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[Octafish]

33. Media, Propaganda and Vietnam

by Anup Shah
This Page Last Updated Friday, October 24, 2003

The “official” or commonly accepted version of how and why the U.S. was involved in Vietnam sort of goes along the following lines:

* Non-communist South Vietnam was invaded by communist North Vietnam
* The United States came to the aid of the regime in the South.
* The regime in the South was democratic

Yet, it turns out that this is untrue, and it required massive propaganda to create this standard and accepted image.

A lot of the following is a summary of part of journalist John Pilger’s book, Heroes, (Jonathan Cape 1986, Vintage 2001), mainly chapters 15 and 20, mostly written in the 1980s (and reprinted in 2001, from which the citations are taken. Where page numbers are cited in parenthesis, it is from this book unless indicated otherwise). He was in Vietnam many times, during the war, and returned on various occassions as well. He received a number of awards for his Vietnam reporting. He has generally been quite critical in his writings about power and authority.

Pilger described some studies in the 1980s where some people by then had already forgotten some of the reasons for the Vietnam war, and that “More than a third could not say which side American had supported and some believed that North Vietnam had been ‘our allies’” (p. 178.) He describes why this “historical amnesia” might occur:

"This 'historical amnesia' is not accidental; if anything it demonstrates the insidious power of the dominant propaganda of the Vietnam war. The constant American government line was that the war was essentially a conflict of Vietnamese against Vietnamese, in which Americans became 'involved', mistakenly and honourably. This assumption was shared both by 'hawks' and 'doves'; it permeated the media coverage during the war and has been the overriding theme of numerous retrospectives since the war. It is a false and frequently dishonest assumption. The longest war this century was a war waged by America against Vietnam, North and South. It was an attack on the people of Vietnam, communist and non-communist, by American forces. It was an invasion of their homeland and their lives, just as the current presence in Afghanistan of Soviet forces is an invasion. Neither began as a mistake."

— John Pilger, Heroes, (Jonathan Cape 1986, Vintage 2001), p.178 (Emphasis is original)

CONTINUED (one heckuva resource)...

http://www.globalissues.org/article/402/media-propaganda-and-vietnam