104. NORTH VIETNAM. 100%
No change.
Vietnamese “nationalism” was invented in 1941 by Ho Chi-minh, a Chinese Communist trained in Moscow, whom the Japanese sent into Indo-China (much as they set up another Communist, Sukarno, in Indonesia) to murder the white colonists. The Japanese had assumed, of course, that they would junk these tools at the proper time. But when Japan surrendered in 1945, both Ho Chi-minh and Sukarno, with Moscow’s blessing, went into business for themselves.
The French never completely recovered Indo-China after the war; and as soon as our State Department and General Marshall had installed the Communists in China, the position of the French became increasingly difficult. And of course, one purpose of the armistice by which the Americans proclaimed their defeat in Korea was to release the well trained Chinese Communist army for service against the French in Indo-China. The French fought on until the fall of Dien Bien Phu in May, 1954, receiving some monetary subventions from the United States while being stabbed in the back by American officials. As the famous French journalist, Raymond Cartier, wrote at the time, and as has never, so far as we know, been denied, “No Frenchman in Indo-China doubts that the tracts inciting the [native] population to massacre them [the French] were drawn up in the bureau of Colonel Lansdale”—this American officer being the Colonel Edward Lansdale who, in recognition of his good work, is now one of the principal military aides to our Secretary of Defense.But the French did not lose Indo-China at Dien Bien Phu. That had been arranged in January of 1954, when, in keeping with Mr. Eisenhower’s pre-election pledge “to roll back the tide of Communism,” the “Big Four” Foreign Ministers met to call a conference in Geneva. At that conference, in addition to a few miscellaneous nations, such staunch opponents of Communism as the United States, Soviet Russia, Communist China, Communist Korea, and the Communist rebels in Indo-China were to decide—and did decide —how todispose of French territory. It was not in the least astonishing, therefore, that, as Ambassador Edwin F. Stanton said at the time, the Geneva Conference “was indeed a major triumph for the Communists.” For although North Vietnam was the only overtly Communist state carved out of French territory, itwas, as the ambassador also pointed out, obvious that the arrangement gave the Soviet every facility for taking over the rest of Indo-China in its own good time. This, naturally, is precisely what is happening; see SOUTH VIETNAM, CAMBODIA, LAOS.
105. SOUTH VIETNAM. 70-90%
1958 and 1959, 40-60%
This is one of our State Department’s less adroit farces. Much is made of the fact that the president, Ngo Dinh Diem, a sleezy adventurer of whom we gave our readers a sketch in February, 1958, pp. 7-12, calls himself a Catholic. What is carefully kept from the American people is the fact that his brother and principal adviser is the Communist head of a Communist “labor union,” and that his Director of the Budget for Foreign Aid, Vu Van Thai, was a top-level official in the Communist government of Ho Chi-minh (see NORTH VIETNAM) and, as we pointed out in November, 1958, p. 58, has been known to use American money for such things as subsidizing a Communist publishing house in Paris.
Not all of Ngo Dinh Diem’s subordinates are Communists, but remedial measures are being taken. In Saigon and in the smaller cities, towns, villages, and rural districts, non-Communist officials are being assassinated—at the time that one of our observers visited South Vietnam this spring, such murders were taking place at the average rate of ten per day—and being replaced by secret agents of the Communist conspiracy. Since the key posts in the security police are in the hands of top-level Soviet agents, the country, described in the American press as a “model republic,” is in a state of virtual anarchy. White men are warned not to appear on the streets of Saigon after 9:00 P.M., and in many rural districts even Catholic priests are not safe on the roads at any time. Buses are regularly stopped en route and their passengers forced to submit to an hour of Communist indoctrination before they are allowed to proceed.
The exploit in “king-making” by our State Department in South Vietnam, and its continuing support of the thoroughly rotten Ngo Dinh Diem regime, have had the usual and general effect of earning additional hatred and contempt for the American government throughout all of Southeast Asia. But South Vietnam has also served two important specific Communist purposes.
One was the invasion of Cambodia (q.v.); another, the “nationalization” of the 900,000 Chinese, who, as is usual in this part of the world, owned much of the retail, wholesale, and manufacturing business of the country and consider themselves, as is also customary, citizens of Nationalist China. The Chinese schools and newspapers were suppressed, and the property of those not willing to surrender Chinese citizenship was confiscated. Since our State Department acted vigorously to prevent effective protest by Chiang Kai-shek, this “nationalization” dealt a fatal blow to the prestige of Nationalist China throughout Asia (cf. THAILAND), and forced the large and prosperous Chinese colonies to seek the protection, and thereby become the agents, of Communist China. In South Vietnam some 200,000 Chinese went into hiding; while most of those who officially surrendered their Chinese citizenship simultaneously became members of the “Democratic and Patriotic Association,” a Communist underground directed from Peiping.
South Vietnam will become officially a Soviet state whenever the Communists decide that the proper time has come. But in the meantime it is so effective an exhibit for showing natives of Southeast Asia the hopelessness of relying on the anti-Communism of the American government and it is so efficient a sewer for draining away the property of American taxpayers, that it obviously would not be in the interests of Moscow or Washington to make a formal change that would have to be reported in the American press and might even attract attention. In the first four years (1955-59) we were able to give the Vietnamese automobiles, refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioners, locomotives, and similar articles to the value of $1,143,300,000.00; and the flow down the drain has subsequently been maintained at about the same rate.
The figure is, of course, exclusive of “loans” by our Export-Import Bank and similar money-giving agencies; and exclusive of all military aid, the total of which Americans are not permitted to know, it being admitted only that all the cost of recruiting, training, equipping, and maintaining an army of fifteen divisions, with tanks, airplanes, and similar equipment, is borne by the United States. This army is said to be one of the best trained and equipped in all Asia, and there is no reasonable doubt but that it will be used against the United States when the time comes for the Communists in South Vietnam to act openly. But in the meantime the United States is busy building roads, equipping railroads, and installing atomic reactors at the expense of American citizens. Who would risk frightening geese that lay such golden eggs?
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