Commercial Censorship?
“Dear Nicholas Roberts:
I presume you understand that Chomsky and I greatly
expanded and improved Counterrevolutionary Violence in the two volume set we
put out in 1979 under the general heading of the Political Economy of Human Rights.
In the first volume, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, we had
a Prefatory Note that describes the suppression of CRV.
If you want to put CRV onto the Web, it is important
that you add a prefatory note pointing out that CRV was greatly expanded and
improved in a two volume set, the first volume, [title], the second volume
After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial
Ideology, both still available from South End Press.
If you do
that, maybe adding something about the Prefatory Note on the History of the
Suppression of the First Edition, you have our permission to go ahead.
Sincerely, Edward Herman”
The Web Edition
Web-Publishing Team
Scan by Richard Wann
Scan Edit by Paul Dagarin
Mark-up by Healy
Published by Nicholas Roberts
Copyright
Copyright 1973 and 2004 by Noam Chomsky and Edward S.
Herman. May not be reprinted without permission.
COUNTER - REVOLUTIONARY VIOLENCE: BLOODBATHS IN FACT
AND PROPAGANDA by
Noam Chomsky
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Edward S. Herman
University of Pennsylvania
With a Preface by
Richard A. Falk
Princeton University
A Warner Modular Publication
Title Code: CHCR Module 57 (1973) pp.1-46
Copyright 1973 by Warner Modular Publications, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may
by reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by
any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise,without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 73-13042
George HARPOOTLIAN, Associate Publisher
SUGGESTED CITATION Noam Chomsky and Edward S Herman,
“Counter-Revolutionary Violence: Bloodbaths in Fact and Propaganda,” Andover,
Mass.: Warner Modular Publications, Inc., Module 57 (1973), pp.1-46.
All original publications appear first as separate
modules. Most modules will appear in one collection; many will appear in several.
To facilitate research use, all modules are numbered serially, and each module
carries the same number in all incarnations.
(Andover:
Warner Modular Publications, 1973)
The original source for this text is taken from: http://web.archive.org/web/20040611022032/mass-multi-media.com/CRV/
For a note on the reaction to this text by Warner
Communications seeT:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-Revolutionary_Violence_-_Bloodbaths_in_Fact_%26_Propaganda
CONTENTS
1)
Preface
2)
Introduction
3)
Benign and Constructive
Bloodbaths
a)
Post-Colonial Rot
and Counterrevolutionary Terror
b)
Thailand: A Corrupt “Firm
Base”
c)
Benign and
Constructive Bloodbaths: East Pakistan, Burundi, and Indonesia
d)
Repacification in
the Philippines
4)
Constructive
Bloodbaths in Vietnam
a)
French and Diemist
Bloodbaths
b)
The Overall U.S.
Assault as the Primary Bloodbath
c)
“Operation Speedy
Express”
d)
The 43-Plus My Lais
of the South Korean Mercenaries
e)
Phoenix: A Case
Study of Indiscriminate “Selective” Terror
5)
Nefarious and
Mythical Bloodbaths in Vietnam
a)
Revolutionary Terror
in Theory and Practice
b)
Mythical Bloodbaths
in Vietnam
c)
Land Reform in the
Mid-Fifties
d)
The Hue Massacres of
1968
6)
Accelerating
Bloodbath in South Vietnam
a)
The Thieu Police
State
b)
Saigon's Political
Prisoners and the Accelerating Bloodbath
7)
Appendix
a)
Report by Jane and
David Barton, “Indochina - Quang Ngai Province Five Months After The Peace
Agreement” (June 20,1973)
8)
Notes
PREFACE
The American public will be slow to connect My Lai to
Watergate, and yet that link is embedded in the political consciousness of
those who are guiding the destinies of this country. Just as the Watergate
burglaries of the Democratic National Committee headquarters were but a stitch
in the fabric of illegal and criminal government, so My Lai was no more than a
particularly horrible example of the American “game plan” in the Vietnam War.
The gruesome sequence of atrocity, frantic cover-up, unintended expose, hypocritical
expression of humanitarian concern by commanders and rulers, and desperate
public relations efforts to confine the blame to the triggermen is manifest in
both settings.
Americans are fascinated by the Mafia, but very few
citizens of this country believed until recently that the brutalities and
deceptions of organized crime were also characteristic of government
operations. We can be thankful, I suppose, that the United States government is
not yet as efficient as the Mafia (whose skill has been built up over
generations and whose personnel have been conditioned from birth) when it comes
to hiding the traces of their crimes, cutting short the investigative trail,
and screening out the occasional honest and principled operative.
This monograph by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman,
both renowned and careful scholars who have struggled over the years to present
the truth about the Vietnam War, makes a major contribution to our
understanding of the present posture of American foreign policy in general and
the character of the persisting involvement in Indochina in particular. Their
account of the role of falsification in official presentations of facts and
interpretations designed to maintain public support and discredit anti-Vietnam
criticism is part of a larger canvas of distortion that is characteristic of
U.S. policy toward poorer and less fortunate peoples throughout Asia, Africa,
and Latin America. The specific subject of this book is the systematic
manipulation of the facts surrounding war atrocities, but its implications are
far broader. Such manipulation of horror stories seems cynical beyond easy
belief, even for those of us who have gradually become hardened critics of
government behavior.
Chomsky and Herman document beyond serious question
the extent to which the United States government has engaged in and hidden
crimes on our side in the Indochina War and fabricated a bloodbath myth to
explain why we must continue to kill on a massive scale. Such a pattern of
double deceit intends to convince the American public that we fight as men of
conscience to protect our threatened friends from a horribly cruel enemy who is
poised to massacre.
Professors Chomsky and Herman present convincing
evidence on four principal concerns:
First, that this double deceit has been a systematic
element in the official policy of our government over the years of American
involvement in Indochina, although it has been carried to new extremes of
blatancy during the Nixon presidency.
Secondly, that this pattern of distortion is imposed
so effectively that it even envelops most citizens who oppose the war.
Thirdly, that America's world role as chief sponsor
of counter-insurgency enterprises in the Third World has led beyond the
distortion of information and included active participation, directly and
indirectly, in the actual perpetration of atrocities.
Fourthly, that these morbid realities of distortion
and participation have led to a widespread poisoning of the language of
political discourse and the overall ethics of governance, making the public
swallow official lies and numbing euphemisms about bloodletting of the innocent
as integral to national security.
Indeed, it almost seems as if a prominent war critic
loses his credibility if he questions or rejects official orthodoxy on
questions of atrocity and bloodbath. It is noteworthy that such widely
acclaimed and influential war critics as Bernard Fall and Frances FitzGerald
blandly transmit official deceptions on such issues as the land reform purge of
1956 in North Vietnam or the 1968 Hue massacre. I do not mean to suggest that
these usually reliable authors are willing instruments of such deceptions, but
only that the official lie has been told so commandingly that it is troublesome
for even honest and dedicated journalists to set the record straight. It is
also well to acknowledge that the real facts are so provocative on these touchy
issues that most efforts to depict them offend mainstream readers and reviewers
and encourages the ironic reaction that a particular author has gone “overboard”
and is no longer to he trusted. It is positively Orwellian to appreciate that
one's credibility as a war critic has depended more on adhering to official
false- hoods than on their documented exposure and correction.
What is at stake here is more than the possibility of
reasoned discourse in a liberal democracy. The veil of secrecy and deception
used to invert the identity of criminal and victim in Vietnam also underlies
the basic pattern of American involvement everywhere in the Third World, and,
as well, characterizes government relations with minority peoples in the United
States. It remains almost impossible to make this case of pervasive distortion
in any influential forum and, as a consequence, there is almost no present hope
of repudiating these most reprehensible aspects of American foreign policy. The
people who brought us the Indochina War are each day quietly achieving the same
disastrous results in a score of other hapless countries around the world.
Chomsky and Herman make it clear that this wider orbit of terror, sponsored and
financed by Washington, persists even in Vietnam despite the illusion that we
have ended our involvement there. And who would dare speculate confidently on
the extent of our role in the daily horrors inflicted on opponents of
repressive regimes in such countries as Greece, the Dominican Republic, Brazil,
Uruguay, South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, South Africa, Iran?
Richard Nixon is a President who claims that it is a
prerogative of his office to bomb foreign countries day after day in secret, to
falsify Defense Department reports, and then to authorize “national security”
wiretaps on his highest aides when such information is leaked to the press.
Even now, amid the furor over Watergate, Nixon refuses to disclose the grisly
statistics on sorties, tonnage, and targets in the Cambodia air war. Perhaps we
can understand President Nixon's reluctance to release information by
considering the explanation given by Mrs. Merry Dawson for her son's (Capt.
Donald Dawson) unwillingness to pilot any further B-52 missions over Cambodia: “He
felt they weren't bombing anything but people.” The long history of
Congressional and public acquiescence in the distortion and suppression of
truth has taken its toll. One consequence is that all elements in the governing
process are disabled and the polity as a whole dispirited. The moral rot is so
widely dispersed by now that it seems likely that a full revelation of the ugly
truth about American bombing in Cambodia would be greeted by one more shrug of
the shoulders, as if genocidal policies are just about what we have come to
expect from our leaders. Unless we can overcome this sense of helplessness and
indifference there is no prospect at all that the forces of evil which have held
sway for so long can be removed from power, or at least dissuaded from
following their impulses.
Indeed, when we audit the bloody balancesheet of
counter-insurgency, as Chomsky and Herman have done, we realize that “the White
House horrors” associated with the domestic “pacification” work of “the
plumbers' is virtually benign by comparison to the catalogue of White House
horrors we ignore or accept as routine in foreign relations. Surely Nixon's
list of enemies is child's play compared with the monthly execution lists of
the Phoenix Program in South Vietnam. There is a danger - I wouldn't yet
describe it as a plan - abetted by those sensible men who write editorials and
headlines for the New York Times, that we will mobilize all of our moral
energies of disgust and reform in relation to the Watergate agenda while
practically winking at our official complicity in the bloody deeds of our
friends and helpmates in repressive regimes around the world.
In addition to worrying about the exact dimensions of
Richard Nixon's involvement in the Watergate burglary - which in this wider
perspective can be dismissed as “a third-rate burglary” - we should insist that
a Senate Select Committee also examine the compelling charge made against Nixon
by Prince Norodom Sihanouk:
We formally accuse him of being the sole person
responsible for the war ... He is the arch criminal with the death of tens of
thousands of Cambodians on his conscience. (New York Times, July 12, 1973)
Not to mention tens of thousands more in Thailand,
South Vietnam, and North Vietnam! In light of such grim realities, the “gentleman's
agreement” between the White House and Congress to go on bombing Cambodia until
mid-August 1973, reeks with a stench of degeneracy far stronger than anything
contemplated by the debased minds of Segretti, Hunt, Liddy, et al.
The main purpose of Chomsky and Herman is to expose
in convincing form the Big Lie as it has been told by the United States
government in relation to atrocities. This Lie has been told by our leaders because
they were either embarrassed by the truth or fearful of its political
consequences. According to John Dean, Nixon's anxieties were capable of being
aroused on one occasion by a lone demonstrator in Lafayette Park. But the issue
cannot be disposed of by reference to the condition of Mr. Nixon's psyche. John
F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson are deeply implicated in the double lie that
allows us to go on and on killing innocent people in distant lands with a clear
conscience. From what hidden reserves of national decency can we find the
strength to face this awful truth? And what can we possibly do about it? There
are no easy answers, no prospect of a “quick-fix,” but this monograph provides
firm ground.
July 1973
Richard A. Falk
Hardwick, Vermont
INTRODUCTION
“Bloodbath” is a familiar word to Americans.
Commonly, the term is applied to describe alleged enemy acts of violence and
terror against civilian populations - past, present and prospective (in the
event that our side did or does not triumph). In the official version of recent
Vietnamese history, for example,only we and our spunky Saigon ally have stood
between the 17 million people of South Vietnam and a bloodbath by the barbarian
hordes of North Vietnam (DRV) and their southern arm, the Vietcong. The
impression conveyed in the standard media fare is one of humanitarian concern
for the victims of “violence” on the part of American leaders; the public has
been led to believe that American policies in Vietnam have been shaped to some
degree by the resort to violence and threat of a bloodbath on the part of
others.
Even a cursory examination of recent history,
however, suggests that concern over violence and bloodbaths in Washington (in
Moscow and Peking as well) is highly selective. Some bloodbaths seem to be
looked upon as “benign” or even positive and constructive; only very particular
ones are given publicity and regarded as heinous and deserving of indignation.
For example, after the CIA-sponsored right-wing coup in Cambodia in March 1970,
Lon Nol quickly organized a pogrom-bloodbath against local Vietnamese in an
effort to gain peasant support. Estimates of the numbers of victims of this
slaughter range upward from 5000 (1) and grisly reports and photographs of
bodies floating down tlie rivers were filed by western correspondents. The
United States and its client government in Saigon invaded Cambodia shortly
thereafter, but not to stop the bloodbath or avenge its victims; on the
contrary, these forces moved in to support the organizers of the slaughter, who
were on the verge of being overthrown.
The small-scale and “benign” Lon Nol bloodbath, of
course, was followed by a much more substantial “constructive” bloodbath mainly
in the form of firepower carried out by the United States and its Saigon affiliate.
In the words of one observer with an intimate knowledge of Cambodia (2):
Cambodia has been subjected in its turn to destruction by American air power.
The methodical sacking of economic resources, of rubber plantations and
factories, of rice fields and forests, of peaceful and delightful villages
which disappeared one after another beneath the bombs and napalm, has no
military justification and serves essentially to starve the population. Refers
to footnotes appearing at the back of this module Those who paid close
attention to the American slaughter of Cambodians in 1970 would have had no
reason to be surprised by the intensive bombing of heavily populated civilian
areas in a last-ditch effort to save the collapsing U.S.-backed regime three
years later. This was simply a minor variant of a policy, consistently pursued
in Cambodia, which President Nixon has called “the Nixon doctrine in its purest
form.” (3)
The regularly publicized and condemned bloodbaths,
whose victims are worthy of serious concern, often turn out, upon close
examination, to be fictional in whole or in part. These mythical or
semi-mythical bloodbaths have served an extremely important public relations
function in mobilizing support for American military intervention in other countries.
This has been particularly true in the case of Vietnam. Public opinion has
tended to be negative and the war-makers have had to strain mightily to keep
the American people in line. The repeated resort to fabrication points up the
propagandistic role that the 'bloodbath” has played in Washington's devoted
attention to this subject. The evidence on myth creation (discussed below) also
makes obvious the fact that stories emanating from this source, whether
produced by the military, intelligence, or state-affiliated “scholarship”
should be evaluated by the standards and methods normally employed in assessing
the output of any Ministry of Propaganda.
The great public relations lesson of Vietnam,
nevertheless, is that the “big lie” can work despite occasional slippages of a
free press. Not only can it survive and provide valuable service regardless of
entirely reasonable and definitive refutations (4), but certain patriotic
truths also can be established firmly for the majority by constant repetition.
With the requisite degree of cooperation by the mass media, the government can
engage in “atrocities management” with almost assured success, by means of
sheer weight of information releases, the selective use of reports of alleged
enemy acts of atrocity, and the creation and embroidery of bloodbath stories
and myths. These myths never die; they are pulled from the ashes and put
forward again and again, although repudiating evidence is readily available.
For example, the New York Times has given significant space to claims of mass
murders by the North Vietnamese and the National Liberation Front (NLF) at Hue
twice within the last year - the first claiming with assurance 5700 murders,
the most recent 2800, and neither citing any specific source of evidence. (5)
As we show below, this myth is concocted from the confusion of many deaths and
mass graves (the bulk apparently occupied by victims of “allied” firepower) and
the deliberate mistranslation and misinterpretation of documents by the Saigon
- U.S. propaganda machine. But with the New York Times' concept of “balance,”
official lies are entitled to their fair share of space. In general, this
amount of space usually is rather more substantial than that allotted to the
low-keyed refutations that may be permitted to present the “other side” of the
question. With this balance of opinion, plus official domination of news
releases and run-of-the-mill editorialists and columnists, atrocity myths can
be institutionalized.
At the same time, our own atrocities can be dismissed
as the “unintended consequences of military action,” (6) or as an historical
inevitability for which we bear no responsibility (7), or as “isolated
incidents” for which the guilty are punished under our system of justice. The
more fanatic state apologists can thus conclude from the Vietnam experience
that (8)
...there are nations more civilized than others, for
reasons of history and providence however freakish. We would not, in America,
in this day and age, treat prisoners of war in the way the Vietnamese did. And
we are, however humbly, reminded that we fought in Indochina to repel the
atavistic forces that gave historical and moral justification to the torture
and humiliation of the individual.
More balanced minds perceive that “unfortunately, the
record is not unflawed” and that “the highest United States authorities cannot
escape responsibility” for certain “violations of the spirit if not the letter
of international law...even if the violations were not expressions of official
policy” - while insisting, to be sure, that the “damning indictment of the
Vietnamese communists...cannot be erased by the pious denials of the North
Vietnamese or their apologists in this country” and that a compelling case can
and should be made against the North Vietnamese for their clear violations of
the Geneva Convention of 1949. (9)
A discussion of the machinery of atrocities
management and the reasons for its continued success is beyond the scope of
this monograph, which has a more modest purpose. We attempt here to establish,
first, that bloodbaths are not necessarily considered bad in the perspective of
the American leadership; they may be unremarkable, benign, or positively
meritorious. A large proportion of the really huge bloodbaths of the past two
decades, in fact, have been viewed in this light by Washington (with some
directly administered or indirectly engineered). It seems to us an elementary
and obvious truth that the leadership in the United States, as a result of its
dominant position and wide ranging counter-revolutionary efforts, has been the
most important single instigator, administrator, and moral and material
sustainer of serious bloodbaths in the years that followed World War II.
After presenting some illustrations of benign and
constructive bloodbaths, we turn to some of the nefarious and mythical
bloodbaths that have played important roles in the defense of U.S. intervention
in Vietnam. We examine in particular the relative levels and strategies of
violence employed by Saigon, the United States, and the revolutionary forces,
the 1955-56 events in North Vietnam, and the Hue massacres of 1968. Finally we
discuss the intensifying repression and threat to political prisoners in the
charnel house the United States has built in South Vietnam - an illustration
and application of the now long standing U.S. policy of support for “constructive”
bloodbaths.
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