Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

by Edward S. Herman

The United States did not achieve its maximal goals in Indochina, but it did gain a partial victory. Despite talk by Eisenhower and others about Vietnamese raw materials, the primary U.S. concern was not Indochina but rather the “domino effect,” the demonstration effect of independent development that might cause “the rot to spread” to Thailand and beyond, perhaps ultimately drawing Japan into a “New Order” from which the United States would be excluded.175 This threat was averted as the United States proceeded to teach the lesson that a “‘war of liberation’ . . . is costly, dangerous and doomed to failure” (Kennedy adviser General Maxwell Taylor, testifying to Congress).176 The countries of Indochina will be lucky to survive; they will not endanger global order by social and economic success in a framework that denies the West the freedom to exploit, infecting regions beyond, as had been feared. It might parenthetically be noted that although this interpretation of the American aggression is supported by substantial evidence,177 there is no hint of its existence in the popular histories or the retrospectives, for such ideas do not conform to the required image of aggrieved benevolence. Again, we see here the operation of the Orwellian principle that ignorance is strength.