ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the success of pacification, was temporary and largely the result of the depopulation of large areas that once controlled by the revolution, as a consequence of the incessant bombing and shelling. To the extent that the pacification of My Thos rural areas was accompanied by programs such as the much-ballyhooed new land reform of the government of the Republic of Vietnam (GVN), initiated in 1970, these programs were a consequence rather than a cause of the Saigon government's security gains in the countryside. Institutionalized corruption stemmed from the top of the GVN system, centered on President Thieu and his main supporters. As the war became more and more devastating, and Vietnamese society was tom apart by the forced draft urbanization and the wartime social maladies, the shrinking zones of the revolution were the last bastions of the peasant conservatism.
