U.S. Battling Peasant Revolt in Vietnam

The war in South Vietnam and the bombings of North Vietnam have precipitated a crisis in United States foreign policy. What direction should future American policy take? The answer must lie in an analysis of the forces in conflict.

The American press maintains that we are fighting against something called the Viet Cong, a small Communist guerilla group. We maintain that the U.S. is fighting against a peasant revolution, a military and political movement supported by the majority of the South Vietnamese peasantry.

From 1902 until the Japanese conquest during World War II, Vietnam was under French colonial rule. The subsistence production of the Vietnamese peasantry was used to support a class of landlords and the French colonial administration. This repression resulted in several unsuccessful peasant uprisings. The biggest, which occured in 1930, was led by Ho Chi Minh, an ardent Vietnamese nationalist who had studied Marxist revolutionary methods in Moscow.

From 1939 to 1943 the Japanese took control of the country. They instituted a hamlet program designed to extract rice from the peasants for war supplies. In the famine produced by the war, two million peasants out of a total of 30 million Vietnamese starved to death.

The result of Japanese control was a major peasant revolt. Ho Chi Minh organized a strong Communist party among the peasants of Vietnam and was able to mobilize over 90,000 guerillas. When the Japanese surrendered on August 14, 1945, the peasant movement controlled enough of the country to call a national congress and to form a new nation-wide government--the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

A guerilla war cannot be won without a popular base. The repressive governments of the French and the Japanese had created the conditions for revolt. The people who led the revolution were Vietnamese; the people who constituted the base of the movement were the Vietnamese peasantry.

At the time the entire country was solidly behind the revolutionary government. While in power, Ho Chi Minh began extensive programs of land and educational reform. But the new regime was short-lived. In order to re-establish colonial control, the French overthrew Ho Chi Minh's government in the South and reinstated a puppet regime headed by Bao Dai.

French Control Falters

But France was unable to maintain, control over the country-side. Faced with consolidated Communist power backed by the peasantry, they could only have found local support among the disinherited landlords and the remnants of the pre-war colonial administration. Attempts to re-establish the landlords failed, however, and the French were forced to fight a long and increasingly hopeless war against the Viet Minh, the peasant guerilla forces.

With the victory of the Communist movement in China in 1949, the United States became increasingly involved in Southeast Asia. During the Korean War the U.S. expanded its economic and military aid to Laos and Vietnam as a part of the overall "containment" policy against China. By 1954 the Americans were paying 78 percent of the French military budget in Vietnam.

Nevertheless, the French colonial regime continued to lose group to the revolutionary Viet Minh from 1946 to 1954. Once more, a popular revolution, based on peasant discontent, broke out. Production and agriculture had already fallen by half; the peasants liberated by the Viet Minh from the burden of rent and excessive taxes were not prepared politically or economically to accept their return.

U.S. Seeks Wider Involvement

By 1954 the French held little more than the Saigon area and were willing to withdraw. But the United States government did not desire a peaceful solution to the Vietnamese war; rather, it wished to internationalize the fighting. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles even offered nuclear weapons to the French government to use against the Viet Minh, but France refused.

After the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu, a conference was called in Geneva in May, 1954. The solution worked out there took no account of the support for the Viet Minh among the peasantry throughout Vietnam: it temporarily divided the country along the 17th parallel and established a Franco-American sphere of influence in the South. This division, supported two distinct objectives: the American intention to keep military and diplomatic pressure on China and the British desire to keep Communist control as far north of Malaya as possible. The U.S., however, refused to sign the agreement, merely promising not to violate its provisions.

In this partition, lies the origin of the present crisis in Vietnam. The Geneva accord promised that nation-wide elections would be held in July, 1956, to reunite the North and the South. But the United States had no intenion of permitting the election. As President Eisenhower stated in his memories. "I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of fighting, possible 80 percent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader." Some observers have estimated that the Viet Minh was even stronger in the South than in the North.

The task that then, faced the U.S. was the creation of an anti-Communist alternative which would appeal to the peasantry of South Vietnam. A successful "containment" policy would have had to include certain economic measures. First, the government should have sanctioned the status quo for those peasants who had enjoyed the benefits of the agrarian reforms instituted by the Viet Minh. Second, tax and land reforms of a similar character should have been extended to the remainder of the population. Third, trade between the industrial North and the agrarian. South should have been continued, since only Vietnam as a whole constituted a viable economic unit. Politically, the government should have been representative of the overwhelmingly Buddhist and peasant population. Existing parties and religious sections should have been given a part in a coalition government.

In fact, all of the preconditions necessary for such a policy were undermined by the regime imposed by the United States. In June, 1954, Ngo Dinh Diem became the de facto chief of state, possessing dictatorial powers. Diem had been in France during the later years of the war, and owed his appointment to his influence with Bao Dai, under whose regime he served as Minister of the Interior.

Diem's policies in opposition to the requirements of containment reflected his prejudices as an authoritarian, a militant Catholic and a social conservative. In all of his programs, he was actively supported by the U.S. government. In addition, acting in accordance with American interests, he cut off trade with North Vietnam and subjected South Vietnamese industry to the debilitating effect of the influx of competing American textiles and other products under the commodity import program of 1953.

The implementation of Diem's agrarian "reform" measures in 1957 coincided with the institution of a wholesale terror campaign throughout the countryside. These programs reinstated the landlords who had been removed by the Viet Minh, reinstituted rent, and at the same time failed to provide the peasants with any security of land tenure. All those peasants who had benefited from the Viet Minh reforms or who had supported the resistance movement against the French were considered "subversives" and, like Diem's other political opponents, were either murdered or subjected to torture and confinement in concentration camps.

The peasant' victims of this terrorism revolted. They were led by former members of the Viet Minh who lived in South Vietnam and by leaders of other political groups attacked by Diem This movement now controls most of South Vietnam. There is no evidence that the Hanol regime is supplying economic or military aid to the South Vietnamese movement. In October, 1963, the Baltimore Sun reported an official U.S. estimate of the sources of Viet Cong arms, which indicated that only one out of fifty weapons came from the Communist bloc. Most of the equipment was American and had been captured from Diem's army.

According to a New York Times report last month, the latest intelligence data show that there was no northern infiltration into South Vietnam through 1946. Beyond this date, there is no information. (A small percentage of the Viet Cong were South Vietnamese who went. north at the time of the partition and began to return when it became clear that no elections would be held.) Thus, the United States has been bombing North Vietnam presumably to halt the Viet Cong attacks, without having produced tenable evidence that Hanoi actually controls the movement in the South.

The only alternative to Ho Chi Minh which the U.S. has thus far offered the South Vietnamese peasantry has been increasing brutal oppression. If the American government were to withdraw now, the Communist-led peasant movement would gain control of South Vietnam. This move would not only give the peasants what they have sought since 1945, but would also offer the country the possibility of economic development, something that neither the United States nor the South Vietnamese landlords have been able to effect. If the United States is concerned about its "strategic interests" in Southeast Asia, it should offer the South Vietnamese Communists economic assistance either directly or through the agency of France or the United Nations. This would enable the regime to remain independent of support by the Communist bloc and allow the U.S. to force whatever social reforms are needed in the rest of the "free world" in that area