A FIRST BOOK ON VIET NAM

...Of these I find the first chapter and the part of the second chapter dealing with Chinese backgrounds singularly unsatisfying...

...What, one might ask, were they civilizing...

...This is Buttinger's reading of Vietnamese history, which is exceedingly similar to the policy followed by the Konbaung Dynastry in Burma at the beginning of the 19th century...

...The publisher, Frederick A. Praeger, is to be congratulated on producing an exceedingly attractive and wellprinted book, complete with index, maps, illustrations and 50 pages of bibliography, including a few biographical notes on authorities—all for $6.001 Buttinger has supplied 122 pages of notes in relatively small print to accompany the six chapters of text (excluding his Foreword and "Chronology and Summary for Viet Nam since 1900...

...That is why, for example, the reader will find so much purely dynastic history as the main and narrow content for Viet Nam even during her post-Chinese independent period.—But this is another story which in no way diminishes the superb value of The Smaller Dragon...

...They failed...

...AFTER THE FRENCH were virtually driven from India by the English in the 18th century wars, they renewed their interest in the South East Asian mainland, at first uncertainly between Siam and Viet Nam...

...He therefore resolved "to communicate to others what had been revealed to him...

...They were followed by the English, the Dutch and the French...

...The Vietnamese first met the Europeans when the Portuguese arrived on their shores in 1535...

...For the Vietnamese mandarinate—the ruling bureaucracy—" quickly found out that the Christian and the Confucianist views of the relationship between the individual and the state were irreconcilable, and that a number of Christian doctrines, with their effect on individual behavior beyond the private sphere, were bound to destroy the moral foundation of a Confucianist society...

...Two weeks after his arrival in Saigon he changed his views...

...was infinitely higher than her expenses during the forty years it had taken her to conquer and to pacify Viet Nam...

...The Portuguese were already finished as an Asian power...

...From 1817 on French trading vessels reappeared in Viet Nam...

...and the cost to France...

...Between 1859 and I867 France established a colony in the South of Viet Nam called Cochinchina, converted Cambodia into a protectorate and by 1883 had succeeded in establishing by conquest her rule over the rest of Viet Nam, the north called Tongking and the center called Annam...

...As in Albert Camus' story of "The Renegade," the will to convert and the will to power were frequently embodied in the same person...

...The sources were many, varied, predominantly French and, otherwise, written mainly from the French point of view...

...I 190 wish Buttinger had omitted them entirely or shortened them considerably...

...Joseph Buttinger, exEuropean, author of In the Twilight of Socialism, wrote The Smaller Dragon, A Political History of Vietnam, in part because he had experienced "something of the quality of a conversion" during his first brief visit to Viet Nam from October through December, 1954...

...They came as traders, conquerors and missionaries...

...This he has done...

...He had felt the "unexpected emotional impact that so many Westerners feel when they first come in contact with the Vietnamese people," an unforgettable impact of "strength, charm and intelligence...

...I DO NOT PROPOSE to review this book in terms of the usual "learned journal" critical apparatus, for I share at least one of Buttinger's motives in writing it: that more Americans become more intimately aware of the newly independent world of South and South East Asia, including Viet Nam...

...Buttinger is acutely conscious of this dilemma...

...The question is as rhetorical as the rationalizations of the colonial powers were insulting to human dignity...

...In 1956 he revisited South East Asia in preparation for a Rand Corporation study on Marxism in that area...

...In these he tells about the peopling of the peninsula, the years of Chinese suzerainty and rule and the eventual independence of the Vietnamese before the arrival of the Europeans...

...In the numerous wars among the contending European powers, Portugal and France vied more energetically for control of Viet Nam...

...wasted four billion dollars (on the French)—a sum with which it would now be able to transform South Viet Nam into an Asian economic paradise within less than ten years...

...Admittedly the pre- or early history is shrouded in difficulty which reexamination of much of the 19th and early 20th century scholarship and subsequent research will clarify...

...Since the area from the Pamirs to the Pacific has been under British, Dutch, French (and earlier, Portuguese and Spanish) control from the 16th century to World War II we, in the United States, have been vastly ignorant of its peoples, cultures and history...

...At first, the Napoleonic Wars at the beginning of the 19th century kept the area relatively free from European penetration...

...Cultures already rich in the arts, religion, philosophy when the colonnial powers were the "savages" described in Caesar's "Gallic Wars...

...She lost all of Indochina [as she will Algeria—FNT], and only a political miracle prevented the Communists from gaining all after the signing of the Geneva Agreement in July 1954...

...These rulers hoped to escape the imperialist advance by limiting if not avoiding the trading and missionary patterns of penetration...

...I am convinced that The Smaller Dragon, A Political History of Vietnam, may not have the immortality assigned to dragons in Vietnamese mythology but it will have a deservedly long and useful life...

...In the short few years since 1954 he has had to master a 188 prodigious literature, make it his own and feel secure enough to use it expertly from his own conceptual approach...

...Since then South East Asian area studies have been launched, on the graduate level, at only six universities, though gradually various scholars and institutions have begun to include "non-Western" civilizations and Asian courses in their curricula...

...That we have made postwar blunders in the area arises as much from our lack of knowledge as it does from another "American Dilemma": to be or not to be genuinely anti-colonialist...

...But Viet Nam was less fortunate...

...The second three of his six chapters, by far the better group, are vividly constructed to give the background of this colonial war...

...When the traders left because of lack of profits, their respective missionaries remained...

...They are a mixture of economic geography (justifiable), migrations (unclear), anthropology (confusing linguistic, tribal variations and the names given or taken by groups with ethnic and racial concepts...

...I suggest that the reader skip lightly over these pages and otherwise plunge into the text at the point of recorded history...

...He is presently holding a Carnegie Research Fellowship at the Council of Foreign Relations...

...One final word about the book itself...

...191...

...In 1847 France attacked the Vietnamese key city of Tourane...

...He had first planned to write a political interpretation of the 20th century Vietnamese struggle for independence and the implications of that partial victory—the 17th Parallel accounts for this—in the continuing contest between the Communist and the Free Worlds...

...Siam in the 19th century managed successfully to maintain its position as a buffer state between the English in India and Burma on the West and the French interests in Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia on the East...

...Or, to put it another way: to decide when and how we can disregard the interests of our European allies in order to support the nationalist aspirations of non-Communist Asia (and Africa...

...Even the early recorded history of the area presents many problems since the evidence comes from annals, chronicles, archeology and epigraphy, etc., which leave much to be filled in...

...The hero-emperor Gia Long, who succeeded in unifying all of Viet Nam, was the beneficiary of this European respite...

...And to do this one must begin to dig into history...

...BUTTINGER'S FIRST three chapters attempt some answers for the pre-colonial history of Viet Nam...

...The results were also similar, and unlike the pattern of Siam...

...Independent Viet Nam disappeared just two years before independent Burma, in the third and last Anglo-Burmese War, finally succumbed...

...Europe-centered historical writing is but one expected outcome of European dominance in Asia since the age of exploration and exploitation...

...He utilized the services of French missionaries but he formulated "a policy of strict non-involvement with any of the Western powers" and bequeathed it to his more adamantly "isolationist" successors...

...However much they contributed to the indigenous population— for example it was the Jesuits in Viet Nam who transformed the Vietnamese-Chinese ideographical writing into a Latin alphabet which still serves the country—"this merging of religious and mercantile interests must be regarded as a memorable phenom189 enon in the history of Western colonial expansion...

...For it is the logical starting point of his history: "Because," he writes, "the struggle for Indochina had been politically hopeless from the beginning (1946), under no circumstances could the war have ended well for France...

...The notes are as important and as interesting as the text itself...

...Before World War II, and mostly written in the 1930s, there were scarcely more than fifteen scholarly titles produced in the United States on South East Asia...

...Memorable and tragic in its consequences...

...the U.S...

...The English called their rule "the white man's burden," the French "la mission civilisatrice...

...Both countries lost their independence and set about immediately thereafter to regain it—to throw out all forms of alien, white man's domination...

...As Is SO OFTEN the case, Buttinger discovered that to do what he intended he had to have some knowledge of and insight into Vietnamese history and culture...

...Buttinger readily admits that he is not a professional historian, though even the latter would find this book of value...

...To remedy this he produced The Smaller Dragon, "so far the only book in the English language that can be called a history of Vietnam...

...He had gone to that country after the Geneva Agreement because he "wanted to see Saigon before it became a Communist city," that is before it would be lost to the Communist Viet Minh, an event he expected "in less than two years...

...Viet Nam was devastated "by the most frightful of all colonial wars...

...Trager was formerly Point Four Director in Burma, 1951-53, about which country he has edited and published a number of studies, including the three volume Burma, Human Relations Area Files, New Haven...

...It appears that this will be his promised second book on Viet Nam which he briefly outlines between pages 423 and 469 of this study...