American Propaganda Evolution In The Vietnam War

American propaganda evolution in the Vietnam War

The Vietnam War, which occurred between 1955 and 1975, was a war conflict whose background is due to both the cold war and the nationalist and self-determination movements of the country carried out mainly by the Viet minh of the communists. After the First War of Indochina, Vietnam was abandoned in 1954 by the defeated French, whose participation in the war had been mainly funded by the United States. That same year it was decided at the Geneva Conference that the country would be divided into two states (South Vietnam and Northern Vietnam), and the celebration of a plebiscite was raised to finally determine its total unification or settle the separation. In an attempt to avoid the first option, Vietnam del Sur decided to take a coup d’etat, causing the north to begin to send soldiers supporting Viet Cong (organized by Ho Chi Minh) and thus annexed to the south.

In the United States, foreign policy was essentially a containment policy, which was based on both Truman doctrine and Eisenhower’s "theory of dominoes", who was then occupying the presidency. This theory assured that if the Southeast Asia fell finally under communist domain, little by little the surrounding countries would also succumb to the regime as dominoes. In the context of the Cold War, the protection of the capitalist system against communism was a matter of vital importance for the United States, so the country was instantly at a support position towards Vietnam del Sur.

Its leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, was a conservative and religious person who completely rejected communism, which made a great ally in the eyes of the US administration.

The Cold War and the events that occurred in previous years (such as the atomic bomb proof of the Soviet Union in 1949) had caused fear among the American people to the communists, so that a large part of the population really believed necessary theintervention of your country in Vietnam to prevent the enemy from gaining territory. To increase such feeling, the United States Information Agency (USIA) began to distribute internationally in 1954 posters similar to that attached to Annex 4. While its primary function was to infuse terror in the anti -communist Vietnam, the poster showed the horrors of communism to extol the United States and the values it represented, and thus maintain a good support of public opinion in terms of its objectives in theCold War. 

As we know, instilling fear in the population to attract supporters is a strategy that has nothing novel, and once again it was used by the American government for propaganda purposes: distributing this state of alarm over the communist threat, the fearful population itself itselfHe gave him the justification he needed to enter a war conflict.