Abstract
This paper challenges dominant discourses and theories of US imperialism and colonialism in the history of Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Thailand). As a Vietnamese-American, my understanding of the American War in Vietnam has been skewed by American education and films depicting the Vietnam conflict. Deconstructing the western bias imposed by American studies of Vietnam allows us to understand the objective truth of the Vietnam War in America. In her acclaimed text, Teaching Critical Thinking, author and educator bell hooks asserts that “understanding that liberation is an ongoing process, we must pursue all opportunities to decolonize our minds and the minds of our students.” This research aims to contribute to a growing alternative historical record and documentation of our contemporary moments.
The Vietnam War does not merely represent a geopolitical conflict but a canvas of American deception in the art of narrative construction. The US, with calculated strokes, engineered a multifaceted campaign of imperial propaganda, war strategies, and media manipulation to sculpt the global perception of its role in Indochina. The efficacy of these tactics successfully paints the pursuit of war as a necessary defense against communism rather than an act of imperial ambition in securing the region from competing Chinese influence. Frameworks from Noam Chomsky and Stuart Hall deconstruct the process of communication to understand the steps used in forming public opinion. In doing so, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of how the United States, as a designing entity, shapes the contours of public opinion to serve its own goals.
The United States has been publicly condemned for its involvement in the Vietnam War because involvement led to thousands of American deaths—implying that, had the United States won their war in Vietnam, it would have been a worthy cause. The narrative shifts focus from US war crimes enacted for American wealth to a ‘worthy’ cause of American values: fighting for democracy. This positions the United States as an entity that shouldn’t be condemned for killing thousands of people but as one that was ‘trying’ to save millions from a ‘tyrant’ system of public enslavement. This research paper gives a brief explanation of the Vietnam War and the terminology necessary to defend my argument of the U.S.’s involvement in the Vietnam War and its use of propaganda.
The Vietnam War, a valiant triumph against the US War Machine, was a monumental event in the history of liberatory movements. As many wars do, the Vietnam War insinuates death, pain, tragedy, etc. The Vietnam War suggests the myth of inhumane Vietnamese guerillas: “gooks or dinks, slopes, slants, rice eaters, anything to take away their humanity” (Turse, 2013), so backward that the only option was to kill or torture them. We remember the Gulf of Tonkin, the Battle of Hue, and the Tet Offensive as the result of an unruly, savage enemy. The US characterized the role of Vietnam, which was fighting for its right to survive against Western colonialism, as the enemy of democracy possessing malicious intent to spread communism with the Soviet Union. This misinterpretation of the Vietnam War is taught in schools and ingrained in American history—a strategy intended to malign the Vietnamese people and glorify US involvement.
In 1954, French colonial control over Vietnam, which had lasted since the 19th century, was overthrown in a national liberation movement led by anti-colonial revolutionaries known as the Viet Minh. It wasn’t long, however, before the Vietnamese would face the world’s largest imperial power, the US. To resolve conflicting geopolitical interests in the region’s eventual governance, the Geneva Accords were drafted to provide Vietnam with a path to eventual unified nationhood. The accords divided Vietnam into two entities: the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), representing the North, and the State of Vietnam, representing the South. It also called for an election to be held by July 1956 for their unification into one Vietnamese state. It was then that the US decided to play a major role in the War for Vietnam. Using the South Vietnamese government as a capitalist pawn for Indochina, the United States appointed Ngo Dinh Diem as the president. Worried about the spread of communism throughout Asia, his main priority was to ensure that the unification elections would be prevented at any cost. Diem’s priorities came to a head in 1956 when the State of Vietnam broke the Geneva Accords and started a war backed by the US War Machine (Martinez, 2015).
The US initiated the war with 2,000 US troops, and by 1963, had invested 16,300 members in Vietnam. Addressing the Sixth Session of the Second National Assembly of the DRV on May 8, 1963, Ho Chi Minh stated that “Our fatherland is temporarily divided in two. The US imperialists are intensifying their aggressive war in South Vietnam. Our southern compatriots are being trampled upon by the brutal US-Diem regime.” It wasn’t until January 17, 1973, that the Paris Peace Agreements were signed. The accords called for an immediate ceasefire, the full removal of the US military, and negotiations between the two states for the reunification of Vietnam. The Paris Peace Agreement allowed the US to pull out of the war, leaving the South to crumble on its own. It wasn’t until two years later, on April 30, 1975, that the North would capture Saigon, bringing the Vietnam War to an end (Mintz & McNeil, 2018).
When the Vietnam War is the topic of conversation, it is most commonly represented with images associated with unimaginable scales of death and the advanced military machinery that creates them: attack helicopters flying over jungles, flamethrowers burning down entire villages, and soldiers enacting war crimes on civilians. The study of these signs and symbols, which signify the war as the referent object and shape its perception, is known as semiotics. This research paper requires a basic understanding of semiotics and the theories of Stuart Hall and Noam Chomsky in the deconstruction of US narratives on the Vietnam War.
Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model of communication is a theory that outlines how media messages are produced, circulated, and interpreted. His work was a departure from the traditional linear model of communication, which suggested a direct transmission of meaning from sender to receiver. Encoding is the process by which the creator (sender) constructs the message. This involves not only content but also the conscious and unconscious influences that affect the creation of the message (ideological frameworks, production practices, regulatory frameworks, and professional codes). The encoded message contains both the literal content and the sender’s intended meaning, which is shaped by these various factors.
Decoding is the process by which the audience interprets and understands the message. In Hall’s theory, the audience does not passively accept the sender’s intended message. Instead, they interpret the meaning based on their own cultural background, experiences, and beliefs. Hall identified three positions from which decoding can be constructed: dominant reading, in which the audience decodes the message the way the sender intended; negotiated reading, where the audience acknowledges the dominant meaning but adapts it as they see fit; and oppositional reading, where the audience detests the dominant message and interprets the message in an entirely different context that may be at odds with the intended meaning.
Hall’s encoding/decoding model has had significant implications for media studies and cultural studies, particularly in understanding how media can reinforce social norms and power structures. The model suggests that communication is a dynamic process where meanings are not simply imparted by the sender to the receiver but are actively constructed by both parties. It also emphasizes the importance of the social context in which media is consumed and the potential for diverse interpretations of media texts.
Noam Chomsky introduced the five filters of media. In his research, Chomsky carves out the influences of mass media and how it is used to manufacture the consent of its audience. There are five filters through which media is channeled and controlled that produce its particular ideological slant. The first of these filters is ownership, exemplified by the originators of mass media: large corporate firms with even bigger conglomerates that are focused on profit, which means critical journalism takes second place to the needs and interests of the corporation. The second filter is advertising, which exposes the real role of advertising as vying to pay for your attention. The third filter is the media elite, which ensures that journalism cannot be a check on power because the very system encourages complicity. The fourth filter is flak, the backlash that journalists, whistleblowers, and sources get when they stray from the consensus. When the story is inconvenient for the powers that be, you’ll see the flak machine in action, discrediting sources, trashing stories, and diverting conversations. The last of these filters is a common enemy, wherein to manufacture consent, a boogeyman—whether as communists, terrorists, immigrants, etc.—helps to corral public opinion. The five filters of media can be applied to all entities controlling the flow of information but are specific to media in the United States.
In his memoirs, President Eisenhower (1963) admitted, “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 the fighting, possibly 80 percent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh.” Interestingly enough, the United States—‘standing’ for democracy and liberation—needed to stop the elections, suppressing the people from their right to choose. In view of the importance Indochina had in the framework of American foreign policy since the Truman Doctrine—that is, military containment of communism on a global scale—the US could not accept any chance of losing the 1956 referendum.
In order to enact war crimes and stop democratic processes with the consent of the nation, the US needed to propagate an inflated reputation to justify its actions. US propaganda imposed an objective narrative of the Vietnam War: the fight against communism. This narrative proved to be a master-guise over the other reasons the US remained involved, primarily being the competition between China for influence in Asia. US officials went so far as to state that “Vietnam is the Asian counterpart of Germany, as far as being a showpiece of direct competition between the Free World and the [communist] Bloc is concerned” (Sheehan, 1971). Writing to President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara stated that deployment in Vietnam would only make sense as part of a long-term US strategy to contain China, which “as a major power [was] threatening to undercut our importance and effectiveness in the world.” In justifying its repression of democratic, populist movements of national liberation and reunification under the communists’ terms, the US created a need for an incomplete narrative backed by propaganda.
Propaganda is used to mislead public opinion, with even the term’s very meaning having been misconstrued to construct US imperial ideologies within its education system. Without unlearning frameworks taught in US education systems, propaganda is treated as exclusively applicable to the tactics of enemies of the state: China, Russia, US-designated terrorists, etc. In reality, however, the US itself is hugely aggressive in constructing and continually pushing imperial propaganda dedicated to the expansion of US capitalism.
In the Vietnam War, the US utilized imperial propaganda to create class and national unity. During their infiltration of South Vietnam, the US spread leaflets against communist governing, using symbols of freedom and democracy to represent the American ideals promised through capitalism. One example of these leaflets features a person being silenced under communism, with the sarcastic line, “This is communist heaven. Freedom to speak!” suggesting repressive control in communist governments and by contrast highlighting the freedoms of democracy and US capitalism. Imperial propaganda tactics were utilized in multiple spaces, including within the United States.
The US devised operations to paint communist uprisings as anti-democratic. Images like those mentioned were mass-produced and circulated throughout Vietnam in efforts to capture national support from Vietnamese civilians. To further capitalize on the support of their nation, politicians misled the US population under the premise of the ‘Domino Theory,’ which asserted that without US involvement, more countries would follow suit under the Soviet Union and the Viet Cong. In Propaganda in Vietnam, Bobby Craig Sinquefield acknowledges the media’s skewed representation of the war: “Due to inadequate policy… during the early stages of the war, there was very little press coverage other than the occasional story about the spread of Communism in Vietnam and Eisenhower’s ‘Domino Theory’” (Sinquefield, 2020). Even today, US educational curricula barely capture the Vietnam War, depicting it through just a few brief battles in its eventful 20-year span. Diane Seo, in the Los Angeles Times, captures the essence of the US education curriculum involving the Vietnam War: “students’ knowledge of it is often limited to such events as the Tet Offensive, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and the Kent State shootings” (Seo, 1995). The lack of media coverage and dialogue about the Vietnam War were calculated strategies to suppress critical inquisition into the war, diminishing public opinion in order to enact war crimes in the Indochina region under the guise of freedom fighting.
The US strategically used propaganda on the battleground and in Vietnam to coerce veterans and civilians to fight for US imperialists. Importantly, the US needed to gain the support of its frontline. In the pursuit of Indochina, it was important to dehumanize the enemy. Terminology deploys certain images, and when used to oppress or characterize a group, it becomes evident that such terminology drills concepts and ideas into the mind, forcing people to interpret words as signs or symbols in order to develop specific intended meanings. War generals are taught to dehumanize their opponent and to pass along that notion of hatred, anger, or disgust onto their soldiers.
When associating their opponent with dehumanizing terms, it creates images or perceptions that negatively apply to their opponent, belittling them and creating this symbol of communism, enemy, alien, other. In Kill Anything That Moves, by Nick Turse, he recalls army veteran Wayne Smith saying, “The drill instructors never called the Vietnamese, ‘Vietnamese.’ They called them dinks, gooks, slopes, slants, rice-eaters, everything that would take away humanity… That they were less than human was clearly the message.” This rhetoric was used top-down—all the way from President Johnson to the general public. Discourse like this was important to ensure soldiers would kill their ‘enemy.’ It is important to note that “men from families with lower socioeconomic status were more likely than those from families with higher socioeconomic status both to serve and fight” (Wilson, 1995). The war promised a better life and fulfillment of the American Dream after their commitment to their nation.
Using American values and beliefs, these soldiers were easily manipulated into dominant decodings. Furthering their agenda in Vietnam, it was important that soldiers believed their opponent was nothing, at least not human. These understandings were ingrained into the thought patterns of US soldiers so that defiant natures against the United States didn’t persist. This gave rationality to mass murder and the torture of their opponent in the fight for democracy and liberation. Terminology like this supported the otherization and dehumanization of the Vietnamese people. These words justified attacks against the opponent, painting them as if they neither were human nor deserved to live. In terms of semiotics, the use of these signifiers and their distinctly pejorative signified meanings created a sharp contrast between the Viet Cong/Vietnamese and the American soldiers.
This symbolism played a key role in stoking fear, diluting the complexity of the war, and treating Vietnamese people as animals in the US’ imperialist ambition to supersede communist influence, most especially from China, in Asia. Dehumanizing the opponent was just one tactic in the war on Vietnam.
American propaganda efforts in Vietnam began in 1954 with Colonel Lansdale’s first operation, “Passage to Freedom.” The objective of this operation was for Western colonizers to relocate as many Vietnamese civilians from North Vietnam to below the 17th parallel into South Vietnam. Controlling the type of information that was being released and contorting the narrative so that people would flee south took priority to gain the upper hand in this war. From 1954 to 1955, Col. Lansdale and his troops utilized a variety of strategies to entice Vietnamese people to move South, such as fake news reports “signed by the Vietminh instructing Tonkinese [northern Vietnamese] on how to behave for the Vietminh takeover of the Hanoi region”—including instructions to make an inventory of their personal property so that the Vietminh would know how much to confiscate—and sending in South Vietnamese soldiers with the aim of spreading rumors in the North.
Propaganda posters were a critical element of this operation. For instance, one poster declared, “Southern compatriots are welcoming Northern brothers and sisters with open arms,” attempting to capture the sentiment of Vietnamese civilians to migrate south. Disseminating stories that demonized the Communist Party of Vietnam thus contributed to the exodus of refugees into South Vietnam. This operation succeeded because the chain of communication was entangled with community values, enticing large populations to accept dominant decodings.
Col. Lansdale escalated this tactic in his second operation, “The Virgin Mary has Gone South.” This campaign was another push to relocate Vietnamese citizens into the South. The strategy was to use religious sentiments of Catholic citizens by narrating lies that the Communist government of the North had plans to persecute Christians unless they moved South under Ngo Dinh Diem’s friendly Catholic government. The Virgin Mary, a symbol of Catholicism, signified the unbelievable influence that religion had on people. The campaign relied on negotiable decodings to persuade devout Catholics to uproot their families and move South. Vietnamese Catholics interpreted the message through the lens of their long-held ideological frameworks. This operation had an enormous impact, convincing nearly 1 million North Vietnamese Catholics to flee to the South.
Since literacy rates were low at the time, with “95% of Vietnamese people illiterate” (World Bank, 2010), the campaign primarily relied on priests and South Vietnamese soldiers to spread false narratives in religious sermons.
The US media crafted a devious narrative of the Vietnam War, deviating far from the objective truth. Many Americans accepted the narrative of “justified action” created by US media, which mischaracterized US involvement as a legitimate fight against communism. Yet, increasingly at home, Americans began to believe the war was mistaken.
In a 1965 Gallup poll, 64% of Americans supported the US’ involvement in the Vietnam War, following the ‘Domino Theory.’ But by 1969, another Gallup poll revealed that 59% of Americans believed that involvement in the Vietnam War was a mistake (Newport, 2005). National sentiment shifted as Americans saw the brutality of the war, given that it was the first war broadcast on television. However, much of what the media covered was planned and restricted by the US government.
The US government placed restrictive policies on journalists during the Vietnam War, significantly reducing their ability to report freely. For instance, “war correspondents were unable to interview the ship’s crew or witness policy debates within Johnson’s administration; therefore, the government controlled what information the media presented to the public” (Hallin, 71). By 1973, a Gallup poll indicated that two out of three Americans were dissatisfied with the war. Yet the dissatisfaction wasn’t entirely due to the ethical implications of the war but rather because American soldiers were suffering and losing the battle for a ‘free’ democratic state in the Indochina region.
In Noam Chomsky’s framework, the broadcasting of this war was manufactured. All television in this sense is manufactured, and the intended message to take home was, above all, a complete dehumanization of the Vietnamese people. Despite waning support for the war, Americans’ views of the Vietnamese remained poor even after its conclusion. The coverage of the war, while oftentimes unable to hide its interventionist nature from its viewers, could obfuscate more fundamental criticisms by making the biggest crime of the war its neglect of US soldiers against an “inhuman” enemy.
In movies like Da 5 Bloods, Apocalypse Now, and Full Metal Jacket, Hollywood constructs narratives starring white saviors and sidelining Vietnamese characters to roles of insignificance. Through fictional movies, Hollywood crafts narratives that often imply authenticity with phrases like “based on a true story.” Viet Thanh Nguyen, in Vietnamese Lives, American Imperialist Views, Even in ‘Da 5 Bloods,’ critiques these portrayals: “For Americans, Hollywood turns a defeat by Vietnamese people into a conflict that is actually a civil war in the American soul, where Americans’ greatest enemies are actually themselves.”
Hollywood redirects public perception from the fundamental contradiction of US involvement in Indochina to the poor logistics of the war: its strategic disorganization and fractured support. This deflection aims to obscure the root issue of US imperialism. While Hollywood casts American characters as flawed antiheroes, this framing ultimately serves to position Americans as the central figures in the Vietnam War narrative, relegating the Vietnamese to the background. Nguyen argues that Hollywood renders Vietnamese people as extras whose “function [is] to be helpful, rescued, blamed, analyzed, mocked, abused, raped, killed, spoken for, spoken over, misunderstood or all of the above.”
For example, in the 1964 film A Yank in Viet-nam, the white American soldier is depicted saving a Vietnamese woman from the traumas of war, carrying her to safety in his arms. This image perpetuates the archetype of the white savior, suggesting that the global south is helpless without the intervention of the West. Such portrayals reinforce stereotypes and shape public opinion by presenting the Vietnamese as incapable and reliant on American benevolence.
The United States camouflages its deception and propaganda through a narrative construction devised to support liberalism around the world. Public opinion on US involvement in the Vietnam War has been severely distorted, condemning the US not for its humanitarian disregard and war crimes but for the losses suffered by American soldiers. Frameworks established within American education systems teach individuals to perceive the United States as a global advocate for liberation, democracy, and freedom, even when historical events clearly contradict this narrative.
For instance, while promoting itself as a defender of democracy, the US actively suppressed democratic processes in Vietnam, such as the unification elections proposed in the Geneva Accords. By dehumanizing Vietnamese civilians, the US sought to justify its intervention as a necessary stand against the progression of communism. Imperial propaganda stands as a tool to expand US capitalist interests while erasing the cultures and communities it exploits.
War strategies were roused under propaganda and covered up through manipulated mass media to design global narratives. The Vietnam War exemplifies how the United States uses its political, economic, and media apparatus to manufacture consent for imperialist ambitions, presenting its actions as noble while silencing the voices of those it harms.
Appendix
Bibliography
Eisenhower, Dwight D. “Mandate for change, 1953-1956 : the White House years.” Doubleday & Co., Garden City, N.Y., 1963. Accessed 1 Dec. 2023.
Hadyniak, Kyle. “How Journalism Influenced American Public Opinion During the Vietnam War: A Case Study of the Battle of Ap Bac, The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, The Tet Offensive, and the My Lai Massacre,” The University of Maine, University of Maine, Spring 2015, www.digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/. Accessed 23 Nov. 2023.
Hammond, William M. “Public Affairs: The Military and the Media, 1968-1973.” U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1995, www./history.army.mil/. Accessed 1 Dec. 2023.
“Hollywood and the Vietnam War.” Digital History: Using New Technology to Enhance Teaching and Research, Digital History, www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/. Accessed 23 Nov. 2023.
Karlin, Samuel. “The Vietnam War: Brutal, Criminal, and Imperialist.” The Left Voice, The Left Voice, 13 Sept. 2020, www.leftvoice.org/. Accessed 23 Nov. 2023.
Martinez, Carlos. “Fight to Win: How the Vietnamese people rose up and defeated imperialism.” Invent the Future, Invent the Future, 30 April 2015, www.invent-the-future.org/. Accessed 23 Nov. 2023.
Mintz, S., & McNeil, S. “The Vietnam War.” Digital History, Digital History, 2018, www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/. Accessed 1 Dec. 2023.
Newport, Frank. “Iraq Versus Vietnam: A Comparison of Public Opinion.” Gallup, Gallup, 24 August 2005, www.news.gallup.com/. Accessed 1 Dec. 2023.
Nguyen, Viet T. “Vietnamese Lives, American Imperialist Views, Even in ‘Da 5 Bloods.’” New York Times, NYTimes, 24 June 2020, www.nytimes.com/. Accessed 23 Nov. 2023.
Seo, Diane. “Getting Vietnam War Into Classrooms Is Still a Battle.” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 1 May 1995, www.latimes.com/. Accessed 1 Dec. 2023
Sheehan, N. (1971). The Pentagon papers: as published by the New York times. Toronto; New York, Bantam Books.
Sinquefield, Bobby C. “Propaganda in Vietnam.” Troy University, Troy University, 2020, www.journals.troy.edu/. Accessed 23 Nov. 2023.
“The Vietnam War.” Digital History: Using New Technology to Enhance Teaching and Research, Digital History, www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/. Accessed 23 Nov. 2023.
Vandre, Jannik. ““THEY NEED US AND THEY WANT US”—ERECTING THE EMPIRE IN THE VIETNAM WAR” U.S Studies Online, USSO, Sept. 2020, www.usso.uk/. Accessed 23 Nov. 2023.
Wilson Thomas C. Vietnam-Era Military Service – A Test of the Class-Bias Thesis. Armed Forces & Society. 1995;21(3):461–71.
WorldBank. “Education in Vietnam.” World Bank. 2010,
http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EDUCATION/Resources/278200-1121703274255/143926 4-1153425508901/Education_Vietnam_Development.pdf Accessed 1 Dec. 2023.
Wilson Thomas C. Vietnam-Era Military Service – A Test of the Class-Bias Thesis. Armed Forces & Society. 1995;21(3):461–71. Accessed 1 Dec. 2023
Leave a Reply