The Morning After
Stein, Jeff
THE MORNING AFTER by Jeff Stein Liberals have fallen out of love with the revolutionaries Radicals of the sixties used to chuckle over the irony of the most persistent criticism of the...
...Were Pol Pot and his cronies the Marxist-Leninists they proclaimed themselves to be, or did they just cynically employ communist buzzwords to dazzle their recruits while exploiting the darker impulses of Cambodian society...
...She was sleeping and obviously pregnant, near term...
...Shaplen's Indochina was laced with joss sticks and bougainvillaea and peopled with a cast of stone-faced Buddhist monks, bitter CIA agents, upbeat American colonels, shadowy Viet-Cong, and greedy Saigon politicians...
...The people have sentenced you to death and I have been given the job of executing you...
...Harper & Row, $16.95...
...bartender, bureaucrat vs...
...If I spare you, I will be killed myself" She didn't say a word...
...A pool of gasoline Few have been harmed so thoroughly by the Indochina wars as the unlucky Cambodians...
...Returning for a five-week visit in 1984, he discovered a Vietnam just emerging from a deep ideological struggle...
...Simon & Schuster, $19.95...
...petitioner, light skin vs...
...She slumped down without a moan...
...This, along with Becker's recounting of Phnom Penh's collapse and the heart-rending confessions of bewildered Cambodian peasants as they faced beheadings at the hands of "the organization," provides gruesome reading about a subject which has too long been overshadowed by the liberal obsession with the secret U.S...
...Becker says that because Stalin and Mao Tse-tung murdered people in the name of the party, "the communist tradition suited" the systematic murders of the Khmer Rouge, which is a less than satisfying explanation...
...Not surprisingly, the overhaul meant introducing profit incentives to rice growers, allowing capitalists to exist alongside the "socialist" economy, devaluing the currency along realistic rates, and establishing a system of "pay according to work ." Just in case the ideologues hadn't gotten the message, Le Duan, a top Vietnamese official, declared in a major speech that a worker's main motive should be "personal interest...
...Vietnamese, proving resilient once more, simply rethought their Marxist economic ways...
...Air Force was coming back to bomb them...
...Afterwards, "like so many other Americans," he writes, "I wanted to forget—or try to forget—what had happened in Vietnam ." And like so many of us, he couldn't...
...With the self-assurance that is the due of an observer who first arrived in Saigon in 1946, he succeeds brilliantly in answering it...
...All this is not made easier by our many shortages and scarcities, but it's all part of the transition to socialism" Disenchantment with socialism is also .the focus of Portrait of the Enemy...
...Both VC and NVA troops alike were literally expected to anonymously "water the south with their blood ." And for decades they did...
...There seems to be a clear revisionist theory emerging here, in which America is no longer the primary source of trouble in Indochina...
...As early as 1970, beneath its placid Buddhist veneer, Cambodian society was boiling with class and cultural resentment: city vs...
...with our bombing, we ignited all the cultural, social, and ideological ingredients later at work in the Cambodian killing fields...
...Over cocktails and dinner on the roof of the old Majestic Hotel in Saigon ("Ho-vilIe" to foreign visitors), Nguyen Ngoc Dung, a middle-aged former diplomat assigned to implement Hanoi's political program in the south, tells Shaplen that she tries to inculcate "socialism" through everyday tasks, such as getting all the neighborhood organizations in the city "to eliminate their own slums, to build new houses where they could, to put in new drainage pipes ." "We learned from experience," Dung went on, "when the [hardliner's] reforms failed several years ago, that we can't be too rigid or dogmatic...
...In Cambodia, teenage revolutionaries persuaded apprehensive city-dwellers to leave Phnom Penh by saying that the U.S...
...THE MORNING AFTER by Jeff Stein Liberals have fallen out of love with the revolutionaries Radicals of the sixties used to chuckle over the irony of the most persistent criticism of the Vietnam war being squeezed between ads for Mercedes cars and Boehm chinaware in the pages of the chic New Yorker...
...I had orders to kill her...
...Random House, $17.95...
...But then the party that had forged Vietnamese peasants into the world's most disciplined army, that during wartime had orchestrated international public opinion like a symphony, suddenly lacked the sophistication to manage a nation at peace...
...Then, behind closed borders, they virtually abolished the 20th century, putting the entire nation to work by hand on massive agricultural projects, and systematically murdering those suspected of having worked with foreigners...
...The irony is that Vietnam, according to Shaplen's account, seems to have veered from complete economic disaster only by taking steps toward greater individual liberties and small-scale capitalism, very much like the Chinese, whom they despise for their ideological deviation and cooperation with the West...
...Elizabeth Becker...
...Doan Van Toai (who after the war briefly served in the communist government before being jailed and later escaping) have managed to track down former Viet-Cong and assemble a riveting collection of oral histories...
...The official unemployment rate is 20 percent, but unlike in a comparably weak economy in the West such as, say, Jamaica's, people are afraid to complain about it...
...In the first draft of a constitution that took a page out of Mein Kampf, the U.S.supported dictator, Lon Nol, paid homage to his own Cambodian Aryans: the so-called "KhmerMon," who were allegedly descended from a mythical "Angkorian era" of Asian political hegemony...
...might have forced a stalemate in the war with even heavier bombing...
...But Shaplen discovers that the "most significant postwar development in Vietnam is the economic turnaround that began in 1979-80 ." The...
...Nor could Elizabeth Becker, who covered the war in Cambodia as a correspondent for several news organizations, including The Washington Post...
...Before, you were my friend...
...By getting people to work together in the right way, we can help them overcome their hostilities, We're still finding things out about economic efficiency—what works and what doesn't— through trial and error...
...I should have waited for her delivery...
...That was in April, 1970...
...In interviews with top Hanoi officials, Saigon bureaucrats, and peasant farmers, Shaplen elicits "Vietnam's bold-if-belated acceptance of its failures to date and of the need to overhaul the foundations of its economy...
...it is more the fault of the Vietnamese than anyone else that their victory has not been savored and that they are still struggling to achieve peace, let alone prosperity...
...It was always puzzling to me why so many VC began defecting in 1968-69, when from our perspective they seemed so close to winning...
...Being perceived as being hostile to "the organization," or having been born to parents who were not peasants, was cause for death...
...We took her over to the road and stabbed her in the chest...
...She replied in quite a normal voice, "Yes, I realize I will die...
...The fear these attacks caused was terrible...
...Robert Shaplen...
...The war that preceded the revolution was also the handiwork of Cambodian politics .. . ." Similarly, about post-war Vietnam, Robert Shaplen concludes that *When the War Was Over: The Voices of Cambodia's Revolution and Its People...
...One estimate indicated that communist officials executed 65,000 people for "political crimes" between 1975-1983, and the regime undoubtedly still maintains a vast prison system for recalcitrants...
...They hung on to win...
...Once we got her out into the open I told her, "You have harmed the Liberation Movement a lot...
...Shaplen's The Lost Revolution (1965) is a gloomy account of U.S...
...before going to Southeast Asia as an Army Intelligence agent handler, I had been sent to study Vietnamese in 1967...
...the account of one VC guerrilla lends evidence to the revisionist view that the U.S...
...dark...
...Ultimately, the Cambodians were victims of their own leaders, traditions and history," she writes...
...I discovered Shaplen's Vietnam on the shelves of the base library in Ft...
...Not even death notices were sent...
...Somehow, David Chanoff and...
...Were they secret fascists born of a particular mutation of Cambodian society, as she sometimes suggests, or did they merely arise in the tradition of Asian millenarian cults...
...It is a relief, though, that Shaplen declines to jam Vietnam's lack of civil liberties down our throats...
...Coupled with Chinese hostility and bad luck, including bad weather," such miscalculations had driven a million desperate Vietnamese into boats...
...You would see them come out of their bunkers shaking so badly it looked as if they had gone crazy...
...Few experts believed the early reports of a bloodbath...
...Such judgments amount to a distinct reversal in the portrayal of Southeast Asian revolutionaries by the American Left...
...Bitter Victory...
...Shaplen evocatively transmits the general sense of fear and uncertainty...
...he expects his readers to understand that Ho Chi Minh City is not Washington, D.C...
...This was Marxism-Leninism at work, "the apex of human thought," as chief North Vietnamese theoretician Truong Chinh had put it...
...Becker leads the reader to wonder if the Khmer Rouge hadn't come along, maybe the Lon Nol regime, which overthrew Prince Norodom Sihanouk, would have taken a crack at mass murder...
...landlord, taxi driver vs...
...But the question of whether the violence was intrinsically Cambodian or communist remains important, and unanswered...
...country, peasant vs...
...Jeff Stein is a Washington publisher and editor...
...Not all communist dictators launch holocausts...
...I regret that I killed her while she was pregnant...
...Left to their own devices, the communists had wrought upon themselves what no amount of American money, troops, airpower, artillery, or diplomacy could: mass domestic discord and international isolation...
...Go ahead with your mission ." No begging for mercy...
...David Chanoff, Doan Van Taoi...
...Along with Portrait of the Enemy,* a compelling volume mostly of interviews with former Viet-Cong fighters and political officials, these books provide damaging new information on the Indochinese communists— information that, in the case of Becker and Shaplen, comes from authors with impeccable liberal credentials...
...had so badly botched the war and destroyed Vietnam to boot...
...On the day North Vietnamese tanks paraded into Saigon, Shaplen writes 20 years later in Bitter Victory,* he felt "remorse and shame" because the U.S...
...One that stands out is the account of a VC assassin sent to execute a woman who had been arrested by the government and then had betrayed her comrades to interrogators...
...The mass executions carried out by the victorious Khmer Rouge in the "killing fields" of Cambodia struck most people as an anomaly...
...There, long before The New York Times or The Washington Post turned their editorial backs on Lyndon Johnson, the regular dispatches of Robert Shaplen from Indochina hinted at his deep skepticism about American policy in Vietnam...
...In the first years following the end of the war, hardliners in Hanoi had ruined the southern economy with collectivization and had led the army into a quagmire in Cambodia...
...So we woke her up...
...Cambodia's had seemed such a peaceful and, more importantly, homogenous culture...
...It was Vietnam as "Dallas," a war fought, watched, and written about in a state of suspended disbelief...
...Elizabeth Becker demonstrates, however, that Cambodia was highly susceptible to a home-grown strain of fascism that led to the mass de-urbanization and genocide of 1975-78...
...Instead, he takes us inside the revolution and lets the Vietnamese explain it themselves...
...But now you are my enemy...
...We stabbed her in the chest" As a serious journalist, Robert Shaplen brings extraordinary gifts to bear on the question of why, after having fought for 40 years, the Vietnamese can't seem to capitalize on their victory over the U.S...
...With the onset of hostilities from Peking, the party further alienated the most skilled merchants and managers among its own Chinese population and plunged the country into mass paranoia—and more war...
...But, of course, they hadn't...
...Becker does succeed in demonstrating that Cambodia was a pool of gasoline waiting for the torch...
...Where Becker falls short is in her ambitious attempt to analyze Khmer Rouge ideology in an intellectual framework...
...The Vietnamese might well take the latter step themselves...
...Economic egalitarianism, he sniffed, "was an erroneous tendency alien to Marxism" After one million combat fatalities against the Americans, the Vietnamese also had scores to settle...
...Bliss, Texas, where, There is a revisionist theory emerging here, in which America is no longer the primary source of trouble in Indochina...
...People pissed and shat in their pants...
...bombing of Cambodia, the importance of which in the rise of the Khmer Rouge Becker can't seem finally to determine...
...But I couldn't afford any indecisiveness...
...For this fate, Becker argues, the Cambodians have no one to blame but themselves...
...Portrait of the Enemy...
...By the accounts in Portrait of the Enemy, relatives in North Vietnam rarely, if ever, got a single letter from their loved ones at the front...
...Month after month, like dependable characters in some Asian soap opera, they, and we, sank deeper and deeper into a plot of inescapable doom...
...The Khmer Rouge revolution was conceived and administered entirely by Cambodians...
...She knew that it was a consequence of what she had done against the Front...
...Knife in hand, he and another assassin slipped into her house one night disguised as government soldiers...
...Like Shaplen's Bitter Victory, Becker's book* is a return to the scene of the crime where a highly talented and serious reporter attempts to understand what went wrong...
...prospects that suggested America had frittered away a natural reservoir of good will among South Vietnamese and blundered destructively into an unwinnable war...
...Then I asked her if she knew she deserved her death...
...One of the things that demoralized a lot of guerrillas were the B-52 attacks...
Vol. 18 • December 1986 • No. 11
