In 1954 the CIA Forced North Vietnamese Peasants to 'Migrate' to the Far South of South Vietnam; the U.S. Later Forced People South of Our Border to Illegally Immigrate to the U.S.: Same Purpose!
It's called Weapons of Mass Migration, and our rulers are attacking us with it.
There is an important “dot” from the early days of the Vietnam war that needs connecting to the current “dots” of illegal immigration into the United States and mass migration into Europe. First, let’s remind ourselves about the current “immigration” dots. Then I will connect these to the earlier Vietnam War dot.
As I show in great detail here, the United States government (both Democratic and Republican party administrations) for decades has been doing things in Mexico and Central America to deliberately force poor people to have to illegally immigrate to the United States just in order to survive. And as I show here U.S. and European rulers have been implementing a strategy of social control based on forcing people to migrate, a policy named “Weapons of Mass Migration” that is even explicitly described in a book written to explain to servants of the U.S. ruling class how to implement it. Here is the section from my earlier article about this book:
Weapons of Mass Migration: Forced Displacement, Coercion, and Foreign Policy, a book by Kelly M. Greenhill, sheds much light on what is going on.
Greenhills’ book is online here, at the website of the United States Naval Postgraduate School, which says of itself that “The Naval Postgraduate School is a defense-focused graduate university offering master’s and doctoral degrees in fields of study core to Naval-unique needs, the U.S. Armed Forces, DOD civilians and international partners.” [source here]
In her book, Greenhill explains how the ruling class of one nation uses forced ("engineered") mass migration of refugees into another nation (the "host" nation) as a weapon to coerce the rulers of the host nation to do this or that. The coercion works best, Greenhill argues, when the population in the host nation is sharply divided into two opposed camps, one saying let the refugees in and the other saying keep them out. This division of the host population, according to Greenhill, creates a huge problem for the host nation leaders, especially if the host nation is a "liberal democracy" such as the United States in which the leaders must try to accommodate the desires of all the people in its population. To escape the dilemma of having to satisfy the two camps with opposing demands, the host rulers are inclined to accede to the demands of the rulers who have engineered the mass migration.
Greenhill's book is written for an elite ruling class audience and people making a career of serving that ruling class, but it is also a book that can be read by anybody. For this reason some of the things Greenhill is communicating to her intended audience cannot be stated explicitly. A sharp example of this is the fact that Greenhill cannot "let the cat out of the bag," i.e., she cannot acknowledge the well-known fact ( also see here and here and here) that the United States is a dictatorship of the rich--an oligarchy or plutocracy to be precise. Instead she "plays the game" of pretending that the United States is a genuine democracy in which the rulers must do their best to accommodate the desires of all the people in the general population. It's as if she's winking to her elite readership. Greenhill thus pretends that the only people who would ever want to create a sharp division of the population of a host nation, into a camp in favor and a camp opposed to the engineered mass migration, are the (presumably “bad guy”) rulers of a different nation. She never so much as hints that the (presumably “good guy”) rulers of the host nation, itself, might want to divide-and-rule "their own" people.
But surely Greenhill and her intended elite readers get the point, without her having to "spill the beans" to the other readers by making the point explicitly. The ruling class of the United States uses divide-and-rule all the time, especially along racial lines, and it is not hard to see that it is using mass migration for the same purpose. Nor is it hard to see that the ruling upper class in Germany is also using mass migration for the same purpose. Part of this strategy requires creating as much internal conflict as possible between those for and those opposed to allowing the immigrants (be they Mexicans or Muslims) to enter. The liberal "Let the Muslim refugees immigrate--it's bigotry to keep them out" politicians and the ones like Donald Trump or the AfD saying "keep the Muslim refugees out" are implicitly if not explicitly in cahoots; they are not real antagonists. The ruling class divide-and-rule strategy requires both a Donald Trump and a Hillary Clinton on opposite sides in the United States on the “ban illegal immigrants and deport them” issue, and an Olaf Scholz and an AfD on opposite sides of the "deport all the immigrants" issue in Germany.
The Vietnam Dot…
Now comes the Vietnam War dot, based on the book JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy (the link is to a partly-text-searchable PDF file of the book) by Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, chief of special operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Kennedy years, who served as the chief of special operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Kennedy years. A retired colonel of the U.S. Air Force, he ran the global system designed to provide military support for the clandestine activities of the CIA from 1955 to 1964.
Briefly (with relevant excerpts from Col. Prouty’s book in this section and also the section below sub-titled “Excerpts from Col. Prouty’s book”) the CIA in 1954 wanted to create a pretext for having U.S. military forces invade Vietnam. The CIA did this by forcing more than one million largely Catholic peasants who lived in the north of Vietnam in a region called Tonkin to pack up and leave their ancestral villages (in which their families’ history went back thousands of years and which they would ordinarily never voluntarily leave) and be transported on CIA planes and U.S. Navy boats to the far south of South Vietnam, where the ethnicity of the peasants was very different and their assimilation was unlikely, and where the U.S. had installed the Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem as its puppet ruler. These Tonkinese “refugees/migrants” were dumped onto the native peasants of South Vietnam. Diem favored the Catholic Tonkinese—making them policemen and government officials. The result was that the native South Vietnamese peasants in some cases were driven off their land and forced to rely on banditry to obtain the food and water they needed just to survive and in other cases the Tonkinese “refugees” had to rely on banditry likewise to survive. The peasants who were forced into banditry were then labeled “communists” and declared to be the “Viet Cong” enemy, the repression of whose “insurgency” was the pretext for the U.S. invasion with eventually more than 500,000 troops.
Read here the Yale University “spin” on this forced migration, namely the “cover” story as Col. Prouty puts it, that these Tonkinese peasants from North Vietnam were fleeing communist oppression. Prouty explains why this “spin” story is absurd:
Indochina is a very ancient land. Vietnam was old in the days of the early Egyptians, Babylonians, and Persians. It is one of the oldest settlements of mankind. To those settled, village-oriented people, obligations to parents and to the emperor were the cement of the Confucian order. Cochin China, the French colony, had changed somewhat as a result of the French occupation that took place between 1861 and 1867, but Annam and Tonkin had not.
Yet it was the “unchanged” Tonkinese who were fleeing, and this was what made it all the more remarkable. To the Tonkinese, the village was a most important institution. In the village, the clans were strong, and the basis of the clan was the veneration of ancestors, which ensured strong attachment to the village and to the land. Each village had a shrine—the “dinh”—which contained the protective deity of that village. The cohesive force of the village was a sense of being protected by those spirits of the soil. Village affairs were in the hands of a council of elderly notables, but there was a considerable degree of autonomy. It was said, “The power of the emperor stops at the bamboo fence.” The village did pay a tax to the higher authority and did provide young men for military service.
In Vietnam, however, law was not based on authority and will but on the recognition of universal harmony. As in all parts of the world, the basic object of rural government was to provide security. As a result, in Vietnam the traditional demand was not for good laws so much as for good men. Law was deemed less important than virtue. 3 This describes the village and the land-based society of these natives who had become refugees in their own homeland as a result of the psychological terrorism instigated by the SMM [Saigon Military Mission run by the CIA—J.S.] and its religious allies. By all accounts, they had to be the least likely people who ever lived to leave their ancestral soil for some unknown and inhospitable alternative. [My emphasis—J.S.]
Little has been said about this clandestine provocation that created such deep fear, but it has to be considered one of the primary causes for the Americanization of the Vietnam War. Once we realize this, we begin to have a much deeper appreciation and understanding of the power of the CIA’s SMM and its unconventional political and psychological warfare techniques not only in Vietnam but elsewhere.
Prouty underscores the key role of this forced migration in making the Vietnam war happen, writing:
“U.S. officials never seemed able to understand why the situation, political and military was much worse in the far south, the Mekong Delta region, than it was in the north and central regions. After all, if the Vietminh in the north were behind the Vietcong enemy in the south, how did it happen that the people farthest from North Vietnam were the most hostile to the Diem government and those nearest to the North Vietnamese the most peaceful? The answer never surfaced. Most of the one-million-plus refugees had been dumped into the southern districts south of Saigon.”
…Much Like the USA Illegal Immigration Dot
When reading about this forced dumping of Tonkinese peasants onto the South Vietnamese peasants one cannot help but see a similarity with a) the dumping of illegal immigrants into American cities as illustrated by reports such as the ones here and here and here and b) the consequent anger of U.S. citizens at this dumping of illegal immigrants into American cities illustrated in reports such as the ones here and here in the comments and here in the comments and here.
I think we—American citizens—are being subjected to essentially the same kind of social-control measure implemented with the “weapon of mass migration” that the CIA used in Vietnam starting in 1954 for the purpose of creating a conflict that would be useful for the billionaire class to increase its power and profits.
The mass media reporting on illegal immigrants in the United States never reports the KEY fact: U.S. rulers for decades have been doing things to deliberately force people south of the border to illegally immigrate into the United States. This KEY fact would, if known, of course anger virtually all ordinary Americans (as it already does anger the illegal immigrants!). Furthermore, this anger would be directed at the rulers of the United States rather than, as is the case with the current anger, at the immigrants or at the liberals wagging their accusatory finger at people who are upset at the influx of massive numbers of illegal immigrants. This KEY fact about illegal immigration is censored because the purpose of this illegal immigration, just like the CIA’s forced migration of the Tonkinese peasants in 1954, is to foment conflict among the have-nots so that the haves can more easily rule over and dominate us..
Please read here how YOU can help build the egalitarian revolutionary movement to remove the warmongering conflict-producing billionaires from power.
Excerpts from Col. Prouty’s book
Furthermore, the series of so-called wars since 1945 were never fought to achieve victory. They were waged for dollars, without a true military objective, under the control of civilian leaders, with the generals in a supernumerary role. In fact, the first twenty years of our “desperate struggle” in Indochina were fought under the operational control of agents of either the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) or the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) first assisting Ho Chi Minh to establish the independence of Vietnam, and later, when U.S. policy swung around in alignment with the Cold War, to support the French. The few bona fide U.S. Armed Forces generals who were in Vietnam were limited to managing supporting activities, and none of them, at any time, ever served in direct command of combat operations in Indochina. There was always an ambassador, and frequently a CIA agent—under the cover of a general—or both in superior positions. Such is the nature of these new, limited, “make money” wars.
it was Alexis de Tocqueville, in his insightful book, Democracy in America, of 1835, who began to define “war” in its modem dress: “The secret connection between the military character and that of the democracies was the profit motive.” With that precise statement de Tocqueville modernized the true concept of warfare: It is driven by the profit motive; it must be profitable. Another way to put it is that the profiteers make war as a necessity.
As the Report From Iron Mountain says:
War itself is the basic social system. It is the system which has governed most human societies of record, as it is today. . . . The capacity of a nation to make war expresses the greatest social power it can exercise; war-making, active or contemplated, is a matter of life and death on the greatest scale subject to social control. . . . War-readiness is the dominant force in our societies. . . . It accounts for approximately a tenth of the output of the world’s total economy.8
Almost from the beginning, Diem was faced with an attempted coup d’état. This threat was ended when the CIA bought off Gen. Nguyen Van Minh and other rivals and packed them off to Paris. But this did not get Diem a needed army and a palace guard for his own protection. There were in the vicinity of Saigon some independently powerful sects. One of them was Cao Dai. By early 1955, the CIA was able to buy off the leader of this sect and place his army under Diem. Then, in June 1955, the army of another sect, the Hoa Hao, was defeated with money—its leader was bought off and his forces joined the government army. A third sect, the Binh Xuyen, better known as the “Binh Xuyen Bandits,” had been running the vice racketeering and the casinos in Cho Lon, a suburb of Saigon….
Most Asian armies of that type are no more than groups of men with families that are one day ahead of starvation. They have joined the army for a bowl of soup and some rice, per day, for themselves and their destitute families. It was this kind of army that the Saigon Military Mission said it was rushing through a course in “Combat PsyWar,” among other things.
One of the first “classes” of these troopers was flown to the vicinity of Hanoi, put in native garb, and told to run around the city spreading anti-Vietminh rumors. They were ordered to pass out leaflets that had been written by members of the Saigon Military Mission and to perform various acts of sabotage, such as putting sugar in the gas tanks of Ho Chi Minh’s trucks and army vehicles. Later, the Saigon Military Mission discovered that these “loyal” troops usually just melted away and lined up for soup with some of Ho Chi Minh’s forces.
By midsummer [1955—J.S.] more men had joined the SMM, and its mission was broadened. Its members were now teaching “paramilitary” tactics—today called “terrorism”—and doing all they could to promote the movement of hundreds of thousands of “Catholic” Vietnamese from the north with promises of safety, food, land, and freedom in the south and with threats that they would be massacred by the Communists of North Vietnam and China if they stayed in the north.
This movement of Catholics—or natives whom the SMM called “Catholics”—from the northern provinces of Vietnam to the south, under the provisions of the Geneva Agreement, became the most important activity of the Saigon Military Mission and one of the root causes of the Vietnam War. The terrible burden these 1,100,000 destitute strangers imposed upon the equally poor native residents of the south created a pressure on the country and the Diem administration that proved to be overwhelming.
What Americans fail to realize is that the Southeast Asian natives are not a mobile people. They do not leave their ancestral village homes. They are deeply involved in ancestor worship and village life; both are sacred to them. Nothing could have done them more harm than to frighten them so badly that they thought they had a reason to leave their homes and villages.
These penniless natives, some 660,000 or more, were herded into Haiphong by the Saigon Military Mission and put aboard U.S. Navy transport vessels. About 300,000 traveled on the CIA’s Civil Air Transport aircraft, and others walked out. They were transported, like cattle, to the southernmost part of Vietnam, where, despite promises of money and other basic support, they were turned loose upon the local population. These northerners are Tonkinese, more Chinese than the Cochinese of the south. They have never mixed under normal conditions.
There was no way these two groups of people could be assimilated by a practically nonexistent country. It is easy to understand that within a short time these strangers had become bandits, of necessity, in an attempt to obtain the basics of life. The local uprisings that sprung up wherever these poor people were dumped on the south were given the name “Communist insurgencies,” and much of the worst and most pernicious part of the twenty years of warfare that followed was the direct result of this terrible activity that had been incited and carried out by CIA’s terroristic Saigon Military Mission.
Moreover, these 1,100,000 Tonkinese Vietnamese were, of course, northerners—that is, the “enemy” in the Vietnamese scenario. However, since the Diems were more closely affiliated with natives of the north than the south, it was not long before a large number of these so-called “refugees” had found their way into key jobs in the Diem governmental infrastructure of South Vietnam.
When one thinks about this enormous man-made problem for a while, he or she begins to realize that much of the Vietnamese “problem” had been ignited by our own people shortly after the Geneva Agreements were concluded. Nothing that occurred during these thirty years of warfare, 1945-75, was more pernicious than this movement of these 1,100,000 “Catholics” from the north to the south at a time when the government of the south scarcely existed. (The figure of 1,100,000 used here is from a John Foster Dulles speech while he was secretary of state.)
Step number two was an amazing operation, unnoticed by almost everyone on the new Kennedy team. They did not realize that during the mid-fifties, more than 215,000 half-terrorized Tonkinese natives had been flown to South Vietnam, 660,000 more had been transported there by sea with the U.S. Navy, and hundreds of thousands of others had traveled by foot and by other means. This horde of destitute people flooded the south and began to take over villages, jobs, the police organization, the army, and many of the top jobs in the new Diem government.
Early in this period the Saigon Military Mission planners had come up with a civic action program “to place civil service [read “Tonkinese”] personnel out among the people, in simple dress, where they would work alongside the people, getting their hands dirty.” (This is from the official report prepared by Edward G. Lansdale and presented to the new President during a White House meeting in January 1961.)
When a training center, established in Saigon for SMM’s civic action program, failed to recruit any native (southern) volunteers, Diem/ Lansdale “selected a group of young university- trained men from among the refugees [read “invaders” from North Vietnam.” Diem ordered the civic action teams and the army commanders to work together on a “pacification” campaign.
As a result, the immediate beneficiaries of this effort were, more often than not, the northern Catholic invaders.
This situation, as was intended, created the matrix of war—and predictably the “enemy,” as often as not, turned out to be the southern natives, while the government was augmented by the Catholic invaders. Between 1955 and 1960 this inflammatory situation became worse every year, and it was exacerbated by steps three and four, to follow.
From the middle of 1959, Diem had begun the creation of communelike “Agrovilles” that were planned as small communities in which all essential amenities were provided. As noted, the greatest single factor underlying the serious unrest in the new nation of South Vietnam was the infiltration of more than one million Tonkinese (northern) refugees who had been transported south by U.S. sea and air assets. These people, many of whom came to fill key posts in the Diem government as the years progressed, needed a place to live. In Diem’s mind, these Agrovilles, designed and supported with American funds, were to provide a place to live for as many of these invading strangers as possible.
The Strategic Hamlet was designed, out of necessity, to overcome two serious problems: It was engineered as much to keep the settlers in as to provide security for them against attack from the outside by starving bandits, usually called the Vietcong. By 1961, South Vietnam was overrun with displaced, starving natives and by equally displaced and starving Tonkinese.
But these conclusions failed to consider the impact of the one-million-plus Tonkinese Catholic “refugees” on the people of South Vietnam and of Diem’s callous disregard for the welfare of the indigenous population.
I was in Vietnam many times during 1952, 1953, and 1954. I saw that serenely beautiful country go from a placid recreation area for wounded and hospitalized American soldiers fighting in Korea to a hotbed of turmoil after the defeat of the French forces at Dien Bien Phu, the division of the country into two parts, the forced movement of more than one million Catholic northern Tonkinese to the south, and the establishment of the Diem administration. During this period I had frequent contact with the members of the CIA’s Saigon Military Mission.
Deep in the forest on the mountains, the Rhade (Rah-Day) tribesmen have lived for hundreds of years. They grow crops. They raise chickens and pigs. They have been lumbermen. They lived easily with the French for generations and managed to coexist with neighboring tribes, because they were strong. The Rhade are a closely knit, self-disciplined group.
The padre explained that when the patriarch [of the Rhade] pushed that shiny red button on the Magic Box [a radio device from the Saigon government], the powerful gods of Saigon would unleash vengeful armies through the air, and the dreaded Vietcong would be blasted by bombs from airplanes and napalmed from helicopters. And the village would be liberated and pacified. He also told them that every village that had been selected by the Father of His Country in Saigon to receive the Magic Box would forever thereafter be furnished food, medicine, and special care.
The Rhade would receive these “benefits” whether they wanted them or not. For they knew only too well that the villages that had plenty of food and medicine and that were the special elect of Saigon were always the first targets for the starving bandits. They knew enough to know that they would live in fear of the Magic Box and its munificence.
Ever since the day when the padre had returned with the American, the village had received special medicine and food relief. The “Extended Arms for Brotherhood” program of the new president in Saigon was caring for these tribesmen. Shortly after the first time this extra food had been delivered, the village had been visited by some young men from the camps in the woods. They sat with the patriarch all day and quietly but firmly explained that they came from a refugee camp that was hidden in the hills and that was caring for thousands of homeless natives from the south (Cochin China) who had been driven from their homes by the Diem-backed police and hordes of northern (Tonkinese) invaders.
These people had fled from their wasted homes. They had been enemies in every new region
they came to, and now, terrorized and starving, sick and dying, they had had to turn to that last resort of mankind, banditry and pillage. These countless refugees, in their own homeland, had fled the careless deprivations and brutal massacres of the benevolent forces of Saigon. They wished to be peaceful, but they desperately needed food and medicine. They demanded that the village share some of its plentiful goods with them. This arrangement, although unappealing to the village, was accepted, and for a while it kept a fragile peace between the two worlds. However, the refugee numbers swelled, and their demands became greater and greater.
It wasn’t long before the Saigon political observer and the padre reported to the American that they suspected that the patriarch was collaborating with the “enemy.” This sharing of their meager goods with the refugees was called “the payment of tribute” by the Vietnamese. The refugees had become the “enemy,” and the Americans’ word for “enemy” was Vietcong.