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Cong Propagandizes Rice Paddies
By Beverly Deepe
A Special Correspondent

SADEC,
South Viet Nam.
Rice-paddy politics is inextricable from the Communist military effort here.
The persuasion ls part terror,
of course, but an often ignored
element appeals-and appeals
well- to pride.
Villagers near this South
Vietnamese army divisional
headquarters town, 73 miles
southwest of Saigon in the
Me kong Delta, are told, for
example, that they can stand
tall among the downtrodden
of the earth if only they'll
heed the word from the Viet
Cong 's political stump.
"Half of our country, with
only 14 million population, is
.heroically standing up against
a nation of 20\ million

people ," many of them were
told recently.
"We will win this war and
our friends in other parts of
the world will follow our · example and the American aggressors will be defeated.
"We will b-e international
heroes," the harangue went
on.
It comes from the littleknown top echelons of the
Communist National Liberation Front. It appears at
monthly meetings of Viet
Cong political · cadre and
propagandists. They then fan
out into the Communist controlled "combat hamlets," into villages in contested areas
and into the paddy fields
themselves.
Villagers exposed to the
spiels repeatedly can quote
them. A recent one:
"The 'people's revolutionary
(<

war' is completely different
from the conventional, Korean-type war, which . the
Americans are trying to manufacture in South Viet Nam,"
they were told in a village
near here.
"After a number of years,
the Americans then hope to
end it with a conference, and
they will continue to occupy
South Viet Nam as they do
South Korea. Viet Nam will
be divided forever.
"Then the Americans can
resume the war any time they
wish. The Vietnamese people
will never have peace. The
country will never be reunited
and our fatherland will never
prosper,"
the
Communist
agent went on.
"The only way to peace and
prosperity is to :fight the
American aggressors to the
end."
As well as instilling ambif

tlon for "international heroism" in the Southerners, the
Viet Cong political agents
promise them they are to be
"masters of the countryside ."
They can dominate the roads
and bridges once resei·ved for
the rich and the powerful;
they can give orders to landowners, they are tbld.
One older villager laughed
openly at the Communist
propaganda and said older
villagers do not believe it, but
that the teen-agers are inflated and inspired by it.
"We dare not laugh out
loud when we see these kids
of 15 or 16 carrying Russian
rifles that reach all the way
to their ankles," the elder
said. "They have weapons
and they are the masters of ·
the countryside. Who dares
challenge them except the
government troops?"