by Mary Grabar
And it was backed, in the final instance, by terror. As Pike explains, to “restructur[e] . . . the social order,” the Communists tried successive escalating levels of “communication” strategies. But these so-called “communication” strategies began with “seduc[ing] [the villager] into voluntarily supporting the NLF.” They became successively forceful: “social pressure,” then “surveillance, indoctrination, and exploitation.”65 While the “agit-prop cadres” hoped to convert the South Vietnamese “to such a degree that the villager would support the cause of his own volition,” when this was not possible they tried to “confuse the opinions and emotions of the villager so that he became indecisive and thus ineffectual in providing support to the GVN [South Vietnam].” They were engaging in standard Communist strategies: “the agit-prop cadres sought to instigate strife along class lines. They dealt in misinformation, exaggeration, and distortion. They concealed or mistated Communist intentions. They drew attention to and inflated real or trumped-up village grievances.”66 And ultimately, the Communists backed up these psychological and social strategies with real violence, killing individuals within the village to form “a scar of fear.” Pike describes three cases that he had personally investigated. These were the killing of a priest by driving bamboo spears into him and then shooting him in the head; two school teachers forced to witness the execution and decapitation of two farmers; and the shooting death after a “people’s tribunal” of a sixty-seven-year-old farmer for “purchasing two hectares of rice land and ignoring NLF orders to turn [it] over to the tenant. . . .”67
It is difficult to imagine a more deliberate misrepresentation of a book than Zinn’s of Pike’s. Pike charges the NLF, in fact, with genocide. Here is page 248 of Pike’s Viet Cong: The Organization and Techniques of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam:
Steadily, quietly, and with a systematic ruthlessness the NLF in six years wiped out virtually an entire class of Vietnamese villagers. The assassination rate declined steadily. . . . from 1960 to 1965 for the simple reason that there was only a finite number of persons to be assassinated. Many villages by 1966 were virtually depopulated of their natural leaders, who are the single most important element in any society. They represent a human resource of incalculable value. This loss to South Vietnam is inestimable, and it will take a generation or more to repair the damage to the society. By any definition, this NLF action against village leaders amounts to genocide.68
But you don’t need to read hundreds of pages to understand Pike’s position. He makes it as clear as day in his preface (Pike’s book was originally published in 1966, with a second edition in 1967, before the outcome of the Vietnam War was known):
I have to a degree put down roots [in Vietnam] and have come to care very deeply about what happens. The plight of the Vietnamese people is not an abstraction to me, and I have no patience with those who treat it as such. Victory by the Communists would mean consigning thousands of Vietnamese, many of them of course my friends, to death, prison, or permanent exile. . . . My heart goes out to the Vietnamese people—who have been sold out again and again, whose long history could be written in terms of betrayal and who, based on this long and bitter experience, can only expect that eventually America too will sell them out. If America betrays the Vietnamese people by abandoning them, she betrays her own heritage.69
Zinn was one of those betraying the Vietnamese people—and then he turned around and made use of Pike’s own book to justify that betrayal, distorting Pike’s analysis to make it appear to support the opposite case. Talk about adding insult to injury. What should be Douglas Pike’s lasting legacy has been hijacked to promote the very cause Pike was urging the American people to defeat. Google searches of several quotations from Pike’s Viet Cong lead the reader not to Pike’s book, but to A People’s History and another book in which Zinn’s chapter is republished: Against the War: Writings by Activists, published in 1999.70 Pike’s book is out of print, and few students today bother to search for the few remaining copies on the shelves of college libraries. Zinn’s book is ubiquitous.
After lying about the NLF, Zinn continues the Communist lies about a protest campaign that led to America’s betrayal of Diem, which enabled his assassination: “One day in June 1963,” begins a paragraph, “a Buddhist monk sat down in the public square in Saigon and set himself afire.” As more monks did the same, “Diem’s police raided Buddhist pagodas and temples, wounded thirty monks, arrested 1,400 people, and closed down the pagodas.” They killed nine demonstrators. “Then, in Hué, the ancient capital, ten thousand demonstrated in protest.”71
But according to Mark Moyar, this “Buddhist protest movement” did not arise “from popular dissatisfaction with a government guilty of religious intolerance.” Rather, it was a “power play by a few Buddhist leaders” who had “close ties to the Communists or were themselves covert Communists.” There were also other Communist agents participating. Diem followed the suggestions of his generals and arrested the leaders and closed pagodas that served as headquarters.72
As Moyar reports, “A few captured Communist documents, available at the time to both the Americans and the South Vietnamese, revealed Communist participation in the Buddhist protest movement. One Communist document, dated July 27, 1963 and captured a few weeks thereafter, stated that in some areas Communist personnel ‘have pushed the political struggle movement by initiating the demonstrations against the terrorization of Buddhism at the province and districts.’ ”
Also inspiring suspicion were the NLF’s statements of support of the Buddhists’ claims early on. Unfortunately, journalists rejected “the claim of Diem and many other South Vietnamese officials that some militant Buddhist leaders were secret agents of Hanoi.” Among these was New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan, who obtained the Pentagon Papers from Ellsberg for publication and who won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for A Bright Shining Lie. Beginning in the 1990s, Communist Vietnamese histories have confirmed Diem’s claims.73
Later, when Buddhists really were persecuted under the Communist regime, they were ignored by most of the media, as Norman Podhoretz recalls about “the self-immolation of twelve Buddhist nuns and priests on November 2, 1975,” and a “raid by the Communist police” on a Buddhist temple in April 1977.74
Moyar sees the assassination of Diem with cooperation from the U.S. as a tragic mistake. Upon the advice of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who was worried about “public opinion,” President John F. Kennedy cut U.S. aid. This led to “portentous consequences that Kennedy had neither intended nor desired.” The cut made Diem even “less cooperative.” He released some Buddhist prisoners, but rejected “far-reaching political reforms demanded by the Americans.” Instead, he enacted “austerity measures” and stalled on appointing generals. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge then agreed to allow South Vietnamese generals to stage a coup, disregarding key parts of the president’s instructions.75 Diem and his brother were captured on November 1, 1963, and killed the following day.
But to Zinn, American involvement in Vietnam was all about secret plotting by greedy capitalists to nip a freedom movement in the bud. As he says in A People’s History, “A secret memo of the National Security Council in June 1952 also pointed to the chain of U.S. military bases along the coast of China, the Philippines, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea:
Communist control of all Southeast Asia would render the U.S. position in the Pacific offshore island chain precarious and would seriously jeopardize fundamental U.S. security interests in the Far East.
And:
Southeast Asia, especially Malaya and Indonesia, is the principal world source of natural rubber and tin, and a producer of petroleum and other strategically important commodities. . . .76
Without identifying the source of this “secret memo,” Zinn comments that it also included the fact that “Japan depended on the rice of the region” and so was also vulnerable to Communist exploitation.77
The source
is actually a June 25, 1952, report to the National Security Council by the Executive Secretary James Lay. It does indeed include Zinn’s quoted material, but it also notes the importance of these resources not to the United States, but to countries in the region. Zinn quotes from item 2(c) of the document’s “General Considerations” but conveniently leaves out this sentence, indicated by his ellipses: “The rice exports of Burma and Thailand are critically important to Malaya, Ceylon, and Hong Kong and are of considerable significance to Japan and India, all important areas of free Asia.” One of the “courses of action” recommended was to “encourage and expand their commerce with each other and with the rest of the free world. . . .” But one does not even need to read that far down. The objective was listed as the first item: “To prevent the countries of Southeast Asia from passing into the Communist orbit, and to assist them to develop the will and ability to resist communism from within and without. . . .”78
Zinn marches on with more selective evidence, quoting from a 1953 “congressional study mission” that “reported: ‘The area of Indochina is immensely wealthy in rice, rubber, coal and iron ore. Its position makes it a strategic key to the rest of Southeast Asia.’ ”79 This quotation appears in the first volume of the four-volume Gravel Edition of The Pentagon Papers—the one that Zinn and Noam Chomsky edited. It comes from a report by “Representative Walter Judd, a recognized Republican spokesman on Asia.” This is what follows the sentence Zinn chose to quote: “If Indochina should fall, Thailand and Burma would be in extreme danger, Malaya, Singapore and even Indonesia would become more vulnerable to the Communist power drive. . . . communism would then be in an exceptional position to complete its perversion of the political and social revolution that is spreading through Asia. . . . the Communists must be prevented from achieving their objectives in Indochina.”80
Zinn’s selective quotation gives the impression that the U.S. was just interested in the resources “rice, rubber, coal, and iron ore.” Not only do the deleted sentences convey something quite different, but so does the explanation in the report that Secretary of State John Foster Dulles “regarded Southeast Asia a key region in the conflict with communist ‘imperialism’ and that it was important to draw the line of containment north of the Rice Bowl of Asia—the Indochina peninsula.”81 The concern was in fighting Communist imperialism.
One wonders if Zinn had simply not read the volumes that he presumably edited. Either that or he deliberately left out key information. In any case, he continues to pursue the line that a secret cabal of imperialists in the U.S. government used the pretext of Communism to grab Indochina’s resources. Zinn presents another example, quoting from a speech that Under Secretary of State U. Alexis Johnson gave before the Detroit Economic Club: “What is the attraction that Southeast Asia has exerted for centuries on the great powers flanking it on all sides? Why is it desirable, and why is it important? First, it provides a lush climate, fertile soil, rich natural resources, a relatively sparse population in most areas, and room to expand. The countries of Southeast Asia produce rich exportable surpluses such as rice, rubber, teak, corn, tin, spices, oil, and many others. . . .”
Zinn huffs, “This is not the language that was used by President Kennedy in his explanations to the American public.” Instead, Kennedy deviously “talked of Communism and freedom. In a news conference February 14, 1962, he said ‘Yes, as you know, the U.S. for more than a decade has been assisting the government, the people of Vietnam, to maintain their independence.’ ”82
But Zinn’s four-dot ellipsis at the end of the “rice, rubber, teak, corn, tin, spices, oil” quotation indicates that he has deleted the next sentence from his source. And no wonder he deleted that sentence! It reads: “It [Southeast Asia] is especially attractive to Communist China, with its burgeoning population and its food shortages.”83
Contrary to Zinn, this Kennedy administration official was expressing concern about the Communists’ desire to conquer Southeast Asia for these natural resources. Alexis Johnson’s speech shows that the real fear was Communist imperialism. Of course, Zinn doesn’t include Johnson’s quotation of Under Secretary Averell Harriman’s statement to that effect: “Chinese communism and all communism is imperialist.”
The fact is, President Kennedy’s references to “Communism and freedom” in his “explanations to the American public” were not a smoke screen; they were the real reasons. And this speech that Zinn falsifies is also printed in The Pentagon Papers.
These are three strikes against Zinn—three times that he has presented Communist imperialism as American imperialism. Such lies are necessary in order to advance his picture of each and every American president as filled with war-mongering greed. The next is President Lyndon Johnson. “In early August 1964,” Zinn claims, “President Johnson used a murky set of events in the Gulf of Tonkin, off the coast of North Vietnam, to launch full-scale war on Vietnam.”84 If only that were the truth! In fact, Johnson hastened to reassure the American public—and, incidentally, our Communist enemies in Vietnam—that “our response, for the present, will be limited. . . .”85 Johnson’s political calculations told him that a too hawkish stance might make him look like a trigger-happy extremist of the sort he had been pretending his Republican opponent Barry Goldwater was. As Podhoretz recounts, Johnson “excoriated the Republicans for their belief in the ‘wisdom of going North in Vietnam,’ ” and promised to “launch an offensive ‘only as a last resort.’ ” “ ‘Dropping bombs,’ ” he said, would likely “ ‘involve American boys in a war in Asia with 700 million Chinese.’ ”86
We have since learned that, contrary to Johnson’s expressed fears, Mao was not ready to go fight in Vietnam at that time. As Mark Moyar explains, “After the Tonkin Gulf reprisals, in violation of previous promises, the Chinese made clear to Hanoi that if American forces invaded North Vietnam, China would not send its troops to fight the Americans.” Instead, the North Vietnamese were advised that in the case of an attack they should leave the cities and fight from the mountains; they made plans to do this.87 In fact, Moyar speculates, “an American expedition to North Vietnam” at that time could have led to an anti-Communist government there, established by volunteers from the one million Northern refugees in South Vietnam.88
Zinn dedicates two pages to the My Lai Massacre—the execution of two hundred to four hundred villagers in the hamlet of My Lai in March 1968 by American troops—a case in which military rules were grossly violated. Much in Zinn’s recounting consists of quoted material from the trial of U.S. Army Lieutenant William Calley, the leader of the massacre. Zinn makes the astounding claim that “My Lai was unique only in its details.”89 Sure—but only if you count as “details” all the significant facts: that the deed was done by American soldiers, that an American officer ordered the killings, and that—as a result of these actually unprecedented “details”—there was a high-profile court martial in which William Calley was found guilty of murder. As Norman Podhoretz wrote in 1982, “no evidence existed at the time—and none has materialized since—to substantiate the charge that My Lai was typical.” He adds that “given the number of antiwar journalists reporting on Vietnam,” it would not have been likely that other atrocities could have been kept secret. Podhoretz cites Telford Taylor, “a prosecutor at Nuremberg and . . . now a strong opponent of the war,” who said he was “ ‘unaware of any evidence of other incidents of comparable magnitude’ ” and noted that “ ‘the reported reaction of some of the soldiers at [My Lai] strongly indicates that they regarded it as out of the ordinary.’ ” Even Zinn’s friend Daniel Ellsberg said, “ ‘My Lai was beyond the bounds of permissible behavior, and that is recognizable by virtually every soldier in Vietnam.’ ”90
In fact, American concern for civilians put American soldiers in danger. Military installations disguised as textile mills and residential buildings increased dangers for pilots, who, as one explained, were “ ‘shot down bec
ause rules of engagement required approach angles and other tactics designed to reduce civilian casualties rather than to afford maximum protection to the attacking planes.”91 In contrast, the Viet Cong abided by no laws of war. They used civilians, “ ‘clutching the people to their breast’ by converting rural hamlets into fortified strongholds that were camouflaged to look like peaceful villages; by disguising themselves as civilians; and by using villagers of all ages and both sexes . . . to plant mines and booby traps and engage in other military activities.”92 Zinn, of course, makes no mention of the Communists’ use of civilians as human shields, nor of multiple other war crimes by the Viet Cong.
And this is the way Zinn explains the “Tet Offensive”:
The unpopularity of the Saigon government explains the success of the National Liberation Front in infiltrating Saigon and other government-held towns in early 1968, without the people there warning the government. The NLF thus launched a surprise offensive (it was the time of “Tet,” their New Year holiday) that carried them into the heart of Saigon, immobilized Tan San Nhut airfield, even occupied the American Embassy briefly. The offensive was beaten back, but it demonstrated that all the enormous firepower delivered on Vietnam by the United States had not destroyed the NLF, its morale, its popular support, its will to fight. It caused a reassessment in the American government, more doubts among the American people.93