Background on Vietnam The Politics of Disaster
Howe, Irving
Like many other people, I have been reading the recent literature on the history and politics of Vietnam. It is a depressing experience, which bears out once more de Tocqueville's remark that...
...Intermediary political groups in the South were weak and confused...
...The decisive moment occurs immediately after the collapse of Japanese domination at the end of the Second World War...
...It is virtually without social content, authentic or false social content...
...At least in respect to the earlier years, it is hard to find a pattern of American interventionism that conforms to a coherent master plan, either benevolent or malicious...
...While not as racialist as the British, the French colonial overseers established themselves in greater independence from the home governments in Paris and could therefore rule more freely in accord with their fundamental outlook—an outlook that combined repressive authoritarianism with a measure of cultural proselytizing...
...Is there any reason to suppose that the outcome of the recent U.S...
...The first question I have already discussed briefly...
...in Japan and Chiang Kai-Shek in Formosa, so that it was possible to override the objections of the old landowners and ignore their political influence...
...It would have been far cheaper, in any effort at even a modest land reform, to compensate the landowners for property appropriated than to do what in effect was done:—a counterfeit "land reform" which did not seriously affect the relationship of power in the countryside but which led the peasants, rightly enough, to feel hostile toward the Saigon regime...
...Ho Chi Minh, part of whose power was connived in by the French, now turns it against them...
...Vietnam is a hope for a nation, to be established once the French are driven into the sea...
...Having stumbled, then raced, into a military adventure from which there seems no ready exit, the Johnson Administration began to develop a rationale of blatant imperialist ideology, a sort of Monroe Doctrine for Asia...
...Yet the irony of it all is that not Ho Chi Minh but the French broke the alliance between Communists and colonialists...
...Now it can be said, with obvious cogency, that the class ties and outlook of the Diem regime made such reform unlikely...
...policy consisted in the fact that it either intervened too much or not enough...
...tion in North Vietnam...
...occupation or a Communist victory...
...The crimes of the past reverberate...
...Behind this policy was a complex of motives and forces: ingrained U.S...
...To look back upon the last two decades of Viet namese life is to annotate the wastage of possibilities...
...Diem's failure to confront these social issues meant that he was in effect cutting himself off from the people...
...never chose, in a decisive fashion, to pressure South Vietnamese governments for a policy of reform...
...For example, to give economic support to Zambia in the present Rhodesian crisis does involve a risk of military intervention at a later point...
...And once again the U.S...
...And what is crucial is that...
...c) There are no guarantees in politics, only chances for better or worse...
...technical experts plans for land reform in South Vietnam similar to the one successfully introduced in Japan...
...it means an incursion upon, or limitation of, and sometimes merely a redirection of its economic power...
...economic and political influence...
...It was in the grip of a narrow social outlook derived from its mandarin origins...
...To have done it democratically would obviously have been difficult, extremely difficult...
...But to say that is, in effect, to limit radical criticism to a "demand" for socialism: highly desirable but not quite immediately to the point...
...Now it is possible to say, as do certain leftists, that anything the U.S...
...they would be crushed before they had a chance to go through any experience of political clarification...
...What South Vietnam did not yet have was the kind of institutional and economic infrastructure which a modern state needs, be it demo *Ellen Hammer writes about this migration: "The religious factor was undoubtedly an important one in their decision to leave, but it would seem that revulsion against forced labor and the tight economic and political controls and heavy levies imposed upon them by the Communists weighed heavily among refugees...
...these properties then became subject to the laws of the Indian states limiting the amount of land individuals could own and distributing surpluses...
...After achieving independence India undertook a program of acquiring the vast properties owned by the petty princes...
...Communist leaders in exile quickly make their way home, especially in North Vietnam, to join their cadres in the villages, with whom they had maintained a functioning underground organization during the war...
...There are in Vietnam few, if any, narodnik or populist inclinations...
...also the support of the 900,000 refugees, mostly Catholic peasants, who came from the North;* and even the support of certain non-Communist Vietnamese who had fought in the Viet Minh against the French but could not stomach the prospect of Ho's totalitarian state...
...foreign policy...
...In short, Diemism could enjoy neither the moral advantages of democracy nor the practical advantages of totalitarianism...
...He would create a nation despite and then in opposition to the people...
...The problems remain very sticky, and you can discard them either by resorting to a Humphrey type of rhetoric, which is to justify whatever is done by the men in power, or by shouting "imperialist," which too often justifies whatever is done by other men in power...
...he managed to subdue the various private armies, some mere rackets and others a strange blend of racket and religious sect...
...Such a course would have meant, in practice, to exert an increasing political influence, but it might also have been a way of escaping the disintegration which would prompt the Johnson Administration to decide upon military intervention...
...cratic or not...
...made its power felt...
...The result of the policy actually pursued by the U.S...
...policy gained the fruits neither of appropriate pressure nor of genuine non-involvement—either of which would have been better, both in terms of democratic values and practical necessities, than the course actually pursued...
...The U.S...
...It can lead only to further bloodshed and perhaps enlarged warfare...
...I doubt it—and what does it matter...
...and second, that each Saigon regime could assume that, because of the political limitations the U.S...
...I see no choice but to acknowledge the inescapability of U.S...
...vent the repetition of disaster...
...Moreover, Diem soon launched a campaign of repression in the countryside against the former Viet Minh fighters and thereby contributed to a resumption of civil war...
...but he did this in an authoritarian and destructive way...
...For all the reasons I have touched upon, there was neither a liberal nor social democratic movement which might have become the agent pressing for the reforms necessary in this new country—though there were elements holding to liberal and social democratic ideas which, had there been a reasonable interval of peace and an atmosphere of political freedom, might have grown into parties and movements...
...Toward this end, pressure was possible...
...Some of the policy-makers in Washington would no doubt have preferred a more liberal regime in Saigon, but they acted according to the view appropriate enough in a stable world or in a pre-modern politics, that power is a visible reality which has to be accepted wherever and however it exists...
...diplomacy continued its traditional policy of relying upon established power, which in this case meant Diem...
...The idea of land reform took on a decorative function—as later, in the rhetoric of Johnson and Humphrey, it would be reduced to absurdity...
...deceit abounds...
...their oscillation between careers in the French civil service, which can be fairly comfortable, and sudden outbreaks of rebellion, which can lead to prison and exile...
...This conviction has been fortified by reading Jean Lacouture's book, which makes clear that in South Vietnam during the middle and late fifties there were nascent political forces—if only they had been given time to regroup and mature!—which might have provided the kind of leadership the country needed...
...might do in Vietnam or anywhere else had, ineluctably, to be reactionary...
...Any democrat who reads the histories of modern Vietnam cannot avoid a feeling of profound depression...
...Coda: The writing of history is, among other things, the description of missed opportunities...
...Once American troops began to be sent, that signified the decisive failure of American policy...
...I do not see how such a question can be answered with any assurance...
...And more than fatal: it is profoundly symptomatic...
...They alone created cadres that would combine a monolithic discipline from above with the manipulation of an untutored population below...
...And we cannot in honesty be at all certain that our answers are always relevant...
...Now it may be argued that the inadequacy of U.S...
...The attitude of the bulk of the population in South Vietnam toward the Diem regime in 1954-5 is not easily determined...
...At the outset Diem seemed on the way toward improvising a nationstate...
...How large or real were those possibilities...
...So I write here not as an expert, but as someone trying, no doubt with errors, to scrape some meaning from what the experts report...
...He never collaborated with the French, and though, like Sukarno, he did accept Japanese protection against the French, he never became a Japanese puppet either...
...During the late forties and fifties, the Vietminh, rebuffed by the French, becomes the dominating force in the Vietnamese resistance...
...economic and political power, which is to say, the inescapability, within the framework of the world as it now is, of U.S...
...But of one thing I am convinced: that the idea of trying in the mid-fifties to create a democratic-reformist alternative— however precarious and difficult— to both Ho Chi Minh and the puppet Emperor Bao Dai was in the interests of the Vietnamese...
...As to the second, our answer is, obviously, no...
...They ordered these things more efficiently in the North...
...How then were they different from the Communists...
...It cannot be said that Diem had any strong social base in the country as a whole or any significant popular movement behind him...
...But meanwhile the nationalist intelligentsia lacks social roots, popular support, authentic experience...
...Since, however, the social issues churning in Vietnamese life were not to be brushed aside...
...Diem lacked this kind of understanding...
...The French succeed in keeping the nationalists cut off from their own nation—without realizing that thereby the nation will be driven to rise up without, and even against, the nationalists...
...Yet once this was done, the sects remained, and had to remain, an important element in the country's life...
...but participate they do...
...Nor was Diem ever accused of personal corruption...
...The Diemists lacked the tried and selfless cadres which the Communists had built up over decades: men idealistic, ruthless and corrupt, devoted to the mystique of totalitarianism and the language of equality...
...given the relationship of forces, it was impossible for anything else to happen...
...These Vietnamese nationalists are trapped in their traditional dependence on mandarin elitism...
...On the contrary, it enabled Diem to stay in power through a virtually unqualified commitment of money and military aid, and by threatening his opponents that if they overthrew Diem such aid would be withdrawn...
...Perhaps, through failure and blindness, it is too late for freedom in South Vietnam...
...Diem, still in the grip of mandarin paternalism as well as an old-style Catholic absolutism, could not act upon such an understanding of modern politics even to the extent that figures like Sukarno and Nasser could...
...Assuming that one would have favored a policy of advocating reforms in Vietnam during the late fifties, can one seriously have expected conserva tive generals and politicians to carry them through...
...The British in India were economic cut-throats and racialist snobs, yet somehow, even if involuntarily, another side of British experience and thought got through to the Indians...
...And they are facts that ought to be considered by those Americans who cultivate the legend of "Uncle Ho," the benign leader...
...Obviously, there was no great enthusiasm, nor any reason for it...
...so that the Diem regime not merely withheld an improvement they expected but reinstated a burden they believed themselves rid of...
...Even if the peculiar conjuncture of circumstances in South Vietnam made a democratic course unlikely, there was the possibility, at the outset, of building on narrow foundations and then, with international help, of creating a more solid infrastructure of political and social institutions...
...involvement in Vietnam came about mainly as the result of drift and without much awareness of likely consequences...
...but they did at least understand that, unless there were an untainted nationalist at the head of the Saigon regime, there was not even a possibility that the new country could be established...
...The Trotskyists, quite strong in the Saigon region and the winning party in the 1939 Cochin China election, are now, in the spring of 1946, brutally decimated by the Viet Minh, the Communist-led resistance move ment...
...By the end of 1956 it was clear that for the scatter of democrats in South Vietnam there was no honorable course but opposition to Diem...
...The delay proves fatal...
...chose repeatedly to throw its weight behind one or another right-wing group or military junta which promised stability and prosecution of the war...
...Unfortunately he came to power at a time when nationalism was no longer sufficient and nothing short of political genius would be enough to cope with the situation...
...given the chaotic conditions of the past several decades, no political tendency in South Vietnam except the Communists could or did...
...probably had almost as decisive a voice as it did in Japan during the MacArthur occupation...
...Yet in thereby helping liberate the nation, the Communists also destroy, at least in the North, its components of diversity and freedom, through a systematic liquidation of non-Communist nationalists...
...The real issue in South Vietnam during the years 1954 through 1956 was whether a nationalist leadership which had managed precariously to establish the beginnings of nationhood would have the social intelligence to see that if it did not institute some reform, even its national aspirations would be frustrated...
...In 1954, when an effort was made, largely under the aegis of the United States, to establish an independent South Vietnam, Diem defined himself politically not only as an anti-Communist but also as an authentic and progressive nationalist leading the opposition to the pro-French and Bao Dai elements in Saigon...
...Lacouture offers a description of the various groups, ranging from the Cao Dai sect to the trade unions which, like the Buddhists, did not know where to turn.* Still, what one can see in South Vietnam during these years was an effort to improvise an uneasy union of Eastern tradition and Western ideas...
...did not press Diem in this direction...
...In an appalling miscalculation they look upon Ho Chi Minh as "reasonable" and upon the non-Communist nationalists as in tractable, and proceed to intermittent cooperation with the Communists in breaking the back of the nationalist and Trotskyist groups...
...What was needed in South Vietnam during the late fifties was not a socialist revolution, for which neither the economy nor the politics of the country was ready, but a policy of serious reform, both on the land and in the cities...
...The French, too, contribute to the growing strength of Vietnamese Communism...
...French colonialism found its rationale in fantasies of glory...
...embassy, both during the time it kept Diem in power and after it drove him out, had no authentic conviction that such things matter crucially...
...but their advice was not taken...
...Quat...
...but then, so was everything in South Vietnam difficult...
...For the Vietnamese, as for the Poles, nationalism became a mystique, and from a mystique it could easily decline into a cabal...
...the nation alists mean to act for, but not through, the nation...
...That an apparently stable structure of power can disintegrate rapidly, they surely knew as well as we do...
...For political mythologists, Vietnam presents an unambiguous picture...
...In his own distorted way, even Diem understood that they had now to be absorbed and allowed to participate in the social-political life of the country...
...And it is probably this parochialism which explains their failure to throw up a true national hero: for none of their leading figures, whatever his ability, could break past French restraints and grow into the role of national leadership...
...it had become a burning political issue...
...he began the physical reconstruction of the country...
...The more one reads about Vietnam, the more one is tempted to cry out, How appalling they have been on both sides...
...X might have meant a deeper political involvement—and it is simply disingenuous not to recognize that deeper political involvement carries with it a risk of military intervention, even if the former is justified as a way of obviating the latter...
...Yet there cannot really be, in the present situation, a policy of absolute isolationism, and the people who argue for it at one point are usually among the first to deplore it at another...
...In 1954-5 Diem also won tentative support among whatever Leftliberal elements remained in Saigon...
...By 1961, it now seems clear, the jig was up...
...At one point there were drawn up by certain U.S...
...Saying this, I would immediately add that democratic radicals ought to have a strong predisposition against military intervention, for some of the reasons Michael Walzer and John Schrecker have suggested in an earlier DISSENT...
...These came to nothing, partly because the political figures under whom the experts worked failed to grasp that in South Vietnam the problem of land reform was far more than a technicaladministrative matter...
...But in South Vietnam during the Diem period the U.S...
...Had South Vietnam been able to enjoy twenty years of relative peace, there might have developed equivalents to Nehru or Betancourt or Mehta—why not...
...Such was the case in 1961, the small beginning of a large disaster...
...They imported a version of Left-Catholic "personalism" from France, which they then twisted into authoritarian channels...
...they set up organizations along semi-corporatist lines, borrowing the techniques which Chiang had tried in China during the thirties and which had in turn been copied from Mussolini...
...they created the appearance of participation (mass rallies, reeducation centers, etc...
...The more I have read about Vietnam, the more convinced I have become that in its decisive particulars the situation there was sharply different from that of any other underdeveloped country...
...Creating an independent Vietnam, they create also an independent police state...
...Which was all the more reason for Diem, simply out of nationalist commitment, to take bold social steps and transcend the limitations of his political outlook...
...So far as one can tell—later investigations may change the picture—U.S...
...Precisely this kind of outrage could have been privately and publicly attacked by the U.S., as in fact it was attacked by liberals and democratic radicals at the time...
...and this narrow outlook made it both intensely de voted to its image of the national interest and utterly incapable of grasp ing the central fact of modern politics: that whether democratic, totali tarian or authoritarian, modern politics is a mass of politics...
...They have thrown up obscure figures of heroism, romantic nationalists who remind one a little of the 19th-century Polish nationalists in doomed revolt against the Czar...
...Nor did South Vietnam have the developed political movements a democratic society requires...
...The plots of the Vietnamese nationalists, most of them sons of mandarins and middle bourgeoisie, fail repeatedly, and most of all, because they do not reach the Vietnamese people, either the peasants or the urban population...
...Even if the right course had been taken, with liberty in the cities and land reform in the countryside, the odds would still have been heavily against the survival of an independent South Vietnam...
...But everyone with power, from Ho to Diem, from France to the United States, made certain that no such development would occur...
...To create a modern nation it was necessary to suppress the particularistic military power of the sects...
...But history—by which, con• cretely, I mean first the French and then the Vietnamese nationalists— would give him and his party the rare privilege of a second and then a third chance...
...I do not hold to an unqualified opposition to military interventionism under any and all circumstances, but the predisposition of radical democrats should be strongly against military intervention, on the ground that it almost always comes as a last-ditch effort to rescue a failed and/or deplorable policy...
...Was it probable or even likely that a South Viet nam initiating some land reform and allowing for a modest democratic life could have become a viable society...
...Again, like the 19th-century Polish nationalists, their bias is unconsciously conservative: they cannot even imagine anything else, and they fail to see the deep connection between French rule and the privileges of the native elite from which most of them derive...
...policy of support for Ky and against the Buddhists will come to anything else...
...This failure to * It soon became clear that there cou'd be no free or even rigged-cum-free election in the Communist North...
...nothing but nationalism...
...intervention in Vietnam was thus, from the beginning, seriously complicated by the cold-war struggle with China...
...has been twofold: first, that whichever clique held power for a time in Saigon could pretty much count on American acquiescence (the one exception apparently being a short-lived semi-neutralist cabinet of the civilian Dr...
...For as it turned out, the Communists were the only polit ical force in Vietnam that functioned according to the premises of mod ern politics...
...Like many other people, I have been reading the recent literature on the history and politics of Vietnam...
...And the sending of troops was to lead, in effect, to a deepening of the political crisis and a worsening of its consequences...
...X? But to have supported the regime of Mr...
...Diem and his clique did try—since they had some glimmer of awareness—to impose an ideology of sorts upon South Vietnam...
...while the nationalist leaders remain exiles in China, wasting precious weeks until they will return with the hated Chinese armies...
...policy, all this poses some difficult problems...
...On the other hand, if the regime in Saigon had been truly progressive and thereby able to garner some popular support, a call for a nation-wide election, both North and South, might have been politically advantageous...
...The rationale Diem gave for suppressing democracy was not very different from that offered by dictators like Nkrumah or quasi-Maoists like Paul Sweezey: that the conditions were not yet "ripe" for anything else...
...Together they created the tragedy of Vietnam...
...1946 Looking back upon the history of modern imperialism, one cannot avoid the ironic reflection that even among oppressors there are crucial distinctions...
...If Diem antagonized the peasants, he also destroyed those political elements in the cities that had a more intelligent approach to the peasants...
...Can revolutionary changes be effected by non-revolutionists...
...despite platonic commitments to land reform and paper programs in behalf of it, the U.S...
...In Indochina, specifically, the colonialists formed a semi-feudal caste free to exploit the country...
...1954-56 Was there ever, after the Geneva Agreement, a significant chance for establishing South Vietnam as a viable country that would be nonCommunist yet devoted to at least a measure of democratic freedom and social reform...
...And partly these plans came to nothing because the U.S...
...could have pressured the South Vietnamese into land reform but failed to do so...
...The Vietnamese nationalists, often men of heroism and purity, see in their nationalism...
...Diem therefore had no alternative—given his political outlook—but an imposition of a politics from above...
...Was the Indian Patel more generous or humanitarian than the Vietnamese Diem...
...Later the representatives of the State Department would refuse or be unable to grasp the need for intensive social reform as a precondition for the survival of South Vietnam...
...policy since the Truman Administration...
...In the summer of 1946 the French supply Ho Chi Minh's second in-command, General Giap, with artillery to wipe out pockets of resist ance, led by the nationalist Dai Viet party against Communist domina...
...For Left-liberal critics of U.S...
...Historically they are squeezed in a nutcracker between the colonial ism of yesterday and the totalitarianism of tomorrow...
...but because it had acquiesced in his earlier destruction of the political life of South Vietnam, there were no popular leaders to replace him, and the U.S...
...had" to pursue military tactics which meant indiscriminate bombings of the civilian population, because it lacked the political support among the people of the countryside which would have enabled it to cope with guerrillas in any other way...
...policy in Vietnam that it tried to influence the direction of that country's economic and social policies or that it did so in a reactionary way...
...The nationalist groups remaining in South Vietnam were small, broken, isolated from the countryside, and, above all, unsure of which course to follow...
...the accession to leadership in the resistance movement by the Communists (something that happens nowhere else...
...And what is more, by the 20th century Vietnam is barely a coherent and functioning nation, any more than Poland could be said to be a coherent and functioning nation at the turn of the century...
...The Vietnamese, as they emerge from the pages of Fall, Scigliano, Hammer, Lacouture, and Buttinger seem a marvelously attractive people: subtle, charming, clever...
...There is a further tragedy...
...But for radical democrats it is necessary to acknowledge, even if we cannot solve, such problems as these: Is our criticism of U.S...
...The spokesmen for Washington, fixated upon their anti-Communist crusade, and the apologists for Hanoi, fixated upon the vocabulary of antiimperialism, tell pretty much the same kind of story: monolithic, brute, devoid of those complexities we know to be the texture of political life wherever it can emerge with some freedom...
...Patel, however, grasped the critical fact that for the survival of a newly-independent country Iike India under Congress party rule, the interests of the princely landowners had to be clipped...
...The motivating ideology behind this interventionist drift was, however, much firmer in nature: it was the kind of anti-Communism which, with variations, has been U.S...
...but what was done in India could have been tried in South Vietnam, where the political need for such measures was even greater...
...Against such competition, the apolitical Vietnamese nationalists, for all their sincere parochialism, were helpless...
...For the Communists alone grasp the need for building a movement with extensive social roots in the countryside, and beginning now, as well as through the war against the French, they transform themselves into a popular movement by means of their identification with the national cause...
...Between what some of them knew intellectually and the way in which most of them acted practically, there was a chasm...
...to support another regime, say that of Mr...
...The French in Hanoi also surround a section of the city to prevent members of the nationalist group VNQDD from coming to the aid of their leaders who, elsewhere in the city, are being rounded up by the Communists...
...Here we ought to gain a clearer sense of Diem, a man who, with good reason, has been portrayed as a despot, but also, it should be remembered, a man about whom Ho Chi Minh once said that "he too in his way is a patriot...
...had him replaced...
...Since the North had a majority of the population, this meant that even if something like a free election took place in the South and even if the Communists won only a small percentage of the vote, they would—with the mechanical majorities rolled up in the North—be bound to win in a nation-wide poll, regardless of whether they really had the support of a majority of the people...
...There can be no question that the idea of "stopping the Chinese" and perhaps of establishing bases in proximity to Communist China gave U.S...
...but that they will soon be the most powerful Vietnamese movement, with strong popular support, cannot be doubted...
...That is quite true...
...a certain legend had grown up around his name...
...Partly because of the penetration of British radicalism (the London School of Economics served as a preparatory school for the Indian nationalists), and partly because of the training provided by the British Civil Service, the Indians were able to create an indigenous political movement, the Congress party of Gandhi and Nehru, which sank its roots into the countryside and gained the assent of the intelligentsia...
...For example, in the elections for the national assembly held in Saigon in 1959, the Diemists were roundly beaten in Saigon but an opposition candidate was nevertheless denied his seat...
...Something of British democracy seeped past British imperialism into Indian society, whereas in Indochina, despite an intensive cultural "Frenchifying" among the landowners and intellectuals, there was not permitted even a feeble carbon of the democratic process...
...Yet we have witnessed several instances during the past half-century in which land reform of varying effectiveness has been carried out by non-socialist regimes partly against the interests of sections of the ruling lasses...
...In at least two ways...
...The other reason for the claustrophobic, pre-modern character of Vietnamese nationalism has to do with Vietnam itself...
...Having decided that Diem had outlived his usefulness, the U.S...
...But the term "revolution" is bandied about a little too much these days in academic circles...
...Once the balance of power in the U.S...
...A few things, however, can be said: a) Time is of the essence...
...Like most decorations, it depreciated in value through careless use...
...but then, because it adopted these tactics, it no doubt further alienated large numbers of Vietnamese...
...Diem and Ky were puppets, yet puppets can sometimes act with a notable freedom of maneuver...
...It knows little of the lessons absorbed by Gandhi, Nehru, and, in a perverted way, even Sukarno...
...There were people both in Vietnam and abroad who kept urging this upon the regime...
...As for Japan and Formosa, the land reform programs there were more thorough-going than in most countries that have been troubled by a land problem...
...Then, having decided upon massive military steps, the U.S...
...can you then propose that they then be allowed to function freely as part of the national life...
...All through the 1920's and 1930's the French colonialists and Vietnamese nationalists play by more or less fixed rules—with the proviso that one side has the power and the other not...
...More than class interest was involved in the failure of the Diem regime...
...A land reform in 1955 would have been worth ten times as much as a land reform in 1965...
...and then the years of struggle between the Viet Minh and the French, brought on by the blindness and cupidity of the latter and leading to results that can only favor the former—all of this militates against a democratic outcome...
...since they co-existed with problems of nationbuilding, and indeed were indistinguishable from them...
...For it is not true, it is a falsehood perpetrated by the apologists for Hanoi, that the country was totally polarized between Ho and Diem...
...The aristocratism of the mandarins, like that of the Polish landowners in the late 19th century, dominates the political style of Vietnamese nationalism...
...he had also to face an enormous social upheaval, a countryside that had been stirred into consciousness and revolt during the struggle against the French...
...presence" within South Vietnam shifted increasingly to the military and the CIA, there was a predictable inclination to rely still more heavily upon military "realism"—which meant upon those Vietnamese generals who, while political cretins, spoke the language of blunt might...
...As it was, U.S...
...What happened instead everyone knows, and since we have discussed recent Vietnamese events in several issues of DISSENT and I am not pretending to write a full-scale political account, I need not here go into detail...
...As Ellen Hammer remarks in The Struggle for Indochina: For some 20 years Diem had remained aloof from the political scene, and, as a symbol of Nationalist intransigence...
...The U.S...
...Brilliant leader that he would become, Ho Chi Minh was deeply implicated in the fiascos and deceits of Stalinist policy in Asia during the 1920's and 1930's...
...A free political life in 1955 might have done for South Vietnam what a free political life could no longer do in 1965...
...conservatism, contempt for non-whites, simplistic anti-Communist mania, political ineptitude, native moralism, and more...
...The impression of the most cautious observers is that a sizable portion of the people was at least prepared to wait and see what Diem would do before it took any decisive stand for or against him...
...A disaster...
...Both were self-deluding, yet the differences would prove to be important...
...Let us avoid mythology...
...Historical reasons for it, historical pressures in behalf of it, historical probabilities pointing toward it—yes...
...In Mexico, India, Formosa and Japan there have been programs of land reform—all countries with sharply different circumstances, yet all granting some landless peasants at least some satisfaction of their hunger for land...
...But insofar as Diem's task was that of a pure and simple nationalist, he did —up to a point—fulfill his perspective.* But the central fact was that Diem did not merely face the problem of nation-building...
...Obviously the U.S...
...But one thing is certain: the failure to try a mixture of political liberty and social reform in South Vietnam made all but inevitable a victory for the Communists...
...The relevance of these experiences is somewhat limited, since in both countries land reform was instituted by military occupations, the U.S...
...abolish the burden of rent was all the more disastrous since the peasants had actually stopped paying rent during the recent years of turmoil...
...but by training, temperament, and tradition they were not equipped to act upon this knowledge...
...Why did not the same thing happen in the French colonies, or even in certain other British colonies...
...These are facts...
...But there would have been a decidedly better chance...
...I am not quite sure, but I would speculate that in France there has always remained a segment of a militarysocial elite which could not reconcile itself to the idea of a democratic 661 republic and found an outlet in the colonies for its authoritarian energies...
...found itself accepting generals even less acceptable than Diem...
...troops began to be sent to Vietnam in 1961, there was a clear understanding in Washington of the ultimate consequences...
...The masses may be aroused to participate democratically, or through totalitarian ritual and mock-action...
...Thus, Diem was forced to ape the repressive methods of the Comunists without being able to copy those of their methods that won them the allegiance of peasants and intellectuals...
...The national program for land redistribution was enacted under the guidance, as it happens, of a conservative bourgeois politician, Sardar Patel, who understood that if India was to survive, at least some redistribution of the land was necessary...
...That this martyred country can have a future in which it will either not be napalm-bombed into extinction or subdued to the ghastly silence of totalitarianism now seems unlikely...
...The tragedy of the Vietnamese nationalists is that they are 19th-century nationalists trying to move from the 17th century into the 20th century, while their French masters and teachers are 18th-century absolutists...
...without, say, the village democracy of Gandhi or the humanitarian socialism of Nehru...
...Yes, precisely...
...the open and hidden cooperation of the French and the Communists in slaughtering political dissidents immediately after the Second World War...
...then, at least, let there be some kind of peace...
...Apart from whether one approves of such a relationship between an immense power and a tiny nation, the fact remains that the U.S...
...For this failure to strike social roots there are at least two reasons...
...their ingrained respect for Chinese and French culture...
...But the U.S...
...for having supported Diem, is not this to imply that you would have wanted the U.S...
...If, for example, you chose to attack the U.S...
...The Vietnamese had the intelligence and sophistication...
...Once again, as in the 1950's, there seemed a possibility of sorts that an indigenous political life could be nurtured in South Vietnam, a political life that is ultimately the only bulwark—if any bulwark remains—against indefinite U.S...
...But choices there were, choices involving social imagination and political grasp...
...And it is also to make incomprehensible the fact that even the most ultra-radicals do in fact make demands upon—that is, proposals for—U.S...
...British colonialism in fantasies of uplift...
...And secondly, the Diemists had nothing to offer the peasants, as by contrast the Communist-led Viet Minh did...
...They alone saw the need to speak to the quiescent mass of the people and to stir them with slogans blending national and social goals...
...Land reform, after all, does not mean the socio-economic liquidation of a ruling class...
...In Vietnam itself U.S...
...They have a history of repeated struggle against French imperialism, from the late 19th century until the Second World War, and a far longer history of resistance against Chinese imperialism...
...and now, as hostages of history, we pay for it...
...The nature of French imperialism...
...There were, to be sure, obvious and enormous differences in their situations: the Indians were not faced with a Communist competitor commanding a network of underground agents and enjoying popular support...
...b) Retrospective wisdom is valuable, if only because it may possibly pre *An editor of DtssENT, scrutinizing an earlier version of this essay, raised the question: "But you yourself said it was necessary to suppress the para-military forces of the Cao Dai and Hoa Hoa sects...
...It is a depressing experience, which bears out once more de Tocqueville's remark that "a true but complicated idea has always less chance of succeeding than one which is false but simple...
...The French circumscribe Vietnamese nationalism into the desperate isolation of cafe and exile, thereby preventing it from taking on the breadth and maturity of Indian nationalism...
...At its most serious, before it degenerated into a mere family oligarchy and racket, Diemism signified an utterly doomed effort to fulfill a 19th-century vision of nationalism in a context where the social problems of the 20th century had burst into full bloom...
...That they will gain the support of a majority of Vietnamese may be doubted, and has, in any case, never been demonstrated through a free election...
...At this point, then, the United States extended support to Diem because it seemed that he, unstained by collaborationism, spoke for those Vietnamese nationalists who wanted an independent country in the South, a country that would be tied neither to the Communists in Hanoi nor to the French and their agents...
...I very much doubt that when U.S...
...They have nothing to offer against these, except the martyred cry of their nation, and soon enough the Communists take over even this, for at the very least the Communists understand that for the national goal to be reached it must contain more than mere nationalism...
...For by 1956 Ho Chi Minh, harrassed by a serious food problem and deeply in trouble with a recalcitrant peasantry, was apparently not at all eager for a genuine vote...
...It meant that his idea of the nation could be imposed only by suppressing the social issues—that is, by establishing an authoritarian regime...
...but they did exist...
...He established a national administration...
...It was clear not only that the exodus constituted a serious popular indictment of the northern [Communist] regime, but that it would have been multiplied several-fold had the refugees been permitted to leave freely...
...What matters, within the boundaries of inherently unsatisfactory relationships, is the political content, character, limitation, and decorum of the influence...
...He could thus satisfy his national ambitions only if he simultaneously undertook a social program—only, that is, if he acted against certain immediate economic interests of the landowning class from which many of his supporters came...
...acquiesced in the policy of the generals...
...intervention in Vietnam a "hard" military character, in which lip service was paid to the need for social reform but the local requirements of Vietnamese society were subordinated to the big-power confrontation...
...Concerning such questions we of the democratic Left have our ready answers—answers, as our critics point out, not always to be distinguished from our fervent hopes...
...The political situation had deteriorated disastrously, and, as usual, the United States tried to undo political failure with military might—of which the consequences would be a magnification of the failure and a new phase in the shedding of blood...
...What I wish to stress here is that there was nothing historically ordained in this failure, either on the part of the South Vietnamese or the United States...
...Fantasies can become or shape realities...
...the political-social weaknesses of traditional Vietnamese nationalism...
...For clearly there are situations in which anti-democratic pressures from both Right and Left are so enormous, that the frail shoots of freedom cannot flourish or survive...
...1956-66 The aspect of the Vietnam conflict that is least thoroughly discussed in the studies thus far written is the role of the United States...
...To all of this, one qualification needs to be added...
...representatives had imposed upon themselves, they were not finally going to exert the kinds of pressures that might discommode their clients in Saigon...
...error multiplies...
...Slender as that possibility may seem—and both the realpolitik Right and authoritarian Left gloat in minimizing the possibility— it is the political and moral obligation of radical democrats to keep stressing that the possibility was there...
...I am not saying that the results have been satisfactory, or that there do not remain large numbers of landless peasants in India...
...If it did not act to limit and confine certain class interests with which it was linked, then both the class and the national leadership would lose everything...
Vol. 13 • November 1966 • No. 6
