In 1954, after a period of such anarchy, Ngo Dinh Diem thought to restore peace by reimposing strong leadership and suppressing the anger, the “egotism,” and aggressiveness of his people. His was the natural reaction of a traditionalist — or indeed of even the most “Westernized” Vietnamese in Saigon. The difficulty was that patriarchal rule in any form no longer carried the same authority. Under pressure from the West the society had “split apart” to such a degree that many Vietnamese no longer obeyed their fathers, much less their village chiefs or their self-created emperor. Bent merely upon domination, neither Diem nor his officers would succeed in restraining their own soldiers from anarchic violence. The conflicts could no longer be suppressed. The dams had already broken of themselves, and no government could survive if it merely attempted to patch them up again. As Mao Tse-tung once wrote, “The force of the peasantry is comparable to that of raging winds or torrential rain. Its violence grows so rapidly, no power would be able to stop it. The peasantry will rip open all the chains that crush it; it will dash down the road to liberation.”15
The revolutionary project of the NLF, like that of the Viet Minh and the Chinese Communists, was to use that released aggression as a creative force. The problem — the central problem — for the NLF was to provide a channel for that energy and to prevent it from exploding outward and destroying their own cause. The containment of violence had, of course, always been the problem for Vietnamese governments at war, and traditional Vietnamese had considered it a task of extraordinary difficulty. Confucius once said, “Only when men of the right sort have instructed a people for seven years ought there to be any talk of engaging them in warfare.… To lead into battle a people that has not first been instructed is to betray them.”16 To Confucius “instruction” meant not military training, but training in virtue, or, in modern terms, politics. And the principal strategy of the NLF consisted precisely in political instruction.
In the course of their denunciation sessions, for instance, the NLF called upon the villagers to focus their “hatred” and “resentment” upon certain specific objects: the “feudalists” and “the American imperialists and their lackeys,” or, alternately, the “wicked tyrants” and “the reactionaries.”17 To most Americans the phrases sounded like nothing more than arid dogmatism: what, after all, could the words “feudalist” and “lackey” signify to villagers innocent of political theory? Nothing at all. And yet that was exactly the point: the words referred only to the people the NLF would later point out as examples of “feudalists” and “lackeys.” The words did not — and the distinction was crucial — necessarily indicate the local hamlet chief, the platoon of Popular Forces, or the landowner who lived in the village. They did not even indicate the stray American AID man or district adviser who might come to the village to give out bulgur wheat and cooking oil — unless the NLF cadres said that they did. In other words, while the NLF cadres allowed the villagers to give free, verbal expression to their hatred, they gave them no immediate object for it: certainly not a defenseless minority (such as the Jews in Hitler’s Germany) whom the villagers might murder as the scapegoat, the ritual vessel of all evil. And they did not on the other hand indicate an enemy that would appear overwhelmingly powerful to the villagers — an instrument of the will of Heaven. (As the young recruit, Huong, had said, “At first I hated only the Diem regime, then I hated its soldiers.” He had begun to hate the soldiers only after he had joined the Front and been persuaded that, as the war extended beyond the borders of his village, he need not be discouraged by the immediate presence of a superior force.) By creating the enemy as an abstraction, the NLF gave itself the time to educate and discipline its recruits: the enemy would appear out of the distance of abstraction only when the recruits had learned to take discipline and to replace their “subjectivism” with a broader perspective on the concerns of the movement as a whole. The force of the NLF’s argument was that, unlike the GVN troops, the peasants did not have guns and would not be given them until the instruction was completed.
For the NLF, the energies of “hatred” were to go first not into violence, but into the formation of a disciplined community. The Front’s plan was to focus hatred upon an external enemy and thus to create unity among its own members. As the cadres of XB village pointed out, the mere thought of the outside enemy operated to reduce the internal conflicts within the village. To take up once more the story of XB village at the point where the Front had succeeded in evicting both the local landlords and the Diemist village authorities:
The Party unit developed and used this slogan: “Kill the Land Robbers.” This slogan was welcomed and used by the local people. The farmers now know they have the force to prevent the landowners from retaking their lands and can prevent the US-Diem clique from oppressing the people. Farmers are now free to farm, without paying either land rent or agricultural tax.…
Victory came to the farmers and the people then enthusiastically joined the movement and put their confidence in the Party as the leader of the revolution.
However there were some clashes of interest, some discord. There was a dispute between two farmers over a small parcel of land and each threatened to kill the other. The Party stepped in and called a meeting of villagers to hear and solve the problem. A cadre pointed out that:
“Land comes as part of the revolution’s achievements and as a result of the people’s struggle. Farmers must remain united and share the good and bad. Because the American-Diem clique and the landlords plot to come back, farmers must make concessions to each other to ensure final victory. Only if these conditions are met will the farmers be able to take permanent possession of the land.”
Upon hearing this the two farmers became enlightened, embraced each other and wept.18
The Front took the same approach to the problem of controlling the behavior of their soldiers towards the civilian population. Front soldiers were instructed not merely to avoid abusing the peasants. They were instructed to love them and to bring them into their own “families” so that the villagers would aid them in defeating the enemy that lay beyond the village. Conflicts had to be restrained because of the larger cooperative enterprise. And the soldiers seemed to understand this necessity. Sir Robert Thompson, the British counterinsurgency expert wrote, “Normally communist behaviour towards the mass of the population is irreproachable and the use of terror is highly selective.”19
Thompson’s statement must come as a surprise to an American audience after the many years of American propaganda about “Viet Cong atrocities,” but it would be confirmed by any informed observer of the Vietnam War — particularly one familiar with the ARVN. Whatever the Front leaders felt about the value of human life as a moral absolute, their own self-interest dictated that they impose strict controls on the use of violence. For, unlike the American or the GVN troops, they depended on the goodwill of the villagers. Their task was easier than that of the GVN in some respects, since they had no bombers and their firepower was so limited that their commanders could never be tempted to use it in an indiscriminate fashion. In other respects their task was a great deal more difficult because of the thinness of communications and the demands of an irregular, guerrilla war. Political assassination, after all, formed a basic ingredient of Front strategy in GVN areas, and for the sake of its own security the Front had sometimes to execute men within its own ranks. From the point of view of the Front cadres themselves, this political violence was extremely dangerous in that it opened the way to an anarchic campaign of revenge killings such as the Diem regime had permitted. To preclude such a disaster the Front employed a multitude of institutional controls. In the first place, it used political re-education rather than violence as its principal means of dealing with hostile people. When it used violence, it placed the responsibility for it not with the regular soldiers and cadres but with the specialized and highly professional Security Section. As more than one U.S. government study showed, the Security cadre did not kill indiscriminately, but carefull
y calculated each of the assassinations for the maximum political effect. The lists of GVN officials to be assassinated or spies to be executed had to undergo long bureaucratic scrutiny before they could be put to use. The killings were then carried out in a cold-blooded manner by specially trained Armed Reconnaissance Teams. The NLF generally proscribed torture and preferred the bullet to any other means of dispensing death.20 In its political violence as in its military operations the Front generally employed the principle of economy of force. Only once did it perpetrate political violence on a massive scale, and that was in Hue during the bloody battles during the Tet offensive of 1968. In the month that they occupied Hue the Front and the North Vietnamese forces murdered some three thousand civilians, including not only government officials, but hundreds of Catholics and members of other anti-Communist political parties and sects. It was this incident that gave President Nixon the major grounds for his prediction that the NLF would carry out a large-scale massacre of Vietnamese civilians if the Americans “abandoned” the GVN. But the attempt to generalize about Front policy from this incident was a dubious undertaking at best. The NLF high command undoubtedly planned to kill a number of GVN officials and other political enemies during its occupation of the city, but there is no clear evidence that it planned the mass slaughter that occurred. The manner in which the killings were performed indicated that in the confusion of the offensive the Security Section lost control and the NLF and the North Vietnamese military units operated without their usual discipline. * In any case, as even the RAND study used by Nixon pointed out, the incident offered a contradiction to normal Front practices over all the previous years of war and to Front behavior in the other cities and towns it occupied during the Tet offensive.21 On the whole the Front maintained discipline even under the extraordinary test of the American war and even during its full-scale attack against the cities. The achievement testified to the strength of its organization.
Organization: The Liberated Village, the NLF Command Structure, and the PRP
Prior to the seizure of power, and in order to seize power, the sole weapon of the revolution and the masses is organization. The salient feature of the revolutionary movement led by the proletarian class lies in its sophisticated organization. All activities aimed at leading the masses to advance step-by-step toward the uprising to overthrow the ruling clique can be summed up as organization, organization and organization.
— Le Duan, February 19701
Apart from military strategy, the one aspect of the NLF that the American counterinsurgency scholars investigated in any detail was its organization, both civil and military. Among others, Douglas Pike, Michael Charles Conley, and W. P. Davison of the RAND Corporation2 wrote exhaustive studies of the organization of the combat villages, the Liberation Army, the NLF command structure, and the Communist Party within the NLF. Pike, for one, justified this special concern by arguing that organization was the most important component of the revolution. As he wrote in the preface to his study: “If the essence of the Chinese revolution was strategy and the essence of the Viet Minh was spirit, the essence of the third-generation revolutionary guerrilla warfare in South Vietnam was organization.” And then later, “The Communists in Vietnam developed a sociopolitical technique and carried it to heights beyond anything yet demonstrated by the West working with developing nations. The National Liberation Front was a Sputnik in the political sphere of the Cold War.”3
The subject of NLF organization was clearly of great interest to the U.S. government. At the same time it had a more general interest, for, under the circumstances — that is, the necessity to fight both a domestic enemy and a vast foreign power within a very small space — the success of the NLF rested heavily on its ability to mobilize the population into a disciplined and coherent force. As Pike himself showed most convincingly, the task of organization for the NLF involved not merely the creation of a command structure but the transformation of the life of the villages.
With such a fruitful subject in hand, Pike and his colleagues ought to have had some interesting insights into the whole problem of government and society in Vietnam. But their conclusions are curiously underdeveloped. Indeed, insofar as they draw any conclusions at all, they tend merely to support the claims of State Department propagandists that the NLF used foreign methods of organization in order to coerce a passive and generally apolitical peasantry. The same charge, however, might just as well be leveled against the GVN, and it begs the question of what made the NLF, by contrast to the GVN, such a powerful political and military force. The conclusion is inadequate; at the same time it is foregone by the nature of the materials used to reach it. Pike and his colleagues conducted their analyses in a void without reference to the nature of Vietnamese society or to the problems besetting it in the twentieth century. Thus their analyses are wholly misleading. In the absence of any information to the contrary, South Vietnam in their work appears to possess a stable, thriving traditional society and an adequate government. Against this background the NLF emerges as a sinister, disruptive force that has no local basis in legitimacy, and that quite possibly is the arm of a larger and more sinister power trying to impress similar methods of organization upon all nations throughout the world.
To look at the organization of the NLF within the context of Vietnamese society in the 1960’s is to charge the same group of facts presented by Pike and his colleagues with an entirely different meaning. It is to see that the NLF strategies constituted not an arbitrary system of domination but, in many respects, solutions to problems that neither the GVN nor the indigenous political groups had been able to solve.
One of the central problems, of course, was the disintegration of village society. The traditional Vietnamese village was in a special sense a collective enterprise. Though each family owned its own land, the village operated as a unit to a great degree. The village council was responsible for the upkeep of the local dike system, for the collection of taxes, for the management of communal lands, for the administration of charity and emergency relief, and for the arbitration of disputes. The family heads usually gave a certain proportion of their crop to the village council for storage in case of a general emergency and banded together in mutual-aid societies for the defraying of certain large, irregular expenses, such as house-building and the ceremonies of marriage and death. The extended families, a handful of which made up the village, also owned land whose produce would be used for the perpetuation of the rites and for the general welfare. This intensive form of cooperation among individuals within the extended family and the village existed in a particular social and psychological landscape radically different from that of, let us say, a New England township. Vietnamese villagers identified themselves not as individual “souls” but as members and dependents of the collectivity. A villager might have said with Paul Valéry, “Every man here feels that he is both son and father… and is aware of being held fast by the people around him and the dead below him and the people to come, like a brick in a brick wall. He holds. Every man here knows that he is nothing apart from this composite earth.”4
The disintegration of the traditional villages under the French regime brought disaster for the individual Vietnamese farmer. By the 1930’s the numbers of beggars, paupers, and prostitutes had increased to the point where even the French administration noticed it.5 The villages no longer provided any social welfare system, any sanction against glaring inequalities in the distribution of land, or any institution of cooperative work. The villagers lived at the mercy of the weather, their neighbors, merchants, and, most important, the nation-state. After the worldwide depression of the 1930’s the rice consumption of the poor peasants in the “rice bowl” of Cochin China dipped below subsistence level.6 In 1945 a million North Vietnamese peasants died because the French and Japanese administrations had neglected to fill the emergency rice granaries in the north and the war prevented any shipments of rice from the south. Even for those who did not suffer starvation or penury the psychol
ogical consequences of the breakdown of the village were severe, for the collectivity, that “brick wall,” had been the very raison d’être of individual existence. Without it, the individual descended into a kind of chaos, separated not only from society but, as it were, from his own soul. It was not so much anticolonialism as the need to re-establish some form of community that led the peasants of the north and the south to join the sects and the Viet Minh at the period of the Indochina war. Anticolonialism was, in fact, only a means to the end of this new community.
In the south after the war the Ngo family had in a confused manner attempted to revive the old collectivity. The attempt was doomed to failure, for the old authorities of the family had been quite superseded by the new economy and the new state. Working at cross-purposes to the Ngos, the American AID representatives had, during the Diem regime and later, made certain small attempts to reform the villages along new lines with farming cooperatives, self-help projects, and finally, in 1966, with the institution of village elections in the “secure” areas. But their efforts were largely abortive. The self-help projects fell away into inertia, the cooperatives disintegrated into factional feuds, and the elected village chiefs proved hardly more effective in solving village problems than their appointed predecessors. The villagers did not trust each other, much less the government above them. To organize them to work together involved not merely the demonstration of the economic feasibility of a project but the changing of their whole perspective on the functioning of society. The West had undermined the authority of the patriarch: but the program of the ancestors remained nonetheless as an invisible obstruction, preventing the villagers from organizing as equals and from accepting the authority of the government. The American AID representatives had success only when they worked with one villager at a time or when they worked in conjunction with the Hoa Hao or the Catholics, the only two non-Communist groups that by the mid-1960’s had extensive organization in the rural areas. The plight of the nonsectarian villagers was all the more pathetic by comparison. In 1967 one of the Mekong tributaries flooded through several provinces of the western Delta, destroying vast areas of paddy land and burying whole villages under layers of mud. Even before the river had subsided, the Hoa Hao leaders were demanding aid from the government, organizing rescue teams and doling out food to the stranded villagers. In the space of a few weeks they had organized a labor force from among the sect members in two provinces to rebuild the villages and dig new irrigation canals. Their villages slowly recovered, but the nonsectarian villagers in the area continued to suffer from disease and near starvation despite the American attempts to deliver aid from Saigon.
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