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THE
DESTRUCTION OF CONSCIENCE by Marshall Sahlins Originally published in Dissent
(Jan.-Feb. 1966) Tea in Ambush Villages in the Mekong Delta are laid out mainly along the canals and rivers. Village may be the wrong term. The houses stand side by side, strung out for hundreds of yards along a road or path paralleling the water course. Besides, one community virtually runs into the next; so that the line of settlement extends sometimes for miles, punctuated periodically by a short stretch of forest, a pagoda, or a focal marketplace town. It is often said of South Vietnam that the day belongs to the government, the night to the "Vietcong." Perhaps it is better said of An Phu District that the day belongs to the Neolithic, the night to the Cold War of the mid-twentieth century. Driving that day to the South Vietnamese Popular Force outpost at Khánh An, I was in Samoa or New Guinea again: the thatch-roof houses on stilts in endless procession along the road; the shaded front verandas overlooking decorative tropical shrubs; the big clay pots in the yard and mats spread out for sunning; the solid fishing boats drawn up on the shore; here and there a woman placidly tending kids or a man mending nets -hardly anything to suggest a civil war, an invasion, and least of all a social revolution other than the neolithic one that brought man from the mobile hunting condition and allowed him to settle down and accumulate a modicum of simple wherewithal. These people, I thought, are historically out of it. Probably they have had little conception of it for centuries, [page 230] and that mainly in the form of a more or less alien landlord or tax collector, a monk, and the few goods from elsewhere they got at market. They have been more subjects than participants in the cultural evolution of the archaic civilizations of Southeast Asia, of the state but not in it, a petty agricultural existence that civilization has rested upon but not incorporated. The Neolithic is here joined as a tributary to the Bronze and Colonial Age, yet preserves its character; so the state is an historic medley of incongruent and opposed nations - the one urban, wealthy, sophisticated, and latterly comprador, the other seeking to perpetuate against exaction "the idiocy- of rural life." But at night, in this war, the two historic epochs join in a ballet which, when it is not a dance of death, is a moment of high comedy. Our Popular Force, platoon strength in black peasant clothes, took stealthily to the road for an ambush position at a river crossing several kilometers from camp. There was something of a moon: one could make out the man several yards ahead and perhaps the man ahead of him, and then one or two others in the parallel line on the opposite side of the road. Somewhere in the middle were two American advisers. Somewhere ahead was a scout with a walkie-talkie; toward the rear was another. We went quietly, watchfully, a little afraid, hunched forward with carbines at the ready. A few- hundred cautious steps, then you stop at a signal from the man ahead, crouch down, look for something, go down on one knee. Then off again on the all-clear. Thus we moved, armed black phantoms. Toward what? Last night the platoon had been ambushed just near here. You could never tell. Certainly not from the incongruent setting. We were carrying guns in the midst of life, where the people live: house by house, family by family, casually going on with it, all along the road we took so seriously. Our antics seemed to make a difference only to the dogs, and then the racket they raised made even our silence ridiculous. (I understood then that whoever controls "the hearts and minds" of the dogs will win the war.) Still, their howls brought no response from the houses. The people stayed just so, arranged around their hurricane lamps in peasant set piece: a sequence of lighted dioramas in a darkened museum, before which passed page 231] beings of such papier-mâché purpose and expression as to raise the question of who was the imitation of humanity. Sometimes an old woman would peer out and say something to us. She was kibitzing the war. For the most part, the family went about its domestic business: an old man working over some tools, a grandmother fussing with crying grandchildren, younger men and boys talking and laughing softly, a woman singing; in one house a transistor radio blaring Vietnamese music at a spellbound family - and all their neighbors hundreds of yards around. Life went on, and why not? The Neolithic (transistorized) was the human occupation; while the black gang with carbines and recoilless rifles and walkie-talkies and Americans seemed as meaningful to this existence as the court ceremony of the Inca emperor. Around here - in this "loyal" area - it's not a civil war, I thought; nor a revolution, nor an invasion from the North. It's the latest thing in warfare - a medieval war. The feudal barons with their kept knights ravage through the countryside to engage in mortal combat for forty days. The peasants go back and forth between the lines, unconcerned except to see that they don't get ravaged or to sell a few things to either or both sides. The peace will certainly affect them, but is it their war - as war? Last night the platoon had gone through a similar performance. They settled carefully into an ambush position at the river. Waiting tensely, one of the American advisers was startled by an arm softly placed over his shoulder. Fortunately, before he could react the thin voice of an old village woman penetrated his senses. It was Mother Courage. "You boys want some tea?" she asked, with plaintive ingratiation. "Go 'way," he said, "we're waiting for someone. I had got to this district, An Phu, by courtesy of the U.S. Information Service (now part of the Joint U.S. Public Affairs Office). It was rather a model village tour: an area of Hoa Hao, a Buddhist reform group now solidly (for the time being) with the South Vietnamese government. But An Phu may have been a perfect model, complete with all the flaws of its political virtues. The Hoa Hao allegiance is probably more practical than principled and [page 232] based fundamentally on "to thine own self be true." Subject for years to opposition and oppression, the Hoa Hao have fought everybody: the Viet Minh, the Diem regime, the Vietcong. Today they accept the Realpolitik - and the weapons and good payoff - of the American presence, decisive in this province where there are no "Arvin" (Army of Vietnam) regulars. It seemed to me quite clear from conversations with the Hoa Hao commander that it was the Americans with whom they were now allied, not the government to whom they were loyal. The late intensification of this war between Good and Evil seems to bring no decision between them so much as it throws into relief a submerged third term of incommensurate value - life. Recalcitrant under pressure, life insists on manifesting itself in all manner of ways - refugees in the cities, revolts in the mountains, desertions in the army, or perhaps just a studied indifference at An Phu. The involvement of the peasant must always have been uncertain and incomplete, particularly on the government side. It is difficult to see how the peasant can be "on" the side - "for" the cause - of a world from which he has been structurally excluded. Historically, peasants have their own side: their family, their fields, their village. Saigon surely offers little alternative to this allegiance. It is allegiance to oneself as a human being, to what one knows as the right human condition. Outsiders must appear as only more or less damaging - or beneficial - to this condition. Foreign warriors in the land may open a new, complicated calculus of alternatives. Even so, what appears to us as a choice of sides may present itself to the peasant as a tactical choice of masters - with a meaning culturally incomparable to the American who is "for" America, or even the Republican Party. Piastres de Resistance At the Saigon airport I handed over the immigration form to the Vietnamese officer. In the space next to "Purpose of your visit" I had written "tourist:' On 5 August, 1965, it was an irrelevant purpose. But was it any more irrelevant than the things other Americans were doing in Vietnam? Actually, I am an anthropologist and an academic critic of the [page 233] war. Neither is a qualification, in the view of administration supporters, to speak on Vietnam: one ought to have been there. I always thought it a weak retort, if only because the critics were as a rule better informed than the tropisimatic adherents of official policy; for another thing, because the record compiled by Americans who had been in Vietnam making and implementing mistakes suggested they had no understanding of Vietnam or of their own existence there. To have been in Vietnam makes one not an expert but perhaps something of a fool or a victim. Nevertheless, as an anthropologist if not as a critic, I had to accept the argument: one should go into the field. I spent six days in Vietnam: mostly in Saigon, one day in Chau Doc Province (An Phu District), and half a day at III Corps Headquarters, Bien Hoa. Much of the time I passed with U.S. Information Service people, to whom I had offered the proposition that they try to convince me they were right. They accepted -"only in America!" -and put me in touch with others, civilian and military (though not with the gung-ho types I asked to see), and with the war (such as it was) in An Phu. These six days did not make me an expert - and I hope not a fool or a victim. It is difficult to become an expert anyhow on things that aren't what they seem. Every day I saw something or learned something that made the country appear irrelevant to what was happening to it. After all, we are fighting Chinese there. There are no Chinese there. So Vietnamese die by way of demonstration. War is the continuation of Madison Avenue by new means; death becomes an advertisement - and "we mean what we say." The single most important and general condition of the American war in Vietnam is its irrelevance. But to kill irrelevantly is a contradiction in terms. All the compromises and the self-deceptions of Americans, and all the brutalization, originate in this contradiction. But the most obvious incongruity is that we are defending the "freedom" of South Vietnam. The absurdity of the statement is not fully manifest by the existing government. To speak of the government disguises the issue of the class of "brave and determined people" we are involved with, of who are our natural allies, who our enemies. It confronts you as you drive into Saigon. The [page 234] rich men's big houses are protected by great iron gates and barbed wire deployed along the tops of thick walls. At the American Embassy and other U.S. establishments the same architectural motif is repeated - with variations as minor in social meaning as the differences between the Mercedes and the Mercuries that jostle aside pedicabs in the crowded streets. Together with a large number of Saigon friends who are doing well while we are thus doing good, we are under siege. The defense of freedom in a lately colonial country takes on elements of a class war. I met a few of our lesser collaborators; also a former enemy:
Critics of the war point to the contradiction between our announced defense of "freedom" and the character of the South Vietnamese government. The criticism does not go deep enough. It is not a question of what government but of what ruling class, what power, we are supporting - and creating - against "communist aggression." It becomes in general a question of what type of society we offer as an alternative. A massive amount of American money is poured into Vietnam. Part of this money corrupts, breeding prostitutes and vendors of "feelthy pictures"; the larger share is simply corrupted and a Vietnamese elite becomes the latest beneficiary of American affluence. The colonial comprador outlives colonialism. He enters into symbiosis with the Cold War. Marshal Ky says the land speculators who drive up prices around the American development at Cam Ranh Bay will be punished. [page 236] The black marketeers and other profiteers will be punished. But under what constraints does the government of Vietnam operate? Large Chinese merchants have a major influence on the government, a senior USOM (U.S. Operations Mission, the AID [Agency for International Development] program) officer told me, an influence that increases in direct proportion to their wealth. He said too that the contracting business was the going swindle. The still-uncontrolled black market is testimony to a large flow of U.S. dollars out of the country, for safe deposit in foreign banks and the import of prohibited luxury goods. Meanwhile, back at the village -
The motivation and dedication of American AID people is beyond question and not at issue. Many, I understand, work tirelessly under dangerous conditions to bring a modicum of betterment to the countryside. Likewise the small Special Forces detachment I saw at An Phu was committed to a program of medical and economic aid for the people - the Peace Corps of the War Corps. But these slim measures of good intention have to be put in the balance against the huge, unplanned subsidization of decadence in the cities to determine a final reading on the American presence. It is not simply that much more goes to bad causes than to good. Hijacked American dollars in the cities capitalize a whole social system, and one in which just this unequal distribution of wealth is proper, a constituted condition. The compradors of Saigon are counterposed economically and ideologically to the people and the resources of the country. The fate of the people, therefore, is not mitigated by small aid in the countryside: it is sealed by big robbery in the city. Saigon, one cynical American said to me, is full of Kennedy idealists who have discovered the facts of life. I thought it a good [page 238] mot as far as it went, but incomplete. He might have added that crossing Kennedy idealism with the facts of life produces a curious political hybrid: a hardheaded surrealist. I spoke with several of the tribe, middle to senior officers mainly, in their air-conditioned sanctuaries at the Embassy, USOM, USIS. I wanted to know how they related, morally at least, to the Saigon cats growing fat on American aid whose interests rather contrast with the dying people. I was reproached for my naiveté: "every Eastern country is full of graft and corruption; it's just like that and always has been" (and therefore always will be?). One or two said that conditions were improving because the present government included dynamic young leaders who took the people's well-being to heart. The most general sentiment was that if the government could somehow be stabilized, the problem of "corruption" would somehow be solved. I had come up against standard American innocence of society: "who is the matter" - as if it were just personalities and not a political structure of economic interest; that the accumulation of wealth is a mere question of "graft" and "corruption" rather than an economic formation of society, a matter of excess rather than a constituted relation to the national economy and the underlying population; that, despite the circumstances, a government could be established on some basis other than the prevailing distribution of wealth and power, apart from its constraints, and become more the executive committee of the people than of the comprador. The last is anyhow ruled out by the "advisory" role of American personnel (civilian as well as military) in Vietnam. In the decisive sense, it is an American war: it is Vietnam's tragedy to have been chosen the battleground for America's stand against the forces of evil. Technically, however, we are just "advisors." I had always thought this was put out for international and home consumption, to make the American intervention palatable for whoever might be inclined to swallow it - but I misunderstood. The "advisory" capacity is taken very seriously by Americans within the country, especially by civilian officials, and it has internal functions much more meaningful than the international propaganda effect. At one level, it is a concession to Vietnamese national feeling;[page 239] and Americans have a complementary need to believe and practice it. As a denial of any colonial status or intentions, it provides for Americans an acceptable meaning of their existence in the country. Beyond that, it serves as a convenient institutional means of personal dissociation from the sufferings of Vietnam, sufferings largely inflicted by the American presence -which is one's own presence. To be an adviser is to be involved yet free of the place, to indulge a sense of duty yet disdain responsibility; so it becomes a prefabricated barrier erected wherever and whenever the ugliness intrudes into consciousness, a denial that one is implicated by what may be going on. It is a moral anesthetic. (And I venture to say that the necessity for moral anesthesia is one reason there are so many versions of truth, why it is so difficult to determine just what is going on in Vietnam.) At the institutional level, which is perhaps the critical level, the function of the "advisory" role must be judged from its effects. The effect at every order of organization from hamlet to nation is to interpose obstacles to American direction of Vietnamese affairs, and so give free play to indigenous forces and interests - especially self-interests. Thus even as America generates powerful economic and political force in Vietnam, it turns around to deny itself the leverage. The free-floating resources are appropriated instead by local collaborators for construction of their own version of Vietnamese society. We give them the advice to do good and the power to do as they please. We say we are "helping they're doing -helping themselves. The "advisory" capacity is a new chapter in the relations between the West and the underdeveloped world. It is a Cold War epilogue of nineteenth-century colonialism. For all our anticolonial protestations we perpetuate a colonial condition in the country. A serious argument against American withdrawal is the bloodbath that would ensue in South Vietnam when the NLF gains control. But against this one might consider the bloodbath without foreseeable end going on now, and the ruling class of South Vietnam to whose tender mercies we would confine the peasant. The [page 240] escalation of war may be narrowing the alternatives for the people to an end with misery or a misery without end. Refugees are streaming en masse into government camps - where they live, newspapers say, in unspeakable conditions. Many Americans I met in Vietnam are convinced the Vietcong have been lately violating their own principles, stepping up economic pressure and terror in the countryside, for their very success has bred control and logistic problems. Washington officials have said that Vietcong terror is the simple explanation. I asked one of the Vietnamese who interviews refugees for Voice of America - principally, however, on agricultural matters - why, in his opinion, the peasants come over to the government. His prompt answer was the "bombing"; the people, he said, want security for their lives and peace for their work. An American VOA employee present at the interview insisted I get the meaning of "bombing" straight. On my request for elucidation the Vietnamese said "bombing and fighting," the fire from both sides. Then he went on to relate that provincial officials who have accompanied him in talks with peasants have several times "asked" him to erase complaints about "bombing" from the tapes. The refugees are supposed to say they have fled from Vietcong terror to a happy life under the government, he said. The provincial officials indicated that the "bombing" need not be broadcast. (Charles Mohr writes in the New York Times of 5 September [1965]: "Already more than 5 per cent of the population has fled into refugee camps. Although it is popular among Washington officials to say that the refugees are fleeing from Vietcong terrorism, some officials on the scene are quite willing to concede or even to volunteer that the majority are fleeing from the insecurity of the countryside and that air strikes are the largest single cause of that insecurity.") I had a number of experiences of this kind, times when I heard a Vietnamese or an American in the presence of another American of official position report something compromising to American ideals, policy, or the Washington line on Vietnam. The incident must be repeated often, as a circumstance of the American presence in Vietnam. On the occasions I could observe it, I was interested in the reaction of the American who was thus suddenly [page 241] confronted with damning information on which he would have to make some reckoning-like the American VOA employee confronted with censorship. If not exactly a moment of truth, the American's response gives subtle intelligence of the critical battle of this war - of how much of America, of what America has meant to us, can be consumed in Vietnam. The Americans I have seen in this predicament were good men and intelligent; but they blanked out, every one of them. Intellectually, they refused to come to terms with it. Morally, they passed. Some said nothing. Some spoke of Vietcong crimes, as if to justify our own or our South Vietnamese agents'. Some glossed over the reported incident as exceptional, as not happening most of the time. And some shrugged, referred to the feudal-oriental character of the country, then asked what one could do since "we're only advisers here." It is, I repeat, an important point. If we are whored by our commitment, if we must lose ourselves in Vietnam, we lose the war - whatever the military outcome. The contradictions of Vietnam may thus reflect themselves in the everyday behavior of Americans. Among military personnel, of course, such translations of big structural events into terms of ordinarv existence will take other forms. Still, the American military adviser who turns his back on the torture of Vietcong prisoners by South Vietnamese soldiers is the khaki counterpart of the VOA civilian who closes his mind to compromising information. But these seem advanced stages of moral decay, people now dangerously close to a final plunge into brutalization. Unless one is so disposed in advance, it may take a certain initial disillusionment with Vietnam to reach this point, a disillusionment that undermines local meanings of the war, leaving one either with the Cold War conviction that it is necessary to stop this Chineseinspired aggression, Vietnam notwithstanding, or else without any conviction at all. I had a glimpse of this earlier phase among American combat troops at Bien Hoa, most of whom were comparatively new arrivals and had seen comparatively limited action. It was enough exposure: Vietnam was incubating in them. Yet one or two resisted the infection: [page 242]
As we walked slowly together toward the commanding officer's tent, he said I could draw my own conclusions from all this. I responded with the obvious: "You mean to say that the war is being [page 245] escalated because of the South Vietnamese desire to be relieved and make a fast buck, complemented by the mentalitv of the American military?" He made no objection. In parting he remarked that if Vietnam wants peace, and if peace means VC control, he for one is willing to accept it. If the VC are elected in a free election, he said in response to my question, he must go along with it - "for God's sake, it's the only honorable thing to do." And he added then: "If they want peace at any price, not to be shot at, the freedom to raise a few crops; let them have it. These are common wants of everyone, aren't they?" Losing the Hearts and Minds of Americans in Vietnam "China" is indispensable to the existence of Americans in Vietnam. The fixation has its own internal, Vietnamese dialectic; but it begins from external conditions, from the Washington Cold War policy and its confrontations with world events. An outsider can attempt only a superficial and partial analysis of the Washington line and very little on its fundamental causes. Clearly, it proceeds from an injunction of sacred ancestral ideology, the Dulles demonology, which defined the struggle against the forces of evil. The evil is the "International Communist Conspiracy," known also in its emanation of "Aggressive Communism" and appearing in Vietnam as "Chinese Expansionism." America, medicine man to the world, is impelled to Vietnam to exorcise the evil spirits. But it was not a simple process of divination that led to this move. The policy for Vietnam seems to have developed from the intersection of the demonology with at least two important events, the Cuban missile crisis and the detente with Russia, which have impressed themselves firmly and in certain ways on political consciousness. The missile crisis is understood to have spiked Russia's guns for the foreseeable future. The detente is taken in evidence that when a communist revolution generates an economic stake in the world, and when the revolutionary generation with its heady ideas of world uprising dies off, a communist power ceases to be aggressive and instead evolves an interest in the status quo. Transferred to China, these understandings dictate a policy of buying time for the revolution - that economic development and [page 246] generational replacement might exhaust its fervor -and, in the meantime, during all that period in which it is dangerous, cordoning the revolution by a strong military stand and preventing its export. Vietnam is the Asian analogue of the missile crisis - therefore, a critical tactic. The "domino theory," moreover, becomes unsuppressible. Its function is to explain the American action, and as the only reasonable explanation of that fact it becomes immune to contradiction by any other fact of life in Southeast Asia. Such seems to be the hardheaded surrealism. In Vietnam, however, the strategy does not present even so rational an appearance. It has to be discussed in more primitive terms. For one thing, the key decision-makers are not there; one sees only partial intimations of the grand design among the few who can seriously reflect on it, and among Americans in general only a vulgar idée fixe about the Red Menace. Besides, the strategy here is refracted through the ugly circumstances of Vietnam, which reshape it into something of an obsession: stopping the Chinese threat is the kind of end that will sanction adoption of any means -even, as I shall tell, Chinese means. We are losing the hearts and minds of Americans in Vietnam. Joining battle with the evil spirits by ritual techniques of bloodletting, we get covered all over with blood ourselves and become ourselves dark forces in the land. It is a classic mythical denouement. Between the medicine man and the spirit of disease there is a close relation to begin with: a set of shared assumptions about the nature of illness, its infliction, and its cure. And, as they struggle for supremacy over the inert body, only shaman and spirit can seem real to each other. The body becomes immaterial, something merely that each attempts to possess and manipulate to defeat the other. The horrifying quality is that the evil spirit is a construction of the medicine man, and though his operation prove a brilliant success the patient may die from it. In the end, the medicine man is indistinguishable from an evil spirit. Americans in Vietnam hold it as a basic expression of purpose that there we oppose Chinese communist expansion. I encountered it among men of fighting ranks and among their officers, [page 247] among staff members of U.S. civilian agencies and among their senior officials. It is the expert opinion of those we employ as political experts. (Vietnamese collaborators, I found, are apt to put it most directly, almost as if the NLF was Chinese.) The confrontation with China has the character of an unquestionable premise of our involvement. Politically aware Americans find it possible to believe it the higher wisdom, even though they are unable to trace the chain of NLF command beyond Hanoi. Everyone knows that communist China is expansionist. Everyone knows, too, that we are faced in Vietnam with communist subversion, which if not contained here will have to be faced again, closer to home. That we are fighting China follows with the force of a categorical syllogism. Perhaps it is the higher wisdom; still, it gives Vietnam a certain air of insanity. Paranoids are after us. The death of Vietnamese is unrelated to their lives. Do we mean to indicate by these deaths that the Chinese must stop threatening us? Then we are involved in killing people to show other people that they should stop threatening us. Or do we mean to show the Chinese they must stop threatening the Vietnamese? Then we are killing people to show other people that they should stop threatening the people we are killing. The "Chinese threat" obscures in advance the nature of the enemy. We cannot know who he is or what he wants. So we destroy in advance the possibility of deciding if he is really our enemy. The counterpart on the political level is the total failure of American policy to support, or even to recognize, nationalism and its human aspirations. Not recognizing it, we succeed in destroying it. Opposing it, we drive it into self-defeating dependence upon major communist powers - and thus in the end obtain the confrontation we sought from the beginning. In my experience, nationalism is simply not discussed by Americans in Saigon. Vietnamese nationalism is a dead issue, buried and covered over by communist aggression. But there is a reason for the madness. Without it one could go insane. Even if "the threat of Chinese expansion" did not exist in Washington, it would be necessary to invent it in Vietnam. The objective conditions make it impossible to sustain any other image [page 248] of the American presence. The lack of freedom mocks our "defense of freedom." The military dictatorship mocks our "defense of democracy." The indifference of the people mocks their "brave struggle against subversion." The thought that these people have been suffering war for twenty-five years must be repressed. And shall we admit our responsibility for the misery of Vietnam? How shall we face the innocent victims of our weapons? Conscience must be destroyed: it has to end at the barrel of the gun, it cannot extend to the bullet. So all peripheral rationales fade into the background. It becomes a war of transcendent purpose, and in such a war all efforts on the side of Good are virtuous, and all deaths unfortunate necessity. The end justifies the means. I stood one morning outside the Psychological Warfare office at III Corps Headquarters, Bien Hoa. Clearly I was an alien: a civilian and an academic dissenter. The bare courtesy of the reception I had just had inside did not trouble to conceal it. Now a young officer came out of the building. With a curious politeness he handed me a newspaper, saving that "a compatriot" of his (but not of mine,) wanted to present it to me and I should especially consider the inside spread of pictures on pages 4 and 5. The paper was the Observer, a weekly published for U.S. forces in Vietnam. The officer was a little surprised when I asked if he could spare any other issues. He did not understand my motives, that I wanted to know what the Observer seeks to teach those who read it. But that general point is not important. The important point is a specific one, dictated by the man who anonymously gave me a present: the inside two pages of the 3 July [1965] edition. It meant something critical to him, and he wanted me to be convinced by it. The two-page banner read: "'A New Glorious Exploit,' Broadcasts Communist Radio." Underneath were seven blood-soaked pictures of the My Canh restaurant bombing in Saigon of 25 June. Most of the photographs, such as the one captioned "Evacuating Innocent Child," showed Americans coming to the aid of shocked and bleeding victims, many of them Vietnamese. Should we share our "compatriot's" understanding of the moral? He might indulge himself in the hate of evil killers at the expense of [page 249] indifference to human pain and death. But no judgment of these pictures should be made in the absence of memory. The American soldiers who see the Observer have already seen certain other pictures. They have looked upon the slaughter of villages, contemplated the civilian victims of American bombs and shells-perhaps not just in photographs. If they are then outraged at the My Canh, it is a cynical lie. They distinguish between "good" and "bad" innocent victims. Human agony has no meaning; the meaning is external, a judgment of those who inflict, not of those who suffer. The outrage at suffering is indifference to suffering. The soldier outraged at this deception of Vietnamese misery has been prepared to commit it. Advanced anticommunism trades places with the enemy. It becomes opposite-communism, and "opposites" are things alike in every respect save one. The final stages of American dissolution in Vietnam will be marked by imitation of the enemy's techniques. I have heard it foreshadowed in the talk of Saigon officialdom: discipline, a senior American civilian officer told me, is what the South Vietnamese government needs; power, he said, is the only thing the Chinese can understand; history, he said, will prove us right. In a remote provincial outpost I found two Americans who had appropriated as their own draconian Chinese methods of interrogation and indoctrination ("motivation" is the American newspeak). The forced destruction of people's beliefs is no longer properly described as something "they" do. Torturously exacted confession and conversion are no longer things we fight against: these are now part of our own arsenal, weapons of our own struggle. The two Americans were leaders of a "motivation" team working among Vietnamese Popular Forces. The team included four Vietnamese instructor-cadres, two of these ex-Vietcong. The dominant of the two Americans was a field representative of a civilian agency; he was assisted by a Special Forces officer. Both were highly qualified, competent in Vietnamese language and custom, and dedicated to Vietnam and their vision of its future. Their program was anticommunist revolution: they were training Popular Forces as revolutionary cadres. The texts were classic communist handbooks on revolutionary warfare, books these [page 250] Americans studied and clearly admired; it does not go too far to say they were disciples, or at least revisionist disciples, of Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Che Guevara. The revolutionary "techniques" were copied in fine detail. (I was given a pledge card that the Americans issued to Vietnamese trainees; it listed "The Four Principles and Eight Rules" of cadre behavior, apparently an amendation of "The Three Rules and the Eight Remarks" Mao developed for partisan warfare against the Japanese.) The Americans insisted, however, on one departure from communist attitudes: alongside self-criticism they encourage the troops to question their instructors and formulate their own views. The indoctrination team moves from outpost to outpost, living in with the troops while "motivating" them. I lived in with them for a night and a good part of a day. They briefed me and allowed me to see the work for myself. But it is not of this guerrilla program that I write. It is of a discussion I had with the Americans about torture and the transformation of Vietcong prisoners to anticommunism. The two Americans allowed they had some experience with it, and some ideas of how it is properly done. I recorded most of that discussion and will excerpt parts of it verbatim. But first allow me to develop the context. The interrogation methods the Americans described are copied from those used most effectively by the Chinese, as they themselves explained. (Of course, there are precedents-for example, the Inquisition.) The treatment seems a compressed and abbreviated version of the procedures used on American POWs during the Korean War. The interrogator has at most four or five days before he must send the prisoner on. Physical torture is precluded. A special type of "mental torture" (their term) is instead inflicted. But it aims not merely at eliciting military information. The prisoner's disclosures are at the same time a betrayal of his cause and a confession of his errors, a renunciation of belief. The betrayal is the first phase of a "cure" of communism - the American civilian kept likening the process to the rehabilitation of alcoholics. If the technique really is effective, and the Americans claim it is, I think it must be because of some rather special qualities of revolutionary warfare and warriors. It has to be understood [page 251] that a Vietcong prisoner comes in with certain comprehensions and expectations that are deeply entwined with his revolutionary ("communist") commitment. A guerrilla movement depends decisively on secrecy. Its members are visible daily to the enemy but must be unknown to him; they maintain a hinterland conspiracy of silence; a single traitor wrecks the organization of a whole village, perhaps a district. The guerrilla thus understands that secrecy is a first principle of the revolution. But, by the same token, intelligence becomes a first principle of the counterrevolution. The prisoner, therefore, expects to be tortured for information and ultimately killed if he remains steadfast. He meets his interrogators prepared to resist the worst: it is a test of his revolutionary soul. But by a carefully calculated approach, the interrogator can from the beginning disappoint the prisoner's expectations, disarm and confuse him. Instead of being tortured, the guerrilla finds himself in the company of an "enemy" who nevertheless treats him with respect, even befriends him, feeds him, makes him comfortable - which is to say, profoundly uncomfortable. The relation the interrogator seeks to effect is one between them as against the world. For even as he binds the prisoner's wounds, he systematically invokes the threat of "the others" - that there are these others (Arvin regulars) around who want at the prisoner and have "more basic ideas" of how to interrogate him. (The Chinese in Korea invoked the North Koreans in the same way when dealing with American POWs.) The interrogator is protecting the prisoner, shielding him against the "big, ugly outside world." Thus, the bond between prisoner and interrogator is forged, the captive caught in a deepening dependence upon his captor. At some point, the latter feels he might press for reciprocity. The guerrilla yields some minor information. Yet emotionally it is not slight: it is a fundamental betrayal of himself, his comrades, and his cause. Still, he is told the information is nothing, not enough, that he will have to do better or the others will move in on him. The trap has been closed. The interrogator is now the only one in the world with whom the prisoner has anything in common. Behind are the people he has sold out, ahead those who would kill him - [page 252] and only the interrogator can help him. The revolutionary is likely to break completely. It is a moment of extreme anguish - "the lowest point in his life in terms of human meaning and existence" (the American civilian said). Yet again, in a disorganized and probably unintentional parody of Chinese techniques, the prisoner learns his confession is still not good enough: he cannot unite with his captors; he must have further "processing" at a rehabilitation center. So I understand the procedure. Something must be said as well of those who described it to me. First - and it is a thing seriously to consider - these two Americans are not strangers, not people who have been metamorphosed by some satanic forces to a point beyond our understanding or recognition. Met on a college campus or in a business office, they would not attract unusual attention. Their attitudes toward Vietnam are indeed more scholarly than demonic. They want to involve themselves in the country. They profess with sincerity their respect for the people - so much that they actively wish them a better fate. For the first several hours of my visit, we had only sparred in a rather formal way. It was not until they saw me sit cross-legged on the floor of a Vietnamese house, and with them eat Vietnamese food with Vietnamese people, that they, these two Americans, accepted me. They,did not give the impression of evil. On the contrary, they presented the appearance of good. And now consider this interview, what they said and what they revealed of themselves. The main protagonist - identified here as "Mr. X" - describes himself as an "agnostic atheist," but clearly he believes in the Devil if not in God. In fact, his is a holy work: to exorcise the communist devils possessing Vietcong. He undertakes the prisoner's "conversion" for the prisoner's own good: he is "helping" the man, saving him. I ask, "How do you offset the damage to yourself?" "Your belief," he answers. Why do these Americans so intensely need to crack down the prisoner, to convince him he is wrong, they right? Is it because they need to convince themselves? The officer ("Captain Y") says that if you don't try to break the prisoner, you're admitting he's right. And Mr. X makes a curious slip: he speaks of an [page 253] "emotional interdependence" between the prisoner and the interrogator, where he means to discuss the dependence of the prisoner upon the interrogator. I sense these men are identified with the prisoner, that they have themselves under the knife, that the prisoner's conversion will validate their own integrity. And so inevitably they fall into a hopeless contradiction. For if their own righteousness is at test in the prisoner's response, then they need too to fail. The prisoner's successful resistance is the interrogators' greatest satisfaction: his strength proves their strength, his will their will, his conviction their conviction. There is no question of Mr. X's admiration of the prisoner who will not be broken. "Tremendous," he says, "just tremendous:" Then he lies when I ask if he admires this man. And at the end he lies the ultimate lie of Americans in Vietnam. Notwithstanding that he had just described a specific prisoner who would not yield, he denies he was ever involved in such an interrogation: "because we're advisers - in every sense. MR. X: At this time [the prisoner] kind of feels an emotional dependence upon you because for two days you've been protecting him from the big, outside ugly world that he doesn't understand: feeding him good chow, talking with him, calling him a [can-bo?] of the NLF, not the derogatory term of Vietcong . . . Then you indicate that this nice treatment that he's had so far [has] not been disinterested good treatment, that we expect his cooperation. This again reintroduces the whole issue of the big, ugly outside world. What's going to happen to him now? Well, he might tell you a couple of things, beginning with rather innocuous things. Well, you can imply that you knew that already, what you're really after are better things and this might rather [uncalm?] him. Then you might say, "Jeez, that scrape you got on your shoulder . . . it obviously needs attention; we'll have to give you some penicillin." And while you're giving him the penicillin, you're telling him that, "You know, there are these other types of people who just . . . " [. . .] MR. X: Actually again, this is the technique that Captain [Y] . . . and myself have been trying to promote in an advisory relationship. [page 254] Again, it's a technique that's been used most effectively by the Chinese, in which you've pulled the man out of his familiar environment: he's dependent . . . upon you for his continual well-being. And even though the prisoner may [resist?], it's kind of an emotional interdependence that's created, and what you try and do is [use?] this emotional interdependence in such a way that he comes to the point where he must tell you what he knows. SAHLINS: It's in effect brainwashing-is that the point of this? MR. X: No, what it is, is breaking him down. But . . . once you've broken him down, it comes to the point where he wakes up in a Sweat one morning and tells you, "All right." Then he tells you the names of the two people in his cell; or, he gives you the location of the camp that he just recently came from. Then you're through with him, in practical terms. You've got what you needed to continue operating. But at this point, if you really believe in anything yourself, what you've got to do is give him something to hope for before you Send him back for further processing. Because you have just brought this individual to the lowest point in his life in terms of human meaning and existence. So at that point, that's when you've got to stress that, "Well now we're releasing you for further processing. But for you, what you've just told us is the beginning of a positive affirmation. We just can't process you right into our unit now; because you don't know what we stand for and what we're fighting for, but we hope that someday you will be joining us:' See, we don't have time to get any brainwashing. The Chinese can do that because they have POWs for months and months and months. If we get a guy, we've got him for two to five days, and then he's out of our hands. In that two to five days, we've got to get the information we need. But we will not get the information we need by physical torture. We've got to get it by an emotional and mental torture. And you can do that because that's what they're least adequately prepared for. It's what Americans are least adequately prepared for when they find themselves in the other side's hands. [. . .] SAHLINS: What kind of control do you have over Arvin types of interrogation [i.e., physical torture]? MR. X: Well again, that's an advisory function. And what you're [page 255] trying to do is - this is just a traditional, feudal Asian Society, Mainlandstyle - and what you're trying to do is change the course of warfare in Asia. To some extent this has been done: the Chinese People's Liberation Army; it's happened probably in the Japanese army, the Japanese Self-Defense and Home Defense Armies. But until the end of World War 11, we always thought of the Japanese army as a real cruel, vindictive bunch of cutthroats. Well, it turned out in post-World War II analysis that the Bataan Death March was something that they handled to the best of their ability, given the available transport and the way that they would have handled their own prisoners. They just moved them, and they moved them as fast as they could. People who couldn't keep up the pace in some cases were helped and in Some other cases -just according to the individual guard - were bashed and thrown aside. Vietnamese to our eves seem rather cruel sometimes to prisoners, but they're not doing this with any ideological vengeance. They're doing that because that's just been the bent of warfare in Mainland Asia for a thousand years, and what we have got to try to do is sophisticate it, and tell them, "Look, that's just not the way.'' It's a slow process; we're attempting a reformation of a whole society. SAHLINS: What practical is being done to discourage this kind of thing? MR. X: Well, guidance on the spot - CAPTAIN D (SAHLINS'S ESCORT): It's up to the individual advisers -MR. X: The individual adviser giving guidance on the spot. CAPTAIN D: Sometimes it's successful, sometimes not CAPTAIN Y: In most cases, it's not. SAHLINS: From what you say about mental torture, you wouldn't make any distinction in the morality of either kind [i.e., physical versus mental torture]? MR. X: Hell, no! I don't make any distinction in morality at all: torture is torture, and when you fuck around with a guy's mind and his whole basic raison d'être, you're really hurting him - especially when he's prepared mentally, Spiritually, for the physical torture. SAHLINS: Then the attempt to discourage Vietnamese water torture . . . is just because the other type [mental torture] doesn't offend American sensibilities as much? [page 256] MR. X: No, it's not because of that. Because we don't concern ourselves here with American sensibilities. We concern ourselves with what will work. CAPTAIN Y: It's relatively ineffective. MR. X: It's ineffective. It may sound hard-boiled to say that we don't concern ourselves with American sensibilities-but we don't. We're concerning ourselves with Vietnamese sensibilities. SAHLINS: What about the sensibilities of the Americans who are involved . . . the person who's torturing? MR. X: To most of the Americans, to most of the simpleminded Americans who get involved in Vietnam - that's all the boobus Americanus that H.L. Mencken spoke about-undoubtedly they think that the mental and emotional torture we're talking about they the least objectionable, because they've never really paused to seriously reflect about it themselves; or perhaps they did not go through the experience of being a POW in the Korean conflict themselves. And they can probably tell you, "Oh, Jesus, I'd try and stop that physical torture, because 1 know it's just wrong"-you know. But we think that we're looking into it a little more deeply, and we see that the mental and spiritual torture that we bring a man through to the point where he voluntarily gives you the information is pretty rough stuff to get involved in too. But it works. SAHLINS: How do you offset the damage to yourself? MR. X: Your belief. Your belief. you have to sincerely believe that in the long run you're helping this man. It's like an AA cure. If you're just breaking the guy down for the sake of getting a poor helpless alcoholic who's hipped on NLF propaganda to admit that he was wrong and give you the information, then you're going to send him out in the street a crushed derelict, then there's something wrong with you. But you have to really believe, as we do - although we get discouraged sometimes by our [Vietnamese] counterparts - you have to really believe that you're helping this guy to something better. SAHLINS: Conversion from communism is involved in the torture. MR. X: Conversion from anything to anything involves a certain degree of self-torture. We just accelerated the process because we need that fucking information. SAHLINS: This is better for him? [page 257] MR. X: He's alive, and you can still help him . . . [. . .] MR. X: Most Americans, unfortunately, don't bother to think deeply about the stuff they get involved in and they make superficial judgments: "Well, it's wrong to torture this guy physically because we're all part of the same [background]" - CAPTAIN Y: If you ask you'll get probably 80 percent of the people [U.S. military] will say, "Well, I didn't get involved in it. When they capture them, when they capture the Vietnamese communists, I just turn my back and go and have a cigarette." MR. X: They take a drink from their canteen and light up a cigarette. And that's discouraging . . . I'd rather get-not get involved in it, not in the actual physical torture myself - but I'd rather be right there and see it done, and then laugh like a horse when it doesn't work and they don't get the information. And then in the long run you're affecting the situation when you just laugh at this guy and say: "Look, you think he's gonna break? So you cut up his stomach a little bit and his insides fell out . . . He got the last laugh on you, because he didn't talk a bit:" And maybe it'll make the guy think, you know, and ten times later, after ten more people have faded out because he physically tortured them, maybe he'll say: "Okay, wise American adviser, what would you do?". . . We have a moral responsibility, it seems to me, once we've stepped into this country to involve ourselves in the complete fabric of the country, and to understand it, and then try and help the Vietnamese to look at some different alternatives . . . We should be acting as a catalyst, as a thinking catalyst in Vietnam. But you cannot be a catalyst unless you know the entire fabric of the thing. And lighting up a cigarette when they bring a prisoner in for questioning is, well, that's an immoral - CAPTAIN Y: It's just like saying, "It doesn't happen." MR. X: That's just about the height of immorality, I think. To think that you can just absolve yourself. That's saying that every man is an island; or at least when it is comfortable, when it's comfortable for me to be an island unto myself, then I am; and the bell's tolling for that poor fucker under the knife, not me. That's real bad. And again, it's a simpleminded approach. [. . .] [page 258] [Mr. X had mentioned that one of the rules imparted to the cadres in training was "be kind to prisoners." I asked if that wasn't a rule he disobeyed.] MR. X: Well, if the final result of it is-it's a cruel process-but the result of bringing him closer to you, of conversion - it's a tortuous process of conversion-but the result is a kind one . . . If you believe in your program, this is what you do . . . SAHLINS: Do you believe in breaking people down so they agree with your program? And breaking them down justifies the end? MR. X: No . . . That's why we would not take a guy who's been broken directly into our unit at this time . . . SAHLINS: Either you will rehabilitate him by converting him to your belief or you're going to leave him a mental wreck . . . Can your ends be so God-given as to give you this right among humanity to do this? MR. X: I don't know. I don't really believe anybody's hands are Godgiven. I'm an agnostic atheist. SAHLINS: No, vour ends. I'm not asking you for religious beliefs. What I'm asking is, do you believe you have the right to impose by this method - MR. X: I think I've got the right to try. Nobody's got the right to succeed - guaranteed. But everybody's got the right to promote and proselytize what they believe. [. . . ] , CAPTAIN Y: If we do not break this guy, if we do not attempt to change his ideas, then in essence what have we done? We've said that basically he's right! SAHLINS: No, that isn't so. One agrees to disagree as a matter of principle in a democratic system. MR. X: Oh wait, this is [where] we begin . . . I've had some tremendous conversations with these guys, and we begin by agreeing to disagree. But you can soon get this guy so flustered and so shaken up that before he knows it, he's agreeing with you -because his assumptions to begin with were rather vulnerable. SAHLINS: But that isn't the issue here. The issue here is whether you l will impose your will by this technique, which is - MR, x: We don't know what our will is yet. SAHLINS: You will impose your ideas by this technique - [page 259] MR. X: What ideas? SAHLINS: . . . I asked the question, how do you justify the effect upon yourself of acting in this way? And you said you're doing the guy a service. Now, I'm asking you, do you believe you have the right to impose your will on somebody, impose what you believe - MR. X: We are not imposing our will. We are not imposing will. Even after you've broken him and gotten the information, he's still a free agent. MR. X: Not impose will-if he fails to accept. . . an alternative. And not our alternative; there are a number of alternatives. Because in essence that's what we're trying to show him. SAHLINS: You don't accept that [i.e., that there is only one way of doing things and nobody can dispute it], but you accept the other premise that there are many ways . . . So, as a matter of fact, by this process you either transform him from that belief into one of a range of acceptable beliefs, or you will leave him a mental wreck MR. X: But we don't leave him this way. We have brought him to a point where he realizes that the faith he placed in his previous system was essentially not powerful. He has volunteered the information. At this point he's got to find a new way. He's got to have a way out of his dilemma, and the people at the training centers should be skillful enough to point out to him a number of alternatives. SAHLINS: We come back to the question: whether you have the right - by these techniques, which are external to him - to deny him [the] belief that he came in with in his hand and only accept a set of alternatives which you propose? [. . .] MR. X: Listen, I've met guys . . . We had a guy in Phu Yen Province in the summer of '63 who was the Propaganda Director for the NLF in that province; and boy, we just worked ourselves literally ragged in four days trying to bring that guy to the point where he'd tell us a few things, and he was tremendous -just tremendous. Didn't tell us a thing. SAHLINS: You admire this guy? [page 260] MR. X: Tremendous - tremendous. SAHLINS: So you admire more a person who will not acquiesce to the thing that you say is right than one who does? MR. X: No, not true. I didn't say that at all. I admire a guy who will tortuously admit - if he really believes - that, "Oh Jesus, I never thought about that before. Those guys [NLF] they told me something else; and you're really doing something else." A guy like that who will examine his previously arrived conclusions and change his mind, I admire that - SAHLINS: That's very admirable, but it doesn't describe the process you went through, which was to leave him in a situation where either he takes his set of alternatives which you give him or he is a mental wreck. MR. X: Remember, this was an act of affirmation on his part, where he yields the information voluntarily. But it's only a beginning; it's only a beginning; and it's not fair to leave him at the point where he's just made the beginning. MR. X: It's just like an alcoholic. An alcoholic can attend the meetings and he can see everybody else get embarrassed; and if he doesn't want to join them he can just back out again. But once a guy begins to join this little society of alcoholics - CAPTAIN Y: These cadres we have [as instructors] - these ex VCs, exNLF, ex Viet Minh - they all in some way or another gave up something in their own mind when they turned, came to the government. MR. X: . . . What we're trying to show these guys when we're interrogating them, through this tortuous process, is that you're not better [off] under the NLF. "Your whole series of assumptions has got to be reexamined here, and we're here to help you reexamine them. And, Jesus, there's some guys here have got some more basic ideas of how they'd like to examine you, but we're just holding these guys off. . . and we'll take good care of you." That's the kind of a dirty trick - [but] when you've only got four days . . . SAHLINS: Have you done this with Vietcong? MR. X: We don't do anything because we're advisers - in every sense.
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