Fire in the Lake (35 page)

The above remarks came from a young man the NLF had refused to promote. Instead of assuming that his rivals had gained their position by influence and intrigue, he felt, as did most of his fellow soldiers, that he had an equal opportunity to compete. Unlike the ARVN soldiers, the Liberation Army’s rank-and-file members usually trusted their commanders. In the
khiem thao
sessions they had a chance to criticize their superiors and to find out for themselves that the promotion system was in no way arbitrary.

Khiem thao
helped to prevent the Front organization from splitting apart into a network of self-protective cliques. Also — and by extension — it opened the gates to the villages and allowed the cadres to have some communication with the peasants, who since the beginning of time had resisted officialdom with all their vast inert strength. “In administering the rural area,” wrote the cadre from XB village, the Party seeks to settle contradictions between people, teach the people Party policy, urge the people to have spite for the Americans and Diem and seek to unite all groups and social classes in the village. If a Party member or cadre makes a mistake he will be freely subjected to the criticism of the people. When the people can boldly criticize Party members they will then be ready to forgive them.
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With some experience in
khiem thao,
the cadres were better prepared to go to the people without fear of “loss of face,” without the inner need to keep their distance from the people and turn the mask of authority towards them.

By accepting criticism from the people, they could show them that a commitment to the NLF did not imply an unconditional surrender to authority. The Front cadres, they suggested, were not trying to be the “fathers of the people”; on the contrary, they were confirming the people in their own rights and powers.

The leaders of the NLF, and of the Viet Minh before them, had the ability, unique among Vietnamese politicians, to make alliances with other political groups and to make compromises in negotiation. This capacity, too, may have owed to
khiem thao
. Certainly it came from an assessment of their place in society similar to that
khiem thao
awoke in the individual. The NLF leaders hoped to become the sole government of the people, but they, unlike the Ngos or the sect leaders, knew that they
were not
— at least not for the moment. They believed the victory of the revolution to be inevitable. But they also knew that making compromises and temporarily sharing their claim to power with other real powers might be sometimes necessary, sometimes advantageous. In the period 1954–1960 they did not destroy themselves, as did the sects — and later the Diem regime itself — through inflexibility and futile military resistance. They did not have to take Ngo Dinh Diem’s passive, all-or-nothing attitude, and so they had the freedom to be truly Machiavellian, taking their advantages where they saw them and giving in on issues that they could not win immediately by direct confrontation. Here, within an attitude, a psychological set, lay clues to those mysteries known as the NLF’s “superior organization” and “superior leadership.”

For a Westerner it is tempting to equate
khiem thao
with the new American practice of encounter group therapy and sensitivity training. A parallel between the two exists, but it is not a direct one: the similarity lies buried beneath an acute difference in psychological perspective. In theory at least, the goal of the American encounter group is to free the individual, to permit him to understand himself and express his personality as fully as possible. The goal of
khiem thao
— and of the NLF’s political training in general — was, on the other hand, to free the individual from old social constraints only to impose new ones. By its own admission the PRP was interested in far-reaching control over the individual. In a study entitled “How Should Party Members Promote Revolutionary Virtue?” the Party outlined the requirements for its members:

The comrades we want are revolutionaries who are determined, hardened, who are well-forged, who have discarded individualism.… They have a steady, firm, impartial spirit, absolutely loyal to the Party. They will work either morning or evening, are tested in battle, in daily work. They always think in terms of controlling their thoughts, their attitudes, their expressions in a sincere way. They always ask the question: are we doing this right, are we thinking correctly? Is this useful or harmful for the revolution? When we act and think that way, are we serving the interests of the revolution or individual interests?… If we see clearly, see there are still shortcomings, such as individualistic thoughts, we must try to overcome them. We must bravely carry on self-criticism, point out where we are wrong, where we are right in our work and in our thought.
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Rather than opening the cadres to themselves, the Party was, on the contrary, demanding that they repress their inmost thoughts and feelings and conform to the narrow, exacting standards of the group — or rather, of the Party cadres who controlled the group. If a cadre showed no enthusiasm, if he deviated from the Party line or put his own interests ahead of those of the Party, he would be criticized and finally expelled if he did not correct himself. Beyond the freedom of their cadres to criticize each other, the Party seemed to want authoritarian order and unanimity.
Khiem thao
and the Front’s political education in general was what Westerners called “thought control” or “brainwashing.”

Of all the aspects of the Vietnamese revolution, it was this domination of the individual by the state which Americans — even those most opposed to their government’s policy in Vietnam — found most difficult to come to terms with. On their trips to Hanoi in 1968 the writers Mary McCarthy and Susan Sontag discovered to their dismay that the North Vietnamese they met seemed to speak entirely in Communist jargon. “Everything is on one level here,” complained Miss Sontag to her journal. “All the words belong to the same vocabulary: struggle, bombings, friend, aggressor, imperialist, patriot.… I can’t help experiencing them as elements of an
official
language.”
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Had Miss Sontag been any less sympathetic to the North Vietnamese, she might have simply concluded that they were “brainwashed victims of Communist tyranny” — though they did not seem to be, for there was not a heavy atmosphere of Stalinism about them. On the contrary, they seemed to take a lucid, almost childlike pride in their government. In Eastern Europe many intellectuals had made it plain to Miss McCarthy that the official language was an oppressive weight upon their normal speech, but the North Vietnamese seemed to possess no other kind of rhetoric. Neither of the writers could dispute the truth of their hosts’ words (the Americans were indeed, they felt, “imperialists” in Vietnam), but they could not help feeling that the North Vietnamese were in some way children, or, as they were not children, people who lacked a dimension of sensibility. Without any rebelliousness, indeed with a kind of joy in their achievement, the North Vietnamese seemed to have suppressed their private lives, their very personalities, in order to act out the cardboard role of “patriotic citizens.”

Miss McCarthy and Miss Sontag saw in North Vietnam what no American official had ever prepared them for: the very foreignness of the Vietnamese. The familiarity of the Communist language was in many ways a deception, for the Vietnamese were not like the Russians or the East Europeans. As Miss Sontag rightly concluded, the Communist ideology was not responsible for the social discipline of the Vietnamese. Rather, the impetus to such discipline rose out of traditional Vietnamese society.

Traditionally, the Vietnamese notion of society was not that of an aggregate, a collection of people, but that of a complete organism. The whole of society was much greater than the sum of its parts because it reflected and duplicated the overall design of the universe. Within his society the individual had no separate existence. His sense of personal identity came from his sense of participation in the society and in the universe. The moral problem for the individual was to discover not what he himself thought or wanted, but what the society required of him. The goal of speech was less to express the individuality of the ego than to arrive at a harmonious relationship with others and with the laws of the universe. “Truth” was not a conquest of reality, but an attempt to harmonize with it — an ethical as well as a scientific goal.

The French invasion effectively destroyed the Confucian design for society and the universe. It did not, however, change the impulse to a social and ideological coherency. For the Vietnamese “freedom” in the Western sense meant the disjunction of the ego from the superego. A disintegration of the personality, it led only to social chaos and the exploitation of the weak by the strong. As one PRP directive explained:

A Party member must forge for himself a spirit of heart and soul serving the people, serving the Party. When the Party [member] joins in work, he must bring all of his mind and thoughts, all of his efforts to try to work as well as possible. He must try to struggle at first to overcome individual difficulties. Generally speaking, people affected with individualism cannot serve the revolution well when they perform a given task if they are thinking more of themselves, thinking about social position, thinking about reputation, thinking about personal gain. The sickness of individualism is the original source of the sickness of negativism, dissatisfaction, corruption.… Bad, old, degenerate habits [such as] bureaucracy; petty authoritarian practices; showing one’s power with the people; not thinking of the interests and aspirations of the people — these are the forms of individualism.
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“Individualism” had much the same connotation for the Communists that “egotism” or “selfishness” had for the non-Communist Vietnamese: it was immoral behavior and the very expression of anarchy. For traditionalists and Communists alike, virtue consisted of the sustained effort to reduce the gap between the individual will and the will of the community that itself expressed the objective laws of the universe. However else they differed, all the Vietnamese sects and political groups of the 1930’s and 1960’s directed their efforts towards creating a conformity of opinions, values, and lifestyles, towards creating a community that would once again give the individual his “place” and
raison d’être
. As a Buddhist bonze once said, “You Westerners believe that you can destroy an idea by killing the man who holds it; we, on the other hand, believe that you must change men’s ideas.”

In some sense, however, it is impossible to compare the Front with all the other political groups of the south. The Front, with its “steel frame” of the Party, was a revolutionary group engaged in a new independence war, and the demands it made upon its cadres were of a different order than those made by the sects. The spirit of “heart and soul serving the people, serving the Party” was not to be found elsewhere, except perhaps among a few Catholic communities. For both the northerners and the southern Party cadres, the discipline did operate as a reduction in the scope of life. The “hardcore” Party cadres did speak in slogans and did abandon their private thoughts and feelings to the cause as no other political leadership did. But that discipline was for many a fulfillment, rather than a suppression, of the personality.

The necessary perspective on the NLF is not contemporary but historical. Traditionally, the rise of an energetic new dynasty never coincided with a period of literary or artistic flowering. The Vietnamese, who looked for the political “virtue” of the regime in a whole man, regarded a time of revolution as a time of austerity in all things. During periods of reformism or revolutionary change the “superior man” threw aside private concerns and, as it were, reduced himself to his role as a member of the society. In such periods the powerful Confucian sovereigns banned the Buddhist literature and shamed their mandarins into avoiding the Taoist temples and giving up their private, “egotistical” pursuits of poetry, painting, and feasting. Austerity in culture went along with austerity in material things. Too many words were like too many dishes on the table — a luxury, a waste, and a distraction. For the Confucians the reduction — even to the burning of books — was not a sign of authoritarian sterility and constriction, but a sign of moral clarity, order, and self-control. The NLF participated in this tradition, but its undertaking was much more radical than that of the Confucian reformers. Instead of merely trying to renew an elitist system, it was attempting to change that system and to bring the common people, the “children,” to participate in the affairs of state. Its reduction was correspondingly severe. The Front cadres dressed in the black clothes of the poor peasants, and, similarly, they confined themselves to slogans so simple that the poor peasants could understand and use them. Only when the revolution was completed, when the round water displaced the thin flame, only then would there be time for the expansion of the self and the indulgence in material plenty and the private pursuits of the intellect. Until then the Party would attempt to keep its cadres thin.

Marxism-Leninism in the Vietnamese Landscape

Driving through the Mekong Delta in the swollen heat of the monsoon rains, Westerners, even those familiar with Vietnam, must find it difficult to imagine how Marxism-Leninism found resonance in that land. Where was the meeting ground between these peasants with their ancient magic, their rituals of the rice planting, and that small German who lived by cold analysis amid the soot of the great black factories and the mildew of books in the British Museum? What had Marx with his treatise on European capitalism to say to those peasants who prized their bullocks and their ancestral tombs above all things? Like their colonial masters, he had considered them “backward people” whom European influence could only improve. Why then had Marxism come to be their standard for an anticolonial revolt? And why was it the dominant influence on all Vietnamese nationalist parties?
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