This process that empowers criminals and outcasts in society can work even better when institutionalized as policy by revolutionary organization, armies, and governments. North Vietnam and its Vietcong proxies represent one force that blatantly used atrocity as a policy and was triumphant because of it. In 1959, 250 South Vietnamese officials were assassinated by the Vietcong. The Vietcong found that assassination was easy, it was cheap, and it worked. A year later this toll of murder and horror went up to 1,400, and it continued for twelve more years.
