Vietnam and the Responsibility of Intellectuals

...In this respect, Hollywood is motivated less by sociology or politics than by a particularly debased version of the adversary impulse that characterizes modern literature...

...They saw Hanoi as the model the NLF would imitate when it set up shop in the South...

...For example, in a recent review of Larry Heinemann's Close Quarters, one of the very few fictional accounts of the war to surface in a decade, Ivan Gold glumly concluded that Vietnam is "novel-proof...

...Stephen Miller Vietnam and the Responsibility of Intellectuals "A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep ."—Saul Bellow Though most Americans prefer to forget about the war in Vietnam, dismissing it glibly as a nightmare, the country and its people still remain in the news—not as headlines but as short takes that haunt the middle pages, cropping up to discomfit us...

...The North, they would probably say, stood for a Vietnamese future whereas the South belonged to a hateful, colonial past...

...And the title of Stone's brilliant tour de force refers not to infantrymen but to narcotics smugglers...

...On the one hand, they urge the United States to become a "clean" world power—that is, not to get involved in the grubby business of international power politics...

...One resorts to speculation, trying to fathom their motives, because their reports so wildly flew in the face of realities—even probabilities...

...But these Americans, we should keep in mind, did not simply protest against the actions of their own government...

...Some critics have even gone so far as to suggest that fiction is an inadequate means of capturing the reality of the American experience in Vietnam...

...Yet this much is inescapable: The war that produced so much in the way of political turmoil has so far yielded very little in the way of art—or even popular culture...

...Susan Sontag reported that North Vietnam was "a deeply civil society which places great value on gentleness and the demands of the heart...

...As Fox Butterfield of the New York Times puts it: "The northern Vietnamese have tended to treat the formerly more prosperous South like conquered territory...

...Robert Asahina Why Were We in Vietnam...

...It is from these refugees, as well as from several intrepid journalists, that we have learned about the Stalinist cruelties occurring in Vietnam and the indescribable horrors taking place in Cambodia, whose government, according to Jean Lacouture, is performing "the bloodiest revolution in history...

...The Vietnam veteran came to play such a peculiar part in popular melodrama partly because of the pressure brought against the networks and producers by minority groups around 1970, which resulted (at least temporarily) in the near disappearance of black, Hispanic, and even American Indian criminals from the screen...

...No doubt Chomsky and company found these rituals moving and satisfying, yet a disturbing question remained: North Vietnam might be a wonderful place for the Vietnamese people, but it was not a place these intellectuals would like to live in...

...Some critics of the war, we should remember, did not merely resign themselves to the collapse of the South Vietnamese government, accepting an outcome that—all things considered—was the best of a bad bargain...

...Honorable sentiments, but during the war years Chomsky and other supposedly "responsible" intellectuals—among the most prominent were Susan Sontag, Mary McCarthy, and Frances FitzGerald—interpreted that task in a peculiar way...

...yet when contemplating the "victims" of American power, these same rules do not apply...

...Chomsky and company—and others who prate about "necessary political work"—ultimately practice a morality of self-regard...

...And so she said: "Though I believe incorporation into such a society will greatly improve the lives of most people (and therefore support the advent of such societies), I imagine that it will in many ways impoverish mine...

...they too were guilty...

...In her report from Hanoi, she assured Americans that "the idea of forgiveness and rehabilitation is underlined by North Vietnamese and NLF officials in discussing the government functionaries of the South...

...and after a little was inscribed in the Master Plan, with land reserved for its eventual Edifice...

...The NLF, these reports make clear, has been all but eliminated, northerners hold all key posts in the South, and the economy of the South has been impoverished by the exactions of the North...

...seemed to be responsible for every felony perpetrated on the streets of San Francisco or in Kojak's Midtown South precinct...

...It would be easy to pass over this news in silence...

...Obsessed with America's morality—or lack thereof—they judge the United States by the severest of standards...

...Few Americans, after all, are inclined to read anything more about that part of the world...

...In order to give Americans a glimpse of what such a future might be like in the South—as well as to report on the devastating effects of massive American bombing—these writers made pilgrimages to the North, where they had long conversations with the leaders of the regime, who took them on guided tours and told them how the North Vietnamese government would assist the NLF in achieving its goals...

...But he had colleagues who seemed to think it more outrageous that students should presume to know so much already, and other colleagues so inured to the profitable system they would even extol the virtues of drudgery...

...Ike's...

...Whereas the government of South Vietnam, supported mainly by decadent, middle-class entrepreneurs, was motivated by greed and dishonesty, the NLF, supported by the vast majority of Vietnamese, was motivated by an intense desire to rid the nation of foreign influence...

...Such is the attitude of a group of Americans headed by Corliss Lamont—a veteran fellow-traveller —that placed an advertisement in the New York Times...

...Indeed, they imitated their forebears, becoming new recruits to the great tradition of willfully ignorant intellectuals, a tradition that has little prospect of falling into desuetude...

...Preoccupied with their own moral image in the eyes of what they consider the world, they care less about the People they champion than that these people can in no way blame them for their miseries...

...They honed their critical pens solely on American misrepresentation...

...It was allotted a modest building, and budgets, and secretaries, and appurtenances...

...Why were these writers, who had spent a good part of their careers critically sifting the words of American politicians for samples of distortion and misrepresentation, so quick to accept without inspection the assertions of the official spokesmen of the North Vietnamese government and the NLF...

...the very word "Vietnam" does not occur again until the last sentence of the book...

...But he was persistent...

...Thus we shall jointly thrive...

...For example, although there has been a great deal of publicity this fall about Hollywood's recent "discovery" of The American Spectator...

...The homefront figures even more prominently in Sticks and Bones, the story of a soldier, blinded in combat, whose homecoming shatters the middle-class complacency of his family...

...Was it the same thing as an Honors Program...

...And the campus where these detainees undergo their "rehabilitation" is usually a malaria-infested jungle...

...One raises the question of Vietnam again, therefore, not to dwell on the nature of the American intervention, but to question the responsibility of those critics who blithely prescribed a North Vietnamese brand of medicine as the appropriate remedy for a diseased South—critics, I should add, who often made much of "the responsibility of intellectuals...

...and it loses all its rights in the unlimited horizon of 'historical perspectives' and 'total' demands...

...Thus do intellectuals, from their perches in the West, tell others that they should be content to do without rights that these intellectuals expect as a matter of course...

...Take, for example, McCarthy's notion of "forgiveness and rehabilitation": Countless Vietnamese have been arbitrarily denounced and arrested, to be sent off to re-education camps...

...By contrast, Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead was released in 1948, just three years after V-J Day, and was quickly followed by James Gould Cozzen's Guard of Honor (1949), J ame J ones' From Here to Eternity (1951), and Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny (1951...

...A tricky report, since it needed to skirt its recipients' idiocy...

...Yet why—one finds oneself wondering—were they guilty of such a betrayal...

...And yet the god of history perhaps did have some influence on the actions of these intellectuals...

...so this man went to the Administration and proposed that incoming students, particularly in mathematics and sciences, should be exempted from elementary courses in those subjects if they demonstrably had no need of them...

...In effect, at least for some writers, the true story of the war is to be found on the home-front rather than the battleground...

...And after much thought and much writing of proposals (the purpose of a proposal, as we have seen, being to conceal its real thrust behind screens of high-minded obfuscation) a huge budgetary entity was created, indeed a separate College in which such exceptional students could be enrolled...

...And lo, it became observable that students, a few of them, were solemnly sitting through courses in what they already knew, and that this was especially true of the very best students: Young prodigies, for example, who having for recreation in their high-school years worked clear through texts on calculus and group theory were now being required to enroll in Algebra I. There was a man who thought this was outrageous...

...In the spring and summer of this year, while the new administration signalled its interest in establishing diplomatic relations with the Vietnamese government, we learned about life in the new Vietnam...

...This view is quite similar to the position taken by Frances FitzGerald in Fire in the Lake, where she wrote that the "narrow flame of revolution" might be needed in order to "cleanse the lake of Vietnamese society from the corruption and disorder of the American war...

...She felt much more comfortable talking to the cultured, French-speaking North Vietnamese officials, calling one of them "an old friend of mine," than she did talking to several captured American pilots who, she said, "were somewhat pathetic cases of mental malnutrition...

...Moreover, in the meantime, writers for television and the movies had quickly turned the hapless homecoming soldier into a comically absurd caricature: For several years, a maladjusted, usually drug-addicted, and often homicidal ex-G.I...

...The need of Chomsky and company for illusion arose, I think, out of the peculiar way in which they regarded their own relation to American society...

...Yet, as Americans, they were implicated in this rottenness...

...Both reflect a politics that operates in a world of absolutes, in a world undisturbed by the shadows of history...

...And that College, in compliance with inexorable law, acquired a name meant to obscure its purpose (which, be it remembered, was merely the abrogation in certain cases of certain Mickey Mouse requirements...

...In talking of impoverishment, Sontag—like McCarthy, FitzGerald, and Chomsky—sneaked past a problem she did not want toconfront: The society she extolled would be unbearable for her because she would not be free to operate as a "truth-seeking intellectual...

...Expanding upon this premise, FitzGerald would no doubt claim that those now fleeing Vietnam are not really Vietnamese at all, but corrupt, westernized, bourgeois "camp followers"—the phrase is McCarthy's—who The American Spectator November 1977 13 have lost the Vietnamese "mind"—a mind, according to FitzGerald, that has no notion of freedom in the Western sense, which for them means "the disjunction of the ego from the superego...

...When the official spokesmen of the North Vietnamese 12 The American Spectator November 1977 government and the NLF gave their version of the truth, these intellectuals either reported it without comment or endorsed it wholeheartedly...

...After belittling the figures given for those detained in re-education camps, they made the following statement: "We share the view that American citizens should be gravely concerned about abuses of human rights, whether they occur in our country or abroad....But Vietnam presents a very different case...

...Yet, on the other hand, they see the United States as an evil late-capitalist state that inevitably is doomed to try to destroy all that is good in the world...

...After all, as has often been noted, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 was not published until 16 years after the end of World War II...

...Unravelling the twisted logic of this statement, one comes upon the following peculiar notion: On account of our intervention in Vietnam, Americans are morally compelled to acquiesce in whatever draconian measures the regime sees fit to impose upon the population...

...This reticence is surprising, since Chomsky himself, on his trip to Hanoi, said that it would be "extremely interesting" to see how the Vietnamese deal with the problem of creating a new society...

...The figures given by respected journalists range from 100,000 to 500,000...

...Escaping at the rate of 1,700 per month, these refugees were hoping that some country would extend them an invitation to settle...

...Yet this "ethical" society is good for the likes of them...

...And she would not be free to move about as she pleased, passport in hand...

...Thousands of camp inmates have died from lack of food, medicine, and clothing...

...To be sure, those works varied widely in literary merit, but no war novel comparable even to the least of them has yet emerged from Vietnam...

...If those who recommended a massive increase in American support for the South Vietnamese government did so in part because they did not want to commit another Munich, those who journeyed to Hanoi did so in part because they did not want to be like the "good Germans"—the law-abiding citizens of the Third Reich who, by their inaction, "supported" the repulsive program of their leaders...

...Thus do self-righteousness and condescension go hand in hand...

...Did it offer to make young folk cosmically aware...

...One wonders if Chomsky and company ever think about what happens to the "citizens" of the People's Republic of Vietnam who protest against the policies of their government—a government these intellectuals praised for its decency and humanity...

...Some mention must be made, however, of Mailer's Why Are We in Vietnam...

...North Vietnam, after all, has always prided itself on its close ideological ties to the Soviet Union...

...In the writings of all four critics one hears an ostinato of disgust about the United States...

...With the noteworthy exception of David Rabe's drama trilogy (The Basic Training of Paulo Hummel, Sticks and Bones, and Streamers), there has been a depressing dearth of significant art dealing with the war...

...these passionately moral Americans, who did not want to be slavishly obedient to their own government, abased themselves before a foreign, totalitarian regime...

...It could be argued, of course, that simply not enough time has passed for the fruits of the creative processes to appear...

...Moreover, as second-generation pilgrims, aware of the absurd reports delivered by American and English intellectuals who visited the Soviet Union during the thirties, these intellectuals should have been inoculated against such enthusiastic ignorance—and should have been especially wary of the soothing sounds they heard in the North...

...What is significant about these two novels is the implicit suggestion that the Vietnam war is accessible through the experience Robert Asahina is managing editor of The Public Interest and film critic for the New Leader...

...Then there is Sontag's complacent quotation from Ho Chi Minh, which now serves as a curse against the new regime...

...Such wisdom constitutes intellectual responsibility, a responsibility that Chomsky and company continually betrayed in their writings on the war in Vietnam...

...Perhaps more important, though, screenwriters are simply always in search of a new outsider, a new alienated anti-hero, whose plight can be exploited for the purpose of yet another critique of bourgeois society...

...Attacking what he called "the widespread habit among our contemporaries of judging every problem concerning social reality in terms of history," Chiaromonte said that "human existence, as we know, is uncertain, relative, transient...

...Even as recently as this year, an insane former combat pilot flew a bomb-laden blimp to disaster in Black Sunday...

...But that style takes a lifetime's mastering, and the committee's report lacks much of being memorable because its chairman had not that mastery...

...Forced to come up with another minority group to slander, Hollywood rather improbably hit upon the disgruntled veteran—who always (somewhat unrealistically) turned out to be a WASP...

...his book was at least eight years in the writing alone...

...and that College could draw up requirements, and dispense with requirements, as it saw fit...

...If they did not want to die, they did want to do penance by risking death and participating in the suffering of the Vietnamese people._ Preoccupied with such moral strategies, the last thing these critics were interested in was the plight of particular Vietnamese...

...Is not the obsession with American guilt that we find in Chomsky and company but the other side of the same coin—the obverse of Wilsonian idealism...

...What better way of expunging this American guilt than travelling to the North to act as "witnesses" to the sins of America...

...and the future, despite the "appearance" of repression in Vietnam now, would somehow bring with it a good life for the Vietnamese...

...Butterfield reports that in some places in Vietnam "people have scrawled on walls one of Ho Chi Minh's most often-cited quotations: 'Nothing is more precious than independence and liberty.' " Such is the furious sarcasm of the conquered, of those who must submit to reeducation...

...the war in Vietnam was, for them, not only a misguided American adventure, it was also incontrovertible proof of the rottenness that is America...

...And one day the Administration noted on its Table of Organization a College of Cosmic Awareness of which no administrator could any longer recollect the use...

...Unfortunately, the play suffers—especially now, in retrospect, six years after its premiere—from Rabe's inability to elevate a theme that is constantly in danger of sinking into banality: the plight of the returning veteran...

...Collected Press Conferences contain a possible model: "We found no place where we were in opposite camps, and we—someone made the observation as we left, whichever wing we all belonged to, it was the same one, and was not different ones...

...I was the chairman...

...Dutifully enacting the prescribed rites, which meant listening to officials who took them on the requisite tours, and dutifully chanting the appropriate liturgy, which meant praising the solidarity, gratefulness, and fastidiousness of the North Vietnamese people, these critics performed the way the North Vietnamese government wanted them to perform...

...The predictions of Chomsky and company, as we have learned from the reports emanating from the new Vietnam, were absurdly wrong...

...November 1977 15...

...We may say, then, that their very moralism results in their maneuvering themselves into disingenuous moral positions...

...The one way to find out was to appoint a committee, which means designating some high-salaried people to drop what they were paid for doing and write a report...

...Moreover, screenwriters were (and are) typically inclined to picture criminals sympathetically as victims of their circumstances —and what could be more conducive to crime than an unjust war waged by a sick society...

...Perhaps Chomsky and company would dismiss these reflections by saying that one had to make a choice and that choosing Hanoi was the lesser evil...

...The news from the new Vietnam also makes a mockery of FitzGerald's idea that during the war the NLF constituted an autonomous force and was not controlled by the North—an idea that was the operating premise of Fire in the Lake...

...Rather, some critics of the war welcomed a Communist victory because they believed in the wisdom and compassion of the National Liberation Front (NLF) and the North Vietnamese government...

...As many writers have suggested, the notion of America's purity and idealism is both arrogant and naive, an overweening notion that makes for trouble, especially when it is used as a basis for formulating a foreign policy...

...History, Chiaromonte knows, is a savage god, one that runs roughshod over the rights of particular persons while never ceasing to proclaim that it is ultimately for the People...

...She was certain that these mentally well-nourished leaders ran "a moral, ascetic government, concerned above all with the quality of Vietnamese life" (emphasis in the original...

...The phrase comes from the title of Noam Chomsky's essay, written in 1965, in which he argues that intellectuals should "seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation...

...Obviously, Gold could be generalizing from a particularly unrepresentative sample of writing...

...Wilson, we should remember, said that the American people are pure and that "America is the only idealistic nation in the world...

...Heller, however, is a notoriously slow worker...

...The war that produced so much in the way of political turmoil has yielded very little in the way of art, Nearly four years after the signing of the cease-fire agreement and a dozen years after the escalation of American involvement, the Vietnam war has still almost entirely escaped the attention of our playwrights, novelists, and moviemakers...

...The dangers and delusions of the moralist are an old American story, a strain in our culture that has been examined by Henry Adams in Democracy and by Henry James in numerous novels...

...According to Sontag, not only did the North Vietnamese government run an "ethical society," it was also a government that "loves the people...

...not of combat but of what might be called the war ethos—the cult of violence for Mailer, and of drugs for Stone...

...For, as Saul Bellow has said, "a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep...

...Frances FitzGerald, the expert on Vietnam, was also charmed by the intelligence and compassion of the North Vietnamese and NLF officials, who told her that they wanted a government of "peace, democracy, [and] national concord" in the South...

...The present suffering of the Vietnamese people is largely a consequence of the war itself for which the United States bears a continuing responsibility...

...Chomsky, Sontag, McCarthy, and FitzGerald went to the North to see how the future worked, and thus to suggest how it would work in the South after the corrupt regime in Saigon collapsed...

...McCarthy and Sontag made no bones about their distaste of the United States...

...Theodore Jacqueney, a former State Department official who recently interviewed many refugees, says that, "Vietnam's detention camps and prisons are full of onetime Thieu opponents of the left, center, and right, many of whom were once victimized by the old regime for advocating democratic liberties and accommodation with the Communists to end the war...

...Our Wilsonian idealism—our penchant for displaying and even acting upon our rectitude—has been, in fact, criticized by numerous writers on the left, and has been offered as a major reason for our intervention in Vietnam...

...Yet these reports raise important questions about the Stephen Miller is with the National Endowment for the Humanities...

...although the story begins in Saigon, it ends in Southern California, by way of San Francisco...

...Describing the reports of Chomsky, Sontag, McCarthy, and FitzGerald, one could invoke Julien Benda's phrase, "la trahison des clercs," for these writers were, in effect, publicists for the North Vietnamese government, less interested in seeking the truth than in looking for evidence to support their beliefs...

...II During the war years Chomsky and company were eminently voluble on the question of Vietnam, yet —so far as I can tell—they have remained silent about the new reports, which describe the ways in which the Vietnamese government does its "necessary political work...

...But that was too simple...

...Eight years of war and four years of peace have inspired little else besides Robin Moore's egregious The Green Berets (1965...

...Quoting Ho Chi Minh's observation that, "Nothing is more precious than independence and liberty," she added that "one could indeed, as the Vietnamese have, live spiritually from that simple sentence for a long time...

...This kind of reasoning, which pervades Fire in the Lake and lurks in the background of Chomsky's, Sontag's, and McCarthy's reports, has been subjected to scathing criticism by 14 The American Spectator November 1977 Nicola Chiaromonte, the Italian essayist, in a recent issue of Dissent...

...Now many of them are dying spiritually from it—the boat cases speaking volumes about "the quality of life," as McCarthy would have it, in the new Vietnam...

...Sontag was vaguely troubled by this problem...

...Though these officials spoke to her about eventually reunifying the country, they realized that they would need "a fairly long period of transition, in which they could do the necessary political work in the cities...

...Indeed, the very strength of the key metaphor in Streamers—that of parachutists suspended between heaven and earth—is grounded in the play's setting: an unspecified stateside jump school, where the airborne trainees are caught between civilian life and combat...

...1967) and Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers, winner of the National Book Award in 1974—even though neither actually deals directly with the war...

...Thousands have committed suicide, some have been secretly liquidated, others perish through staged 'accidents.' " Or take FitzGerald's notion of "peace, democracy, [and] national concord...

...Requirements, being interpreted mean: If you will force your students to take courses in my department, I will force my students to take courses in yours...

...conduct of some Americans who opposed American intervention in Vietnam—questions that should be confronted no matter what position one took with regard to the American role in the war...

...The Vietcong, Frances FitzGerald said in her influential book, Fire in the Lake (the winner of a National Book Award), wanted "to restore their country and their history to themselves...

...McCarthy was, in fact, quite taken with the North Vietnamese officials, especially the•rime minister, who was "a man of magnetic allure," emotional and yet at the same time highly intellectual...

...History, in other words, was on the side of the North—the Communist future being the only legitimate heir to the pre-colonial past, the only force that could restore Vietnam to the Vietnamese...

...The people of Vietnam, one might say, were only grist for their mill—less real persons than characters in an allegory, in which the hero, suffering from the stain of having been born in a wasteland, undergoes purification by visiting the good "enemy...

...Had it even a curriculum...

...Some intellectuals are never at a loss to find "deep" reasons for justifying the infliction of misery upon others...

...In answer to the question posed by his title, Mailer spends 140-odd pages describing a bear hunt in Alaska...

...a mere rewriting of the general requirements was not...

...Surely all the historical evidence suggested that the regime in the North had never been concerned about human rights, or democracy and concord, or forgiveness and rehabilitation...

...According to Le Thi Anh, a Vietnamese refugee who was a member of President Ford's Advisory Committee on Indochinese Refugees, "one out of every three Saigon families has a member in one of the camps...

...These writers are silent, I suspect, because they believe that Americans, as original sinners in Vietnam, have no right to criticize present realities...

...Sontag spoke of a "society based on maximal waste," and McCarthy spoke of consumer societies with their "capitalist laws of marketing" and their "capitalist newspapers...

...McCarthy was similarly worshipful...

...But Chomsky and company threw caution to the winds...

...This shift in focus is certainly evident in Rabe's much acclaimed trilogy...

...These guilt-ridden Americans suffer from a kind of moral hysteria, a hysteria that is shot through with contradictions...

...Like most pilgrims, these writers were often breathless with enthusiasm for the holy place they were visiting...

...There were reports about re-education camps where conditions were "Gulag-like," and reports about the "boat cases"—those Vietnamese (as well as Laotians and Cambodians) who had managed to flee the country in small fishing boats, only to end up—for the most part—stranded in miserable detention camps or anchored offshore somewhere, having been refused permission to gain entry...

...Both Streamers and Sticks and Bones are set entirely in the United States, and only about a third of the action in The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel takes place overseas...

...Removing requirements looks like a step back, and so must be disguised as a great step forward: hence what we may call the College of Cosmic Awareness...

...That was administratively feasible...

...The Vietnamese, Sontag had thought, have lived "spiritually from that simple sentence for a long time...

...According to these writers, the war in Vietnam was less a civil war between North and South than a revolutionary war in which a corrupt, westernized South Vietnamese regime, propped up by the Americans, was opposed by a moral, patriotic NLF...