Life in Liberated Vietnam

...As a political prisoner under both Thieu and the Communists, Toai is unusually qualified to judge the differences between traditional dictatorships and totalitarian systems...

...Realities in the past three years have adequately exposed the negative aspects of these two economic systems...

...The goal, in Saigon at least largely fulfilled, was the interrogation and identification by political belief of every citizen in the South...

...With no real "class enemy" to serve as a hate object, the Communists could offer little incentive for peasants to join the Soviet-style collective farms they hoped to establish...

...T f Vietnamese socialism could not I compete with the remnants of Saigon's free enterprise, much the same was true in the cultural sphere, and so a number of the same remedies were applied by the new rulers...

...It would be read aloud before an assembly of prisoners and camp officials, after which the author was subjected to a session of criticism and self-criticism...

...This isolation and uncertainty was the result of calculated policy, and not bureaucratic sloppiness...

...I n 1977, two years after the Communist triumph, the authorities announced their intention to "socialize" the economy.4 Many of the larger businesses had already been nationalized, but thousands of smaller enterprises remained in private hands...

...Above all else, they said, Ho and his followers were nationalists who desired nothing more than to replace the regime of corrupt generals with a system consistent with Vietnamese history, culture, and tradition...

...The Communists knew full well that socialism could not compete with the market, particularly in the South, where capitalism had produced a measure of prosperity—prosperity, moreover, which stood in marked contrast to the poverty and shortages of North Vietnam...

...Yet the regime's economic policies are not entirely irrational...

...This pledge too proved a lie, and when Toai objected—mildly—to plans for massive nationalization and confiscation, he was soon arrested...

...The reasons for release were just as obscure as those for arrest...

...Although being gradually limited and restricted to a very small area, the capitalist economy has continued to "rule the roost...

...Naturally, the more "class enemies" implicated by the prisoner, the more valuable his conTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1987 19 fession...

...Billed as agricultural communes, the Zones actually functioned as labor camps without barbed wire: wild, uncultivated areas where urban dwellers, unused to farm work, frequently succumbed to overwork, malaria, or snake-bite...

...Prisoners wrote draft after draft of their autobiography, with an eye towards unearthing weaknesses in class background that had led them to side with the imperialists and their Vietnamese puppets...

...He reluctantly accepted the appointment after receiving assurances that the regime did not envision immediate, far-reaching socialization...

...There were even certain medicines reserved for party members which were unavailable to the public...

...Sleeping and moving about were not permitted during the day, and if the cell leader was an especially zealous revolutionary, prisoners might not be allowed to talk either...

...But according to Toai, the authorities were fully capable of distinguishing between amateur revolutionaries like him and the committed Communist...

...Although Toai was occasionally arrested, and served several brief jail terms, the government was generally conciliatory...

...For the people of South Vietnam, the Communist leadership's determined adherence to a Stalinist economic course has brought about a devastating decrease in the standard-of-living, widespread unemployment, and a marked deterioration in basic social services...

...The Vietnamese were thus learning the wisdom of Lenin's famous maxim that "the struggle between socialism and capitalism is even harder than war...

...By the summer, some 30,000 businesses had been nationalized or closed, and the state found itself in complete control of the legal, non-agricultural economy...

...for a bribe, many things could be accomplished, including the most coveted thing of all: flight to freedom...

...As a result, prisoners all the year round live under pressure, because no one can 'One of the best surveys of Vietnam's prison system is Violations of Human Rights in the Socialist...

...For while some within the protest camp concluded that the horrors of Communism were preferable to the horrors of a protracted war, the majority simply denied that a Stalinist fate awaited the South Vietnamese at all...

...Teams of party cadres visited each household, after which family members were classified by ideology and class background, with those expressing suspect opinions or revealing questionable class backgrounds designated for arrest, reeducation, or deportation to the Zones...

...It goes without saying that corruption is endemic to any system where rewards are apportioned on the basis of politics, rather than merit or the market...

...His interrogations, if such they can be called, consisted of writing and rewriting an autobiography...

...The "repressive junta" engaged in frequent dialogues with the students and invariably made concessions...

...but many others held out, and even today full collectivization has eluded the Communists...

...The authorities also found it useful to rid the country of those who would not adjust to the new social arrangements...

...Mornings began at 4 a.m., when the loudspeakers summoned the children outside for collective exercises...

...the sleazier Arch Puddington is on the staff of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in New York...

...party cadres were engaged in serious competition to seize the possessions of those who escaped or who were caught trying to escape...

...Those who wrote and speechified about Vietnam's "different" brand of revolution, who unearthed fact after fact to demonstrate the democratic character of the Communists and Vietcong, who achieved instant, if fleeting, stardom as revisionist scholars and underground journalists—they not only do not know much about life in revolutionary Vietnam, they seem determined to avoid the issue of Vietnam at all costs...

...The transition to a fully nationalized economy always poses a serious headache to Communist regimes, with its inevitable shortages and mass poverty...

...Also, William J. Duiker's Vietnam Since the Fall of Saigon, Ohio University Press, 1985 (revised edition...

...To be sure, some opposition figures were treated harshly...

...The demands of the authorities were twofold: that relatives encourage prisoners to cooperate by issuing confessions, naming names, and so on...

...On the other hand, antiwar activists have adopted a stance best described as calculated ignorance...

...Many who advocated the military defeat of the North today regard Vietnam with a sense of shame...

...Toai spent nearly 900 days in various Saigon prisons, including a brief stint in a cell he had occupied under Thieu...

...There was a justified Surrounded by countries whose economies are among the fastest growing in the world, Vietnam today registers a per capita income that is only slightly higher than Ethiopia's...

...The revelation that a child's parents were selling off the family furniture, for example, might result in banishment to the New Economic Zones...

...and most important of all, corruption—rampant, officially condoned, and commented on ad nauseam by the Western press—would be eliminated...

...Toai was a Vietcong sympathizer and student rebel during the Thieu era who nonetheless fell victim to Communist persecution for having expressed muted opposition to the regime's postwar economic policies...

...For the average resident of Saigon, the health care privileges afforded party members were particularly galling, since medical care in general deteriorated under the Communists...

...instead of some thirty or so newspapers, there were now two dreary party organs...

...In discussing the evolution of his political consciousness, Toai lays great stress on the cleverness of Hanoi's broadcast propaganda, which emphasized nationalist and anti-imperialist themes and scrupulously avoided the touchy matter of postwar domestic arrangements...

...There was nothing haphazard about it: reeducation was carefully planned and efficiently executed...

...South Vietnam never experienced this period of revolutionary euphoria...

...The hunt for subversive materials was extended to private homes...

...Organized into Vanguard groups, youngsters were encouraged during meetings to discuss any unusual events at home, as well as political opinions expressed by their parents...

...What was never permitted was open, orderly, safe emigration...

...Saigon...

...Each family was required to maintain a book recording the names of visitors or trips made by family members...

...The regime desperately wanted the "exit fees" it extorted fromthe boat people, which in one year was estimated to be 2.5 percent of Vietnam's GNP...

...remember the details of what he declared two or three years earlier...

...To minimize popular discontent, the authorities decided to eschew half-measures: on the night of March 23, 1978, teams of young party cadres arrived, unexpected and unannounced, at practically every private business in 'See Canh's Vietnam Under Communism for analysis of the regime's economic policy...

...After fifteen months, he had yet to meet one inmate who had been officially charged with a crime...

...During the war, Hanoi's propaganda had carefully avoided references to collectivization, stressing landredistribution and the sanctity of private ownership...

...During Toai's wartime run-ins with the police he could always count on the support of family, friends, opposition politicians, journalists, lawyers, even concerned Americans...

...Inside information often came through the children...

...Instead they claimed that Ho Chi Minh and other Communist leaders understood the folly of trying to impose on the South an alien ideology and way of life...

...The difficulty of the struggle was most pointedly demonstrated in the countryside, where the authorities were compelled to beat a tactical retreat from an ambitious collectivization scheme...

...An inThe Vietnamese Gulag, Doan Van Toai and David Chanoff, Simon and Schuster, $18.95...

...All this, bear in mind, in the midst of a deadly serious civil war that his own country was destined to lose...

...as one former camp inmate recollects, the autobiography was a complex and formidable challenge: During my 32 months in different camps in South Vietnam, I had to write at least 30 self-criticism reports...

...Doan Van Toai describes the South Vietnamese attitude towards Communism—his early attitude as well—as one of "deadly naivete...

...With the exception of a violent internal party purge, all the elements of traditional Stalinism are present: the taming of religion, destruction of a once-lively press, socialist realism as the only acceptable cultural norm, strict control of internal movement, persecution of national minorities, destruction of the private sector accompanied by irrational economic policies, state control over the "allocation" of jobs and housing, pervasive militarization, and 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1987 the systematic indoctrination of the young...

...not so those Americans who, having once welcomed a Communist victory in Vietnam, now blithely wish a similar fate on other luckless people in distant lands around the world...

...For while the Communists did eventually establish a veneer of legality—i.e., trials were conducted and maximum sentences set—in practice sentences for political offenders were of indefinite duration...

...In addition to the shortages of drugs, ordinary Vietnamesewere forced to run a bureaucratic gauntlet in order to gain admission to a hospital, even in cases of serious illness...

...Indeed, the debate had important repercussions, especially in the early years of the antiwar movement when intellectual arguments for and against American involvement in Vietnam were being shaped...

...Similarly, as long as capitalist trade survives, it will be impossible to build a strong socialist trade...

...The, major instrument was taxation...

...Nor in fact was there a "land problem" in the South...

...Regrettably, Toai and his countrymen are paying dearly for the naivete...

...In fact, Communism in Vietnam has turned out to be precisely what its former defenders said it would never be: still another variant of the Soviet system...

...Officially, practically nothing was available...

...By law, fleeing the country without permission was illegal, and permission was rarely granted...

...In this, they relied not on raw police power, but on an elaborate neighborhood surveillance bureaucracy.' They divided each neighborhood into "clusters" comprising a few families, and placed a security deputy, usually a housewife, in charge of vigilance work in each unit...

...Coercion therefore had to be applied, but a little more subtly...

...The goal was to deprive the political prisoner of the dignity and sense of honor that often is his sole source of strength...

...Certain changes could of course be anticipated: the "comprador" bourgeoisie would be expropriated...

...As Doan Van Toai recalls: "Raids by especially zealous commandos were capped off by impromptu book burnings in streets, rare, religious, and historical works going up in the same blazes that consumed trashy romances...

...The study,was published in 1983 by'the Aurora FOundation...

...Previous Corn-munist societies, however, had undergone an initial period when .the ideals of the revolution are taken with the utmost seriousness by party members, when party workers are convinced they are building a system morally superior to all that had come before it...

...I f the Communists have demon- stratedd a unique ineptitude in administering Vietnam's economy, they can at least claim remarkable success in how quickly they consolidated total social control...

...Now all that remained was the party, an implacable bureaucratic monolith that could neither be resisted nor reasoned with...

...A second jolt came when Toai was asked to serve on a commission empowered to draw up an economic plan for the South...

...One of the most impressive achievements of Communism in Vietnam was an astonishingly thorough ideological census conducted almost immediately after the fall of Saigon...

...Afternoons were reserved for discussion, with prisoners expected to regurgitate material from the morning lectures...

...The prison routine was organized to reinforce the inmate's isolation...

...He and his fellow dissidents conducted sit-ins, vigils, and teach-ins, published remorseless attacks on the government, issued non-negotiable demands, even organized a takeover of the National Assembly...

...It was also during Vanguard meetings that children were introduced to the practice of criticism and self-criticism, as a means of training them to control each other...

...Saigon's bookstores were shut down, and their inventories examined by Vanguard cadres, who destroyed practically all the books published in the South, even those critical of the military regime...

...Not that many Americans seem real-ly to care about what kind of society has been "constructed" since the fall of Saigon...

...At the same time, a currency "reform" was instituted, further wiping out the savings of the middle class...

...Also recommended is Portrait of the Enemy (Random House, $17.95), edited by the same two authors.itial dose of reality was provided when the weary Northern troops triumphantly entered Saigon only to be bedazzled by the South's consumer society...

...The authorities also attempted to involve prisoners' relatives in the "rehabilitation process...

...He even believed Hanoi's ludicrous boast of having forged an "economic miracle" at a time when North Vietnam already ranked as one of tht poorest societies in Asia...

...Land values were assessed not in terms of what was actually produced, but at an arbitrary figure said to reflect what should be produced under ideal circumstances...

...For example, the regime established six distinct categories for the ration system, ranging from ministers at the top to ordinary citizens at the bottom...

...They sealed off the premises, conducted an inventory, and in effect expropriated the contents for the state...

...As Toai shrewdly notes: Most of [the northern soldiers] were simple country people who had firmly believed the crude whip-and-slave propaganda that had been their only information about conditions in the South...

...In his student days under General Thieu, Toai conducted his protest campaigns with a brazenness worthy of campus radicals in Berkeley and Madison...

...Just as invariably, its patient attempts to convince the students of the dangers of Communism were scornfully rebuffed...

...Reeducation reached its high point with the confession...

...Cells were five to ten times as crowded as in pre-Communist times, and the overcrowding forced prisoners to sleep, packed together, on their sides...

...On several occasions, Toai took his anti-government message abroad, including a speaking tour of American campuses...

...thanks in part to a "land to the tiller" program adopted at the urging of the United States, the power of the large feudal landowners had been broken...

...A really daunting thing was that Communist cadres in the reeducation camps usually compared the details of one report with those of another...

...Now they saw not only that quite ordinary people had refrigerators and cars, but that the farmers used tractors and the fishermen motorboats...

...To resist the incessant pressure for self-abasement was futile...

...In fact, corruption became semi-officially inscribed in national policy...

...The cultural offensive represented something more fundamental than revolutionary values...

...The disintegration of political faith had its most palpable reflection in the widespread corruption at all levels of government...

...While the more prominent political prisoners, particularly those once counted as loyal to the Revolution, were consigned to Saigon's jails, the majority of errant southerners were packed off to reeducation camps.' The Vietnamese Communists take reeducation much more seriously than have the Soviet or East European regimes, even during Stalin's time...

...Along with corruption came a new class system, based on political connection, that was even more rigid than the old one based on wealth...

...As these revelations sank in, you could see their zeal almost visibly crumbling...

...aspects of Saigon life would be rooted out...

...Prisoners were allowed no contact or correspondence with the outside world, nor did they have an inkling of how to behave to expedite release...

...So long as it exists, the reorganization of agriculture and handicrafts along socialist lines will be very difficult...

...IN or, as Doan Van Toai reminds us, have the Communists made good on their vow of "reconciliation without retribution...

...oai experienced only one dimension of the vast Vietnamese gulag...

...For the people, and especially the elites, of other Third World countries, the most important lesson is the Communist success in politically disarming the South Vietnamese through a cleverly packaged set of lies: lies about private property, the rights of peasants, freedom, and national independence...

...Farmers who could not meet tax payments faced confiscation and possible deportation to the New Economic Zones...

...The old Saigon corruption—prostitutes, bars, shady business dealings—was supplanted by a distinctly Communist brand of corruption...

...The loudspeakers continued to broadcast throughout the day, providing lists of youths selected for military service, explaining the latest decrees regulating or restricting people's lives, or airing dreary selections of "revolutionary music...

...The regime's apprehensions were made explicit in Nhan Dan, the party organ: Some people contend that integrated revolution, socialism and the abolition of the capitalist economy are not necessary, that socialism can set good examples while overcoming its own shortcomings and that the good points of capitalism and private economic systems can be of use...

...In a similar vein, the censors went to work eliminating American music, including protest songs by Joan Baez and other antiwar stalwarts...

...The security deputy in turn apprised the police of the comings-and-goings within the cluster, taking special note of visitors from outside the cluster, or the unex3An extremely valuable description of daily existence in postwar Vietnam is After Saigon Fell: Daily Life Under the Vietnamese Communists, by Nguyen Long with Harry H. Kendall, Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1981.plained absences of cluster families...

...Here the motive was not merely loyalty to the Revolution...

...An additional benefit for the new regime of the chaotic mass exodus was the resulting turmoil in neighboring Asian states...

...they would prefer to concentrate on the struggles of the present than the setbacks of the past...

...Republic of Vietnam, April 30, 1975 April 30, 1983, by Ginetta Sagan and Stephen Denney...

...Dress and hair styles were not overlooked: Communist cadres armed with scissors would stop young Vietnamese on the street, shearing off long hair or flared trousers...

...and that families relocate to the New Economic Zones, with the implied promise that the early release of a loved one would follow...

...war profiteers would forfeit their ill-gotten wealth...

...or Vietcong agents who were occasionally captured...

...Ordinary dissidents were not confined in the infamous "tiger cages...

...Unofficially, emigration was allowed, for a price...

...Noisily proclaimingone's loyalty to the Revolution appeared no more effective than silence...

...Not surprisingly, many did join one of the various collective entities...

...The party's official position was that a prisoner's relatives shared in his guilt, at least indirectly...

...Great emphasis was placed on "collective" activities...

...This was a source of constant anxiety for the parents, especially those preparing to flee...

...Its scope was massive, since the potential candidates for reeducation ranged in the millions, embracing South Vietnamese soldiers, civil servants, doctors, teachers (almost all male teachers were sent to the camps), and anyone else who could be accused of having contributed, however tangentially, to the war effort...

...The security officials were obsessed with gaining information about ordinary Saigon citizens, in particular anything which might indicate an intention to-flee abroad...

...The books were examined by security officials during frequent house searches...

...20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1987 fear that a free, Western, capitalist culture would infect the soldiers and officials who remained in the South as an army of occupation...

...Surrounded by countries whose economies are among the fastest growing in the world, Vietnam—North and South—today registers a per capita income that is only slightly higher than Ethiopia's...

...At the reeducation camps, mornings and evenings, inmates attended long indoctrination sessions...

...What, then, is the lesson of Vietnam...

...Medical care was similarly organized, with separate hospitals for party members and government officials...

...Another excellent source is Vietnam Under Communism, 1975-1982, Nguyen Van Canh with Earle Cooper, Hoover Institution Press, 1983...

...In this, the Communists were quite successful...

...The prisoner's total dependence on his jailer lasted throughout Toai's term...

...Moreover, the prisoner could not fudge his way through...

...He quickly learned that among the most revolutionary changes ushered in by the new regime was the status of the political prisoner...

...these were reserved for genuine subversives...

...Loudspeakers were installed in each neighborhood as an omnipresent reminder of the party's inescapable presence...

...A family's fate was decided without resort to legal proceeding: thousands of ordinary people were jailed or uprooted on the say-so of low-level party functionaries...

...To begin with, Toai was never officially charged with a crime, nor even informally apprised of the reasons for his arrest...

...If one of your reports is inconsistent with another, you're in serious trouble...

...An epidemic of cynicism began to take hold, its most conspicuous symptom being the uncontrollable hunger for goods...

...The "lively and obstreperous" press of the South was quickly eliminated...