The New Empire of Debt: The Rise and Fall of an Epic Financial Bubble (25 page)

But we are getting ahead of our story.When Ho came of age, the gabby talk of independence was running through Europe’s colonial possessions like an epidemic of Bird Flu. Locals who had been exposed to a little education were quickly infected and often succumbed. Ho Chi Minh was one of many thousands who got the bug. He had gone to Europe, where he heard Woodrow Wilson’s airy song of freedom. It was just after World War I had ended. Paris had a habit of turning a young man’s head. Ho’s head swiveled around just like everyone else’s. Soon, he had joined not only the Annamite Patriots league, but also the communist party. Of all the world improvers of the time, the Bolsheviks had the biggest improvements in mind. Near the close of the war, against all odds, they took over the world’s biggest country and were improving it mercilessly. The rest of the improvers looked on in admiration, and turned to Moscow for guidance and money. Ho was no exception.

Ho Chi Minh traveled widely, partly to see how the rest of the world worked, and partly to make contacts that would be useful in his campaign to liberate Indochina from the French. One trip took him to NewYork and Boston, where he claimed he worked as a cook’s helper in the Parker House Hotel in Boston. He also said he once took a trip to the South, where he witnessed the lynching of blacks by the Ku Klux Klan. (Sounds improbable; the Klan did not exactly lynch someone everyday. It is also hard to imagine a young man fresh off the boat from Vietnam standing around to watch the Klan at work; we imagine Ho would have felt like a lamb attending a wolves’ picnic.) Ho spent much of the Great War years in London, working as a sous-chef under the celebrated culinary master, Auguste Escoffier at the Carlton Hotel. In this passage from Ho Chi Minh’s biography, wherein he refers to himself as “Ba,” we see how close the world came to having another decent pastry chef instead of another indecent world improver:

Each of us had to take turns in the clearing up. The waiters, after attending the customer, had to clear all the plates and send them by means of an electric lift to the kitchen. Then our job was to separate china and silver for cleaning. When it came to Ba’s turn he was very careful. Instead of throwing out all the bits left over, which were often a quarter of a chicken or a huge piece of steak, and so on, Ba kept them clean and sent them back to the kitchen. Noticing this, Chef Escoffier asked Ba: “Why didn’t you throw these remains into the rubbish as the others do? ”

“These things shouldn’t be thrown away.You could give them to the poor.”

“My dear young friend, listen to me!” Chef Escoffier seemed to be pleased and said, smiling:“Leave your revolutionary ideas aside for a moment, and I will teach you the art of cooking, which will bring you a lot of money. Do you agree?”

And Chef Escoffier did not leave Ba at the job of washing dishes but took him to the cake section, where he got higher wages. It was indeed a great event in the kitchen for it was the first time the “kitchen king” had done that sort of thing.
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Alas, the smell of good works must have been more alluring then the
pain au chocolat.
The world lost a good pastry chef and gained a bad activist. Instead of bringing pleasure to a few hundred, or maybe a thousand, customers, the Annamite Wilson decided instead to launch himself into politics and begin a campaign that would bring misery and death to millions. In London, he warmed up with street demonstrations in favor of Irish independence and a variety of progressive causes.When he read Marx and other revolutionary
penseurs,
his head was turned so far his neck almost broke. Here were people with a grand theory of how the entire world could be improved. And here were people ready to help a skinny, poor young man take over a country.

Ho Chi Minh returned to Indochina, organized the Vietminh, and began the long campaign for independence. The struggle was neither easy nor short. If he was to be the
capo
of Vietnam, he had a number of other
capos
to bury first. First, he had the French to deal with. Then, the Japanese. Then, the Chinese. Then the Vietnamese nationalists. Then the French again. More Vietnamese. And, finally, the Americans. Before he was finished, he would have to bury nearly as many people as Alexander or Pol Pot.

Ho Chi Minh’s brief visit to the United States had left him somewhat naïve and puzzled about America. Ho had not kept up with Wilsonian improvements in the land of the free. When he addressed the crowd in Ba Dinh Square following the August Revolution of 1945, he spoke not of America as it was, but perhaps as it should have been. It was the America that existed before Wilson improved it. It was the America that minded its own business and had not yet taken the road to empire.

“All men are created equal,” said Ho. “They are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” This statement appeared in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, it means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live and to be happy and free.

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the citizen, made at the time of the French Revolution, in 1791, also states: “All men are born free and with equal rights, and must always remain free and have equal rights.”

In this short speech, Ho extended a hand to two nations. One already had not just one empire, but several of them. It had been home to the Empire of the Franks, and then the Holy Roman Empire. Bonaparte made his own empire and his nephew revived it, briefly. The other nation, the United States of America, had been a modest republic only a few years before, but now had imperial responsibilities all over the globe. Ho didn’t know it, but if he wanted to rule Indochina he would have to kick both their derrieres.

The August Revolution had been swift and relatively bloodless. On August 14, the Japanese surrendered. All of a sudden, there was an empty hole where an imperial power used to sit. The Japanese were laying down their guns. In Vietnam, they wanted to surrender, but didn’t know to whom. French administrators were still in the prisons where the Japanese had put them. So were other allied troops. Chiang Kai Shek’s Nationalist Chinese troops would soon be coming down from the north to oversee the Japanese departure.The French would soon be out of jail. Ho’s Vietminh forces had to act fast. On the morning of August 25, 1945, his “defense units” swiftly seized government installations and enterprises all over Vietnam. Within hours, the country was under Vietminh control. Vo Nguyen Giap described the joyful scene in Ba Dinh Square, formerly known as Place Puginier:

Hanoi was bedecked with red bunting.A world of flags, lanterns and flowers. Fluttering red flags adorned the roofs, the trees and the lakes.

Streamers were hung across streets and roads, bearing slogans in Vietnamese, French, English, Chinese and Russian:“Viet Nam for the Vietnamese.” “Down with French colonialism,” “Independence or death,” “Support the provisional government,” “Support President Ho Chi Minh,” “Welcome to the Allied mission,” and so on.

Factories and shops, big and small, were closed down. Markets were deserted . . . the whole city, old and young, men and women, took to the streets . . . . Multicolored streams of people flowed to Ba Dinh Square from all directions.

Workers in white shirts and blue trousers came in ranks, full of strength and confidence . . . . Hundreds of thousands of peasants came from the city suburbs. People’s militiamen carried quarter-staffs, swords or scimitars. Some even carried old-style bronze clubs and long-handles [sic] swords taken from the armories of temples. Among the women peasants in their festive dresses, some were clad in old-fashioned robes, yellow turbans and bright-green sashes . . .

Most lively were the children . . . . They marched in step with the whistle blows of their leaders, singing revolutionary songs.
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At that very moment, about 15,000 French people living in Hanoi, and five thousand French prisoners still being held in Japanese internment camps, along with any number of Vietnamese nationalists, were all preparing to contest Ho’s authority. But naïve Ho called on his people to treat foreigners with tolerance and respect and looked to the United States for support. Surely the country that made wars of independence popular would back him up. Ho wrote several letters to the Truman administration asking for help. One requested food for starving people in the North of the country. In 1945, over a million people in Vietnam starved to death. Another letter praised the United States for its humanitarian ideals and asked for American support of the new government. None of the letters was answered.

Americans had come to see the world in a new way. They were an imperial power; they had to think like one. Winston Churchill, representing a declining empire, stood before a crowd in Fulton, Missouri, and said an “iron curtain” had come down separating one empire from another. There was now a “communist bloc” that threatened the “free world.” Communism must be “contained,” or it would take over the entire world. A new war had begun—the “Cold War.”

Typically, the empire builders see the globe in simpleminded terms. It is the only way they can understand it; the only way they can justify their own vain and preposterous interventions. There was no iron curtain in Vietnam, just the same diaphanous fabric that was draped over the rest of the world. Ho Chi Minh explained it to an American official, Archimedes Patti, on September 30, 1945.

At the close of the conversation, Ho recounted to his visitor some of the key events in his life as a revolutionary. Conceding that many Americans viewed him as a “Moscow puppet,” Ho denied that he was a Communist in the American sense. Having repaid his debt to the Soviet Union with 15 years of Party work (Ho had been an agent of the Comintern), he now considered himself a free agent. In recent months, he pointed out, the DRV (the Democratic Republic of Vietnam) had received more support from the United States than from the USSR. Why should it be indebted to Moscow?

As they parted, Ho Chi Minh asked his visitor to carry back a message that the Vietnamese people would always be grateful for the assistance they received from the United States and would long recall it as a friend and ally, and that the American struggle for independence would always serve as an example for Vietnam. A few weeks later, another departing U.S. military officer carried a letter from Ho Chi Minh to President Truman. But the likelihood of any U.S. assistance was rapidly dimming. Patti’s activities had strengthened suspicions among U.S. officials in both China and the United States, and when his successor cabled Washington that Hanoi would welcome a U.S. effort to mediate the dispute, both Hanoi’s offer and Ho’s previous letters were ignored.

Americans were once again in no mood for modest restraint, ambiguity, or question marks. Senator Joseph McCarthy was readying his inquisition. Children were pledging allegiance to the flag and hiding under their desks in preparation for a nuclear attack.The enemy was at the gates. It was time for “100 percent Americanism.”

Poor old Ho ought to have given up. In a matter of weeks, the French were on the loose and rebuilding their bases. There was an awkward period—a modus vivendi was worked out with the French.They were tolerated, but agreed not to impose themselves. On October 18, the French ship,
Dumont d’Urville,
sailed into Cam Ranh Bay with Ho aboard, back from a peace conference in Paris. But there was no peace.The French were becoming more and more insistent.They drove around in U.S.-made jeeps and carried U.S.-made arms. Ho began to wonder whose side the Americans were on.

Again, as in World War I, the United States seemed to pick its ally without much real thought. In Indochina, for the next quarter of a century, the world improvers would run into each other. Ho wanted to liberate the Annamites from the yoke of colonial rule. Other Vietnamese—Catholics, Buddhists, capitalists, traditional nationalists—wanted to liberate them from Ho. The French, meanwhile, didn’t want to liberate them at all—but force them to be good subjects of France’s reconstructed empire in the Far East. And America, what did America want? America didn’t know exactly what she wanted. But she definitely wanted to throw her weight around.

Ho was duly elected in January 1946.As president of the country, it was not at all clear that he had to run in a district election, but he chose to do so, and won 98.4 percent of the vote.The French were about to nullify the vote and reimpose colonial rule. A moment’s thought would suggest that the Americans would side with Ho, or at least stay out of it.

But if America could back the world’s two largest colonial empires in World War I—and do so in the name of democracy—there was no effective limit to the hypocrisy of her foreign policy. Besides, once again, she looked up at those big, gaudy bubbles, those empty, floating words, and she was in a trance. This time they did not say anything about democracy. The mood had changed.This time the bubbles said “red menace.”

The first Indochina war began on December 19, 1946, when the Vietminh blew up the municipal power station in Hanoi. It ended 89 months later, in defeat for the French at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. Next it was the American’s turn to meddle.

After the fall of Indochina, the French renounced their “civilizing mission” foreign policy. Now, it is the United States that claims to make the world a better place. But when it comes to blockheaded bellicosity and desperate courage, Americans have nothing to teach the French. In comparison to Napoleon’s grand campaigns, America’s early wars were piddling affairs. Its wars against the Mexicans and Spaniards were more sordid than glorious. Even its Revolutionary War was merely a minor engagement compared with the Napoleonic Wars, and only won because the French intervened at a crucial moment to pull Americans’ chestnuts out of the fire. Here, we quote Charles W. Eliot’s history, in which he describes how the patriots had fallen “into a condition of despondency from which nothing but the steadfastness of Washington and the Continental army and the aid from France saved them.”
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