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Hanoi's Diplomatic Front in Sweden: Communist Propaganda Strategies in the Vietnam War
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2021
Abstract
This article offers a new perspective on the Swedish protests against the Vietnam War by placing it in its broader global Cold War context. As a case study on ‘people's diplomacy’ and ‘united front strategy’, it acknowledges the importance of Chinese and Vietnamese influences on the peace campaigns in Sweden and aims, as far as possible, to reconstruct Hanoi's motives, strategies and actions to create and direct Sweden's policy and opinion on the war. With the extremely generous political freedoms granted it by official Sweden, Hanoi was able to find new international allies as well as organise political propaganda manifestations from their Stockholm base. In the end, North Vietnam's version of the war as being about national liberation fought by a people united in their resistance to a foreign, genocidal, aggressor won a large enough share of the opinion in the West to force the American political leadership to give up the fight. Hanoi's Diplomatic Front in Sweden was one of the important battlefields behind that victory
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References
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88 In an otherwise masterful study, Brigham wrongly claims that the prime minister, Tage Erlander, ‘faced a serious challenge from Olof Palme, who attacked Erlander for not backing the NLF’ and that ‘one year later Erlander and de Gaulle suffered political defeat at the hands of the NLF’. Brigham, Guerrilla Diplomacy, 82, 83.
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91 Ibid. Foreign Minister Torsten Nilsson was, of course, referring to the United States.
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93 Brigham, Guerrilla Diplomacy, 80.
94 Ibid.
95 De förenade FNL gruppernas arkiv housed in the Riksarkivet, Stockholm. Mats Widgren to Rolf Bucht (no date), international secretariat of DFFG, korrespondens.
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111 Ibid.
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