By the late '60s, schoolchildren were given assignments in the Weekly Reader, which goes to elementary schools throughout the country, to write letters to Ho Chi Minh pleading with him to release the Americans he had captured -- the implication being that the evil Communists had snatched them as they strolled peacefully on Main Street, Iowa, spiriting them off to Hanoi for the purpose of torturing them. The PR campaign went into full gear in 1969, for two major reasons. First, US atrocities were reaching a scale that surpassed any hope of denial. Defense against the charges being impossible, the debate must be transferred to the evil nature of the enemy: his crimes against us. Second, corporate America had determined that the war must end. It would therefore no longer be possible to evade diplomacy and negotiations. But the Eisenhower-Kennedy-Johnson doctrine still held firm: diplomacy is not an option because the US and its clients were too weak politically to hope to prevail in the arena of peaceful competition. Accordingly, Nixon and Kissinger radically accelerated and expanded the violence, and sought in every way to deflect unwanted negotiations. The device used was to raise demands on prisoner return that no belligerent had ever so much as considered in the past, in the hope that Hanoi would keep to traditional Western standards and reject them, so that the Commie rats could be denounced for their infamy and the negotiations could be delayed.

After the war's end, a new motive arose. The destruction of Indochina was not considered a sufficient victory: it was necessary to continue to strangle and crush the Vietnamese enemy by other means -- refusal of diplomatic relations, economic warfare, and the other devices available to the toughest guy on the block. The cause was taken up by President Carter, accelerated as he made his "tilt toward China" in early 1978. It has been pursued since by his successors, with the support of the political class generally. Its current manifestations, we have just reviewed.

This resort to the "Thief! Thief!" technique was a brilliant success throughout, thanks to the compliance of the institutions of indoctrination. Franklin reviews the matter in some detail, showing how the press leaped into the fray on command while film-makers and TV pursued the ingenious strategy of selecting the best-publicized atrocities of the US and its client and rearranging personnel to transform them into crimes of the enemy. The supreme cynicism of the enterprise is highlighted by the maneuvers that had to be undertaken to shift from professed outrage over Pol Pot atrocities -- itself an utter fraud in elite circles, as demonstrated conclusively by their reaction to US atrocities in Cambodia a few years earlier and to those of the US-backed Indonesian client in Timor in the very same years⁵⁴ -- to a complex stand in which Pol Pot is condemned as the very symbol of Communist horror, while the Vietnamese invasion that saved Cambodia from his atrocities is shaped into a still more monstrous Communist atrocity, and the quiet US support for Pol Pot is somehow finessed. Even that task was effortlessly accomplished. And the ideological institutions shifted gears smoothly when the Cambodia pretext was lost and only the POW/MIA issue remained to justify the torture of the people of Indochina.

Michael Vickery makes the important point that every time Vietnam has had a chance, however slight, to escape from the conditions left from the cruel and destructive era of French colonialism, the US has stepped in to block that opportunity. When the Geneva settlement of 1954 laid the basis for unification with countrywide elections, the US barred that option, recognizing that the wrong side would surely win. Though the DRV (North Vietnam) was cut off from the traditional food surplus areas in the south, by 1958 it had achieved food self-sufficiency while industry was developing -- a prospect of success that caused much dismay among US planners, who urged secretly that the US do what it could to retard the economic progress of the Communist Asian states, with its dangerous demonstration effect. They were particularly concerned over the progress in the DRV in comparison to the failures of the US-imposed regime in the south: US intelligence in 1959 expected development in the South to "lag behind that in the North," where economic growth was proceeding and was "concentrated on building for the future." The Kennedy escalation and its aftermath took care of that threat.

After the war, Vietnam was admitted to the IMF, and in a confidential report of 1977, a World Bank team "praised the Vietnamese government's efforts to mobilize its resources and tap its vast potential." The US made short shrift of that danger as well, blocking any assistance and imposing an economic stranglehold. In 1988-1990, Vickery observes further, "in spite of an extremely unfavorable international position, Vietnam had come through with a surprising economic success," leading the IMF to present a "glowing report," the Far Eastern Economic Review reported. The response was George Bush's renewal of the embargo; and in the ideological institutions, a revival of lagging fervor over the abuse we endure at the hands of the criminal aggressors.⁵⁵

There is method in the madness. Apart from the principled opposition to Third World development out of US control, it is important for subject peoples to understand that they dare not raise their heads in the presence of the master. If they do, not only will they be devastated by overwhelming violence, but they will continue to suffer, as long as we deem it in our interests. Current treatment of Nicaragua illustrates the pattern, as of Iraq, where Bush's friend and ally stepped out of line, so we must see to it that tens of thousands of his Iraqi victims die of starvation and disease after the war's end. The West sternly destroys the weapons of mass destruction it provided to this monster when it was profitable and advantageous to do so, while unleashing "the destructive power of another weapon of mass destruction -- the effective withdrawal of food and other necessities from the Iraqi people," two specialists on world hunger observe.⁵⁶ The lower orders must understand their place in a world of order and "stability."

In its editorial on Vietnam marking the Pearl Harbor anniversary, the editors of the Washington Post note the

abiding irony that the United States lost the war in a military sense but ended up imposing a victor's terms for normalization. It could do so because it remained a country representing dominant global values, powerfully influencing the regional balance and the international economy. This is how all the concessions came to be made by Vietnam.

The statement has merit, though a little amplification is in order. The "dominant global values" extolled by the Post editors are the values of those who wield the sword and thereby set the rules.⁵⁷

It would be difficult to find an example in the 500-year conquest as sordid, dishonest, and cowardly as the carefully contrived display of self-pity on the part of the murderous aggressors who destroyed three countries, leaving mountains of corpses and countless others maimed and orphaned, in order to block a political settlement that they knew their clients were too weak to sustain -- a fact that is clear from the internal record, has been developed in detail by military historians, and is recognized even by the most fanatic government "scholars."⁵⁸ The "abiding irony" is that this shameful performance proceeds, untroubled, alongside our musings about the defects of the Japanese psyche.

⁵⁴ On these enlightening and therefore intolerable comparisons, see PEHR, vols. I, II; MC.

⁵⁵ Vickery, Cambodia After the `Peace'. On the internal US documents, see FRS, 31f., 36f.

⁵⁶ Drèze and Gazdar, Hunger and Poverty.

⁵⁷ See note 32. On the belief that the US "lost the war," and its significance, see MC, 241ff.; and below.

⁵⁸ E.g., Douglas Pike. For sources and discussion, see MC, 180f.; PEHR, vol. I, 338f. See RC, ch. 2.3.