1954 to 1960 - U.S. Rulers Bet on Diem
The U.S. wanted an anti-red regime in the south to expand counter-revolutionary activities throughout Asia and encircle China. But the U.S. needed someone to head up this regime. Here's how they chose Ngo Dinh Diem:
Secretary of State Dulles picked him, Senator Mike Mansfield endorsed him, Francis Cardinal Spellman praised him, Vice President Nixon liked him, and President Eisenhower OK'd him. (Look, January 28, 1965.)(Note; Look has left out John F. Kennedy and William O. Douglass, both key backers.)
As Look admits, Diem was chosen by the U.S. government, not by Vietnamese working people. He was not the "father of his country." He was the willing servant of his boss - U.S. imperialism.
(And what is left of the U. S. government claim that it intervened at the request of Diem? What does it mean to honor a "call for help" from a regime you've installed yourself? What a shallow, hypocritical cover for an imperialist attempt to reverse a popular, anti-imperialist revolution.)
BUILDING SUPPORT THROUGH BRIBERY AND FRAUD
To get the army to support their puppet, the U.S. government started sending aid directly to Diem right after Geneva. At the same time, $12 million in bribes was distributed to leaders of the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao religious sects. This became an established pattern -- bribes for the army and selected civilians. Thus from '55-'60, 3/4 of the $2 billion in aid to Diem went for the army. The small amount that paid for the "commodity imports'' program was intended to get support from the middle class, the only ones who could afford to buy anything.
But the U.S. government didn't just bribe support into existence. It also tried to trick it into existence. About 900,000 northern refugees moved south between '54 and '55. The U.S. government claims these people "voted with their feet" against the reds. Actually, the government is lying:
The mass flight was admittedly the result of an extremely intensive...American psychological leaflets appealed to the devout Catholics with such. themes as "Christ has gone to the south" and "the Virgin Mary has departed from the north." (Bernard Fall, The Two Vietnams, pp. 153-154.)
Thus about 85 percent of the refugees were Catholic. Entire parishes were led south by priests. The rest were mainly families of civil servants and; soldiers who'd backed the French. The U.S. government spent nearly $100,000,000 on this trick(Fall, ibid.)
MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY VERSUS THE PEOPLE
To strengthen Diem's army, the MAAG (Military Assistance Advisory Group) was expanded. MAAG built the Saigon army up to 150,000 and established a local militia of 40,000. Besides this, a 50,000 man Civil Guard was trained. But this wasn't done by MAAG, it was done by MSUG.
MSUG, the Michigan State University Group, played a key role in building Diem's puppet government. It consisted of some professors, experts in police training and administration, and some C.I.A. agents. MSUG trained Diem's palace guard, his secret police, and a Vietnamese Bureau of Investigation. It systematized the keeping of dossiers, and taught other security techniques.
Helping counter-revolution is the key job U.S. colleges. Sometimes this takes the -blatant form of the MSUG, sometimes the more quiet form of war and social-control research, or the everyday form of teaching anti-communism and racism in courses. Students have been -- and should be -- fighting this. An example is the many militant fights to drive ROTC off campuses across the
country.
During 1954-1955,the U.S. government created a vast repressive force in Vietnam, complete with a huge army, police, "FBI" and a civilian bureaucracy. Using this arsenal, the U.S. government's Diem regime attacked the people.
COUNTER-REVOLUTION 1N THE COUNTRYSIDE
Early in 1956, the New York Times said:
Government must be extended to tee villages where all too often ... Communism obtains. And the time is short. Geneva fixed July, 1956, the date for all-Vietnam elections. These really will never be held ... the non-communist south cannot afford the slightest risk of defeat. (New York Times, our emphasis, 3/ 12/56.)
Early in 1956, the Government must be
In other words, the U.S. had to smash the Vietminh's influence right away or when -- as had already been decided -- they announced there'd be no elections, the Vietnamese people would rise up and smash Diem.
The Vietminh armies had regrouped to the north, as decided in the Geneva Agreements. But there were millions of Vietminh supporters in the south.
In mid-'55, Diem launched the first "Anti-Communist Denunciation Campaign" -- an attempt at mass terror. All Vietnamese who'd opposed the French were subject to bloody persecution. By '56 about 50,000 were in jails and concentration camps. Law 10/59, passed in 1959, went further -- travelling military courts complete with guillotines, were sent out; they could sentence anyone to death as a threat to the "security of the state."
This wasn't a matter of terror directed at individuals alone. It was a class terror, directed against Vietnamese working people, especially peasants In the south the Vietminh had carried
out much land reform. Hundreds of thousands of peasant families were free of vicious, gouging landlords. They controlled their own villages. Vietminh support was rooted in this social revolution. So, to destroy this support the U.S. government tried to break the back of the revolution.
U.S./Diem began a program to reimpose landlord rule on the peasants. To implement this program required the terror discussed before.
The key to this program was the so-called land reform. Drawn up by the U.S. "experts" Wolf Ladejinsky and Price Gittinger, the reform was unusual. It took land from peasants and gave it to landlords!
Officially, the plan allowed landlords up to 250 acres and let them charge up to 25 percent of the peasants' crop. Thus, for the millions of peasants who'd gotten land during the Vietminh-led revolution, this meant return of landlords, return of high rent and brutal landlord rule. And, in practice, it was even worse. The 26 percent rent ceiling was taken as a minimum by the U.S.-imposed landlords. Pre-revolutionary rates of 50-60 percent were soon common. And, to top it off, the landlords often demanded back rent for the period during which the peasants had kept them away.
These anti-peasant measures were, once again, no blunder. U.S. officials not only knew what was happening -- they planned it that way! These measures were carefully calculated. For they knew -that most Vietnamese were pro-Vietminh. Only the classes who'd backed the French were really "reliable." The U.S. had to resurrect the local rule of the French lackeys if it was going to begin to create an anti-revolutionary base in the south.
First the U.S. claimed to be bringing democracy to Vietnam. And now -- this land reform.
Who were they trying: to kid?
Throughout 1955, Diem refused to discuss the '56 elections with DRV officials. Instead, in October, he staged what was probably history's most creative; election. Running against the French pup pet-emperor Bao Dai, the U.S.. puppet worm Diem claimed … only 98.2 per cent of the vote.
The only U.S. complaint was that 60 percent would have looked better. (Life Magazine, 5/ 13/57.)
The leaders of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) or "North Vietnam" attacked Diem for this and called for demonstrations against the cancellation of the elections decided on at Geneva when, as was inevitable -- since Diem had virtually no support -- they were officially cancelled. But the DRV leaders failed to expose the absurdity of having elections at all to decide whether Vietnam would be run by an imperialist-installed puppet, or the masses of working people. What right had the U.S. government to "run against the people?" More fundamentally, it is unimaginable that the U.S. would have given up had the elections in fact been held. This too the DRV leaders did not say. In other words, they fostered a movement in the southern section that relied on U.S. imperialism to hold elections and free the people (from U.S. imperialism). Aside from their acceptance of the Geneva Agreements in the first Place, the DRV leaders should not have asked the southern Vietnamese working people to wait two years, while they relied, we would guess, on the good graces of the Russians to make the U.S. government honest. That's a loser.
In any case, Vietnamese workers and peasants did not take Diem's vicious attempt at counterrevolution passively. Massive opposition to Diem's phony referendum developed in late '55. Massive demonstrations continued to 1956, protesting the cancellation of the elections. And in the countryside, the peasants fought back against the return of landlord rule and, with it, the vicious army/police raids.
Bernard Fall analyzed the increasingly violent struggle in the September, 1955, Pacific Affairs. He sketched two maps. One showed where Diem's violations of the Geneva Accords against persecuting Vietminh sympathizers had occurred. The other showed the location of revolutionary actions -raids, ambushes, assassinations of Diemist officials. The two maps were almost identical.
The U.S./Diem attempt to return landlords to local power and suppress the working people had led to renewed rebellion.
As the anti-U. S.1Diem forces grew stronger, they began to attack and sometimes wipe out Diemist forces, including individual village chiefs and militia members who'd led the local "anti-communist" slaughters.
Diem's police and army saw their sources of information drying up one after another. To make good the lack, they resorted to worse barbarity, hoping to inspire an even greater terror among the villagers. (Phillippe Devillers "The Struggle for Unification of Vietnam," China Quarterly, 1/3/62.)
But nothing worked. By March, 1959. Diem had to admit it. His bogus "Republic of Vietnam" was "at war" -- i.e., in rebellion.
This official recognition of the revolution completely reversed Washington's earlier stand. From '54-'59, Americans were told all was well in Vietnam, that Diem was a gem. In fact, a group called the American Friends of Vietnam even hired a public relations firm to push this nonsense. Its founding members were not, by the way, "bad guys" Like Nixon or Goldwater. They were highly "liberal'" imperialists: for instance; John F Kennedy, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Max Lerner Not to mention Norman Thomas, the Socialist Party leader.
By November, 1960, things were going so badly (for U.S./Diem) that a section of the army staged an unsuccessful coup. A month later the National Liberation Front was formed under communist leadership.
THE MYTH OF NORTH VIETNAMESE AGGRESS1ON
The U.S. government has always maintained publicly that it's answering the call of the south Vietnamese who are supposedly being besieged by foreign tyrants. Let's consider this -- it's the U.S.'s main justification.
First, we've already seen that the U.S. "commitment" was really self-created. The U.S. installed the Diem regime, which then "requested" U.S. help. Contrary to liberals' arguments, the U.S. did not intervene in an on-going civil war. It installed and consolidated the reactionary side.
Second, until about 1965, there were very few north Vietnamese fighting in the south. The south Vietnamese REBELLION was a just response by south Vietnamese working people to terrible oppression by U.S./Diem. Only animals would not have fought back. The south Vietnamese fought back -- heroically. It did not take any "outside aggressors" to convince these people to fight back. The picture of the south Vietnamese as 'slow-moving, apathetic, yellow beasts of burden without feelings" is a vicious, insulting lie. It rests on and aims at reinforcing the racist image of Asians spread by the rulers of this country ever since the Chinese were forced over here to provide very cheap labor to build the transcontinental railroad. By pushing this racism, the rulers hope working people will accept as "natural" the killing of Asians. (One Of the GI's involved in the My Lai massacre said that "none of us would have accepted an order to kill people in cold blood ... I mean white people.")
Vietnamese working people have dealt hard blows against the U.S. ruling class. They have exposed it as never before. They've provided a living example of mass revolutionary struggle that inspired millions of workers and students. There is only one working class in this world, and it has nothing to do with color. Workers in every country have the same class interest. Their international class interest is to defeat the big businessmen, the capitalist class, all over -- and these billionaires are led by U.S. bosses. The working class must scrub off the racist filth bosses use to blind the people.
We stand with the father of one of the My Lai soldiers. Asked what he would have done if an officer ordered him to kill unarmed Vietnamese, this miner said: "I would have shot the bastard right between the eyes."
And consider: IF the U.S. really thought it was helping the southerners resist an evil invasion - why didn't it just give everyone guns to defend themselves? Arm the peasants! But the U.S. did the exact opposite. From 1954 to the present, the U.S. government has been trying to smash the Vietnamese peasants and workers.
The huge "anti-subversive" apparatus, directed against the bulk of the population and carrying out furious repression, linked with the anti-peasant "land reform" and other pro-landlord programs -- these showed that the U.S. and Diem knew the people were their enemies.
So much for the argument that the U. S. government is trying to bring democracy to the Vietnamese but it's hard because these savages think with their stomachs. As we have seen, democracy was the last thing the U. S. government could tolerate in south Vietnam. And as we have also seen, far from being "passive Orientals," the Vietnamese have fought with a courage and cooperative spirit that merits great respect.
Any aid the southerners could get from the north was and is completely justified.
So if the Vietnamese workers and peasants got help from the north -- assuming that help wasn't aimed at getting them to stop fighting -- more power to them. The unfortunate thing is that in the first six years of the rebellion, the DRV did not aid the south Vietnamese.
(Actually, the charge that the south Vietnamese rebellion was fomented by "outsiders" who "invaded the south" is not so unusual. U.S. imperialism always blames people's struggles on "outside agitators." As in the case of Vietnam, this first of all insults the people doing the rebelling. It says they're too stupid to know on their own that they're getting shafted and ought to rebel. Second, geographically speaking, very few people's movements are organized by strangers. And so what if they were? Third, by "outsider" the rulers don't really mean "stranger." It's really just a catchy way of describing someone who opposes them "Outside agitator" really means" "somebody who attacks us, the wonderful exploiters and murderers of working people all over the world, the adorable capitalist class.")
Next section: 1960 To 1965 -- People's War
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