PART I
“This is a proposal to train what the Communists call a cadre – but on behalf of democracy and the government in South Vietnam … “
-So begins a confidential proposal from the imaginative professors of the Simulmatics Corporation (a private think-tank in New York City) for a $2,497,000 Defense Department contract to train 100 citizens of South Vietnam to be “as loyal, as effective and as energetic as the Vietcong” in representing the interests of the Saigon regime. Improbable? No more so than dozens of related projects underway at major American universities and research organizations. Only in this instance is the language somewhat more unassuming than the usual academese, and here the half-baked social theory and rank hucksterism typical of America’s new counterinsurgency establishment stands out in bold relief. The social theory behind the Simulmatics project embraces most of the basic assumptions of contemporary American behavioral science. For the chosen Vietnamese, the training program was to be “an intensive, all-consuming experience,” which would be “embedded in the service of a higher purpose,” providing “an individualized emotional experience involving positive loyalty to a human model” that would be “reinforced by a group.” The American instructors, to be recruited from the Peace Corps, would provide training in “Group dynamics and group leadership, organization building, methods of rural development … the history and character of communism, the history and society of Vietnam, American goals and the democratic way of life… .” It appeared likely to Simulmatics that such a politically strategic project could expect to have “some secret Vietcong agents among the 100 trainees.” And so the professors devised an ingenious scheme for guaranteeing the participants’ “security.” First they would be broken up into separate 5-man teams, and then each man would be allowed only limited contact with his own team. In this way it would not only be impossible for a hostile outsider to compile a full list of Saigon’s new cadre, but their identity would be concealed from each other and from their own communities as well, thus assuring maximum secrecy for the project (and perfect laboratory conditions for transmission of U.S. goals). Simulmatics’ hucksterism has a familiar ring for anyone who recalls how the Michigan State University Group (MSUG) under Professor Wesley Fischel ingratiated itself with the CIA in South Vietnam from 1956 to 1960. Like Michigan State, “the Simulmatics Corporation would provide, as an independent behavioral science research agency, an additional ‘cover’ to avoid direct U.S. government involvement.” And like so many of the millenial projects which have emanated from America’s think-tanks (the Strategic Hamlet Program, designed by
Eugene Staley of the Stanford Research Institute, is another example), this one promises to do what the combined might of the U.S. military and foreign aid bureaucracies have failed to do: “A three-year program would provide a cadre which could ultimately make South Vietnam the showcase of South-east Asia.”
One can imagine the hilarity with which a political commissar from the “other side” might regard a captured enemy document such as this. A resistance culture which has not been terrorized or bombed into submission after
twelve years of American military intervention, is surely not now going to be bamboozled into place by a group of university professors free-lancing for the Pentagon. But while the Vietnamese communist – or the ordinary peasant, for that matter – might laugh at some of the means to which the United States has resorted to impose its will on Vietnam, he would find nothing funny about the ends. In this case it is the driving compulsion to substitute an artificial culture, subservient to American interests, in place of the indigenous one which has proved so hostile to the intrusions of so many great powers. This is what the real revolutionary cadre means when he speaks out against American “neocolonialism.” And a survey of U.S. counterinsurgency research tells us that he knows whereof he speaks: the entire U.S. social science research community has been mobilized to assist in the task of
investigating, manipulating, co-opting and controlling the societies which occupy the underdeveloped lands of the Third World.’ Every imperial system has possessed some apparatus for penetrating and manipulating the social structure of its client and colonial territories. A century ago in Indochina, French gunboats were preceded by Catholic missionaries who served the Empire by converting the native “heathen” to the faith of the Motherland. Similarly, in China, English traders helped to develop a new mercantile class which saw its interests linked not to sovereign China but to the British Navy. What has distinguished U.S. imperialism, and particularly U.S. imperial operations in Latin America and the Pacific since the 1950s, is the fact that the wholesale Americanization of national societies has become an end in itself, as important to America’s counterinsurgent mission in the
Third World as the development of new markets is to the multinational corporations, or the extension of military alliances and bases is to the Armed Services. The pecuniary goals of previous imperial systems, in fact, limited social penetration to the particular classes
whose allegiance and/or services were required for the
material enrichment of the Motherland. The remainder of the population – so long as it did not interfere with the operation of colonial enterprises – was permitted to follow the traditional patterns of culture. That is not to say that the practice of colonialism left the native culture untouched: in Vietnam, the French developed a parallel governing apparatus which destroyed the autonomy and authority of the French mandarinate; in the economic sphere, French planters wrecked one fo the world’s oldest rural market economies, and French mining companies created a huge conscript army of coolie labor where12
before there had been none. The results of these
innovations were devastating; what had been a highly
literate population now boasted more jails than schools,
and literacy actually disappeared from large parts of
Vietnam. What was once a strong communal society,
characterized by a Confucian order of noblesse oblige
toward the ill-favored, had become a ward of the French
Empire. What is remarkable is that somehow, in spite of
all this destruction, Vietnamese culture survived to sustain
and nourish an indigenous independence movement led
by the Vietminh which ultimately vanquished the French
Army itself. The French in Vietnam managed to impose the most
coercive institutions of France dOutre Mer. but they
never sought to implant an alien social order in the
countryside. What the French colonial administration
neglected – and what has driven the United States so
deep into the mire of South Vietnam – is the attempt to
reeducate an entire population to collaborate in its own
oppression. It is this improbable goal which sets American
imperialism off by itself, and defines the essence of
neocolonialism. In Vietnam, the United States is fighting, and losing,
the first battle in a postwar campaign to bring its global
strategy of Containment around full circle in the East. At
the heart of this campaign is a very different set of
priorities than those which guided the French – whose
empire, along with those of Britain and olland, the
United States has inherited.
The priorities which have sustained the present
intervention through so many humiliating defeats were
formally enunciated early in the Kennedy Administration.
They included, first of all, the fact that Kennedy saw
Vietnam as a “test case” for the contest between national
liberation movements and the new doctrine of
counterinsurgency which was fast gaining ground in the
Pentagon under Maxwell Taylor and in the State
Department under Walt W. Rostow. By successfuly
defeating a national liberation movement such as had
developed in Vietnam, Kennedy hoped to prove to
potential insurgents elsewhere that revolutionary warfare
posed no threat to U.S. hegemony. Central to the concept
of a “test case” war was the requirement that it be
restricted to certain geographical, racial and geopolitical
boundaries which were not indispensable to the security
of either contending great power. Southeast Asia clearly
was such a zone.
The second priority entailed the political and military
encirclement of Communist China. What this meant to
government ideologues sensitive to the ramifications of
the Sino-Soviet split was not a static defense posture, but
a more aggressive intervention in the “soft underbelly” of
Asia. There was, after all, no status quo to be defended in
Southeast Asia, but – in American eyes – a virgin
territory far more susceptible to revolutionary (i.e.,
labor-intensive; self-subsistent) models of development
than those of the industrialized West. China represented a
remarkably successful model for revolutionary
development which could not be contained by military
bases alone: it would have to be attacked on its own
terms through the wholesale Americanization of the
development process, through a command over Asian
elites, and through a monopoly on capitalization and
technical assistance. In the eyes of such ideologues, China
was viewed as the organizer – and most certainly the
beneficiary – of a successful unification of Vietnam
under a revolutionary socialist regime. Accordingly, to
defeat the NLF would be to deliver a decisive blow not
only to Third World revolutionaries but to China itself.
Complementing and reinforcing these arguments was
the growing influence of the new U.S. military-industrial
conglomerates of the Southwest and California. The
fortunes of these interests were closely tied to an
expansion of private investment and trade in the Pacific,
which ultimately required the extension and enlargement
of U.S. military capabilities in the region. An
unambiguous commitment to the “defense” of South
Vietnam, then, was seen as the basis for the buildup of an
American military presence in Southeast Asia which
would in turn guarantee U.S. access to the region’s
resources. At the same time, South Vietnam was seen as
the key wedge in a Pacific trading system securely linked
to the “Free World.” If the raw materials and foodstuffs
of Southeast Asia, so vital to Japan, South Korea and
Taiwan, could not be guaranteed under Western auspices,
then those countries – particularly Japan – would be
driven to a more natural trading partner in Communist
China, or perhaps even worse, to a neutral Southeast
Asian bloc freely playing each of the great powers off
against each other (much as the exemplary Prince
Sihanouk has done in Cambodia).
In the eyes of the Kennedy Administration, success in
attaining these three priorities would be dependent upon
the prior achievement of a fourth: the successful
demonstration of the “anti-communist, nationalist
solution” to the problems of the “emerging nations” of
the Third World. According to this approach, the growing
synthesis of nationalist and communist movements in
many parts of the Third World could be dissolved by the
installation of new, pro-U.S. regimes that could not be
identified with the old colonial overlords, but which
would be committed to the “modernization” of their
societies through acceptance of Free World aid, trade and
military alliances. This was the strategic line for South
Vietnam which Cold War liberals had successfully lobbied
through the CIA and the United States Operations
Mission (forerunner of the Agency for International
Development) during the Eisenhower Administration. It
wasn’t until Kennedy took office, however, that this
policy won the support of the State Department and the
Pentagon and thus secured the full and direct
commitment of the U.S. government.
In practice, as we now know, the top government
officials who met every Thursday in a “Special Group” to
give intellectual and practical direction to American
counterinsurgency and paramilitary operations, did not
see Vietnam so much as a proxy confrontation with the
Soviet Union or China, as a confrontation with a new13
revolutionary force genuinely indigenous to Southeast
Asia. This was, in fact, what preoccupied them: the very
evident possibility that the revolutionary socialism which
sustained an impoverished and war-torn North Vietnam,
and inspired an indisputably popular and effective
liberation movement in the South, might well appear
exemplary to the underdeveloped countries of Asia,
Africa and Latin America. Nobody could be more
sensitive to the dangerous contradictions which beset the
American inheritance of the old European empires than
men like Walt Rostow, McGeorge Bundy and Roger
Hilsman. Rhetorically they argued that the “rising tide of
expectations” could be appeased through the stepped-up
flow of American technical expertise, investment capital
and “food for peace” shipments to the Third World. In
fact, they devoted much more attention to the
development of an airtight counterinsurgent apparatus
capable of stemming that tide with force. The truth was,
as we shall see, that even American development plans –
which were real enough – required first a socio-political
climate of guaranteed “stability.” The lesson of Vietnam
was clear: Eisenhower’s gift of $1 billion in U.S. aid,
backed up by American administrative, police and
paramilitary training programs, had only served to
aggravate Diem’s relations with every major political
grouping in the South, and inflamed the insurgent struggle
in the countryside. The Special Group’s answer’then was
not to cut off aid to Diem, or halt the manifold rural
resettlement programs, but rather to salvage the whole
enterprise with a massive counterinsurgent intervention to
restore the necessary climate of stability that would make
further modernizing programs possible.
Given these priorities, the rapid Americanization of
almost every institutional feature of South Vietnam –
from its governmental and military organizations to its
“rural development” and “civic action” programs – was a
necessary precondition for successful intervention. The
“anti-communist nationalist solution,” or, more precisely,
the practice of neocolonialism, dictated that the Vietnam-
ese provide – in the jargon of the day – a native
“counterpart” for every mission in which the U.S. was
engaged. The counterinsurgency strategists innocently
believed that these “counterparts” would deceive the
population into believing that programs conceived in
Washington were the product of Vietnamese
decision-making.
In South Vietnam, of course, the political line had
already dissolved in contradiction with the primary
military necessity of defending the neocolonial adminis-
tration from encirclement and defeat by the rural
liberation forces. In practice, the Americanization of the
war turned the “counterparts” into dependencies – and
ultimately into troublesome appendages – of the U.S.
military machine.
However, in most of the countries where the Kennedy
Administration’s Special Group had programs underway
(the Congo, Bolivia, Iran, Ecuador, Colombia, Thailand,
Venezuela and Peru) the U.S. still worked feverishly to
co-opt native institutions for the task of securing
American interests in the area. In these cases, the
penetration and manipulation of traditional and/or hostile
social structures was real and deliberate. The function of
these operations (which McNamara once referred to as
“subliminal warfare”) was to preclude the necessity for
outright military intervention which the United States
could ill afford.
The ways in which the United States wages political,
economic and cultural war on this front have become
familiar enough: a favored regime catapulted into power
and protected by enviable military and economic aid
programs (Bolivia, Brazil); an ambitious road-building
project launched to enhance surveillance and control
operations in the hinterland (Thailand, Peru); import
subsidy programs to underwrite the buying power and the
allegience of the urban upper classes (Venezuela, Iran);
and in every target culture, the development of “Nation-
building” institutions – universities, communications
systems, training programs – and the overhaul of cen-
turies-old agricultural techniques and market systems.
Perhaps the most appropriate guide for understanding
contemporary American neocolonialism is the model
which inspires its principal ideological tract: The Stages of
Economic Growth, Walt Rostow’s 1961 “non-communist
manifesto” for the development of the Third World. In it
he argued that there were several discernible stages in the
progress of a country from traditional, stagnant economic
life to modern industrialism and high mass consumption.
To start this process of transition, a great deal of capital
must be accumulated or poured in from the outside
(“force-feeding”); when a country reaches self-sustaining
growth – that is, when its own productive apparatus
(whether foreign- or domestic-owned) begins to produce a
value in surplus of capital and labor costs – no more
“force-feeding” is necessary and the country is well on its
way to modernization. But the crucial stage before
self-sustaining growth, and the one with particular rele-
vance to American investment and to counterinsurgency
planning, is what Rostow calls the “take-off stage.” This
is when every process accelerates – capital accumulation,
foreign investment, development of labor skills and
industrial technologies – and when powerful new
resources are concentrated- in the hands of a new
entreprenurial class whose authority over the develop-
ment process is not always given traditional or political
sanction. In the United States – whose history,Ibf course,
provides the model for the whole process -. this stage
would have occurred in the mid-19th century. The
take-off stage may be no longer than a decade or two (in
some Latin American countries the United States has
tried to jam it into a few years), but a society failing to
pass through it remains unable to sustain its investments,
much less to advance, and is therefore likely to be
unstable and susceptible to popular insurgency.
In the Third World, unlike the “New World” of North
America, the obstacles to the approved sequence of
development are viewed not so much as the absence of
technical cadre and sources of capital (which are to be
imported in any case), but the conservatism and strict
communalism of rural societies, and the insurrectionary
potential which such societies have demonstrated. Thus in
Rostow’s scenario, the American pattern is judged
inadequate and the stages reversed: instead of moderniza-
tion and industrialization yielding stability, which in turn
lays the groundwork for democracy, in the Third World
stability – through armed pacification – lays the ground-
work for modernization, and “democracy” may follow
only when the new U.S.-tied entreprenurial class has
gained full control of the economy and all other key
national institutions. At that point, the whole process is
sometimes crowned with “free elections” in which the
populace is offered the chance to ratify the new status
quo.
U.S. intervention in the Third World in its profoundest
sense entails first the destruction of the indigenous social
structures and the forced substitution of new ones
responsive to the American model of development. Thus
in Vietnam where the rural population was viewed as a
hindrance to modernization, the U.S. initiated a massive
strategic hamlet program which was intended to eliminate14
the peasantry as an independent political force, and place
them under the direct military control of the government
in Saigon. Like the Catholic missionaries of past centuries,
who sought to destroy native cultures they encountered,
America’s 20th century missionaries – the social scien-
tists, foreign area specialists and technical advisors who
accompany every U.S. aid program – seek to destroy
existing economic and cultural institutions which do not
conform to the approved “scenario” for the stages of
economic development. And when people resort to armed
struggle to establish control over their national destiny,
the U.S. “missionaries” call for help from the counter-
insurgency forces – just as the original missionaries
received help from the imperial forces of the Motherland.
Since World War II, the United States has been
confronted by the revolutionary wave which has surged
through the old colonial territories and which today
threatens to turn that “third” of the globe into a far more
formidable antagonist to the imperial ambitions of the
United States in the 1970s than any other adversary it has
faced. The U.S. is here confronted with the spectacle of
technologically primitive societies, still writhing under
colonial wounds, underfed, over-populated, which have
nevertheless provided a breeding-ground for a new
economic system — revolutionary socialism and a new
system of alliances which remains politically independent
of both Cold War blocs. In its post-World War II drive to
extend the “Free World” to encompass the destinies of
the post-colonial world, the United States has had to
contend with peoples who have learned – through
centuries of colonial oppression – to struggle collectively
for their own liberation. In Vietnam, it faces a people
whose will to independence has survived – and drawn
strength from – warfare against the occupying forces of
four empires. The U.S. has been stopped in Vietnam by a
people whose real strength lies not in its technology
which is inferior, not in its receipt of aid from abroad
which is minimal, nor even in its military prowess which is
considerable, but rather in its extraordinary cohesive
social organization and a centuries-old culture which
values above all else a common history of struggle against
foreign domination. These are precisely the attributes of
the “enemy” that military force alone cannot erase. It is
to counter such “resistance cultures” that the American
social science establishment has been mobilized to form a
Fourth Armed Service of the U.S. War Machine.
(Part 2, a Survey of Counterinsurgency Social Science
Research, will appear in the March Newsletter.)
Chinese woodcut: “Defend the fatherland to the last man!” / LNS
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