The United States was adroit enough to obtain the immense psychological leverage of getting the Korean war recognized as a UN war. The Indochinese war was not made a UN war even though it was the same enemy who was being fought—Asian Communists underwritten by Peking and guaranteed by Moscow—in each case.
Amazing though it may seem, practical psychological warfare was almost completely neglected by the French until the Americans supplied the French with printing facilities for French Annamite leaflets in 1950. By 1952 the French had assigned staff officers to carry out psychological warfare responsibilities and were making a serious effort to link up with the other anti-Communist forces in East Asia for the purpose of obtaining psychological warfare know-how. A considerable improvement in tactical psychological warfare was made between 1950 and 1952. The strategic psychological warfare position of the French in the area must be referred back to the "battle of the probabilities," mentioned earlier in this chapter. So long as French, Americans, and Annamites all feel that a French defeat is quite probable and say so both publicly and privately, it will be difficult for the French to make the Indochinese believe that Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Laos are here to stay as French-protected and anti-Communist nations.[51]
Malaya and the MRLA.
What are "life, purpose, and honor" in basic human terms?
They are the rights to belong to something, to be a part of history, to make one's own world move, to be a human being superior to other human beings, to be vain, to be proud, to be self-sacrificing.
After years of war against the Chinese Communist guerrillas who have small components of Malayans and Indians with them, the British have not yet found a single British brigadier or major general of the Chinese race. The world at large on the anti-Communist side has yet to hear of a Chinese-Malayan hero who served mankind by falling martyr to the Communist terror or by emerging as victor in valiant heroic combat.
The Chinese in Malaya, as the author has observed at first hand, are probably more prosperous than any other Chinese have ever been anywhere in the world. Under capitalism today the Chinese communities in Malaya have achieved a degree of wealth, health, and education which Communist China will be remarkable to have achieved if it survives and succeeds for the next hundred years.
Does this not give the lie to the great Communist myth concerning Asia—the myth accepted by many Western politicians, intellectuals, and newspaper men—that the struggle between Communism and anti-Communism is a struggle for living standards? that the issue is an issue of "who will provide the best livelihood"?
On the pro-Communist side in Malaya, Chinese who are not religious and who are known for their practicality and secularism, struggle for the chance to go forth and suffer, to serve in an army with bad medical service and no pensions, to face an almost certain death in the jungle, to lose life and property (which they could keep on the British side) in order to gain that other kind of life—life with honor and purpose, on the Communist side.