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Next Left Notes Is A News Magazine Devoted To Direct Action
By Howard Machtinger
(Comments on this article sent to editor@nextleftnotes.net
will be forwarded to the author).
I'd like to summon up images of 3 moments in the American relationship to Viet Nam as a way to
appreciate the significance of the US war in Viet Nam in the lives of the American people and
people throughout the world.
1. in the early 1950s as the US made its decision to intervene directly in Viet Nam
2. 1975, 30 years ago when the last US personnel skulked out of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) in
the face of the victorious Vietnamese resistance, which accomplished its goal of reunifying its
country independent of foreign control
3. today, in a world of US unilateralism, faltering neo-liberalism, and Viet Nam in the midst of
dynamic change, in an America which has now memorialized the war in myth, sentimentality permeated
by an ahistorical amnesia.
1. The world of the 1950s seemed to most western observers to be a bipolar split between US-led
capitalism and Soviet-led communism. To most people inside America, the US seemed invulnerable - according
to school textbooks, the US had never lost a war. Having turned back Hitler, in possession of the world's
largest economy and a growing arsenal of nuclear weapons; the US was at the top of its game. It seemed to
be a citadel of freedom and good intentions, the world's benign policeman.
What we now call Euro-centrism barely had a name, so ingrained were notions of western superiority in
western consciousness, so taken for granted. What mattered, happened in the US, Europe, the Soviet Union.
Anything else originated in and was reducible to these white centers of action.
So why did the US intervene in Viet Nam? Historians are divided: was it to combat the growth of Communism
in Asia (particularly after the success of Maoism); was it to gain a foothold in the Asian mainland for the
exercise of US power (a long-term fantasy of American rulers); or was it to assure access to SE Asian rubber,
tin (and perhaps oil), as Eisenhower suggested? Very few credit the spread of democracy as a serious motive
for US intervention - any democratic pretensions were shattered by the corrupt, dictatorial rule of the South
Vietnamese government. Even though the Vietnamese had defeated the French imperial army, the deciding battle
at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, American government analysts credited this defeat more to the decrepitedness of the
French than to the power of Vietnamese resistance. A final motive was that the Americans were determined to
erase the memory of Dien Bien Phu, to try to make sure that others would not follow the Vietnamese example.
American know-how and ingenuity were sure to out-do the French. When US soldiers intervened in force in the
1960s, even sympathizers with the Vietnamese cause took American victory as a foregone conclusion.
2. Flash to 1975. The US has been forced out, its army withdrawn in semi-rebellion, its allies in
disarray; those vivid pictures of the losing side desperately clinging to helicopters to escape.
What had happened? In the long saga of Vietnamese nationalism, the Americans had become the latest
aggressors to be turned back. Open-minded Americans had begun to make a human connection, a move away
from demonization, sometimes connecting to Vietnamese victims of US bombs, napalm, Agent Orange, or massacres;
sometimes recognizing Vietnamese capability in outmaneuvering, outthinking, outlasting, and outfighting a
superior technological force. There was an initial sense of Vietnamese subjectivity, of their fellow humanity.
Many of us on the left saw the Vietnamese triumph as the precursor of many more third world victories to come.
To explain away this historic defeat, the myth began to be propagated that Washington had hamstrung the military
and caused its defeat. This despite the presence of over half a million US troops, bombing at WWII levels,
the expenditure of tens of billions on the killing. This analysis is both dangerous and false. Dangerous
because it implies the necessity for the use of nuclear weapons - something that was contemplated by the Nixon
administration, unbeknownst to the antiwar movement, and only abandoned because so many people were already
in the streets and the world had become increasingly appalled by the recklessness of the US war. But the analysis
is also false because it fails to recognize the contradictions at the core of US strategy, or most imperial
strategies that pretend to be democratic. For the US to succeed and withdraw in triumph, required the establishment
of a self-sustaining, legitimate South Vietnamese government. The solution could not be more and more US military
intervention - this could never lead to a viable, legitimate South Vietnam. The Vietnamese people refused to
accept a puppet government; thus the more the US intervened, the more it undermined the chance for an independent,
self-sustaining South Vietnam.
This was already quite apparent by 1968 when Nixon was elected. The sheer cynicism of the Nixon strategy - the
pretence of futile "Vietnamization" of the war, the slogans of "peace with honor", a "decent interval" before the
US admitted defeat and withdrew, the creation out of whole cloth of the POW/MIA victim, as if a war could be
justified by its POWS -- led to even more unnecessary Vietnamese and American deaths. And after the defeat,
the refusal to help in the removal of land mines, the further apotheosis of the POW issue along with the false
promise of reparations to repair a devastated land - this is all worth remembering today.
Supporters of the Vietnamese struggle drew dramatic and extravagant conclusions from the defeat of US power.
Along with the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement helped explode the myths of Eurocentrism. It was
not academia but the impact of these earth-shattering events, including the women's movement that provoked
anti- and post-colonial breakthroughs, a critique of traditional hierarchies, as well as a sense of historical
possibility as "the barefoot and shirtless people" stood up, as Martin Luther King put it. Yes, the American
war in Viet Nam was a key component in an intellectual, conceptual revolution.
Beyond that, some of us foresaw the inevitable triumph of national liberation movements, modeled on Viet Nam,
leading to more humane forms of socialism.
3. What happened? Where did we go wrong and where were we prescient?
Thirty years might provide some perspective.
Today, Viet Nam is still independent and unified, but it is also engaged in market economic reform and is eager
to join the WTO. We seemed to have receded from a bipolar world to a unilateral, if multicultural, world.
National liberation as a movement seems to have run its course. China is the fastest growing capitalist economy
in the world, with huge and growing gaps in wealth distribution. Russia is caught between authoritarian traditions
and mafia-style capitalism. US power looms larger than ever in the world. And the US is once again trumpeting
its brand of democracy as the ultra right has seized control of the government.
The war and Viet Nam have been consigned to a strange nether world; always in the background, but its implications
avoided and distorted. The basic lesson of the Viet Nam war, that it was a war of aggression against fully human
beings - not Asian or Communist demons - has been lost. Movies, to cite one powerful media representation,
imply that the war happened mainly to Americans and the American psyche. Most Americans today, whatever their
politics are even unaware that Viet Nam is one country.
This is, and ought to be, very sobering to progressives. We underestimated the tremendous price that Viet Nam
paid for its victory, materially, socially and internationally. We underestimated the resilience of US led power.
The question for us today is whether 2005 is more emblematic, defining and enduring than 1975. Is right wing
fundamentalism here to stay or is it rather a desperate, regressive attempt to rein in an uncontrollable world,
in which millions stood up against the Iraq war in unprecedented international demonstrations, in which Latin
America seems to be abandoning the neo-liberal model, as the grassroots have begun to mobilize against authoritarianism,
HIV, and for the vitality of the public sector; in which Bush is routinely mocked and vilified, beyond even what
Nixon provoked in the waning days of his war? Non-western subjectivities are alive and struggling, and they
cannot be suppressed forever; the sense that America is heading in a dangerously wrong direction is widespread,
if not majority opinion, here at home.
The lesson of the Vietnamese struggle is to link up internationally (as American war vets have begun to do with
their Vietnamese counterparts), to be committed and persistent and patient, no matter how seemingly all-powerful
the enemy; to be flexible in strategy and tactics, and most importantly to craft a clear, meaningful message to
communicate with ordinary people. The right has been tremendously successful in depicting progressives, starting
with the anti-war movement, as emasculated, elitist spoiled brats. We need to communicate a sense of urgency
without condescension. To cope with capitalist globalization, US war mongering, one-nation nationalism has proved
to be insufficient. We need an invigorated international movement in response to the corruption, decay, and defeat
of actually existing socialism; we need a non-compromising, non-patronizing message of democracy and community, of
equity, of environmental consciousness, of anti-racism and anti-sexism; a message of hope to distinguish ourselves
from the fundamentalism, irrationalism, obscurantism, militarism, macho, arrogance, manipulation and cynicism of
the other side. We have to believe that a message that speaks authentically to people's needs, which addresses the
reality of their spiritual yearnings is superior to media manipulation, fundamentalist ravings and posturing; that
freedom is more attractive than resentment and fear.
The lesson of Viet Nam is that seemingly all-powerful power can be set back, that the contradictions of imperial
power can be exposed, and that ordinary and "barefoot and shirtless people" can make history. This cannot be
denied; whether by irresponsible, inarticulate Texans or by the mesmerized media. But its memory must be kept
alive and renewed from generation to generation.
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