Makeshift_Swahili posted:Picked this up for cheap today ($3)
Lots of interviews with veterans apparently. Hopefully plenty of material for troop hate if nothing else.
lol this book has a long interview with democrat superstar Jim Webb
Edited by Chthonic_Goat_666 ()
Just reminded of it reading a James Baldwin thing:
In those days, not so very long ago, when the priests of that church which stands in Rome gave God's blessing to Italian boys being sent out to ravage a defenceless black country - which until that event, incidentally, had not considered itself to be black - it was not possible to believe in a black God. To entertain such a belief would have been to entertain madness. But time has passed, and in that time the Christian has revealed itself as morally bankrupt and politically unstable. The Tunisians were quite right in 1956 - and it was a very significant moment in Western (and African) history - when they countered the French justification for remaining in North Africa with the question 'Are the French ready for self-government?'
from "The Fire Next Time" p. 49
Makeshift_Swahili posted:Makeshift_Swahili posted:
(page 530)
Notice that Karnow underreports the amount of civilians killed at Mylai, which is at least 347 even by the U.S Army’s own admission (no mention of the gang-rapes either). I might go check a later edition of the book when I get the chance because it seems the most egregious error so far (to my untrained eyes).Just checked a 1994 edition and the error was not corrected
one of the most eye-opening posts in this thread imo. i'm almost sorry i'm writing about worthless shit right now.
Makeshift_Swahili posted:I'm moving onto other stuff for a while so I might not really update this thread for a few months
ok ignore this lol, im going through mary mccarthy's stuff i mentioned earlier (which is pretty short) then im gonna tackle alfred mccoy's "Politics Of Heroin" and hopefully some other stuff about opium trade and imperialism. then ill try to return to something broader like Kolko probably.
cars posted:one of the most eye-opening posts in this thread imo. i'm almost sorry i'm writing about worthless shit right now.
to be thorough i've just now checked the index to look at the other instances Karnow mentions Mylai. on page 24 he says "more than three hundred" (better but still not the minimum of 347 lol). Karnow pretty severely downplays the atrocities committed by the us army and i only really noticed these omissions when i got to the obvious one about "a hundred" victims in Mylai on page 530. Mylai in general is mentioned 4 times in the book, probably a total of about 6 sentences are dedicated to it. there's never any in depth description of the episode, if i combine all references to Mylai in Karnow's book I would get a sentence like this:
"The US army indicted Lieutenant William Calley and Sargeant David Mitchell for their roles in the massacre of more than 300 South Vietnamese civilians, including women and children, at a coastal village called Mylai"
anyway, i've got Kill Anything That Moves here and "War Crimes in Vietnam" by Bertrand Russel so ill get more detailed version eventually...
Makeshift_Swahili posted:
from Fanon's Wretched Of The Earth, pages 70-71
MATHIEU
It is an inevitable stage in revolutionary
war; from terrorism, one passes to
insurrection ... as from open guerrilla
warfare one passes to real war, the latter
being the determining factor ...
3RD JOURNALIST
Dien Bien Phu?
from The Battle Of Algiers (1966) go watch it!!!!
on a serious note, it was the first movie that put Morricone on the map and rightfully so
EmanuelaBrolandi posted:In a class i took in college the professor played the battle of algiers and afterwards asked, "do you feel like the film presents the french or the resistance as right?" and there were several people who said the french lol
sometimes i wonder how much people like this are committed imperialist types or if they just see a white face like theirs and figure they're in the right.
french = wimped out of iraq but basically Good People
fln = muslim or something? scary terrorists
Edited by Chthonic_Goat_666 ()
Makeshift_Swahili posted:i want to read this but its never been translated into english
General introduction
This book retraces the history of the role of opium in the finances of French Indochina from the conquest of Cochinchina in 1868-1862, to the beginning of the 20th century, the conclusion of a fifty-year evolution which saw the progressive elaboration of the managed opium system. The Indochinese opium system – a system of "controlled distribution of opium"(1) constitutes in itself a "period of history of drug law, a transitory state on the route to general and absolute prohibition."(1)
From their arrival in Cochinchina, French administrators, first military, then civil, threw themselves at the critical problem of funding, not only of the colonial conquest, but also of the French presence in the region. In fact, for reasons of continental (European) politics, the conquest of Cochinchina was very contested in Paris, which would limit its financial support, causing the Cochinchinese administrators to find sufficient resources "on-site" – a task to which they put themselves to with much pragmatism, inspired, notably, by the financial practices of Southeast Asia.
The question of opium in French Indochina in the 19th century can only be understood with reference to other Southeast Asian countries, and chiefly, China. It is in China where the opium problem was born in the middle of the 19th century; it is from China that the great international campaign against opium would commence, at the beginning of the 20th century. In both of these occasions, the driving force would be the Europeans, most particularly the English who, in the 19th century, for commercial reasons introduced opium by force, and who, a half-century later, under the cover of morality and public hygiene(2), would force China to become prey to grave domestic troubles to eliminate poppy culture.
translating is cool because you get to read the book, but man, this is probably a long book right
I - Culture and Fabrication of Opium in Asia In the Mid 19th Century
Opium, remedy of the traditional pharmacopia
Since the ancient past, opium has been used in medicine, especially in China. This usage has to do with the particular properties of its medical complex composed of a dozen alkaloids, the most important of which is morphine, whose principal virtue is to soothe pain. In the middle of the 19th century, opium was used as an analgesic. Its therapeutic uses were many – in particular, to combat inflammation in pneumonia, peritonitis, or meningitis.(3)
We also had recourse to it for combatting certain fevers, such as malaria, smallpox, and certain types of measles or scarlet fever. Finally, it was the sole remedy to fight chronic dysentery and cholera. In a time when medical knowledge was limited, opium and its derivatives (laudanum, for one) seemed a veritable panacea.
ok shriekingviolet your turn
I haven't exercised my french since high school
shriekingviolet posted:There seems to be an english review on it at JSTOR if anyone has jstor access http://www.jstor.org/stable/2759397
drwhat posted:i thought i would type part of it as a joke but then i got into it. if you want me to look up anything specific though & translate it in here, i'll do it, i like the practice. same goes for whatever else, anyone else, in french
cheers mate 
Makeshift_Swahili posted:I'm reading some of Ho Chi Minh's short articles on marxists.org and he seems to make a point of always mentioning alcohol and opium in the same breath
http://marxists.org/reference/archive/ho-chi-minh/works/1922/07/01.htm
"We will not speak for the time being of the poisoning and degradation of the masses by alcohol and opium of which the colonial government is guilty"
http://marxists.org/reference/archive/ho-chi-minh/works/1922/08/01b.htm
"Under your proconsulate the Annamese people have known true prosperity and real happiness, the happiness of seeing their country dotted all over with an increasing number of spirit and opium shops which, together with firing squads, prisons, ‘democracy’ and all the improved apparatus of modern civilization, are combining to make the Annamese the most advanced of the Asians and the happiest of mortals."
http://marxists.org/reference/archive/ho-chi-minh/works/1923/01/15.htm
"Is it also from an excess of generosity that you are doing all you can to intoxicate the Annamese with your alcohol and stupefy them with your opium?"
.
-Jon Oliver
This book was also serialised by New York Review of Books through 1967 (apparently with a few minor changes). This chapter was printed by them April 20 1967. Just for some context about 400,000 US troops are in South Vietnam at this point (500,000 by the end of the year). The overall thrust of this chapter is mostly about two things; the Americanisation of Saigon ("it resembles a giant PX" p. 13), and the attempted pacification of the rural South Vietnamese population.
Already from the very start we get a detail which I don't think turned up in Karnow:
At the airport in Bangkok, the war greeted the Air France passengers in the form of a strong smell of gasoline, which made us sniff as we breakfasted at a long table, like a delegation, with the Air France flag planted in the middle. Outside, huge Esso tanks were visible behind lattice screens, where US bombers, factory-new, were aligned as if in a salesroom. On the field itself, a few yards from our Caravelle, US cargo planes were warming up for takeoff; US helicopters flitted about among the swallows, while US military trucks made deliveries. The openness of the thing was amazing (the fact that the US was using Thailand as a base for bombing North Vietnam was not officially admitted at the time); you would have thought they would try to camouflage it, I said to a German correspondent, so that the tourists would not see.
(page 11-12, my emphasis added)
Here's a map of major US airforce bases in Thailand from wikipedia:
The one McCarthy would have been at is Don Muang. Here's a tidbit from the same wikipedia article: "During the Vietnam War, about 80% of all USAF air strikes over North Vietnam originated from air bases in Thailand. At its peak in 1969 more airmen were serving in Thailand than were serving in South Vietnam."
Early part of the chapter is just about the way Saigon is being transformed. Corruption, black market goods, prostitution etc etc.
In the field, moreover, the war is not questioned: it is just a fact. The job has to be finished—that is the attitude. In Saigon, the idea that the war can ever be finished appears fantastic: the Americans will be there forever, one feels; if they go, the economy will collapse. What postwar aid program could be conceived—or passed by Congress—that would keep the air in the balloon? And if the Americans go, the middle-class Saigonese think, the Viet Cong will surely come back, in two years, five years, ten, as they come back to a “pacified” hamlet at Têt time, to leave, as it were, a callingcard, a reminder—we are still here. But, at the same time, in Saigon the worth of the American presence, that is, of the war, seems very dubious, since the actual results, in uglification, moral and physical, are evident to all. The American soldier, bumping along in a jeep or a military truck, resents seeing all those Asiatics at the wheels of new Cadillacs. He knows about corruption, often firsthand, having contributed his bit to it, graft, theft of AID and military supplies from the port.
(page 18-19)
The war, they say, is not going to be won in Saigon, nor on the battlefield, but in the villages and hamlets. This idea, by now trite (it was first discovered in Diem’s time and has been rebaptized under a number of names—New Life Hamlets, Rural Construction, Counter Insurgency, Nation-Building, Revolutionary Development, the Hearts and Minds Program), is the main source of inspiration for the various teams of missionaries, military and civilian, who think they are engaged in a crusade. Not just a crusade against Communism, but something positive. Back in the Fifties and early Sixties, the war was presented as an investment: the taxpayer was persuaded that if he stopped Communism now in Vietnam, he would not have to keep stopping it in Thailand, Burma, etc. That was the domino theory, which our leading statesmen today, quite comically, are busy repudiating before Congressional committees—suddenly nobody will admit to ever having been an advocate of it. The notion of a costly investment that will save money in the end had a natural appeal to a nation of homeowners, but now the assertion of an American “interest” in Vietnam has begun to look too speculative as the stake increases (“When is it going to pay off?”) and also too squalid as the war daily becomes more savage and destructive. Hence the “other” war, proclaimed by Johnson in Honolulu, which is simultaneously pictured as a strategy for winning War Number One and as a top priority in itself. Indeed, in Vietnam, there are moments when the “other” war seems to be viewed as the sole reason for the American presence, and it is certainly more congenial to American officials, brimming with public spirit, than the war they are launching from the skies. Americans do not like to be negative, and the “other” war is constructive.
(page 19-20)
The "other war" (pacification of rural elements) and Honolulu stuff is referring to a conference which occurred in February 1966 between President Johnson and South Vietnamese Premier Nguyen Cao Ky. Here's a statement from Johnson at the time:
Thus, we are fighting this war. It is a military war, a war for the hearts of our people. We cannot win one without winning the other. But the war for the hearts of the people is more than a military tactic. It is a moral principle. For this we shall strive as we fight to bring about a true social revolution.
At the time of writing the "other war", winning the hearts & minds of South Vietnamese rural elements, was apparently a hot topic. Office of Civilian Operations was set up with this pacification purpose in mind:
The briefing official is enthusiastic, as he points out the progress that has been made, when, for example, the activities organized under AID were reorganized under OCO (Office of Civilian Operations). You stare at the chart on the office wall in which to you there is no semblance of logic or sequence (“Why,” you wonder, “should Youth Affairs be grouped under Urban Development?”), and the official rubs his hands with pleasure: “First we organized it vertically. Now we’ve organized horizontally!” He does not say that one of the main reasons for the creation of the OCO was to provide a cover for certain CIA activities. Out in the field, you learn from some disgruntled officer that the AID representatives, who are perhaps now OCO representatives without knowing it, have not been paid for six months.
(page 21)
OCO was a recent creation (November 1966) and apparently by May 1967 it was already transformed into something called "CORDS" (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support). All this alphabet soup agency shit is gonna do my head in. Would have liked more than a throwaway line about it being CIA cover. Much of the pacification stuff was medical care but there's also an ideological function to it all:
These springy, zesty, burning-eyed warriors, military and civilian, engaged in AID or Combined Action (essentially pacification) stir faraway memories of American college presidents of the fund-raising type; their diction is peppery with oxymoron (“When peace breaks out,” “Then the commodities started to hit the beach”), like a college president’s address to an alumni gathering. They see themselves in fact as educators, spreading the American way of life, a new propaganda fide. When I asked an OCO man in Saigon what his groups actually did in a Vietnamese village to prepare—his word—the people for elections, he answered curtly, “We teach them Civics 101.”
(page 26, my emphasis added)
Neocolonialism, economic pacification and ideological pacification:
The American taxpayer who thinks that aid means help has missed the idea. Aid is, first of all, to achieve economic stability within the present system, i.e., political stability for the present ruling groups. Loans are extended, under the counterpart fund arrangement, to finance Vietnamese imports of American capital equipment (thus aiding, with the other hand, American industry). Second, aid is education. Distribution of canned goods (instill new food habits), distribution of seeds, fertilizer, chewinggum and candy (the Vietnamese complain that the GI’S fire candy at their children, like a spray of bullets), lessons in sanitation, hog-raising, and croprotation. The program is designed, not just to make Americans popular but to shake up the Vietnamese, as in some “stimulating” freshman course where the student learns to question the “prejudices” implanted in him by his parents. “We’re trying to wean them away from the old barter economy and show them a market economy. Then they’ll really go.”
“We’re teaching them free enterprise,” explains a breathless JUSPAO official in the grim town of Phu Cuong. He is speaking of the “refugees” from the Iron Triangle, who were forcibly cleared out of their hamlets, which were then burned and leveled, during Operation Cedar Falls (“Clear and Destroy”). They had just been transferred into a camp, hastily constructed by the ARVN with tin roofs painted red and white, to make the form, as seen from the air, of a giant Red Cross—1,651 women, 3,754 children, 582 men, mostly old, who had been kindly allowed to bring some of their furniture and pots and pans and their pigs and chickens and sacks of their hoarded rice; their cattle had been transported for them, on barges, and were now sickening on a dry, stubbly, sandy plain. “We’ve got a captive audience!” the official continued excitedly. “This is our big chance!”
(page 26-27)
McCarthy gives you the sense that the entire pacification strategy is a farce. Much of the programs are ineffective (i.e. schools with not enough available teachers - page 29), McCarthy states they're often for American's own sense of self-worth more than the actual Vietnamese (page 37).
Edited by Chthonic_Goat_666 ()
For many of the soldiers in the field and especially the younger officers, the Viet Cong is the only Vietnamese worthy of notice. “If we only had them fighting on our side, instead of the goddamned Arvin (Army of the Vietnamese Republic), we’d win this war” is a sentiment the newspapermen like to quote. I never heard it said in those words, but I found that you could judge an American by his attitude toward the Viet Cong. If he called them “Charlie” (cf. John Steinbeck), he was either an infatuated civilian, a low-grade primitive in uniform, or a fatuous military mouthpiece.
(page 17)
All over Vietnam, wherever peace has broken out, if only in the form of a respite, Marine and army officers are proud to show the schoolhouses their men are building or rebuilding for the hamlets they are patrolling, rifle on shoulder. At Rach Kien, in the delta (a Pentagon pilot-project of a few months ago), I saw the little schoolhouse Steinbeck wrote about, back in January, and the blue school desks he had seen the soldiers painting. They were still sitting outside, in the sun; the school was not yet rebuilt more than a month later—they were waiting for materials. In this hamlet, everything seemed to have halted, as in “The Sleeping Beauty,” the enchanted day Steinbeck left; nothing had advanced. Indeed, the picture he sketched, of a ghost town coming back to civic life, made the officers who had entertained him smile—“He used his imagination.”
(page 29)
Edited by Chthonic_Goat_666 ()
philcag = Philippine Civic Action Group
In the field, you are actually able to see medical teams at work, setting up temporary dispensaries under the trees in the hamlets for the weekly or bi-weekly “sick call”—distributing medicines, tapping, listening, sterilizing, bandaging; the most common diagnosis is suspected tuberculosis. In Tay Ninh Province, I watched a Philcag (Filipino) medical team at work in a Buddhist hamlet. One doctor was examining a very thin old man, who was stripped to the waist; probably tubercular, the doctor told me, writing something on a card which he gave to the old man. “What happens next?” I wanted to know. Well the old man would go to the province hospital for an X-ray (that was the purpose of the card), and if the diagnosis was positive, then treatment should follow. I was impressed. But (as I later learned at a briefing) there are only sixty civilian hospitals in South Vietnam—for nearly 16 million people—so that the old man’s total benefit, most likely, from the open-air consultation was to have learned, gratis, that he might be tubercular.
Across the road, some dentist’s chairs were set up, and teeth were being pulled, very efficiently, from women and children of all ages. I asked about the toothbrushes I had heard about in Saigon. The Filipino major laughed. “Yes, we have distributed them. They use them as toys.” Then he reached into his pocket—he was a kindly young man with children of his own—and took out some money for all the children who had gathered round to buy popsicles (the local equivalent) from the popsicle man. Later I watched the Filipino general, a very handsome tall man with a cropped head, resembling Yul Brynner, distribute Têt gifts and candy to children in a Cao Dai orphanage and be photographed with his arm around a little blind girl. A few hours earlier, he had posed distributing food in a Catholic hamlet—“Free World” surplus items, such as canned cooked beets. The photography, I was told, would help sell the Philcag operation to the Assembly in Manila, where some leftist elements were trying to block funds for it. Actually, I could not see that the general was doing any harm—unless not doing enough is harm, in which case we are all guilty—and he was more efficient than other Civic Action leaders. His troops had just chopped down a large section of jungle (we proceeded through it in convoy, wearing bullet-proof vests and bristling with rifles and machine-guns, because of the VC), which was going to be turned into a New Life Hamlet for resettling refugees. They had also built a school, which we stopped to inspect, finding, to the general’s surprise, that it had been taken over by the local district chief for his office headquarters.
(page 23-25)
(pages 102-103)
around $38 million was spent by the US on this philcag program (page 103), about 4 times as much as the Filipino government themselves spent on it (page 105). apparently a lot of this money went missing, probably to Marcos cronies?; "How the money was disbursed and if it was recieved by the Philcag contingent could not be established" (page 106). apparently the US was interested in using military bases in the Philippines in return for all this patronage (of which the philcag program formed only a part) (page 106).
Edited by Chthonic_Goat_666 ()
dipshit420 posted:, to be fair
-Jon Oliver
in the one segment of his show that ive seen he said this 9001 times. its like an anime-style vocal tic or something
Makeshift_Swahili posted:Karnow pretty severely downplays the atrocities committed by the us army and i only really noticed these omissions when i got to the obvious one about "a hundred" victims in Mylai on page 530.
another thing Karnow downplays which i didnt really think about until now is US use of defoliants. there's one captioned picture that i've already posted and other than that there's only one indexed mention of agent orange. it's weird how you, personally, can be aware of this stuff, but when you're reading dozens of pages of whitehouse back-and-forth it doesn't even come to mind that it's missing.
edit: there's at least one other mention of defoliants, maybe i'm being unfair and it just wasn't indexed well for whatever reason.
Edited by Chthonic_Goat_666 ()
Edited by Chthonic_Goat_666 ()
Also published by NY Review Of Books May 4 1967.
This chapter is mostly about conditions in refugee camps, hamlets, hospitals etc in the areas McCarthy visited. As you might expect they're mostly terrible. Mary McCarthy first talks about the refugee camp at Phu Cuong in Tay Ninh province (same place as in the video from my last post). I tried to pull up a map but Phu Cuong seems to be a very common name for places/things in Vietnam? ::eliothiggins:: Also Tay Ninh province seems to have changed borders multiple times (expands less to the south now?). Here's a map I found on the internet:
Anyway, just north of Phu Cuong was the "Iron Triangle", an area which heavily supported the NLF. This is all relatively close to Saigon (south east of Tay Ninh) so its an area of concern for the US. Operation Cedar Falls happened in January 1967 so McCarthy is writing very shortly after.
These people, obviously, are not refugees at all in the dictionary sense of the word (“A person who flees his home or country to seek refuge elsewhere, as in time of war, political or religious persecution, etc.”). They did not flee from the B-52s, though they might well have; they were moved by US troops, who were systematically setting fire to their houses. Thanks to world press and television coverage, nobody could claim that they had “voted with their feet” to join the Free World. They did not use their feet; they were packed into Army trucks and loaded onto boats. And here begins the story of how with nerve and enterprise you can convert a liability into an asset, not just by word-manipulation but by the kind of action that talks. The Americans moved in squarely to meet unfavorable publicity with favorable publicity.
(page 44-45)
The camp at Phu Cuong has become a "showcase", with journalists flown in by the military (page 45).
The hero of the Phu Cuong story is American know-how, American generosity, Uncle Sam with candy in his pockets. And Uncle Sam, like so many benefactors, is misunderstood. At lunch in his house, the JUSPAO official I spoke of in my last article expressed hurt and bewilderment over a New York Times story about Phu Cuong. The reporter had interviewed several refugees and printed what they told him; he quoted one woman as saying that she wished she were dead. “But that’s natural,” I objected. “Her husband had been killed by the Americans, and she’d lost her home and everything she had.” “He ought to have given a cross-section,” the man said in injured tones. “It creates the wrong picture of the camp.”
(page 48-49)
There's also informants placed among the refugees in case they get the wrong idea.... "an indispensable measure, said the advisers, to prevent agitation and propaganda: after all, these people were Viet Cong dependents, and some troublemakers in their midst were trying to stir up a protest-strike" (page 47)
There's some footage of the camp here:
http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/vietnam-287a79-phu-cuong-refugee-philip-carolin-robert-shea-binh-duong-province-south-vietnam
Later McCarthy visits areas which are not "showcases". Description of a refugee camp in Cam Chau:
Skin diseases were rampant, especially among the children, diseases of the scalp, eye diseases, gross signs of malnutrition, bad teeth, stained by betel-chewing and reduced, often, to stumps. Most of the refugees (as usual women and children and a few grandfathers) were dirty—how could they wash? In contrast to the new American-made seersuckers and ginghams of Phu Cuong, the pajamas of the children here were old, torn, discolored. The daily food allowance of ten piasters per family, supplemented irregularly by a little rice, said the doctor, was below subsistence requirements. Some families had begun straggly little vegetable patches—mainly lettuce plants, cabbage, and mustard—that were growing haphazardly amidst the refuse. This would help a little. And there were a few pigs, chickens, and the ducklings. But except for this spasmodic gardening, there was no work for these people—no fields they could plant, nothing.
(page 56)
Aside from the awful conditions of the camps and all the waste the Americans have brought with them (food packaging, military waste/wreckage etc) (page 59-60, page 62) a main theme of this chapter is McCarthy's sympathy for US troops, who she regards as well-intentioned but naive (page 63) and misled by their superiors:
One example of this revealing blindness can illustrate. In the OCO offices in Saigon, I was offered a freshly typed list of Viet Cong acts of terror committed during the previous week; as the reader must have gathered, this material seems to be the favorite reading of our spokesmen. That and infiltration figures, to give the “background.” As I looked down the list I noticed that it included an attack on a US Army post! “Is that terrorism?” I wondered, pointing. The official studied the item. “No. It doesn’t belong there,” he admitted, poring over the type-sheet with a mystified air, like one awakening from a dream. “We’ll have to correct that,” he added briskly. It was clear that he had offered me those figures in good faith, having seen nothing wrong with them; to him an attack on a US army unit, even in wartime, was dastardly.
At present the terror statistics issued to the newspapers are blandly including kidnappings and “murders” of Rural Construction workers, which sounds very atrocious if you do not know (as everyone in Saigon does) that Rural Construction is the old name for Revolutionary Development—the “workers” are para-military elements trained and drilled in a special school and sent to “cleanse” (US word) “pacified” hamlets; of each team of fifty-nine, thirty-four are armed for security purposes, i.e., to repel a Viet Cong attack. The sudden switch to the old name is like an alert to the press to watch out for the oncoming lie. Why, you ask, are they cooking these particular statistics? What is behind it? What are they up to now?
(page 65-66)
(page 439-440)
At noon, a Revolutionary Development cadre, in black pajamas, was supervising the rice distribution. The free market had been introduced—a novelty, it was said, to these peasant women and old peasant men. Merchants from the town came to sell fresh vegetables and buy canned and packaged products accumulated by the camp inhabitants, who received a daily ration as well as welfare payments and cash for what labor they did. In the beginning, the merchants had cheated the camp people, who did not know the fair market price of American surplus products, but the Americans had quickly put a stop to that. The evacuees were learning to make bricks out of mud, water, and a little cement for the supports of their future homes, using an American molding-process called Cinvaram—all over Vietnam, wherever the Americans were “pacifying,” there was Cinvaram, a singularly ugly gray brick.
(page 46 in McCarthy)
You can see the cinvaram stuff prominently in the video I posted just before ( http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/vietnam-287a79-phu-cuong-refugee-philip-carolin-robert-shea-binh-duong-province-south-vietnam )
Edited by Chthonic_Goat_666 ()
Edited by Chthonic_Goat_666 ()
also appeared in the May 18 1967 New York Review Of Books
Chapter covers connections between US academia, CIA and South Vietnamese government/army... also the Chieu Hoi program (psywar designed to generate Viet Cong defectors) Some good shit but McCarthy kinda loses focus as the chapter progresses. Still there's some interesting stuff that I hope will come up more in other books...
Here comes details on potential CIA activities (underway before the war proper)
Right after the Geneva Accords, the para-military professors began moving into Vietnam, the first being Diem’s inventor, Professor Wesley Fishel of Michigan State. But as long as Eisenhower was in office, the academic expertise on Vietnam remained rather old-fogeyish, like the prudent Eisenhower himself. Though the CIA virtually took over Michigan State University to train a Vietnamese police force and to form Vietnamese adepts in Political Science and Public Administration, this, after all, was a classic colonial practice.
(page 73)
There's a funny follow-up to the above paragraph I'll get to in a bit...
It took the New Frontier, though, to really update American “thinking” on Vietnam. A fresh look at the situation revealed the need for brand-new tactics with brand-new names: counter-insurgency, special warfare. The notion of counter-insurgency in reality was borrowed from elite French officers who used it in Algeria - with what results, we know. The Army created its Special Forces—the Green Berets—whose task was to combine unconventional fighting (counter-guerrilla activity) with political savvy. The Vietnamese, separate but equal, got their Special Forces—the Red Berets—a counter-terror group wearing leopard-spotted uniforms with a tiger’s head on the breast-pocket; they are still in action, bringing the severed heads of guerrillas or putative guerrillas into a pacified hamlet to show the shocked American colonel.
(page 74)
I'd be interested to see if there really is a continuity between French counter-insurgency in Algeria and American tactics in Vietnam. McCarthy simply makes the claim without elaborating.
The same year—1961—that the Special Forces were created, the Staley Plan was devised by a Stanford economist, Eugene Staley, whose name is now identified with Strategic Hamlets, though his Plan, in fact, was much more comprehensive and undertook a complete restyling of the Vietnamese economy, the political struggle, and the AID program.
No ordinary desk official in Washington could have imagined the Staley Plan. The idea of Strategic Hamlets was not new in itself; Diem and his brother Nhu had founded agrovilles—basically fortified settlements—which at one time bore the name of Camps of the Just Cause. But Staley perfected the agrovilles. With a professor’s fondness for the diagram, he divided the country into yellow zones, blue zones, red zones, the yellow zones being governmental (available for US aid), the blue dubious, and the red VC. His plan was to transfer the population, wherever movable, into Prosperity Zones, which were to contain 15,000 model hamlets, for a starter, all heavily fortified and surrounded by barbed wire. With the enthusiastic cooperation of General Maxwell Taylor (who is still testifying before the Senate as an authority on Vietnam), about 2,500 Staleyized hamlets were actually built. Life in them was diagrammed down to the last detail. Everyone was obliged to purchase and wear a uniform—four different color combinations, according to age and sex—and to carry two identity cards, one for moving about in the hamlet and the other for leaving it. The gates were closed by a guard every night at seven o’clock and opened at six in the morning. Persons consenting to be resettled in a strategic hamlet had their houses burned and crops sprayed with poison chemicals, so as to leave a razed area behind for the Viet Cong—this was the first wide-spread application of the science of chemistry to the political struggle. The US government paid compensation, of course.
Those who did not agree to relocation were removed forcibly and their villages burned and sprayed anyway; some reluctant peasants and village elders were executed, as examples, by the Vietnamese army. Inside the hamlets, strict political control was exercised; executions took place here too. The settlers were gouged for special taxes and other arbitrary impositions; the compensation money was not turned over to them in many instances. They were ordered to get any relations they had in the red zones to join them in the hamlet within three months; if they failed to recruit them, they were punished. Professor Staley, no doubt, was not responsible for the excesses of the program as implemented; he had only drawn a totalitarian blueprint for the Vietnamese and American advisers to follow, based on his experience of the country.
The Staley Plan proved to be the greatest gift the US gave the Viet Cong. Naturally revolts broke out in the strategic hamlets; sometimes the settlers put fire to them. When Diem fell, the program was dropped, and Professor Staley apparently went to Limbo, to join Professor Fishel. No one mentions them any more. But in fact the Strategic Hamlet idea reappeared, in less draconic form, in the Rural Construction program, which failed and was replaced by the Revolutionary Development program.
So McCarthy segues back to two current programs, Revolutionary Development and Chieu Hoi. Revolutionary Development are South Vietnamese anti-communist cadres that are assigned to hamlets:
Each team, when it went into a hamlet (where it would spend three to six months), would be given ninety-eight “works” to accomplish; thirty-four cadres (this figure is sometimes given as thirty-three) would be detailed to security, nineteen to general staff, one to agriculture, one to cooperatives, one to construction and public works, one to public health, one to education and culture, one to grievance and public investigation. Given this division of labor, it was not surprising that I had never been able to see the RD cadres actually doing anything in a hamlet, except lounging around with a weapon or eating. Yet their training was evidently successful in instilling an elite spirit, to the extent that complaints of their “arrogance” and “insolence” are mentioned even in Vietnamese government reports.
(page 81-82)
The idea of the Chieu Hoi program is not just to cause wide-scale desertions from the Viet Cong by loudspeakers broadcasting from planes and helicopters and by pamphlet drops, with the usual promises of money and good treatment—a natural enough proceeding in a civil war—but to turn every deserter into a defector by “re-educating” him in a camp. The Chieu Hoi centers are even more depressing than the refugee camps, although they are much less crowded and do not lack water and elementary sanitation. A Hoi Chanh or “returnee,” once he turns himself in, becomes a prisoner condemned to a forty-five-to-sixty-day stretch for having “chosen freedom.” He is finger-printed, interrogated (“The informing they do is on a purely voluntary basis,” the American adviser emphasizes), indoctrinated, and finally released into society with a set of identity papers. In the Chieu Hoi camps I saw, which resembled old-fashioned reform schools, the inmates were roaming dully about the yard or simply lying listless on their bunks; one or two were writing letters. In theory, each defector receives vocational training (indeed a job is promised him by the loud-speakers), but the only evidence of this that was visible in one camp was a Hoi Chanh sitting in a barber’s chair, having his hair cut by another Hoi Chanh, while, across the small dirty room, two tailor’s apprentices were cutting out a pajama; in the other camp, it was Têt, and no one was doing anything, but there was no sign of equipment or tools to work with.
The Americans agree that the vocational program is not “rolling”; one explanation given is that the defectors are coming in so fast that they are overtaxing the facilities—another of the “problems of success.” And the job prospects of the Hoi Chanh, trained or not, are bad. He re-enters society with the stigma of having been a Viet Cong, to which is added the stigma of treachery. The Americans at one time hoped to organize an army of defectors (on the Bay of Pigs model, no doubt), with colonels, captains, and other ranks; this, it was argued, would give the defectors “status.” But the thought did not appeal to the Vietnamese Army.
The most active part of the day in the Chieu Hoi camps is spent in indoctrination classes, where the defectors are supposedly decontaminated of VC ideology. Yet it seems that quite often the first they learn of the Viet Cong program is in these sessions, and many find it attractive—which may account for the regular one per cent that defect back at the end of the training period.
(page 92-93)
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Fishel (in the photo above with Diem), the guy McCarthy mentioned as the "inventor" of Diem sent an angry letter to New York Review Of Books. I'll quote the important parts:
It was especially flattering to learn that I had “invented” Ngo Dinh Diem, but that is an honor I must disavow. Diem was known and respected by the Vietnamese long before I or any other American had met him. In fact, Ho Chi Minh had offered him the Vice Presidency in his government four times before I appeared on the scene. Bao Dai, furthermore, had tried to induce Diem to head his government several times, but Diem had refused because neither Bao Dai nor his French sponsors would accord a non-Communist Vietnam the independence which was Diem’s sine qua non for accepting office.
{...}
As for Miss McCarthy’s remarks about Michigan State University, the CIA, and myself, this is a classic example of how one man’s charges, however effectively refuted they may be, are picked up and repeated by another person, and another, and yet another, elaborated upon and embellished, until, in this ridiculous example, she writes that “the CIA virtually took over Michigan State University to train a Vietnamese police force and to form Vietnamese adepts in Political Science and Public Administration….” In fact, there was never at any time any overt or covert connection between MSU and the CIA; there was no contract nor even an informal relationship. Except for five training officers among the 23 members of the police training division of the MSU project in Vietnam, who had been hired away from US Government agencies to train Vietnamese police (civil police, not secret police) in counter-subversive organization and techniques, no member of the MSU project—including myself—was ever employed by or made a consultant to the CIA, to the best of my knowledge. Furthermore, there was at no time any passage of funds, direct or indirect, from the CIA to MSU, nor was there at any time any “spying” activity permitted, or even contemplated.
Wesley R. Fishel
Professor of Political Science
Michigan State University
East Lansing
And here is Mary McCarthy's rebuttal:
I didn’t mean that Professor Fishel invented Diem out of whole cloth. He had to have something to work with. It is true that the Bao Dai had offered Diem the premiership twice and that Ho had offered him a post in his government, in 1946, when Ho was looking for nationalist backing. According to Bernard Fall (The Two Viet-Nams), the post was the Ministry of the Interior. Fall also cites an interesting fact: that Diem’s name never figured in a sort of Who’s Who in Indochina, a red book published every year till 1943 by the French Governor General, listing leaders and leader-material; three of Diem’s brothers, including Nhu, were listed. This may prove how stupid the French were or how little known Diem was. In any case, Diem as “the man of providence” was an American invention; he was put into power on American insistence and kept there on American insistence. All authorities I am aware of are agreed on this. It is generally agreed too that his meeting with Professor Fishel in Tokyo in 1950 (when he had just got the brush-off from General MacArthur) was what put him on the map. His chief palace advisers, aside from members of his family, when he came into power, were Professor Fishel and Colonel (now General) Lansdale of the CIA. See Donald Lancaster, for instance (The Emancipation of French Indo-China), on Diem’s lack of local support, which Lancaster accounts for partly by his long absence in the United States during the war against the French. Robert Shaplen contributes a biographical note that may explain the instant attraction between the two men when they met in Tokyo: Diem was a student of communism. As early as 1925, as a French provincial official, he became alerted to the danger of communist subversion and “immersed himself” in communist studies. The French took no interest in Diem’s expertise, but with the Americans it was love at first sight.
{...}
Professor Fishel is right when he objects to my statement “the CIA virtually took over Michigan State University,…” etc. That is a big exaggeration. In fact, the ICA (a US government agency for international cooperation) made an open contract with MSU involving only fifty-four professors, 200 Vietnamese assistants, and 25 million dollars. I think this was a CIA inspired project but I cannot prove it. What has been attested, though, by other members of the program is the presence of a CIA nucleus—the five men alluded to by Professor Fishel, some of whom, according to one MSU professor, were given faculty rank. These men, listed on the University chart as “Police Administration Specialists,” were training an internal security police force, modeled on the FBI. I don’t know what Professor Fishel means by using “civil” police as an antonym of secret police; this must be more semantics. Undercover agents of an internal security police force are engaged in intelligence work; they are political policemen. If there were such a thing as a civil police force as opposed to a criminal police force and a political police, they would have to be traffic cops. Is that what Professor Fishel is trying to say?
Finally, I was too hasty in assuming that Professor Fishel was in Limbo. He is still active and operating from quite another address—234 Fifth Avenue—as I discovered from a money-raising appeal that came through the mail the other day from the American Friends of Vietnam, Incorporated, with Wesley R. Fishel on their letterhead as first vice-chairman. “Dear Friend,” it said, “The nature of the Communist threat to South Vietnam has never been clearer than it is today…. We call upon you and other Americans to educate our countrymen to the essential facts concerning the situation in South Vietnam.” Underneath, in small italics: “Contributions are deductible from taxable income.”
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Makeshift_Swahili posted:page 86 "You never know whether someone you meet in Vietnam is a CIA agent or just a product of CIA thought." lol
Nice
(page 218)
But why does Bao Dai percieve Diem as "America's challenge to France"? Just because he visited USA for a couple years?...
In Karnow's book Fishel doesn't turn up at all (or at least isn't indexed - i aint readin' the fucken book again). The other person McCarthy cites as an important Diem adviser is Lansdale, Karnow acknowledges Lansdale's influence with Diem but says "his clout has been exaggerated by both his admirers and critics" (page 220). Check my summary of Chapter 6 for some of Lansdale's activities (pages 221-222)
Edited by Chthonic_Goat_666 ()