Fire in the Lake (6 page)

Fire in the lake: the image of REVOLUTION.

Thus the superior man

Sets the calendar in order

And makes the seasons clear.

—
I Ching
²⁸

In August 1945 the whole city of Hanoi turned about on itself within the space of a few days. The highest officials of the Emperor Bao Dai’s government fled, and their subordinates joined the Viet Minh. In a city that the French had thought passive, acquiescent to foreign rule, there were suddenly Viet Minh flags in every window and vast crowds cheering for the independence of Vietnam.
²⁹
In Hue in 1966 at the beginning of the Buddhist struggle, much the same phenomenon occurred. Overnight the Buddhists, led by the brilliant rhetorician Thich Tri Quang, took over the administration of the city. Arriving at their desks the next day, the American officials suddenly found that the city government was at war with Saigon — though its personnel had hardly changed and there had been no violence. By the beginning of the next week the troops of the ARVN First Division stationed near the city had either fled, complied with the Buddhists, or given their active support to the struggle against their own command in Saigon.

Time after time Westerners have been surprised by the suddenness of political change in Vietnam, by its seeming lack of motivation. But the motivation is always there. It is just that, given the commitment the Vietnamese have to their society, it remains hidden, and for the majority of the people, hidden even below the surface of consciousness, until in the old language the will of Heaven manifests itself and the success of the rebellion appears assured. At that moment the wind shifts, and if all goes for the best, the whole society changes from unanimity to unanimity. In such a change, the element of personal leadership is of the highest importance, for the Vietnamese do not look upon government as the product of a doctrine, a political system that hangs somewhere over their heads, but as an entire way of life, a Tao, exemplified by the person of the ruler.

Over the years those American officials concerned with the Saigon government occupied themselves almost exclusively with the development of policies and programs, with organization and reorganization. That the Vietnamese showed much less interest in the programs than in the people who ran them proved a continual source of discomfort to the Americans. This discomfort they manifested in their complaints about the “underdevelopment” of Vietnamese politics. In part, of course, this American preoccupation with programs and instrumentalities arose out of the ground rules of their involvement in Vietnam. (Officially, the U.S. government was “not interfering in Vietnamese domestic politics.”) In part, however, it came from the basic American — or Western — view of government as a complex machine. Americans tend to speak of “governmental machinery” and to look upon the problem of government as one of programming the machinery correctly to attain the goals desired. For Americans it is ideas, principles, and organization that count: men are replaceable and their “personalities” almost incidental to their functions. (In Vietnam it was simply embarrassing that gossip about the Vietnamese generals described the workings of the government better than all of their organizational charts.) But the Vietnamese look at government in a very different light. To them it is not merely one organization among others, but a complete enterprise that comprehends much of what Westerners would consign to personal life and private morality. In looking for a leader they look not merely for a man with ideas and administrative skills; nor do they, as many Americans assumed, look only for a charismatic figure, a magical authority. They look for a man who expresses in his life how the government and the society ought to behave. In coming to the court of Lu, Confucius made no speeches and gave no orders. He gave the people a picture of the “correct” way of life; he showed them what had to be done.

The Vietnamese Communists understood policies and programs as well as anyone else in Vietnam, but they, and in particular Ho Chi Minh, made an effort to present a picture of “correct behavior” to the people. Dressed usually in shorts and rubber sandals, the North Vietnamese leader lived as simply as a peasant in order to show that his revolution would inaugurate a truly popular regime. The same dress on Lenin would have been sheer affectation. But for Ho Chi Minh and his representatives to the people it was a necessity, for the Vietnamese do not differentiate between a man’s style and his “principles,” between his private and public “roles”: they look to the whole man.

It was this very coherency of man and society that was to Westerners the most bewildering and unsympathetic aspect of the Vietnamese — Communists, Buddhists, and Catholics alike. In his biography of Ho Chi Minh, Jean Lacouture observed:

However ruthlessly the people of North Vietnam may be governed, it would be wrong not to indicate how fully Ho has managed to identify with his fellow countrymen, and what an unusual relationship he has established with them. He is forever addressing ordinary citizens in an easygoing or fatherly tone, forever distributing oranges or other tidbits to the children. This is partly play-acting — why deny it? The character he projects is too well rounded to be entirely spontaneous, and his large red handkerchief has too often dabbed at dry eyes.
³⁰

While generally admiring of the North Vietnamese leader, Lacouture could not get over the suspicion that he was “playing a part,” that he was, to put it more harshly, insincere. Lacouture was right in a sense. But the very terms he chose to describe Ho Chi Minh showed exactly how Westerners and Vietnamese differ in their view of the function of the individual. To Westerners, of course, “sincerity” means the accord between a man’s words or actions and his inner feelings. But to Vietnamese, for whom man is not an independent “character” but a series of relationships, “sincerity” is the accord between a man’s behavior and what is expected of him: it is faithfulness not to the inner man, but to the social role. The social role, in other words, is the man. To many Vietnamese, therefore, Ho Chi Minh was perfectly sincere, since he
always
acted in the “correct” manner, no matter what effort it cost him. And it was the very consistency of his performance that gave them confidence that he would carry the revolution out in the manner he indicated. Ironically enough, because of this very intimate relation of man to society, it was precisely those Vietnamese military men, such as Nguyen Cao Ky, who had no notion of a political system and who did not therefore “hide their feelings” or practice the Confucian “self-control,” who seemed to Westerners the most likable, if not the men most fit for the job of government.

The Confucian world was rationalist rather than mystical, characterized by the ethical bureaucrat-scholar rather than by the heroic tribal chieftain. In times of crisis the Vietnamese looked for a particular kind of leader. A Hitler or a Joseph McCarthy or an Abraham Lincoln would have had no success in Vietnam, for they did not conform to the model laid down in the depths of Vietnamese history.

At the beginning of the first Indochina war Paul Mus asked an old friend of his, a Vietnamese intellectual, whether he supported the Emperor Bao Dai or Ho Chi Minh. “Ho Chi Minh,” said the intellectual. “Ho Chi Minh because he is pointed, whereas Bao Dai is circular like a drop of water. Like water, he will rot everything he touches. What we want is pointed fire and flames like Ho Chi Minh.” As Mus explained, the traditional Vietnamese, like so many peasant people, saw history not as a straight-line progression
³¹
but as an organic cycle of growth, fruition, and decay; for them these seasonal changes were associated with textures and pictures — the images as old as China itself. In times of prosperity and stability the empire appeared circular — the image of water and fecundity, or a time when, in the words of the great Vietnamese poet, Nguyen Du, “The emperor’s virtues spread like rain over all the land, penetrating deeply into the hearts of men.” Inevitably times would change: rich and secure, the dynasty would isolate itself from the people and grow corrupt — the image of degeneration, the stagnant pool. Then revolution would come — the cleansing fire to burn away the rot of the old order. At such times the Vietnamese would look for a leader who, in his absolute rectitude, his puritanical discipline, would lead the community back to the strength and vigor of its youth. And it was this picture that the Viet Minh and the Viet Cong presented to the Vietnamese of the twentieth century.

This view of history does much to explain the fact — so long puzzling to American officials — that a peasant people who otherwise seemed to resist change and innovation could turn to the most radical of revolutions. For Westerners, even Marxists, who see history as a progression, revolution is an alarming prospect. The very word implies a mechanical operation — and one that more or less escapes human control. Revolution for Westerners is an abrupt reversal in the order of society, a violent break in history. But the Vietnamese traditionally did not see it that way at all. For them revolution was a natural and necessary event within the historical cycle; the problem of revolution was merely one of timing and appropriateness.

Times change and with them their demands. Thus the seasons change in the course of a year. In the world cycle also there are spring and autumn in the life of peoples and nations, and these call for social transformations.

—
I Ching
³²

Vietnamese history was far from uneventful, but it was without movement of the sort that took place in Europe over the same millennium from the accession of Charlemagne to the industrial revolution. Distant from the seat of empire, the traditional villager did not fear the coming of a new regime, for like leaves in the Celestial Book the dynasties were bound to a common base in the traditional agriculture and the traditional Way. What the villager did fear was a difficult transition, an interregnum of social disorder and violence in which the conflict broke through the bamboo hedges of the village and disturbed the cycle of the rice. As long as the revolution passed over quickly, he had no reason to be conservative. Secure within his own landscape, he could accommodate himself to the dynasties that came and went like the seasons passing through the heavens. To him revolution meant no alarming break from the past, but simply a renewal. The Chinese character for revolution meant in its original sense an animal’s pelt, which is changed in the course of a year by molting.
³³

In the twentieth century the Westerners are probably correct: revolution in Vietnam now implies a change of structure and a modulation in history. But the question remains whether it, too, is not in its own way appropriate. The French and the Americans tried to stop the revolution, and in doing so they created an interregnum of violence unparalleled in Vietnamese history. In the end the Vietnamese may reject them and their intervention as an organism rejects a foreign body. As one Vietnamese scholar told a Frenchman, “If you want so much to be in Vietnam, just wait a bit and perhaps in your next reincarnation you will be born Vietnamese.”

2

Nations and Empires

    Tzu-lu said: “The ruler of Wei has been waiting for you in order with you to administer the government. What will you consider the first thing to be done?”

    The Master replied: “What is necessary is to rectify names. If names be not correct, language is not in accord with the truth of things. If language not be in accord with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.”

Saigon in 1966 was, as always, a city of rumors. It breathed rumors, consumed only rumors, for the people of Saigon had long since ceased to believe anything stated officially as fact. Rumor was the only medium. Among the stories of comets falling and bombing halts there was that year one rumor that stood out from all the rest. A work of art, a Fabergé among rumors, it was so embellished with circumstantial evidence of murders and secret meetings, so exquisitely crafted of inference, coincidence, and psychological truth, that its purveyors established its value without question. The central theme of the rumor was that Premier Nguyen Cao Ky and a number of other highly placed politicians in Saigon belonged to a secret society formed in northern Vietnam before the Indochina war. The aim of this society was now to subvert the Saigon government and enlist the Americans in helping the North Vietnamese to conquer the south.
¹
The rumor had a certain undeniable attraction in that year when the Saigon government lost control of central Vietnam and two southern politicians were shot by unknown assailants in the streets. Few Americans, however, fully appreciated it, for as they saw it, the story had a certain internal logic for the southerners — a logic that went as follows: Premise: All northerners are alike. Premise: Nguyen Cao Ky is a northerner. Conclusion: Nguyen Cao Ky is an agent of the Politburo in Hanoi.

Having thus reduced the rumor, most Americans would then proceed to attack it on the grounds that it was not true — a conclusion which, while undoubtedly correct, left something to be desired. The story of Oedipus was not true either, but it did describe a certain fundamental dilemma in the most graphic manner possible. In this case the dilemma was that although the United States claimed to be supporting the right of self-determination for the South Vietnamese people, it was in fact supporting a government of northerners who, to judge by their performance, were aiding and abetting their Communist compatriots. Clearly the rumor was an attempt by the Vietnamese to reconcile the claims of the U.S. State Department with the evidence before their own eyes.

Over the years American government officials have assembled a number of theories that present similar contradictions with practice — not only in the matter of Vietnamese politics, but in that of the whole political geography of Southeast Asia. In trying to persuade the American public to support the war in Vietnam, they invested twenty-five years of political rhetoric in the establishment of certain propositions about the nature of the area. On the strategic plane they held South Vietnam to be the second in a series of domino-countries that in their black-and-white uniformity stood in a row beginning at the Chinese border and ending at the foot of Southeast Asia. If South Vietnam were to “fall to the Communists,” then it was more than likely that Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Malaya (and then, successively, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Australia) would “fall to the Communists” in their proper order. Just what nationality these Communists might be was not exactly clear, as U.S. officials often warned in the same breath of Chinese aggression, of North Vietnamese aggression, and of Khrushchev’s “wars of national liberation” around the world. The indefinite nature of this threat notwithstanding, the peoples of Asia (so the officials insisted) had called upon the United States to help them in their common struggle for freedom and against Communism.