Word: saigon
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AMERICAN NEWSPAPER accounts of the Saigon government's collapse last week seemed fairer and more compassionate--if only because they conveyed some of the event's magnitude and ambiguities--than there was reason to expect. Outside of big cities, headlines like "Red Blitz Continues" topped wire service copy. But even the wire services tried for impartiality. Nestled between headlines about orphans and columns of political jostling over whether or not the Indochina war was a "mistake," and if so by whom, lay solid chunks of information about the war's latest effects on the people of Indochina...
...American correspondents who flocked back to Vietnam provided little insight into what will happen when the Saigon government falls they gave an acute sense of what is happening now, and a clearer overview of Vietnam than any available to the most recent thousands of Vietnamese refugees...
Nevertheless, the language that reflected and helped shape American attitudes towards the government's enemies was still in the newspapers last week. As they had throughout the war, the newsmagazines led the way, with reporting whose bias verged on the ridiculous. To Time magazine, the Saigon government's abandonment of half its country was "a gritty gamble," a "historic rearrangement of the Vietnamese political map" to be celebrated with an in-depth look at the government's head: "As both soldier and politician, Nguyen Van Thieu has fought the Communist menace from the North, and it remains his abiding passion...
Such reporting was blatantly tendentious, but even where this was not true, the Provisional Revolutionary Government and the NLF were still "the political arm of the Viet Cong" and "Communist-led forces," and the Republic of Vietnam, now little more than an enclave around Saigon, was still "South Vietnam." In United Press International's dispatches, North Vietnamese troops and the NLF "overran" province after province. And Time attributed many of Saigon's difficulties to Montagnard tribesmen "who, as despised fourth class citizens in South Vietnam, were ripe for exploitation by the Communists," and who now "infested" much of the country...
...when Russian peasants deserted the Czarist army in droves while parliamentarians claiming to represent them vowed continued war, Lenin said that the deserters were voting with their feet. Most American politicians would have indignantly rejected that idea--its most obvious application last week was to the Saigon troops who deserted, fled, or went over to the NLF--but this did not prevent them from seizing triumphantly on the phrase. Nevertheless, no reporter in Indochina attributed the mass flight to the simple fear of Communism the politicians cited. Instead, reporters spoke of a combination of factors--fear of renewed American bombing...