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193 c h a p t e r s e v e n Vietnam and the Fall of an Image From 1964 to 1973, Soviet and American images of the Cold War child clashed in the propaganda battles of the Vietnam War. Information brokers at the U.S. Joint Public Affairs Office (JUSPAO) and at the Soviet State Service for Television and Radio (Gosteleradio) generated vast numbers of pamphlets, television shows, billboards, films, and radio reports that focused on the lives of Vietnamese children. Soviet and American propagandists borrowed heavily from the images of children created in their respective countries in order to present a portrait of themselves as concerned and mobilized for war-ravaged populations in Southeast Asia. They portrayed Vietnamese kids as innocent victims of enemy barbarity, as grateful recipients of Soviet and American care, and, in the Soviet Union, as trained revolutionaries prepared to fight and die for national liberation. They were not the only contributors to this visual cacophony. North Vietnamese propagandists who were working through the Central Executive Committee of the People’s Revolutionary Party (called COSVN, or the Central Office for South Vietnam, by the Americans) marshaled these images and remobilized them in their efforts to counter the agendas of both sides. In protest against the visual control, or scopic regime, that Soviet and American propagandists were attempting to create, the NLF presented visions of its own children in order to argue not only that the next generation was capable of fighting off the American menace with or without Soviet help, but that Western policies toward Southeast Asia and their claims to moral legitimacy were bankrupt. From this visual and rhetorical dialogue surrounding the vision of the Vietnamese child it became clear in the late 1960s that no image, regardless of how seemingly staid or archetypal it appeared to be, could be relied upon as semiotic capital. Visions of mobilized Russian children standing at the ramparts with the North Vietnamese, which fit so nicely into the domestic visual paradigm of the ideal Soviet child, nonetheless could not conceal the unavoidable message that despite Soviet support, the youth of Vietnam, like their parents, were going to have to fight this war without Russian help. Similarly, JUSPAO’s efforts to redeem American policies in the region by 194 revising an ideal portraying children (and women) as passive victims of the North Vietnamese rang increasingly false and compromised the argument that populations in the South were capable of liberating themselves from invasion from North Vietnam. JUSPAO’s message of American humanitarian concern and defense for Vietnam was made even more problematic by depictions in the world press of lynched children in Mississippi and slaughtered infants in My Lai. Not surprisingly, the North Vietnamese made it a practice to highlight all of these contradictions in their own propaganda. Just as American and Soviet broadcasters worked frantically to use Vietnamese youth to justify their policies in the region and to demonize the enemy, NLF broadcasters were busy using these same images to argue that this was not a war about capitalism versus communism or East versus West. Instead, they argued for a total reconceptualization of the conflict as one that pitted both superpowers against those populations who were most vulnerable to state coercion. Youth, which played such a central role in articulating the semiotic battle lines of the Cold War for American and Soviet image makers, played a part in remapping the conceptual battle lines of the conflict when they were contextualized by the moral and political ambiguities of the Vietnam War. As Soviet and American propagandists would quickly learn, manufactured images of mobilized Cold War youth, even those that seemed to support state policy, were open to alternative interpretations and subaltern constructions by the very groups that were supposed to be their consumers. If there ever had been a Cold War consensus, by 1968 it was gone, and the child had become its greatest symbol of collapse. The American Message In 1964, JUSPAO launched a campaign to sell the American message to its Vietnamese audience. Twenty new officers joined the Vietnam office, and funding for propaganda to the region increased dramatically. The American program in Vietnam quickly became the largest propaganda effort in American history, requiring vast expenditure, the attention of thousands of workers, and the use of all possible psychological tactics in the struggle for Vietnam’s “hearts and minds.” By 1967, Voice of Freedom and Voice of America broadcasts were transmitting seventy hours a day over...

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