Abstract
Like vultures swarming over a dying carcass, American establishment intellectuals have been swift to dissect the agonizing war in Vietnam. Yet poring through the massive scholarly, journalistic and official works heralding American attempts to crush the Vietnamese resistance, one is struck by the void of information concerning the National Liberation Front. The enemy remains almost as elusive in the literature as in the swamps of Vietnam. After more than a decade of fighting, the NLF is virtually as ‘faceless,’ unknown, unfathomable as ever to the American people. Indeed a careful search reveals not a single significant scholarly work on the subject. In the absence of independent scholarship, the officially sanctioned work of Douglas Pike, an officer of the United States Information Service with long tenure in Vietnam, has gone virtually unchallenged. Consider Pike's conclusions about the NFL:
Notes
This essay is part of a study of “People's War and the Transformation of Peasant Society: China and Vietnam,” to appear in Edward Friedman and Mark Selden (eds.) America's Asia, Pantheon, 1970. I am indebted for incisive criticism—all too often honored in the breach—to the contributors to America's Asia, to Glen Holt and William Caspary, and to the participants in the Washington University seminar on imperialism and People's War.
Footnotes
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- Pike, Douglas , 1966. Viet Cong. The Organization and Techniques of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam . Cambridge: M.I.T.; 1966. pp. 272–273.
- 1968. Our People are a Wonder , Liberation (1968), p. 18.