The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 56, No. 17, Ed. 1 Thursday, January 23, 1969 Page: 2 of 8
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Myth of democracy
Diem's totalitarian blunders boost NLF, alienate peasants
(Third in a series)
By STEPHEN K. FOX
"Without American aid to [South]
Vietnam's military and economic
machinery, the country would not sur-
vive ten minutes."
—Bernard Fall,
"The Two Vietnams"
In 1955 the United States began giving
direct aid to the first of many Saigon
regimes. At that time, the nominal ruler
of South Vietnam was the Emperor Bao
Dai, who had served as a puppet to the
French colonial administration since
1949.
Realizing that we had not picked a
"winner" around which to build a new
government, the United States had Bao
Dai deposed by Ngo Dinh Diem, who
received 98 per cent of the vote in a
referendum which even "Time" maga-
zine conceded was rigged.
Diem, who had spent the last four
years of the Indochinese War in the
L nited States, was not well known in
South Vietnam and had the backing of
m one but the United States. His prob-
lem was to consolidate his power; his
mistake was that he chose to base his
power on an increasingly authoritarian
form of government, rather than by in-
creasing his popular support.
Bernard Fall characterized Diem's
concept of government in his book,
"The Two Vietnams":
" 'Society,' said Diem, 'functions
through personal relations among
men at the top.' Whether that image
of history went out with Louis XIV
is immaterial in the present context;
that is the way Diem runs Vietnam.
"In such a Weltanschauung, com-
promise has no place and opposition
of any kind must of necessity be sub-
versive and must be suppressed with
all the vigor the system is capable of."
The United States accepted Diem's
claim that his security measures were
aimed at the communists, while Diem
systematically began to suppress oppo-
sition of all kinds, including democrats,
socialists, liberals and nationalists.
Phillipe Devillers, a French scholar and
writer who lived in Vietnam during the
Indochinese War, writes in the "China
Quarterly":
"In 1958, the situation grew worse.
Round-ups of 'dissidents' became more
frequent and more brutal. ... A cer-
tain sequence of events became almost
classical: denunciation, encirclement
of villages, searches and raids, arrest
editorial
LClhXQ
Same coitt, otfa* dccie
Any program of minority admissions must pay primary concern to the welfare
ot the individuals involved—students from the minorities who are being admitted.
' oncern for preserving institutional prestige, or at the other extreme a desire to
mollify student pressure groups, must in the end give way to a real desire on the
part of concerned Rice students, faculty, and administrators to help minority
.-Indents in their intellectual, and, inevitably, their personal development. The insti-
tutional gears grind at an often agonizingly slow pac-e at Rice, and it is questionable
v.'iiether any institutional action or commitment toward increasing minority enroll-
ment would yet have taken place without long and steady pressure from certain
students and faculty. However, the failure in social responsibility-—to use a mild
phrase—implicit in Rice's past lack of action to racially, culturally, economically,
and geographically diversify its student body could probably be equalled in extent
( y the damage done countless minority group students if they were admitted under
program hastjly conceived and ill-suited to their needs. c
It is still an open question how much committee deliberation and discussion is
Really necessary before a concrete proposal is forthcoming, if as Dr. Grob of the
Committee on Minority Admissions has indicated the committee and the administra-
tion share the goals of the Student Committee on University Research. It is also
debatable, however, how much Rice can contribute to the intellectual and personal
development of very many minority students, as long as it remains in its present
state. Rice was conceived as a lily-white institution, and it remained entirely segre-
gated until 1905; it is unlikely that a significant number of minority students can
now be successfully introduced into a University with Rice's present reputation for
"toughness," and its inflexible and foreboding course load and degree requirements.
Dean Cordon's proclamation that in order to attract more minority students, Rice
must "overcome its image of being tough," is both unfair and dishonest if Rice does
not become a little less "tough" in actuality before those students arrive here to
matriculate. It would not be in keeping with a desire "to further the development of
minority students" if they were brought here only to be injected into that academic
moatgrinder which this University calls its freshman year.
One advantage of investing a great deal of time and care into a move for change
is that it makes possible substantive reform. In his talk at Hanszen Tuesday night,
Dr. Grob voiced the truism that by studying the problems of curriculum, counseling
and tutoring programs, and other alternatives to the standard four-year, ten-courses-
a-year route to a degree, it becomes clear that most of these problems affect every
student just as much as they affect a specially-admitted minority of the student
body. If it is decided that it is not advisable to require underprivileged minority
freshmen to take a full course load complete with the usual number of lab sciences,
this naturally leads to questions of the freshman program as a whole—if Rice is to
avoid the undesirable result of creating old-fashioned "separate-but-equal" facilities
right within its own hedges. The fact that Rice has a national reputation in the
sciences and engineering, Grob said, may lead a good many minority students to
enter this program. The few electives allowed S-E's in the first two years, however,
do little to offer a glimpse of an alternative vocation, with the result that those who
finally drop out of that curriculum change majors so late they often have consider-
able backtracking to do. Conversely, an academ's or architect's contact with the
sciences is all too often limited to travesties like Physics 101 or Math 101.
Many more examples could be added to the list of problems common to pros-
pective minority group s.tudents and those students who are already here. The con-
current appearance in the Rice community of a drive to increase minority enroll-
ments and a thoroughgoing evaluation of the whole undergraduate experience offers
some hope for a common solution. 1—drb
of suspects, plundering, interrogations
enlivened sometimes by torture (even
of innocent people), deportation, etc."
A vai-iety of repressive laws made it
almost impossible for a legal opposition
to exist. The worst of these, Law 10-59,
although aimed at stopping sabotage,
also punished "infringements of national
security" with the minimum sentence of
either death or hard labor for life. The
military tribunals that were established
to handle such cases were expressly pro-
hibited from considering any extenuating
circumstances. No appeal was possible.
The New York World Telegram revealed
that merely "the intention to shake one's
fist in the direction of the Presidential
Palace" made one liable to punishment
by military tribunal.
Assembly restricted
Diem even went so far as to prohibit
any kind of public assembly that did not
have prior authorization. Robert Shaplen
in his book, "The Lost Revolution; the
U.S. in Vietnam, 1964-1966," writes:
"Public meetings required seven
days' advance notice, and, of course,
could be disapproved, as they usually
were. Even private meetings of asso-
ciations and unions not held during
working hours required forty-eight
hours' notice. Weddings and funerals
could not be held without twenty-four
hours' prior notice. Penalties for vio-
lations ranged from fines to six
months in jail."
By April, 1960, the situation in Viet-
nam had become so bad that a group of
eminent South Vietnamese citizens, in-
cluding doctors, former governmental
officials, lawyers, the former Chairman
of the Vietnamese Delegation to the
1954 Geneva Conference, an engineer,
and a priest, publicly issued "The Mani-
festo of the Eighteen," which listed the
ills that were plaguing South Vietnam
and urged Diem to institute reforms:
"... A constitution has been estab-
lished in form only; a National As-
sembly exists whose deliberations
always fall into line with the govern-
ment; antidemocratic elections — all
those are methods and 'comedies'
copied from the dictatorial Communist
regimes. . . .
"Continuous arrests fill the jails
and prisons to the rafters . . .; public
opinion and the press are reduced to
silence. The same applies to the pop-
ular will as translated in certain open
elections, in which it is insulted and
trampled. . . ."
Democratic farce
This last sentence refers to the nation-
al election held in August, 1959. Diem's
National Revolutionary Party and other
pro-governmental parties won all of the
seats in the National Assembly, by the
simple expedient of allowing no opposi-
tion candidates to take their seats.
In the next national election, held in
September, 1963, all the candidates were
approved in advance by the government.
Many were unopposed, including Diem's
brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu and his wife,
Mine. Nhu.
Far from having established a democ-
racy in South Vietnam, Diem deserves
the credit for destroying one of the few
native democratic institutions in- Viet-
nam, the village elections, abolished in
1956. Henceforth, the village chiefs and
municipal councils were to be appointed
by the government. To quote again from
Shaplen's "The Lost Revolution":
". . . Dang Due Khoi, a young
nationalist who later became Diem's
press officer and eventually turned
against him, was among those who
thought Diem's decision unwise. . . .
" 'Even if the Vietminh had won
some elections,' Khoi said, 'the danger
in doing away with the traditional
system of village elections was great-
er. This was something that was part
of the Vietnamese way of life. . . .
" 'The security problem existed, but
it wouldn't have made much differ-
ence if the Vietminh had elected some
village chiefs—they soon established
their own underground governments
anyway. . . .' "
Fatal policy
In a war where the counterinsurgent
must outgovern the guerrilla at the
grass roots level and prevent the moral
isolation of his people by giving them a
stake in their government, Diem's policy
was suicidal. The National Liberation
Front gained the people's approval by
assassinating Diem's appointees, first by
the hundreds, and then by the thousands.
Diem's failure to carry out land re-
forms is too well known to be worth
repeating. However, "The Manifesto of
the Eighteen" pointed to corruption in
other areas as well:
". . . Not a month goes by without
the press being full of stories about
graft impossible to hide; this becomes
an endless parade of illegal transac-
tions involving millions of piastres.
. . . Sources of revenue are in the
hands of speculators who use the gov-
ernment party to make monopolies
operating for certain private inter-
ests. . . ."
Despite massive American economic aid,
by 1962, almost 50 per cent of the poten-
tial workers in South Vietnam were un-
employed, according to official statistics.
Aid squandered
How then was American aid used ?
According to Bernard Fall, between 1957
and 1960, the Diem regime built 6500
square meters of hospitals, 86,000 square
meters of schools, and 425,000 square
meters of high-rent villas and apartment
buildings. He goes on to remark that this
sort of thing tended to make communist
guerrillas out of peaceable peasants.
Faced with a steadily growing guer-
rilla movement in the countryside where
the government's local influence had
become nominal or non-existent, Diem
resorted to the strategy of physically
separating the National Liberation Front
from the people. With the advice of
R. K. G. Thompson, former Permanent
Defense Secretary of Malaysia, the Sai-
gon regime announced in May, 1961, that
16,000 "strategic hamlets" would be built
in South Vietnam. Copies from the Ma-
laysian non-example that had worked
against a minority based insurgency, it
had virtually no hope of succeeding in
South Vietnam where a{3proximately 85
per cent of the people live off the land.
Hamlets opposed
The Program met with immediate hos-
tility from both the peasantry and the
N.L.F. To quote the Dallas Morning
News, January 1, 1963:
"Supposedly the purpose of the for-
tified villages is to keep the V.C. out.
But the barbed wire denies entrance
and exit. Vietnamese farmers are
forced at gunpoint into these virtual
concentration camps. Their homes,
possessions, and crops are burned."
Of the 8,000 strategic hamlets even-
tually constructed, 80 per cent were de-
stroyed by the people. Some had to be
rebuilt as many as sixty times. By mid-
1963, even "Time" admitted that "the
peasants strongly resist the plea for
strategic hamlets into which they are
herded by force."
The N.L.F. had a field day. By June,
1963, a Resources Control Survey of the
U.S. Operations Mission, Saigon, indi-
cated that the government's control
measures were nonexistent or ineffec-
tive in 16 of South Vietnam's 37 prov-
inces and "acceptably effective" in only
six. The same survey showed that the
N.L.F. was collecting taxes on a for-
malized basis, with bond issues, tax
tables, and receipts, in 27 provinces and
on a less formal basis in three more.
Hope remains
As bad as things were, it should still
be remembered that the N.L.F. had risen
to power on a program of social reform
and grass roots government under a cor-
rupt and authoritarian Saigon regime.
The revolution was still limited to its
fourth stage and it may have been (the-
oretically) possible to prevent the total
moral isolation of the people of South
Vietnam under new, reform-minded lead-
ership. The war was still being fought
by South Vietnamese; it might still have
been possible for Saigon to establish
some kind of organic relationship with
its people, instead of becoming an Amer-
ican satellite.
Instead, exactly the opposite happened.
the rice thresher, january 23, 1969—page 2
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Bahler, Dennis. The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 56, No. 17, Ed. 1 Thursday, January 23, 1969, newspaper, January 23, 1969; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth245046/m1/2/: accessed July 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Rice University Woodson Research Center.