Fire in the Lake (36 page)

As a young man living in Paris, working “now as a retoucher at a photographer’s, now as a painter of ‘Chinese antiquities’ (made in France!),” Ho Chi Minh joined the Socialist Party. He had read no Lenin. As a child he had learned from his French teachers the beautiful words “liberty, equality, fraternity” and learned at the same time that they did not apply to Vietnamese. He had no ideology apart from that, but the “ladies and gentlemen” of the Socialist Party (as he called them then) had shown sympathy to him and to his cause. During the debates on whether the Party should join the Second or the Third International, one of these “gentlemen” gave him Lenin’s
Thesis on the National and Colonial Questions
in which the Russian leader argued that socialists ought to support the struggles of the colonial peoples for national independence. Ho Chi Minh became a Leninist on that day. “There were,” he wrote, political terms difficult to understand in this thesis. But by dint of reading it again and again, finally I could grasp the main part of it. What emotion, enthusiasm, clear-sightedness, and confidence it instilled into me! I was overjoyed to tears. Though sitting alone in my room, I shouted aloud as if addressing large crowds: “Dead martyrs, compatriots! This is what we need, this is the path to our liberation!”
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As a true internationalist, Lenin was the first European leader to extend his philosophy to the peoples of Asia and to support national revolutions against the Europeans. Later, in his appeal to the peoples of the East, he called upon the revolutionaries to apply the theory and practice of Communism to local conditions, where the peasants formed the basic masses, and the task was to struggle not against capitalism but against vestiges of the medieval past.
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Marxism was not, Lenin argued, a utopian socialism, but a dialectical theory of history in which each new movement originates in the concrete condition of the society. The nature of each revolution is determined by the nature of the system of oppression. The task of the Europeans was to wage an anti-capitalist revolution. The task of the Easterners was to wage a nationalist revolution against the colonialists and the native reactionaries in league with them. Lenin saw no contradiction in the Marxist direction of an anticolonial struggle, since, if Marxist theory was correct, the Marxists knew better than anyone else what direction the society ought to take in the future.
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Lenin opened the doors of Marxism to Ho Chi Minh. In going through those doors Ho found international support for his own particular rebellion. But he also found what he could not have foreseen: an economic analysis that could be brought to bear on the conditions of Vietnam and a set of values that, as it happened, coincided to a great degree with those of the Vietnamese peasants.

To support his argument for economic equality, Marx had, after all, attributed all surplus wealth to the exploitation of human labor. In Europe his analysis was a conclusion reached only after long examination of the complex tissue of society — government, industry, and the capital market — but in Vietnam it was a truism that even the smallest peasant understood: wealth was a product of labor in the rice lands. An agricultural country with a single technology, few precious metals, and little national or international trade, traditional Vietnam possessed almost no surplus wealth. Compared with their rivals in China or Cambodia, the Vietnamese emperors did not accumulate great fortunes. When the French came to build their plantations, their roads, and their cities, they built them only by direct taxation of human labor. The traditional economy was both simple and inelastic: to acquire wealth within a village meant to deprive others of it. For the sake of their own survival, the villagers had to maintain a relative equality between their members. A man gained prestige not by increasing and maintaining his wealth, but by giving it away. Within the villages, as within the empire of the north and center, the accumulation of private wealth was a sign of anarchy — a sign that the great family of the village or empire had broken apart to such an extent that some of its members threatened the others with starvation.

In Vietnam equality of wealth always bore a direct relation to the order and harmony of the society. The southerners of the 1960’s had never lived in an equal society, but many of them still assumed that it was desirable. As the young recruit, Huong, had said:

I, personally, don’t want to be rich while others have to suffer misery. I want to have the same living standard that most of the people have.… If the people are not happy because they have miserable lives, I could never enjoy life.… I never want to have a high position in government and to be rich while many other people are poor. I simply want to have enough to eat and for all the people in the society to have equality.
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This desire for equality was no mere altruism. On the contrary. Many Vietnamese of the twentieth century sought wealth as a form of social security, but this search had meant an unbridled competition of the sort that terrified them. Inequality meant division and conflict in the once uniform society.

The Marxist notion that economic equality could be gained by a nationalization of the means of production was not at all unfamiliar to the Vietnamese. By Confucian law the emperor acted as a trustee of all the rice lands, reserving the right to redistribute them among the people. The strong emperors exercised this right either to rid themselves of the independent barons or to improve productivity and the lot of the peasants. The powerful Confucian emperors prevented their own mandarins from establishing large estates on the principle that as senior members of the great family, they had no need for food: the people would feed them of their own free will. At a lower level of government, the village councils and the heads of the extended families acted as guardians against glaring economic injustice. In their role as administrators of state rituals and upholders of state values, they mobilized individual labor and individual resources for the benefit of the collectivity. To some degree, then, the land had already been collectivized and nationalized before the coming of the Marxists.

The French changed the economy of Vietnam, but they did not succeed in persuading the Vietnamese to accept the notion of private enterprise, or even of “private property” in the Western sense of the word. Many Vietnamese landlords of the Delta, the one large group with any considerable assets, often regarded the transferable value of their land as relatively unimportant. To them, the wealth was the land itself and not the price of it, a physical presence within a small community. The ownership of land meant the establishment of a family and a government over the people. Ngo Dinh Diem protected these landlords for reasons of political weakness, but he persistently opposed the American attempts to establish private industry in South Vietnam. Diem regarded private industry much as the Confucian sovereigns had regarded the vast “feudal” estates of the warlords. In his view, the establishment of private industries would create a series of irreconcilable rival powers; it would undermine the state and the “natural laws” of the universe, and it would lead finally to anarchy. The Vietnamese Marxists differed from him only in that they put their theoretical emphasis on the people rather than the state. To them capitalism was “egotism” or “individualism” unbridled. Because it was morally unjust, it would, they believed, lead to popular discontent and rebellion. And in a society where “individualism” is looked upon as immoral, they might well have been right.

The socialization of the means of production, the centralization of power in the state — so much of the Marxist program did not present at all the same difficulties of application in Vietnam, as it would in Europe or the United States. By contrast to almost all Western countries, Vietnam traditionally possessed no institutions independent of the state — neither guilds nor corporations nor churches nor feudal fiefs that recognized, and cooperated with, the state. The “feudalism” of the warlords and, later, the landlords, was no more than an ad hoc system of exploitation — pervasive, but by all Confucian standards illegitimate.

Overlooking this background, certain American experts — particularly George Carver of the CIA — began to argue after the fall of the Diem regime that the Communist attempt to unify the country and to centralize power ran counter to Vietnamese political traditions. Vietnam, they argued, was a country of autarchic villages, a country so long divided by regional and religious feuds that the peasantry, by and large, felt very little loyalty to the nation-state. The South Vietnamese, they concluded, would resist all attempts at centralization, and therefore the GVN could defeat the Communists by turning itself into a federal state. The argument, however, ran counter both to the grain of Vietnamese politics and to the course of Vietnamese history. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Vietnamese monarchy was not as strong or well developed as the national governments of Europe at that period. On the other hand, the state was all that existed above the villages. After the French destroyed the village system, there grew up not a group of intermediate institutions — guilds, churches, and so forth — but a group of competing states. From the Hoa Hao to the Communist Party, all the political groups claimed sovereignty over the entire country — at the expense of all the rest. In the eighteenth century Vietnam had sustained two separate, antagonistic states, the Nguyen and the Trinh monarchies, for a long period of time. In the twentieth century, however, the “states” of South Vietnam could not survive independent economic enterprises. If Vietnam were to be independent, it would have to be unified — north and south. And it would not be unified under a federal system because the Vietnamese, whatever their political outlook, believed in uniformity, not in agreement to disagree. While the Americans were trying to teach the Vietnamese to live with their differences, the Vietnamese were only interested in erasing them. And Marxism-Leninism provided them with one method.

It was not apparent to many Americans, but the coincidence between the Confucian and Communist ideas of the state intrigued many non-Communist Vietnamese intellectuals. Communism held a peculiar fascination for the Catholic Ngo brothers: the attraction of opposites, perhaps, but opposites within a single class. For a Communist as for a Confucian
plus royaliste que le roi,
the state was monolithic. It did not represent the people, it
was
the people in symbolic form. For Communists and Confucians the society was embarked upon a way that never ended but that led towards a condition of social harmony so perfect that the state did not have to function at all: for the Taoist mystics, the “emperor who rules by non-doing,” for the Marxists, the “withering away of the state.” Confucianism, like Marxism, focused not on the individual, but on the society as a whole. Because there was no separation between religion and state — “religion” in the sense of a private search for the absolute, “state” in the sense of a social order — there was no liberal tradition in Vietnam. As Confucians, the Vietnamese had never been interested in diversity or originality for its own sake. From their intellectuals they required only what was “morally enlightening,” or in Communist language, “socially useful.” The writing of lyric poetry, along with gambling and worshiping of Taoist goddesses, they consigned to an area of free play outside the moral and intellectual world. The duty of the intellectual was to keep society on the correct path. (This tradition did not necessarily imply in the twentieth century the banning of all criticism, or the construction of art and science to the corridors indicated by Stalin. The Confucian sovereign had never subscribed to such restrictions any more than did Lenin.)

Like Confucianism, Marxism was a social morality. Like Confucianism, it was also a science that described the progress of society through history. In blaming the demise of the early nationalist parties on their failure to perceive and follow the “objective” laws of social development, Ho’s theorist, Truong Chinh, was saying something quite similar to the Emperor Ly Thai To when the emperor blamed the three-year drought on his neglect of the rituals. As far as the authors were concerned, their statements were true, and that truth lent an absolute authority to their own political systems. Because the system was “true” or “natural,” it could, if properly handled, guarantee success to the state that employed it correctly. The mandarins studied the Confucian texts in order to learn how to govern; similarly, the Communist Party cadres studied Marxism-Leninism, not merely because it was more important than technical knowledge, but because in their minds it permitted the state to function. The proof of the system was that it worked inside history. If at a certain point it ceased to work — as had been the case with Confucianism — then, as they saw it, it should be abandoned without further ado.

The legitimacy of a Confucian or a Marxist government rested directly on its faithfulness to a science. It rested indirectly, but nonetheless absolutely, on the will of the people. As to what the community was and how its will ought to be expressed, there Confucianism and Marxism diverged sharply. In the Confucian world the ancestors constituted the source of all wisdom and power. The state was the interpreter of the wishes of the people, and the people were consulted only in exceptional moments when the state dissolved and left them as the only transmitters of tradition. According to Marxism-Leninism, however, power and wisdom lay with the people of present and future generations. As Truong Chinh put it, “The people’s intelligence and experience are infinitely rich and their force immensely great.” The people had to be consulted by the state at all times because “every policy we put forward has direct repercussions on the people’s interests.”
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In theory, popular opinion would support the proper application of the historical sciences. But just how and by whom these laws ought to be interpreted remained open to question, for Marxism gave no precise set of instructions. As guides, there remained only the practice of other socialist countries — just as for the Vietnamese emperors there remained the practice of the Chinese. Like the Confucian monarchs, the Vietnamese Party leaders saw it as their duty to set a course between “dogmatism” or slavish imitation of precedent on one hand and “revisionism,” or localism, and the dilution of the universal truth on the other. In sum, even the dilemma of nationalism and internationalism remained the same.