ON THE WAY TO 1984

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP75-00149R000100890004-3
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 4
• Document Creation Date: November 11, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 15, 1998
• Sequence Number: 4
• Publication Date: April 15, 1967
• Content Type: NSPR

L
unitized - Appr ~ j Rele
CPYRGHT
ON THE WAY TO 1984
By HENRY STEELE COMMAGER,
professor of history, Amherst College.
G ORGE ORWELL'S Oceania had
a vast and efficient information
agency; its name was the Minis-
try of Truth and its purpose was to make
every citizen of Oceania think the right
thoughts. "The past is whatever the re-
cords agree upon," was its motto and
it wrote, or rewrote, the records. Now
the information agencies of our own
State and Defense Departments, the
USIA, and the CIA, seem bent on creat-
ing an American Ministry of Truth and
imposing upon the American people a
record of the past which they themselves
write.
It is the CIA whose activities have
been most insidious and are most notori-
ous, but the CIA has no monopoly on
hrain\kasihing. Consider, for example,
the film Why Vietnam. It is "one of our
most popular films"; it is distributed free
to high schools and colleges throughout
the country, and to other groups who.
ask for it-as hundreds doubtless do. Its
credentials are beyond reproach; it was
produced by the Defense Department
and sponsored by the State Department,
and President Johnson, Secretary Rusk,
and Secretary McNamara all pitch in to
give it authenticity.
The USIA is not permitted to carry
on propaganda within the United States,
and the reason it is not is that the Ameri-
can people do not choose to give govern-
ment authority to indoctrinate them.
Government, they believe, already has
YR HT
every mmemott 71 (7,73 t icahon 7777
tile ople that . ,:i I ;,r( i" T. The
armed services-these can command at-
tention for whatever they have to say,
at any time. There is therefore no neces-
sity, and no excuse, for government pro-
paganda, no need for government to
resort to subterfuge in its dealings with
the people.
What we have always held objection-
able is not overt publicity by govern-
ment, but covert indoctrination. Why
Vietnam is, in fact, both. It is overt
enough, but while it. is clear to the
sophisticated that it is a government
production and therefore an official
argument, the film is presented not as
an argument, but as history. Needless
to say it is not history. It is not even
journalism. It is propaganda, naked and
unashamed. As the "fact sheet" which
accompanies it states, it makes "four
basic points," and makes them with the
immense authority of the President: that
the United States is in Vietnam "to ful-
fill a solemn pledge," that "appeasement
is an invitation to aggression," that "the
United States will not surrender or re-
treat," and that we-but alas not the
other side are always "ready to negoti-
ate a settlement."
Government, which represents all the
people and presumably all points of
view, should have higher standards than
private enterprise in the presentation of
news or history. But Why Vietnam is
well below the standards of objectivity,
accuracy, and impartiality which ve are
accustomed to in newspapers and on
television; needless to say, as scholarship
one-dimensional terms it presents the
official view of the war in Vietnam with
never a suggestion that there is or could
be any other view. Wheii Communists
sponsor such propaganda, we call it
"brainwashing."
Let us look briefly at this film, for it
is doubtless a kind of dry run of what
we will get increasingly in the future. It
begins-we might have anticipated this
-with a view of Hitler and Chamberlain
at Munich, thus establishing at the very
outset that "appeasement" is "a short cut
to disaster." Because the free nations of
the world failed to stop aggression in
the Thirties, they almost lost their free-
dom and had to fight a gigantic war to
survive; if we fail to stop "aggression"
now we, too, may lose our freedom. For
"we have learned at terrible cost that
retreat does not bring safety and that
weakness does not bring peace, and it
is this lesson that has brought us to
Vietnam."
Here, then, is the first distortion of
history and it is a preview of what is to
come throughout the film. The aggres-
sion of the great totalitarian powers in
the Thirties in fact bears little analogy to
the civil war in Vietnam, nor is the
Geneva Agreement of 1954 to be equat-
ed with appeasement. The fact is al-
most precisely the opposite of that
implied by Why Vietnam. One of Presi-
dent Roosevelt's objectives in the Second
World War was to get the French out
-Photo, by W id, N o:.n.
Meeting at Munich, 1938, and the Geneva Conference of 1954-"The aggression of the great totalitarian powers in the
Thirties hears li5ed l MI the c tl.~v @~ic , l~ ~eit ]~ ~~ 4~ j 0 u3t??
 CPYRGHT
RIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE
1jCE CE A. CARVER, JR., ttttlent of political theory and Asian affairs, with degrees
om Yale and Oxford; forme 41icer in the U.S. aid mission in Saigon; author of "Ass-
n and the Proble ailtl'baning" " ' JULIUS %. NYERERE, President of Tan-
zama; tent of Tanganyika; Chancellor of the University of East Africa
? ? ? LUCIAN W. PYE, Professor of political Science, Massachusetts Institute of
Trthnology; Director of the China Studies Prbjcct of the Council on Foreign Relations;
?is article is based on a paper for the Princeton University Conference on the United
Sates and Communist China ' ' ? DAVID ROCKEFELLER, President the Chs,c
Minhattan Bank; Chairman, Council for Latin America ? ? ? J. ROBERI1$CHAET-
ZEL, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Atlantic Affairs, Department of State
AA.tOAOAAAAA 4__7
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
APRIL 1966 No. 3
THE FACELESS VIET CONG
By George A. Carver, Jr.
'fie George A. Carver article on Vietnam in the April 1966 issue of Foreign Affnirx-"Carver, an entplot?eV
of the CIA, did not bother to make that connection known to the editors of that journal or the Intblic."
of Idochina; the Eisenhower objective
,,f the Fifties was to keep them there.
The French are out now and we are in,
playing the role that the French played
before Dicnbienphu-and still fighting
Ifo Chi Minh.
But now the scene shifts to Vietnam.
in 1954, says our narrator, "the long war
is over, and the victorious Communists
are moving in." It is a statement which
fats only the most fortuitous relation to
reality. The long war was indeed over
-[lie war between the Vietnamese and
the French. But to label the Vietnamese
who fought against the French "Com-
munists" and to assume that somehow
they "moved in" (they were already
(here) is a distortion of history. Yet
there is worse to come. For next the
t amera is turned on to the Geneva Con-
ference. It was, so we learn, "a victory
.or the Communist world," and there is
hint that we ourselves accepted the
. cults of the Conference. Vietnam, we
Ire told, was "divided at the 17th paral-
!el" and there is no suggestion that the
division was to be a purely temporary
or "or is there any reminder that the
...eva Agreement called for an elec-
r,, that President Eisenhower himself
;d *!-.at in such an election 80 per cent
tat :*"e would have gone to Ho Chi
:unit, and that we were chiefly respon-
for putting off the election. No,
s:;ltaol children and students are
r IVY- is a one-dimensional story of
un:n7jst conspiracy to destroy the
e of 1954. Worse yet, they are pre-
.,uted with the spectacle of a "reign of
error" in which "children are killed in
their sleep." Clearly only Communists
kill children; we don't kill children.
where is there any mention of the Viet-
cong, nowhere any suggestion of a civil
war, and nowhere any hint that until we
began a substantial military buildup in
Vietnam-in violation of the Geneva
Agreement-there was no invasion from
the North. And, as part of that corrup-
tion of the vocabulary familiar to stu-
dents of Newspeak, words like North
Vietnamese and Vietcong give way to
the generic word, "Communist."
But still worse is to come. What is it
the "Communists" want? Shadowy hints
conjure up terrors that even the narrator
is reluctant to name. "The prize the Com-
munists are after . . . South Vietnam .. .
standing at the gateway to Burma, Thai-
land, Cambodia, East Pakistan." The
imagination reels as it is, of course,
meant to. For here, looming up before
us, is the menace of China. S:.ys our nar-
rator, "Spurred by Communist China,
North Vietnam's goal is to extend the
Asiatic dominion of Communists." No
wonder that in this phantasmagoric
scene American "advisers" somehow be-
come "fighting men," helping the out-
numbered South Vietnamese resist Com-
munist aggression. And if there are still
any lingering doubts about the justice
and the necessity of American participa-
PEKINGA1'
?PEOPLE' , u'T:liS
Now we are bemused by a scene of
peace and plenty, liberty and reform, in
South Vietnam. It is Eden before the
fall. But staggered by the success of the
South, the Communists launch "a fur-
tive and remorseless war against the
people," and Secretary Rusk is dragged
in to denounce this "cruel and sustained
attack." Attack by whom? Presumably
by IIo Chi Minh, though this is left,
safely enough, togf'pj#jz@dianApr
SR/April 15, 1967
tion, here are both President Johnson
and Secretary McNamara to set the re-
cord straight.
Now we have a new thence: peace.
"Fifteen times," no less (it is doubtless
thirty by now), we have tried to open
negotiations and each time we have
been rebuffed. All we want- there is a
note of plaintiveness here-is free elec-
tions; curiously enough, just what the
Geneva Agreements called for back in
1954. All we want is to limit the war.
And how do the recalcitrant Commun-
ists meet our appeals? They attack us
with "high explosives aimed at Ameri-
can air bases." They kill little girls (pic-
ture of little girl cruelly destroyed).
They even attack the United States
Embassy, clearly the crowning infamy.
There is a kind of inarticulate assumption
that we don't do anything as unsporting
as using "high explosives."
Now we are invited to take a more
philosophical view of the war. Why are
Americans risking life and limb in this
distant jungle? That is easy. To keep
American promises-indeed, "to fulfill
one of the most solemn pledges" in our
history, a pledge made by three Presi-
dents, no less. Needless to say, this is
(Continued on page 80)
Jackets of books published with USIA subsidies-"If the USIA and the
CIA can sponsor books to fight Communism, they may, with equal
justification, sponsor books to fight `socialism' or the `welfare state.':'
 CPYRGHT
concerns of
he curricula
o that most
to questions
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themselves.
Sane - Approved For Release : CIA-RDP75-00149R000100810004 3 - --
i ~ ~1
Continued from page 69
nonsense. President Eisenhower refused
to make such a pledge; President Ken-
nedy insisted that the Vietnamese should
fight their own war. It is President John-
son who made the pledge (though not,
it might be remembered, in the cam-
paign of 1964), and who is now busy
conferring retroactive solemnity upon it.
But there is still another reason why
we are in Vietnam-self-defense. For if
freedom is to endure in Chicago, Birm-
inghanm, and Dallas it must be vindicated
in South Vietnam. What is more it must
be vindicated by us, for the non-Com-
munist countries of Asia cannot, by
themselves, resist the grasping ambitions
of the Communists. What we have here
is pretty clearly a rationalization of in-
tervention against Communism every-
where, for Communism is, by definition,
"grasping and ambitious." And the rea-
son we must take on this heavy re-
sponsibility is because "there is no one
else." How does it happen that there is
no one else? How does it happen that
except for Thailand the other members
of SEATO are not taking on any re-
sponsibilities? Deponent saith not.
THERE is one final reason for fighting
in Vietnam and it is given us, again, by
President Johnson. "We intend to con-
vince the Communists that we cannot
be defeated." This has, at least, the
merit of frankness: we are fighting a
war to prove that we can't be defeated.
It is all a bit like William James's Italian
woman who stood on a street corner
passing out cards saying that she had
come over to America to raise money to
pay her passage back to Italy, but not
nearly so amusing.
We are almost through with Why
Vietnam. Once again the audience is
assured that we long for peace; once
again that "as long as there are men
who hate and destroy" we must keep on
-U.S. Iniorntation Agency.
Reed Harris of the USIA-"We con-
trol the things from the very idea
down to the final edited manuscript.
fighlmg. Perhaps even ug i sc roo c
drer+ are mature enough to wonder who
it is who is doing the destroying. But
are they mature enough to resist hate?
The dissemination of Why Vietnam
in high schools and colleges is no iso-
lated episode in the manipulation of
public opinion by government, but part
of a larger pattern. We must view it
in connection with the publication pro-
gram of the USIA, the clandestine ac-
tivities of the CIA, and the vendetta
of the Passport Office against travel to
unpopular countries, or by unpopular
people, as part of an almost instinctive
attempt (we cannot call it a,iytliiug so
formal as a program) to control Ameri-
can thinking about foreign relations. We
had supposed, in our innocence, that
this sort of. thing was the special pre-
rogative of totalitarian governments, but
it is clear that we were mistaken.
Forbidden by law from carrying on
propaganda in the United States, the
USIA has managed to circumvent this
prohibition. Not only does it sponsor
books that give a benign view of Ameri-
can policies, it cooks up the books, finds
the authors, provides the materials, and
subsidizes the publication. "We control
the things from the very idea down to
the final edited manuscript," said Reed
I larris of the USIA, his contempt show-
ing through by the use of the term
"things." The CIA-it, too, is forbidden
by raw from operating as all intelligence
agency at hone-engages in much the
article in the distinguished journal For-
eign Affairs defending the American role
in Vietnam, by George Carver-an em-
ployee of the CIA who did not bother
to make that connection known to the
editors of the journal or to the public.
I1ow many other articles of this nature
have been planted or insinuated in
American magazines we do not know.
One of the worst features of this clan-
destine activity is that it exposes the
entire publishing and scholarly enter-
prise to suspicion.
IT is, needless to say, not the sponsor-
ship but the secrecy that is the pervasive
and irremediable vice. If books and arti-
cles sponsored by government agencies
were openly acknowledged for what
they are, they could be judged on their
merits, which are often substantial. In
the absence of. such acknowledgement
they are a fraud upon the public. What
is needed is a Truth in Packaging Act
for the United States Government.
What is perhaps most surprising is
that many of those involved in these
subterranean activities seem unable to
understand what is wrong about them.
They defend them on the ground that,
after all, the Communists use deception,
too, and we must fight fire with fire.
Sanitized/-AAppoo l For Release Q'lA.RDP OO 49R0&(K8
SRI April 15, 1967
CRITICS, SCHOtAt.
"A stunning p il+li t
"It i~ excellent 11,
the best ever d u
`Bantam Sinike 1
dally the te,,hi.l
criticism.'
"A great job, 11;.
I don't et, him it
The Raniata t.:
Exarnin+dion
Education 1).
271 Atadi,on 1
Sup e
ec.
If lou it"',
he deep, .
0004-3
 - CPYRGHT
Sanitized - Approved For Release : CIA-RDP75-00149R000100890004-3
able to grasp the essential point: the organizations; if they circumvent these Games
corruption of the democratic process. prohibitions will we not have an end to
All of these attempts to control the
minds of the American people in order
to win the cold war violate the two great
Kantian moral imperatives: to conduct
yourself so that your every act can be
generalized into a universal principle,
and to regard every human being as an
end in himself, never as merely a means
to an end.
Consider the first imperative. We can
generalize the particular policies which
the CIA, USIA, and Defense Depart-
ment have adopted into three principles.
rA 11ST, and most elementary, if govern-
anent can indoctrinate schoolchildren,
and their parents, about foreign policy
it may, with equal logic, indoctrinate
them about domestic policy. If the USIA
and the CIA can sponsor books and
finance organizations to fight Commu-
nism they may, with equal justification,
sponsor books and finance organizations
to fight "socialism" or the "welfare state"
or anything else that they think odious.
Congress has quite deliberately with-
held such powers from these and other
WYETH. "COOT HUNTER"
to x 284. 412.00
ORIGINAL LITHOGRAPHS
FINE REPRODUCTIONS
EXCEPTIONAL FRAMING
Continued from page 64
ual" whose life they are managing, wins
the game. This game proved particularly
successful recently when used by some
Baltimore high schools to motivate slow-
learning students.
Slow-learners, in fact, are among the
chief beneficiaries of games, say re-
searchers. One game specifically aimed
at students considered to be potential
dropouts is BMG, developed two years
ago by the Western Behavioral Sciences
Institute for use in Four San Diego
schools. Noting that such students are
often fond of cars, a WBSI spokesman
explains that the young people, for the
purpose of the game, play auto manu-
facturers required both to increase prof-
its and carve out a larger share of the
market for their respective "companies."
LIKE some Baltimore and San Diego
schools, Nova High School in Ft. Lau-
derdale also uses games "to meet the
educational needs of the student classi-
fied as nonmotivated, under-achiever, or
less capable," says Robert Allen. At the
same time, he notes that Nova's games
are aimed at "the gifted or advanced
student; or the student who has formed
negative attitudes about a given sub-
ject."
Perhaps more deeply involved in gain-
ing than any other school, Nova now
uses about fifteen games in its science,
mathematics, and social studies classes.
Among them are a smattering of games
developed at Johns Hopkins, such as
Life Career and the Game of Democ-
racy, and two logic games--Wff'n Proof
and Equations-developed by Layman
Allen, associate professor of law at Yale
University and brother of Nova's Robert
Allen.
Such games are by no means used
simply as teacher aids, however. During
1965, the first year games were used at
Nova, the school divided its mathemat-
ics classes into two five-week phases
of intramural competition using \Cff'n
Proof and Equations. Now in its second
year, Nova's intramural competition con-
sists of ten leagues, each with anywhere
from six to twelve teams. Student gamcrs
push the parallel with athletics about as
far as it will go. Each week complete
statistics are compiled giving individual
and team won-lost records, total points
scored, and league standings. Further,
teams carry names like The Mods, Bat
Finks, Brain Kids, and Clear Thinkers;
each week Nova names "a player of the
week." Winning teams of the intramural
leagues eventually compete in a playoff
43 W. 46 St. (Bet. 5th & 6th Aves.) N.Y.C. pudiate and paralyze the principles of Not surprisingly, some Nova educa-
genuine freedom of choice in
politics?
Second, if government can carry war
propaganda into the classroom - even
without a formal war -may it not with
equal logic carry any other propaganda
into the classroom? And if it has this
power, what will happen to the Ameri-
can principle that the national govern-
ment has no control over the substance
of what is taught in the schools? If the
principle of indoctrination of schoolchil-
dren is once firmly established, may we
not end up with the Napoleonic philos-
ophy of public education-that the over-
arching purpose of schools is to produce
loyal patriots?
Third, if government can control the
thinking of its citizens it can control
everything else. Americans pride them-
selves on their tradition of "free enter-
prise," and some of them go so far as to
equate free enterprise with "the Ameri-
can system." But the only free enterprise
that counts, in the long run, is intellec-
tual enterprise, for if that dries up all
individual enterprise' dries up. A gov-
erninent that can control the thinking
of its citizens can silence criticism and
destroy initiative, and a government
that is exempt from the pressures of
criticism and of political initiative is one
that is in training for tyranny.
Governmental malpractices of thought
control violate, just as clearly, the sec-
ond categorical imperative: to treat all
men as ends, never as means. For to
exploit the integrity of school and uni-
versity, science and scholarship, to the
dubious ends of ideological conflict, is
to subvert the very foundations of our
civilization and our moral order.
THE reason we are trying to win the
contest with Communism, and indeed
with all forms of injustice and oppres-
sion, is because we believe in the virtue
of freedom, of the open mind, of the
unimpeded search for truth. Theis are,
not only our ultimate ends; they are,
equally, the indispensable means where-
by we hope to achieve these ends. If
we corrupt all of this at the, very source
we may indeed win the immediate con-
test with "Communism" and lose the
cause for which we are fighting. If we
triumph over the enemy with the weap-
ons of deceit and subversion we employ
his weapons, embrace his standards, and
absorb his principles.
Without intellectual freedom-uncon-
taminated, unimpeachable, and cate-
which our society is dedicated. This is
ultimately why we cannot tolerate ac-
PLaza 7.1190 / Open Thurs. 'till 9 PM free o ?s o a c )e 81t o ay
OdlIILit-VU vec"1or Release : CIA-RDP75bO R00670O~~tO 4-IT(,
82 R/ April 5, 7