Several times in this blog I’ve talked about the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (also called the National Liberation Front or NLF). In Vietnamese, it’s Mặt trận Dân tộc Giải phóng miền Nam Việt Nam. It was an organization supposedly formed in South Vietnam in 1960. It was purported to be a coalition of all the patriotic groups in South Vietnam opposed to the government of the Republic of Vietnam (i.e., South Vietnam) and the U.S.
In fact, it was a fiction created by the North Vietnamese communist party in Hanoi. That’s where its charter-declaration was written in 1960. It was then transmitted to communist subordinates throughout the south with orders to promulgate it. In fact, the front never existed.
I am disturbed to discover that American experts on the Vietnam war write of the NLF as if it were a real functioning organization. Brian VanDeMark in his new book, Road to Disaster, (see my review at http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/bookreview/road-to-disaster-a-new-history-of-americas-descent-into-vietnam) refers to it that way. So did Robert McNamara in his In Retrospect.
I’m tempted to ask NSA to declassify the proof of the NLF prevarication so that I can write an article on the subject. It’s never too late to learn the truth about our own history, even if it comes almost sixty years after the fact.
