agit-prop work. He was regarded as an instructor who explained NLF policies and programs in terms the ordinary rural Vietnamese could understand, using whatever arguments seemed most likely to be effective. Mass media, where they did exist, were never regarded as strong enough in themselves to convince the unconvinced.

6. Although the successes of the communication program were not due to its Marxist content so much as to its pragmatic arguments, the appeals were rooted in fundamental Communist doctrine: the united-front concept, class consciousness, and the historically determined inevitable triumph of the cause. Contamination of the communication system was reduced by requiring cadres to use Radio Liberation and Radio Hanoi as basic sources of material and by postcommunication audits at higher levels.

7. The NLF communication system suffered from standard Communist communication weaknesses: obtuseness, formalism, irrelevancy, and ultraconformity.

This summary and the following sections on social movements as communication devices and on agit-prop work were taken from two key documents that fell into GVN hands in mid-1962. The first was an NLF document entitled Directive on Information, Propaganda, Agitation, and Cultural Activities for 1961. It was written at the Central Committee level for use at the provincial level and contained an analysis of GVN rural communications efforts, an assessment of the rural climate of opinion, a critique of NLF communication efforts during 1961, and a master plan for its communication work during 1962. The second, a PRP document entitled Training of Propaganda, Cultural and Educational Workers at the District and Village Levels, was prepared for lower-echelon agit-prop cadres and dealt with specific agit-prop techniques and organization, the staffing of agit-prop and armed propaganda teams, and the use of culture and education (or indoctrination).

The first document was highly theoretical, the second concrete and practical. Taken together, they portrayed the full range of the NLF-PRP communication process; dozens of other documents, as well as more than 4,000 NLF propaganda leaflets subsequently collected, illustrated in detail the basic concepts outlined in the two major directives. Both documents stressed the importance of agit-prop work. The PRP cadre directive outlined it in specific terms:

Daily the masses are oppressed and exploited by the imperialists and feudalists and therefore are disposed to hate them and their crimes. But their hatred is not focused; it is diffuse. The masses think their lot is determined by fate. They do not see that they have been deprived of their rights. They do not understand the purpose and method of the Revolution. They do not have confidence in us. They swallow their hatred and resentment or resign themselves to enduring oppression and terror, or, if they do struggle, they do so in a weak and sporadic manner. For all these reasons agit-prop work is necessary to stir up the masses, to make them hate the enemy to a high degree, to make them understand their rights and the purpose and method of the Revolution, and to develop confidence in our capability. It is necessary to change the attitude of the masses from a passive one to a desire to struggle strongly, to take part more and more violently to win their rights for survival. Good or bad results in our Revolution depend on whether agit-prop action

to educate and change the thinking of the masses 3 is good or bad. Every person in the Revolution therefore must know how to conduct propaganda. It follows that the [agit-prop] task is a very important one. During the Resistance, this task made the armed struggle possible. At the present time, with our struggle movement approaching, it is the unique weapon the Party and the masses use to strike at the enemy. Therefore a Party member must, in all circumstances-even when he has fallen into enemy hands continue by all means to make propaganda for the Party under the slogan "Each Party member is a propagandist."

Explaining the difference in approach between efforts during the Viet Minh war and the later period, the document declared:

During the Resistance our struggle approach was to arm all the people and have them engage in guerrilla warfare. At that time we had a slogan, "Propaganda action is half the resistance work." At the present time we pursue a political struggle combined with the armed struggle, which present to the world three faces: political struggle, armed struggle, and struggle among the enemy. . . . It is the present policy of the Party that after completing the indoctrination work in the Party, Youth League, and other mass-based revolutionary organizations, we begin to reach the masses by propaganda in depth, by meetings in hamlets and villages, word-of-mouth communication. In this, the first action is agit-prop work, which serves two purposes: a means of persuading the masses to participate in the political struggle movement against the enemy and, second, it is a [propaganda] weapon we place in the hands of the masses in their political attack on the enemy. The masses themselves therefore must be trained in the use of propaganda arguments. What we must do is to influence public opinion so as to get the masses to stop the enemy and win over officials of the enemy administration and enemy troops.

The NLF Central Committee directive took a somewhat longer view: In all phases of the Revolution, the Party's agit-prop effort is vital and must not be neglected.... Our programs and policies and our effort to develop Party leadership of the Revolution require that the Party make every effort to develop agit-prop potential and in this way develop and widen Party influence among the

masses.

The end result of agit-prop acitvity, both documents clearly stated, was not to be passive belief or acceptance by the people but actions by them against the GVN in the form of propaganda activities, one of the several forms that the struggle movement could take. Said the NLF Central Committee directive:

If the masses take part in propaganda action it is because it will serve their interests. Because they want to keep their land, peasants persuade each other to take up the struggle. Because they want to protect their homes and property and fight against regrouping [i.e., relocating], the masses take up the binh van movement.

Again the PRP cadre directive was more specific:

Agit-prop cadres must get the masses to invent propaganda arguments to use during struggle movements. The masses already have developed many slogans such as "Struggle against shelling and bombing," "Struggle against the strategic hamlet and agroville," "Struggle against conscription, "Struggle against looting," ... and "Americans get out." During struggles, the masses themselves have invented many other arguments to deal with the enemy and stop terroism.

The importance of agit-prop work was outlined succinctly in a document issued a year later by the Long An province central committee: It helps the masses understand the Party's programs and policies..., assists in unmasking the U.S.-Diem plot to keep the masses poor and miserable, and helps them realize their condition is not due to their bad luck or ignorance, and thus causes the masses to hate the enemy and to sacrifice for the Revolution. . . . It promotes unity and helps organize the people in the struggle. . . .

THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT AS COMMUNICATION CHANNEL

With the social organization as a communication device we reach the heart and the power of the NLF. Here lay the solution to the mystery that for so long puzzled knowledgeable and thinking Americans: How could the NLF achieve success in the face of overwhelming GVN military superiority and massive inputs of American material resources for civic action programs to alleviate economic grievances? Not superior ideology, not more dedicated personnel, not because voluntary support of the villager had been won, but the social movement shaped into a selfcontained, self-supporting channel of communication-that was the NLF's secret weapon.

Working from the fundamental assumption that if an idea could be rooted in the group it would become strong, durable, and infinitely more difficult to counter, the NLF created a communication structure far beyond any simple propaganda organization and plunged to depths far below mere surface acceptance of a message by an individual. In the hands of the agit-prop cadres the social movement as a communicational device made these contributions to the NLF cause:

1. It generated a sense of community, first, by developing a pattern of political thought and behavior appropriate to the social problems of the rural Vietnamese village in the midst of sharp social change and, second, by providing a basis for group action that allowed the individual villager to see that his own efforts could have meaning and effect.

2. As an organizational armature, it mobilized the people, generating discontent where it did not exist, exacerbating and harnessing it where it did, and increasing especially at the village level the saliency of all the NLF appeals.

3. It altered to at least some degree the villager's information input, perception of the world, attitude toward government, and daily actions in and out of the village. It changed underlying beliefs and even caused villagers to do things to their own disadvantage.

4. In a self-reinforcing manner it fostered integration of the NLF belief system, turning heterogeneous attitudes into homogeneous ones; the social facilitation or interstimulation that resulted canalized and intensified village feelings, reactions, and aims. Thus even when the NLF organization turned coercive as it finally did, members continued to hold imported and alien values and norms.

5. It greatly facilitated the NLF's efforts to polarize beliefs, stereotype anti-NLF forces, and generally shift. villagers' attention in the directions chosen by the NLF leadership. As does any social organization, it caused the villager to rationalize more easily, being influenced by those around him. Since resistance to suggestion, that is, critical judgment, is lower within a group, it caused him to accept spurious arguments more easily and to succumb more quickly to emotional or personal appeals by the cadres and the village NLF leaders. Once critical judgment was impaired, the villager soon came to confuse desire with conviction.

6. Once momentum in the group was developed, the group itself tended to restrict freedom of expression to the sentiments acceptable, to the NLF-created group norms. The individual became submerged, the group became the unit, and great social pressure was brought to bear against the deviant, thus achieving the ultimate NFL objective—a selfregulating, self-perpetuating revolutionary force.

7. Finally, because it helped cut social interaction and communication with the social system represented by the GVN, it isolated the villagers and heightened the sense of conflict between the two systems.

The significance of the social movement as a communicational device and the contribution it made to the NLF effort cannot be stated too strongly. Its essential importance was clearly grasped by the NLF from the earliest days, the result of lessons learned in the Viet Minh war. A 1961 document declared:

An enlightened people if unorganized cannot be a force to deal with the enemy. . . Therefore organization of the masses is essential, it facilitates our cause in all ways.... The [social movement] provides a strong force to oppose the enemy, it makes the Party's task much easier, [and] it both provides an audience for the agit-prop cadre and facilitates further agit-prop work. The [social movement] is a measure of our physical and moral strength, it is a practical way of both serving the people's interests and guaranteeing Party leadership among the people, it is the decisive element in the Revolution.

What the NLF leadership realized-and was all too poorly understood in the United States-was that social organizations are especially potent communication devices in underdeveloped countries. Yet the process is in no way alien to Americans, with their proclivity for the voluntary organization. The Boy Scout movement, for example, transmits and inculcates a whole complex of beliefs, the scope of which is indicated by the twelve Scout laws. A college fraternity can heavily indoctrinate an impressionable youth, shape his political beliefs and economic values, even dictate what sort of a wife to choose. This is done not as a premeditated brainwashing scheme but simply as a by-product function of the organizational essence or nature of its being. What the NLF did was deliberately to create such an organizational structure specifically to transmit information, data, ideals, beliefs, and values.

THE AGIT-PROP TEAM

The Communist institution of the agit-prop cadre is generally well known but little understood by Americans. Its utility to the NLF was so great that it has been singled out from other communication methods for special consideration here. Let us begin by inspecting the visit of a hypothetical NLF agit-prop team to a Vietnamese village.

The team approaches in late afternoon and has a rendezevous outside the hamlet with a Party member or sympathizer who carefully briefs it on developments in the village or hamlet since the team's last visit; he lists the local grievances, local animosities, the most disliked persons in the village.

At dusk the team enters the hamlet with a great deal of fanfare,

shaking hands, greeting people, carrying with it an aura of excitement, a break in the village monotony. Villagers are asked to assemble voluntarily at some central location. One old man, known to be irascible and intractable, announces loudly he'll be damned if he'll listen to a bunch of agitators. The team chief ostentatiously excuses him. However, should a sizable number of villagers indicate reluctance to attend, the team chief grows stern and indicates by gesture and manner that it would be well to give the memebers of the Revolution at least an opportunity to present their message. So the villagers gather.

The session begins with a short talk by the team chief in which he mixes flattery of the villagers' spirit, sympathy for their plight, and the hint that he will present later a message of great importance.

An interlude of singing and quasi-entertainment follows. The team chief or one of the members leads the villagers in a traditional folk song known and loved by all South Vietnamese. When it ends, the song leader announces that he has written new words to the old melody that he would like to teach the villagers. He receites the verse, which carries a class. consciousness and revolutionary message, and after the villagers learn the words, he leads them through it several times.

Then comes the main speech, lasting up to an hour. The team chief has previously received from the interzone agit-prop section a directive outlining current themes to be stressed; they are biological warfare and cholera in an anti-American context. These are carefully fixed to local grievances. He tells the villagers: "Your harvest this year was not so large as in years past. The reason for this is that the Americans are conducting in South Vietnam something called defoliation. Strange chemicals are sprayed from airplanes, killing crops and foliage instantly. It is true that no planes have been seen, for none has sprayed within fifty kilometers of the village. But these chemicals can be carried vast distances, even halfway around the world, by the wind. What has happened is that some of the noxious chemicals have drifted over the village and fallen on the crops, stunting their growth and causing a lower yield." It is also believed by the villagers that there is cholera in the village. “This isn't really cholera but a germ disease for which there is no cure, also spread by the Americans." He continues to recite local fears, grievances, and problems, ascribing them all to some action by the Americans or officials in Saigon. He recounts atrocities committed in nearby areas. As a closer, he tells the villagers that the only way they can fight this injustice, the only way they can survive, in fact, is to join with the NLF and work for a General Uprising, after which there will be peace, economic abundance, and freedom for all.

The general meeting breaks up and the submeetings begin. The farmers gather to be addressed by the team's Farmers' Liberation Association representative, women by the Women's Liberation Association representative, and the youth by the Youth Liberation Association representative. In these meetings appeals are further refined and pin