Notes on the Colonial Heritage
Buttinger, Joseph
The following statement was submitted as background material for the informal hearings held in New York City this past August by Congressman William F. Ryan on the Vietnam crisis. The...
...They also had support from the Soviet Union...
...French colonial policy, by provoking the Indochina War, again contributed to the popularity of Vietnamese Communism...
...Landrents robbed the tenant of up to fifty per cent of his crop...
...The author is at present completing a history of Viet nam, of which the first volume, The Smaller Dragon, has al ready been published.—EDIToas...
...The people who most consistently expressed this national sentiment were of course the Communists...
...Colonial Vietnam had only a small industrial labor force...
...Of the price at which rice was sold by the Saigon exporters, the peasant's share was 12...
...Our force is probably sufficient to prevent the Communists from winning this war...
...No other group enjoyed any of these advantages...
...In the absence of any organized forces to oppose them, the Communist leaders gained the support of almost the entire nation before one month had elapsed...
...Communist strength is the result of historical conditions—economic, social, and political conditions peculiar to Vietnam and created by the colonial regime...
...As long as the colonial heritage in Vietnam is not liquidated by a socially progressive regime, the people of South Vietnam will continue to expect the Communists to perform this urgent historical task...
...These schools were held abroad, where the Communists permanently kept a reserve of cadres...
...Most nationalists supported the armed struggle against the French led by the Viet Minh...
...They had a wealth of experience and skills in underground work, and highly sophisticated theories about it, which had been tested in Russia and elsewhere over a long time...
...Others worked as teachers, journalists, lawyers and doctors, but many remained unemployed, and all were deeply frustrated because the colonial regime deprived also them of any kind of political voice...
...The French were of course not "pro-Communist...
...All the fighting that has been going on there for the last twenty years has aimed at reversing this historical fact...
...Any movement that promised these people an end to their inhuman conditions of existence was bound to gain their support...
...If there is still, as under the colonial regime, a total neglect of social and political reform, the United States must accept part of the blame for this...
...Nationalist intellectuals who lacked a Communist political training clung to the century-old view of Vietnam's elite, which was that public affairs were matters reserved to the educated...
...From this follows a still unrecognized and therefore startling truth: The loss of Vietnam to Communism occurred in 1915...
...No one expressed this necessity more consistently than the Communists, who constantly attracted the most determined elements of all the nationalist groups...
...During the war, the French had denounced the entire resistance movement as Communist...
...The heritage of colonialism in Vietnam is Communism...
...However, what reminds the Vietnam people more than anything else of their colonial past is that the Saigon regime, like that of Bao Dai, would collapse overnight if foreign armies were not again on Vietnamese soil...
...If we rely on force, it must be because we either do not know the means required to defeat Vietnamese Communism politically, or we are afraid to apply them...
...the aims of the revolution were declared to be national liberation and moderate social reforms...
...At the risk of starting a larger conflict, we may even succeed in defeating the enemy, but we can defeat him only under one condition: We must summon up the inhuman determination to destroy the country, wiping out most of its unfortunate people...
...The following statement was submitted as background material for the informal hearings held in New York City this past August by Congressman William F. Ryan on the Vietnam crisis...
...Under the colonial regime, the elite of the nation was deprived both prestige and power...
...They had schools to train people engaged in secret political activities...
...Whoever was awakened to political consciousness sooner or later aimed at overthrowing not only the colonial regime but also the social order it had created...
...But there are still more than merely shades of the colonial heritage in the views and actions which describe United States policy in South Vietnam...
...But the colonial regime went even further in its promotion of Communism...
...Colonialism transformed the rural masses into agricultural laborers, landless peasants working as tenants for landlords, and poor peasants without sufficient land...
...Why the government established in the South in 1954 failed to break the power of the Communists is another story...
...The present regime of South Vietnam, which could not exist without American support, is politically just as ineffective against the Communists as was the Bao Dai regime under the French...
...It did not create a land-owning peasantry immune to Communist propaganda...
...Colonial Vietnam never developed a middle class in the Anglo-Saxon sense, a class of property-owning natives opposed to radical social movements...
...There was virtually no Vietnamese capitalism, no Vietnamese bourgeoisie...
...During the Indochina War, the French could have helped weaken the Communists' hold on the nationalist movement by granting a non-Communist regime what the Vietnamese people were fighting for, which was not Communism but national independence...
...This was true even for an authoritairan conservative like Ngo Dinh Diem...
...Thousands of young Vietnamese, mostly sons of landlords and mandarins, received a higher education, but were not given an opportunity to apply their knowledge and skills...
...Communist control was limited to the North of Vietnam only by the international circumstances that induced the Western and Eastern powers to conclude, and impose upon the Viet Minh, the compromise reached at the conference of Geneva...
...For reasons also peculiar to Vietnam, this was done only by the Communists...
...Basically it is due to the fact that in too many social and political areas the Diem regime did not liquidate the colonial heritage...
...The prestige of the Hanoi government was immense...
...We treat the National Front for the Liberation of the South as the French treated the Viet Minh—as a solid Com munist bloc, and, like the French, we refuse to negotiate with the people whom we are fighting...
...they knew that their compromise with Ho Chi Minh would end in armed conflict, but they did not want the antiCommunist groups as their opponents in the government of Vietnam...
...A small number of intellectuals were allowed to enter the colonial administration, but under conditions materially unsatisfactory and morally degrading...
...Its popular support and military strength were such that it could probably have thrown the French out of Indochina and extended its power over the whole of Vietnam...
...After having reconquered the Southern half of Vietnam, the French, in exchange for permission to station army units in the North, recognized the Ho Chi Minh government at Hanoi with an agreement in March 1946...
...Furthermore, the Communists were the only ones who knew that a successful revolution against the colonial regime required organization of the masses...
...We too, like the French, act as if military force alone could defeat Communism...
...The Communists alone possessed certain advantages essential for the survival of illegal organizations...
...They were not land-owning peasants interested in maintaining their status and therefore politically conservative...
...Only pro-colonial attitudes could be freely expressed...
...We too use napalm, condone torture, kill innocent civilians by bombing and burning villages...
...Ninety per cent of the prominent Viet Minh leaders came from this class of people...
...Nationalist movements could operate only clandestinely, in an atmosphere essentially hostile to the development of democratic ideas...
...it did not oppose organized Communism by creating democratic mass movements, but decided to fight it with police and army...
...Capitalism was foreign, an alien power engaged in exploiting the land and the people, and therefore opposed by all patriots striving to free Vietnam from foreign rule...
...Who in the Western world showed an interest in the national aspirations of the Vietnamese people, let alone supported them...
...No trade unions were allowed...
...Many of these colonial conditions still persist under the tutelage of the United States...
...When the revolution broke out in April 1945, only the Communist party had people who spoke in support of the Viet Minh to the rural masses in the villages all over the country...
...They were solidly in power when the anti-Communist leaders a few weeks later arrived from their exile in China, together with the unwelcome Chinese armies of occupation...
...This too was a result of a colonial policy which held back the development of industry and excluded the Vietnamese from participating in trade and commerce...
...Another cause of Communist strength was the conditions of existence which the colonial regime created for the country's educated elite...
...By creating, particularly in South Vietnam, a system of feudal landholdings, the colonial regime had gradually destroyed the traditional class of land-owning peasants...
...No opportunities existed for them in business, commerce or industry, activities virtually closed to the Vietnamese...
...Only the Communists trained cadres for organizing the masses...
...The social basis of Communist strength was the rural masses constituting 85 per cent of the population...
...All were ruthlessly exploited by the landlords, the moneylenders, and the taxation policy of the colonial regime...
...France, the only democratic country that knew about these potentially democratic movements, was engaged in destroying them...
...This is when Ho Chi Minh became Vietnam's great national hero...
...When the anti-Communist nationalists, in an attempt to exploit popular opposition to the return of the French army, fiercely attacked this agreement, the French cooperated with the Communists in destroying all nationalist groups opposed to the Viet Minh regime...
...There is no evidence at all for an innate disposition of the Vietnamese people to favor Communist ideas...
...It would of course be absurd to impute colonial motives to American intervention in Vietnam...
...Vietnam was the only country where a Communistled government was established at the end of World War II without the kind of outside help the Red Army gave to the Communist parties of Eastern Europe...
...when it triumphed, the Vietnamese naturally gave the Communists most of the credit...
...They preferred to present the war against the Vietnamese national revolution as a war against Communism...
...In Vietnam, education had always been not only the primary source of prestige but also a road to power...
...Most effective in directly promoting Communist strength were the political conditions which French colonialism created for the existence of all nationalist movements...
...The strength of the Communist party of Vietnam is a unique phenomenon in the developing world...
...This failure to take proper political action led, in turn, to the military defeat of the French at the hands of the Viet Minh...
...A political movement based on a strong native middle class would of course also have fought for national liberation, but it would have been opposed to social revolution...
...it treated its democratic opponents as they had been treated by the colonial regime, denouncing them as Communists and throwing them into jail...
...Movements organized by moderate middle-class nationalists were as brutally suppressed as was the Communist party...
...This is a failure not only of Vietnamese anti-Communism but also of the United States...
...The Viet Minh government became the symbol of national resistance to colonialism...
...The absence of a solidly conservative peasantry, of a property-owing middle class, and of a socially satisfied intelligentsia meant that the country lacked the social basis for moderate democratic movements interested in maintaining or improving the status quo...
...Instead of turning South Vietnam, with United States help, into a country that might seem attractive to the people both in the South and the North, the Diem regime relied for its survival on force...
...The modern sectors of the economy, as far as they existed, were in French and Chinese hands...
...Instead, the French colonialists set up a corrupt puppet regime under the former emperor Bao Dai, discredit ing the cause of anti-Communist nationalism, and enhancing once more the prestige of the Hanoi regime...
...They did not speak of Communism...
...Since such a class was practically non-existent, all nationalist movements tended to embrace socialistic ideas...
...The most moderate nationalists, forced underground, hunted by the police, condemned to death or to endless years of concentration camp, ended up by becoming radicals, believers in revolutionary action and in the necessity of fighting the colonial regime with force...
...the masses were not ripe for political action, and had no significant part to play in the national liberation of Vietnam...
Vol. 12 • September 1965 • No. 4
