Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy: 1945-1975 by Max Hastings

Author:Max Hastings
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780008132996
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Limited
Published: 2018-09-15T22:23:06.400000+00:00

But Luc also affected a red scarf with the words ‘Pledge Resolutely to Sacrifice for the Nation’s Survival’ stitched into its fabric, and was wearing it when he was killed attacking Duc Pho district centre.

The fervour of committed revolutionaries such as Luc and Tram impressed some Americans. Jack Langguth, a reporter who covered the war for the New York Times, wrote in a subsequent book: ‘North Vietnam’s leaders … deserved to win. South Vietnam’s leaders … deserved to lose.’ This view, quite widely held among correspondents, was influenced by daily encounters with the cruelties and bungles of the Saigon regime and its American mentors, while those of the communists took place out of sight. Citizens of modern liberal democracies, many of whom exercise the privilege of their freedom to care more for the fate of a sports team than about politics, are often impressed by True Believers in other cultures. Yet history’s least humane movements have inspired and also perverted young men and women to sacrifice all in their name. It is unsurprising that foreigners in Vietnam favourably contrasted the commitment of the communists with the corruption and lethargy of the Saigon regime. Yet this was only half a story.

Hanoi’s success in the global propaganda contest was partially rooted in a policy of omertà, silence. The oppression of its own people and the failure of its economic policies were curtained by censorship. No images of its war crimes existed. Only card-carrying foreign sympathisers were granted glimpses even of its scenery. French writer Jean Lacouture, a prominent contemporary apologist for Ho Chi Minh, told a Milan newspaper in a hand-wringing interview long afterwards: ‘With regard to Vietnam, my behaviour was sometimes more that of a militant than that of a journalist. I dissimulated certain aspects of North Vietnam at war … because I believed that the cause … was good and just enough so that I should not expose their errors. I believed it was not opportune to expose the Stalinist nature of the North Vietnamese regime.’

Propaganda policy enforced the exclusion from North Vietnam’s state broadcasts and publications of all tidings not relevant to the national struggle. Thus, radio announcer ‘Hanoi Hannah’ made no mention of the 1967 Middle East war, nor later of the 1968 Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia or the 1969 American moon landing. Prisoner Doug Ramsey recoiled in disgust from a communist ‘True War Heroes’ comic which extolled the virtues of a female suicide-bomber. He hated Radio Hanoi’s incessant war songs, ‘frightening in their obvious sympathy with and preference for violence, their narrowness of view, shrillness, tendency to find only hero-figures and villains in Washington and Vietnam alike’. He became weary of the marching song of the NLF:

Liberate the South!

We are staunchly resolved to march

To kill the American imperialists,

Smash and scatter their lackeys who sell our country.

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