THE COLONIAL HERITAGE IN VIETNAM

...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...

...This failure to take proper political action led, in turn, to the military defeat of the French at the hands of the Viet Minh...

...This is why Ho Chi Minh became Vietnam's great national hero...

...The Viet Minh government became the symbol of national resistance to colonialism...

...Most nationalists supported the armed struggle against the French led by the Viet Minh...

...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...

...They did not speak of Communism...

...the aims of the revolution were declared to be national liberation and moderate social reforms...

...Movements organized by moderate middle-class nationalists were as brutally suppressed as was the Communist party...

...Many of these colonial conditions still persist under the tutelage of the United States...

...WHY THE GOVERNMENT established in the South in 1954 failed to break the power of the Communists is another story...

...Whoever was awakened to political consciousness sooner or lated aimed at overthrowing not only the colonial regime but also the social order it had created...

...The social basis of Communist strength was the rural masses constituting 85 percent of the population...

...ANOTHER CAUSE of Communist strength was the condition of existence which the colonial regime had created for the country's educated elite...

...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...

...Colonial Vietnam never developed a middle class in the Western sense, •a class of property-owning natives opposed to radical social movements...

...they knew that their compromise with Ho Chi Minh would end in armed conflict, but they did not want the anti-Communist groups as their opponents in the government of Vietnam...

...No one expressed this necessity more consistently than the Communists, who constantly attracted the most determined elements of all the nationalist groups...

...it did not oppose organized Communism by creating democratic mass movements, but decided to fight it with police and army...

...it treated its democratic opponents as they had been treated by the colonial regime, denouncing THE COLONIAL HERITAGE IN VIETNAM 251 them as Communists and throwing them into jail...

...Colonial Vietnam had only a small industrial labor force...

...However, what reminds the Vietnamese 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...

...No other group enjoyed any of these advantages...

...The absence of a solidly conservative peasantry, of a property-owning 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...

...This is a failure not only of Vietnamese anti-Communism but also of the United States...

...During the war the French had denounced the entire resistance movement as Communist...

...No trade unions were allowed...

...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...

...Who in the Western world showed an interest in the national aspirations of the Vietnamese people, let alone supported them...

...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...

...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...

...France, the only democratic country that knew about these potentially democratic movements, was engaged in destroying them...

...They preferred to present the war against the Vietnamese national revolution as a war against Communism...

...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...

...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...

...A small number of intellectuals were allowed to enter the 249 colonial administration, but under conditions materially unsatisfactory and morally degrading...

...For reasons also peculiar to Vietnam, this was done only by the Communists...

...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...

...The prestige of the Hanoi government was immense...

...They also had support from the Soviet Union...

...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...

...Vietnam was the only country where a Communist-led 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...

...There was virtually no Vietnamese capitalism, no Vietnamese bourgeoisie...

...French colonial policy, by provoking the Indochina War, again contributed to the popularity of Vietnamese Communism...

...Any movement that promised these people an end to their inhuman conditions of existence was bound to gain their support...

...the masses were not ripe for political action, 250 JOSEPH BUTTINGER and had no significant part to play in the national liberation of Vietnam...

...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...

...From this follows a still unrecognized and therefore startling truth: The loss of Vietnam to Communism occurred in 1945...

...In Vietnam, education had always been not only the primary source of prestige but also a road to power...

...By creating, particularly in South Vietnam, a system of feudal landholdings, the colonial regime had gradually destroyed the traditional class of land-owning peasants...

...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...

...Only the Communists trained cadres for organizing the masses...

...We too, like the French, act as if military force alone could defeat Communism...

...Colonialism transformed the rural masses into agricultural laborers, landless peasants working as tenants for landlords, and poor peasants without sufficient land...

...They had schools to train people engaged in secret political activities...

...Only procolonial attitudes could be freely expressed...

...Nationalist intellectuals who lacked Communist political training clung to the century-old view of Vietnam's elite, which was that public affairs were matters reserved to the educated...

...But the colonial regime went even further in its promotion of Communism...

...It would of course be absurd to impute colonial motives to American intervention in Vietnam...

...This was true even for an authoritarian conservative like Ngo Dinh Diem...

...All the fighting that has been going on there for the last 20 years has aimed at reversing this historical fact...

...Communist strength is the result of historical conditions-economic, social, and political conditions peculiar to Vietnam and created by the colonial regime...

...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...

...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...

...Of the price at which rice was sold by the Saigon exporters, the peasant's share was 12 percent...

...Our force is probably sufficient to prevent the Communists from winning this war...

...All were ruthlessly exploited by the landlords, the moneylenders, and the taxation policy of the colonial regime...

...Furthermore, the Communists were the only ones who knew that a successful revolution against the colonial regime required organization of the masses...

...Ninety percent of the prominent Viet Minh leaders came from this class of people...

...There is no evidence at all for an innate disposition of the Vietnamese people to favor Communist ideas...

...It did not create a land-owning peasantry immune to Communist propaganda...

...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...

...When the antiCommunist 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...

...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...

...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...

...Under the colonial regime, the elite of the nation was deprived of both prestige and power...

...252 JOSEPH BUTTINGER...

...The people who most consistently expressed this national sentiment were of course the Communists...

...These schools were conducted abroad, where the Communists permanently kept a reserve of cadres...

...Others worked as teachers, journalists, lawyers, and doctors, but many remained unemployed, and all were deeply frustrated because the colonial regime also deprived them of any kind of political voice...

...The French were of course not "pro-Communist...

...when it triumphed, the Vietnamese naturally gave the Communists most of the credit...

...Since such a class was practically nonexistent, all nationalist movements tended to embrace socialistic ideas...

...Instead, the French colonialists set up a corrupt puppet regime under the former emperor Bao Dai, discrediting the cause of anti-Communist nationalism, and enhancing once more the prestige of the Hanoi regime...

...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...

...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...

...We treat the National Front for the Liberation of the South as the French treated the Viet Minh—as a solid Communist bloc, and, like the French, we refuse to negotiate with the people whom we are fighting...

...Land rents robbed the tenant of up to 50 percent of his crop...

...The Communists alone possessed certain advantages essential for the survival of illegal organizations...

...We too use napalm, condone torture, kill innocent civilians by bombing and burning villages...

...They were not land-owning peasants interested in maintaining -their status and therefore politically conservative...

...Basically, it came about because in too many social and political areas the Diem regime did not liquidate the colonial heritage...

...They were solidly in power when the anti-Communist leaders arrived a few weeks later from their exile in China, together with the unwelcome [nationalist] Chinese armies of occupation...

...The modern sectors of the economy, as far as they existed, were in French and Chinese hands...

...Nationalist movements could operate only clandestinely, in an atmosphere essentially hostile to the development of democratic ideas...

...MOST EFFECTIVE in directly promoting Communist strength were the political conditions French colonialism had created for all existing nationalist movements...

...No opportunities existed for them in business, commerce, or industry, activities virtually closed to the Vietnamese...