by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night PBS debuted the first episode, “Déjà Vu,” of Ken Burns’
series The Viet Nam War. (He actually
spelled it The Vietnam War, since
“Vietnam” as one word is the
usual American rendering, but I remember a UCSD professor whom I met in the
early 2000’s who had compiled an anthology of accounts of the war, many of them
by people who’d actually fought in it, solemnly telling me that “Viet Nam” —
two words, no hyphen — is the correct way to spell that country’s name.) The
Viet Nam War featured the usual suspects —
Ken Burns and Lynn Novick as the filmmakers, Geoffrey C. Ward as the writer,
Peter Coyote as the narrator and a batch of oddball funding sources including
the Bank of America and David H. Koch (when I saw that name on the credits I winced, though any thought I
might have had that Koch was going to insist on making this a Right-wing
propaganda piece was quickly disconfirmed by the content of the show itself) —
and the first part was a compelling presentation of the pre-history of the Viet
Nam war, starting in 1858 when the French invaded Viet Nam and relatively
quickly took it over. Their main interest in Southeast Asia generally and what
was then called “French Indochina” in particular was as a giant plantation that
would produce rice the French could then sell to other countries in the region,
and to that end they ran Viet Nam
as a sort of giant plantation, maintaining a puppet emperor to put a Viet
Namese face on their occupation and dividing the country into French-owned
giant farms where the Viet Namese were forced to work as peasants, frequently
starving while the ample food supplies they were producing went to other, more
profitable markets. (It’s the same old sad story of all imperialisms.)
The French occupation naturally
engendered a nationalist resistance — several nationalist resistances, actually
— though the one that became important was the Viet Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh
(that wasn’t his birth name: one of the things I didn’t know before I learned
from this program was that he used about 70 different aliases before settling
on that one) and aligned with the Communist movement worldwide because Ho had,
as a young man, read Lenin’s analysis of imperialism and call for national
self-determination and decided that was the blueprint for struggle in his own country.
He actually spent 31 years in exile, from 1910 to 1941, until the German
conquest of France in World War II threw the entire French colonial system into
turmoil. The Japanese sought to take over all France’s colonial possessions in
Asia, and a number of Viet Namese embraced them on the ground that at least the
Japanese, as fellow Asians, would liberate them from white rule. When the
Japanese proved at least as oppressive colonial overlords as the French —
something that Ho hadn’t been surprised about at all — Viet Namese nationalists
formed resistance movements and hoped that an Allied victory in World War II
would end both French and
Japanese occupation and pave the way for Viet Namese independence. As I
remember reading in the 1960’s from Robert Scheer’s famous short book How
the United States Got Involved in Viet Nam
— which became virtually the Bible of the anti-war movement in the 1960’s and
published excerpts from many of the cables between the U.S. State Department
and its diplomats in Viet Nam that were later included in the Pentagon Papers —
Ho Chi Minh actually thought the U.S. would take his side: he deliberately
began the Viet Namese Declaration of Independence with the same words as the
U.S. Declaration of Independence (the ones about people having certain
unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness) and he wrote
several letters to U.S. President Harry Truman in both French and English
asking outright for his support. The letters never reached Truman: they were
intercepted by the fledgling Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which had
already written off Ho as a Communist and therefore someone the U.S. not only
wouldn’t support, but would bitterly oppose. The next nine years were a brutal
conflict between the French, attempting to reconquer Viet Nam through military
means; the Viet Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh and claiming to be the legitimate
government of the entire country; and other Viet Namese nationalists who
rejected Communism and wanted independence under non-Communist, non-Viet Minh
auspices.
The story that Burns, Novick and Ward tell is one of bitter war and
atrocities on both sides — they note that Ho Chi Minh was out of the country
for much of this period, vainly trying to negotiate an end to the French
involvement in Paris, and the ruler actually on the ground in the Viet
Minh-controlled parts of Viet Nam was Ho’s military commander, Vo Nguyen Giap
(Coyote in his narration pronounces Giap’s last name as “Zap,” by the way), who
was considerably harder-line than Ho himself and ordered some brutal massacres
— though the anti-Communist Viet Namese and the French all committed war
atrocities of their own, including the conqueror’s ultimate privilege, rape.
(There are a lot of reasons to be
a pacifist, but one of them is that victorious armies throughout history have
almost always regarded the bodies of the females — and sometimes the males as
well — of the vanquished as part of war booty, and considered rape one of the
perks of victory.) The program deals with the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu —
in a pattern that would repeat itself when the Americans replaced the French as
Viet Nam’s would-be imperialists, the French massed their forces for a
conventional battle on the plains while the Viet Minh hid out in the hills, secretly
assembled artillery that had been carted up by hand in bits and pieces and then
reassembled in place, and shelled the French before the French had the chance
to mount the mass attack they’d planned — and the much-misunderstood Geneva
Accords of 1954. The Geneva Accords called for a temporary division of Viet Nam into northern and southern
occupation zones, the north to be ruled by the Viet Minh and the south by the
French, until 1956, when a nationwide election was to be held in which the
people of Viet Nam would vote on who should rule the entire country — an
election just about everyone involved knew that Ho Chi Minh and his Viet Minh
would win. It also set up a demilitarized zone (DMZ) between northern and
southern occupation zones, and allowed anyone in either half of Viet Nam to
move to the other within 300 days. What actually happened was that 100,000 Viet
Namese moved from the south to the north and 1 million moved from north to
south — which was hailed in the U.S. and European media as the Viet Namese
people voting with their feet for freedom over Communism.
Robert Scheer’s
account was, not surprisingly, quite different: he said the Viet Minh asked
their people not to come north
because they wanted them in the south to prepare for the elections that were
supposed to happen in 1956, while most of the people who went south were Viet
Namese who had converted to Roman Catholicism during French rule. Among the
most interesting aspects of this documentary were Burns’ and Novick’s judicious
use of film clips of future Presidents who would one day have to deal with Viet
Nam — John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon — to show what they had to
say about the conflict in the early 1950’s; Kennedy’s initial comments were
eerily prescient about the U.S. having no national interest in Viet Nam and
thereby best off staying out, but his tune changed when the French ultimately
withdrew from Viet Nam in 1955 and Ngo Dinh Diem emerged as the first president
of the newly proclaimed “Republic of Viet Nam” in the South. Diem was a Roman
Catholic who never married and at one point had planned to become a priest, and
apparently he and Kennedy bonded over their shared religion as well as Diem’s
promise to show Viet Nam in particular and the world in general that there was
a “Third Way” Third World countries could follow besides imperialism and
Communism. Once in power Diem turned out to be as autocratic as anyone in the
North, locking dissenters into concentration camps and summarily executing
people. The first episode of The Viet Nam War ends with Kennedy’s inauguration as President and a
successful attack by the National Liberation Front (derisively called the “Viet
Cong” by its enemies), the guerrilla movement in the South Ho and Giap
green-lighted in 1959 after they realized that the national unification
elections, which they had counted on to give them power over all of Viet Nam,
were not going to happen. The attack killed two of the U.S. “advisors” who were
supposedly there to help organize and train the South Viet Namese army, and
these 1959 casualties are considered by the U.S. government to be the first
Americans actually killed in the Viet Nam war and are the first names on the
famous Viet Nam war memorial in Washington, D.C.
Of course I was particularly
interested in The Viet Nam War
because I have a personal relationship to this history: it was going on while I
was growing up (though I missed being vulnerable to the draft by a hair’s
breadth: I was subject to the last draft lottery drawing during the war but my birthday,
September 4, was 356 in the lottery drawing so I wasn’t in any danger of being
sent off to fight in that horrible war) and it had a lot to do with shaping the politics I’ve had ever since,
particularly a hatred of Western imperialism and a belief that Third World
nations should have the right to determine for themselves what sort of
government they should have. I remember being one of the earliest people in my
generational cohort to oppose the war, and how classmates who’d once argued
with me and given all the usual propaganda justifications for the war — the
“domino theory,” the idea that the fall of Viet Nam would bring all Asia under
Communist rule and ultimately if we didn’t vanquish the Communists in Viet Nam
we’d be fighting them on the California shores — suddenly started turning up in
the same peace marches I’d been going to since my mom took me to my first one
in 1965, when I was 11. I also remember the arguments between Viet Nam war
opponents over whether the war was “a mistake,” an exception to America’s
usually idealistic foreign policy, or a deliberate exercise of U.S.
imperialism: as the opposition to the war got more Left-wing “imperialism,” not
“mistake,” became the answer that was considered “politically correct.” Only
later did it occur to me that Viet Nam was both an exercise in U.S. imperialism and a mistake: Viet Nam had virtually no natural
resources to speak of, and the cost to the U.S. in both lives and money of
attempting to conquer and “pacify” Viet Nam was so far out of proportion to its
potential value as a dependency any truly rational imperialists would have
abandoned it the way the French had in 1955.
