was not enough: "Thus to stay in Vietnam and remain silent is to fail to respond to the first need of the Vietnamese people—peace...
...When Mr...
...Wiesner and various Vietnamese officials inspecting some of the best resettlement results...
...He left out a great deal which we both knew...
...he is currently free pending an appeal...
...Perhaps my hour or so was not really spent in Lewis Carroll's wonderland after all—an altogether too logical and gentle a place to sustain the comparison...
...military destruction of the village of Ben Sue in "Operation Cedar Falls," special attention has been paid to its 6,000 former inhabitants...
...Probably most of us who have opposed the war for some time try occasionally to imagine what goes on inside of the mind of a war proponent —not the average member of anybody's "silent majority" but the Administration official or the Senator whose business and responsibility it is to be informed and to judge clearly...
...As a result, the Welfare Minister asked the American authorities to stop "generating" refugees, to stop such "wholesale destruction...
...Adding to these estimates my own conservative guess as to the number killed and wounded, it is apparent that more than half of the South Vietnamese have been forced from their homes or have become casualties—not impressively good in a country "relatively little damaged by war...
...The barbaric enemy still makes trouble, for in Mr...
...Having been silent so far, I made a little speech about Don Luce—how he had worked in rural Vietnam as a non-political agricultural expert for nearly a decade, becoming the respected head of International Voluntary Services whose work had just been mentioned approvingly by Mr...
...they are all "good citizens" now...
...Wiesner appeared sincere and matter-of-fact, somewhat like a bank official or corporation executive explaining his business...
...military rule with a democratic facade...
...Next question...
...Wiesner surely knew the answer to that: rigged elections in South Vietnam...
...Or who contends, at this late date, that the United States is helping the Vietnamese to "fight for their freedom...
...There have been a few problems, naturally...
...Wiesner isn't running for anything, and no one in the audience cheered...
...Is this simply crude lying...
...2) to escape from U.S...
...forces in Vietnam," Mr...
...Some 200 families have been taught to raise chickens by modern methods, while others farm Or work for the American military...
...It does seem to raise a question or two...
...Consequently, in June, 1968, General Abrams issued instructions to limit the damage...
...But never mind, let's explore the refugee problem with Mr...
...According to Mr...
...But Mr...
...Nixon blatantly falsifies history and distorts the facts I assume he is lying and knows it...
...This remarkably successful program was developed by the United States, and (apart from humanitarian motives) had the goal of making the refugees "loyal citizens of the government of South Vietnam" instead of a source of trouble...
...According to Mr...
...Wiesner, no operation "to generate refugees" (his words) can now be undertaken by U.S...
...On the screen was a color slide of a Saigon flower market...
...He knew how the United States then broke its word by preventing the elections and reunification scheduled for 1956...
...Wiesner said, and added that most of the destruction in Saigon during the 1968 Tet offensive was caused by U.S...
...But the realities were there too...
...There are several...
...Wiesner, but I came away more puzzled than before...
...And here and there among the facts were statements and conclusions which, like the Saigon flowers, bloomed in sublime indifference to the grim realities of the war...
...the occasion, an International Relations Colloquium held recently at Dartmouth College...
...Wiesner's words, "We can count on the VC targeting refugee sites as well as ordinary villages, burning and destroying...
...planes and artillery...
...forces without the approval of the Central Pacification Council...
...And we are currently operating at an even higher level of humanitarian restraint...
...Next question...
...I don't know, but it didn't seem so...
...We saw slides showing Mr...
...He knew about our peace-keeping obligations under the United Nations Charter and how assiduously we have respected those in Vietnam...
...I hoped to get some such insight from Mr...
...How did Mr...
Vol. 34 • May 1970 • No. 5
