The legacy of Vietnam's long struggle
http://socialistworker.org/2010/12/07/legacy-vietnams-long-struggle
Memories of defiance from the time when children sang that the
"planes come no more."
December 7, 2010
by John Pilger
THE RAIN sheeted down, time washed away. I looked down from the
rooftop in Saigon where, more than a generation ago, in the wake of
the longest war of modern times, I had watched silent, sullen streets awash.
The foreigners were gone, at last. Through the mist, like little
phantoms, four children ran into view, their arms outstretched. They
circled and weaved and dived; and one of them fell down, feigning
death. They were bombers.
This was not unusual, for there is no place like Vietnam. Within my
lifetime, Ho Chi Minh's nationalists had fought and expelled the
French, whose tree-lined boulevards, pink-washed villas and
scaled-down replica of the Paris Opera, were façades for plunder and
cruelty; then the Japanese, with whom the French colonists
collaborated; then the British, who sought to reinstall the French;
then the Americans, with whom Ho had repeatedly tried to forge an
alliance against China; then Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, which attacked
from the West; and finally the Chinese, who, with a vengeful nod from
Washington, came down from the north. All of them were seen off at
immeasurable cost.
I walked down into the rain and followed the children through a
labyrinth to the Young Flower School, an orphanage. A teacher
hurriedly assembled a small choir, and I was greeted with a burst of
singing. "What are the words of the song?" I asked Tran, whose father
was a GI. He looked gravely at the floor, as 9-year-olds do, before
reciting words that left my interpreter shaking her head. "Planes
come no more," she repeated, "do not weep for those just born...the
human being is evergreen."
The year was 1978. Vietnam was then being punished for seeing off the
last American helicopter gunship, the war's creation; the last B-52
with its ladders of bombs silhouetted against the flash of their
carnage; the last C-130s that had dumped, the U.S. Senate was told,
"a quantity of toxic chemical amounting to six pounds per head of
population," destroying much of the ecosystem and causing a 'fetal
catastrophe"; the last of a psychosis that made village after village
a murder scene.
And when it was all over on May Day 1975, Hollywood began its long
celebration of the invaders as victims, the standard purgative, while
revenge was policy. Vietnam was classified as "Category Z" in
Washington, which imposed the draconian Trading with the Enemy Act
from the First World War. This ensured that even Oxfam America was
barred from sending humanitarian aid.
Allies pitched in. One of Margaret Thatcher's first acts on coming to
power in 1979 was to persuade the European Community to halt its
regular shipments of food and milk to Vietnamese children. According
to the World Health Organization, a third of all infants under five
so deteriorated following the milk ban that the majority of them were
stunted or likely to be. Almost none of this was news in the west.
Austerity, grief at the millions dead or missing, and an incredulity
that the war was no more became the rhythms of life in a forgotten
country. The "democracy" the Americans had invented and
life-supported in the south, which once accounted for half of
Amnesty's worldwide toll of tortured political prisoners, had
collapsed almost overnight. The roads out of Saigon became vistas of
abandoned boots and uniforms. "When I heard that it was over," said
Thieu Thi Tao Madeleine, "my heart flies."
Still wearing the black of the National Liberation Front (NLF), which
the Americans called the Vietcong, she walked with a limp and winced
as she smiled. The "Madeleine" was added by her French teachers at
the Lycee in Saigon which she and her sister Thieu Thi Tan Danielle
had attended in the 1960s. Aged 16 and 13, "Mado" and "Dany" were
recruited by the NLF to blow up the Saigon regime's national
intelligence headquarters, where torture was conducted under tutelage
of the CIA.
On the eve of their mission, they were betrayed and seized as they
cycled home from school. When Mado refused to hand over NLF names,
she was strung upside down and electrocuted, her head held in a
bucket of water. They were then "disappeared" to Con Son Island,
where they were shackled in "tiger cages": cells so small they could
not stand; quick lime and excreta were thrown on them from above.
At the age of 16, Dany etched their defiance on the wall: "Notre
bonjour a nos chers at cheres caramades." The words are still there.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THE OTHER day, I returned to Vietnam, whose agony I reported for
almost a decade. A poem was waiting in my room in the Caravelle Hotel
in Saigon. Typed in English, it was a "heartfelt prayer" for "the
stones [of life] getting soft," and ended with, "I'm still living,
struggling...please phone."
It was Mado, though I prefer her Vietnamese name, Tao. We had lost
touch; I knew of her work at the Institute of Ecology, her marriage
to another NLF soldier, and the birth of a son against all the odds
of the damage done to her in the tiger cages.
Through the throng of tourists and businessmen in the Caravelle lobby
navigated diminutive Dany, now 57. Tao was waiting in a taxi outside.
Five years ago, Tao suffered a stroke and lost the use of her voice
and much of her body, but these have now returned, and although she
needs to take your arm, she is really no different from when she told
me her heart "flies." We drove past the sentinels of the new Vietnam,
the hotels and apartment blocks under construction, then turned into
a lane where wood smoke rose, and children peered and frogs leapt in
the beam of our headlights.
The walls of Tao's home are a proud montage of struggle and painful
gain: she and Dany at the Lycee Marie Curie; the collected
exhortations of Ho; the letters of comrades long gone. It all seemed,
at first, like flowers preserved between the pages of a forgotten book.
But no: these here the very icons and inspirations of resistance that
new generations must recreate all over again, for while battlegrounds
change, the enemy does not. "Each time we are invaded," she said, "we
fight them off. At the same time we fight to keep our soul. Isn't
that the lesson of Vietnam and of history?"
I was once told a poignant story by a Frenchman who was in Hanoi
during the Christmas 1972 bombing. "I took shelter in the museum of
history," he said, "and there, working by candlelight, with the B-52s
overhead, were young men and women earnestly trying to copy as many
bronzes and sculptures as they could. They told me, 'Even if the
originals are destroyed, something will remain, and our roots will be
protected.'"
History, not ideology, is a living presence in Vietnam. Here, the
experience of history forged a communal ingenuity and patience to the
extreme human limits. The NLF leadership in the south was an alliance
of Catholics, liberals, Buddhists and communists, and most of those
who fought in the northern army were peasant nationalists. With its
structures and disciplines, communism was the means by which
Vietnam's protracted wars of independence were fought and won.
This is appreciated by Vietnamese today who idly refer to "the
communist period" as if the party was no longer in power. What
matters here is Vietnam. Visit the museums in Hanoi, and it is clear
that the word Ho Chi Minh never stopped using was "independence":
"the right you never surrender." In retirement, President Dwight
Eisenhower wrote that had his administration not delayed (sabotaged)
the national elections agreed at the United Nations conference on
Indochina in Geneva in 1954, "possibly 80 percent of the population
would have voted for Ho."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I THOUGHT about this on the journey back from Tao's. More than 20
years of war would not have happened. As many as 3 million people
would have lived. No babies would have been deformed by Agent Orange.
No feet would have been blown off by the cluster bombs that were tested here.
On the overnight train to Danang, I could tell the bomb craters that
joined together, leaving not even Pompeiis of war, except perhaps on
a distant rise the gravestones of the anti-aircraft militia. They
were often young women like Mado and Dany. In Hanoi, I took a taxi to
Kham Thiem Street, which I first saw in 1975, laid to waste by B-52s,
which had struck every third house. A block of flats where 283 people
died is now a monument of a mother and child. There are fresh
flowers; the traffic thunders by.
Sitting in a café with these unnecessary ghosts, I read that
Britain's military chief, Gen. Sir David Richards, had called for
NATO "to plan for a 30- or 40-year role" in Afghanistan. NATO is said
to spend $50 million for every Taliban guerrilla it kills, and
cluster bombs are still a favorite. The general expressed his care
for the Afghan people. The French and Americans also said they cared
for the "gooks" they killed in industrial quantities.
When I was last in Vietnam 15 years ago, making a film, my only brush
with officialdom was the Ministry of Culture's concern that the
footage I had shot at My Lai, where hundreds of mostly women and
children were slaughtered, might offend the Americans. In Saigon, the
War Crimes Museum has been renamed the War Remnants Museum. Outside,
tourists are offered pirated copies of the Lonely Planet guide, with
its tendentious devotion to an American sense of "Nam."
Perhaps the Vietnamese can afford to be generous, but the reason, I
think, runs deeper. Since Dai Thang, "the great victory," the policy
has been to end a seemingly endless state of siege.
Color and energy have arrived like breaking waves; Hanoi, with its
mist-covered lakes and boulevards once pocked with air-raid shelters,
is now a gracious, confident, youthful city. There is the kind of
freedom that ignores, navigates and circumvents the old Stalinist
strictures. The newspapers take officials to task and damn
corruption, but then, occasionally, there is the bleakest of
headlines: "Alleged agitator to face trial." Cu Huy Ha Vu, 53, has
been charged with "illegal actions against the state." Such is an
ill-defined line you dare not cross.
Bill Clinton came to lunch at my hotel in Hanoi. He runs an AIDS
charity that does work in Vietnam. In 1995, as the first modern-era
American president to visit Vietnam, he "normalized relations." That
meant Vietnam was allowed to join the World Trade Organization and
qualify for World Bank loans provided it embraced the "free market,"
destroyed its free public services and paid off the bad debts of the
defunct Saigon regime: money which had helped bankroll the American war.
The reparations agreed to by President Richard Nixon in the 1973
Paris Peace Accords were ignored. Normalization also meant that
foreign investors were offered tax-free "economic processing zones"
with "competitively priced" (cheap) labor.
The Vietnamese were finally being granted membership in the
"international community" as long as they created a society based on
inequity and exploited labor, and abandoned the health service that
was the envy of the developing world, with its pioneering work in
pediatrics and primary care, along with a free education system that
produced one of the world's highest literacy rates.
Today, ordinary people pay for health care and schools, and the elite
send their children to expensive schools in Hanoi's "international
city" and poach scholarships at American universities.
Whereas farmers in difficulty could once depend on rural credit from
the state (interest was unknown), they must now go to private
lenders, the usurers who once plagued the peasantry.
And the government has welcomed back the Monsanto company and its
genetically modified seeds. Monsanto was one of the manufacturers of
Agent Orange, which gave Vietnam its chemical Hiroshima. Last year,
the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal by lawyers acting for more
than 3 million Vietnamese deformed by Agent Orange. One of the
justices, Clarence Thomas, worked as a corporate lawyer for Monsanto.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
IN HIS seminal Anatomy of a War, the historian Gabriel Kolko says
that the party of Ho Chi Minh enjoyed "success as a social movement
based largely on its response to peasant desires." He now says that
its surrender to the "free market" is a betrayal.
His disillusion is understandable, but the need to internationalize a
war-ruined country was desperate, along with building a counterweight
to China, the ancient foe. Unlike China, and despite the new Gucci
emporiums in the center of Hanoi and Saigon, the Vietnamese have not
yet gone all the way with the brutalities of "tiger" or crony capitalism.
Since 1985, the rate of malnutrition among children has almost
halved. And tens of thousands of those who fled in boats have quietly
returned without "a single case of victimization," according to the
EU official who led the assistance program in 1995. In many parts of
the country, forests are rising again and the sound of birds and the
rustle of wildlife are heard again, thanks to a re-greening program
initiated during the war by Professor Vo Quy of Vietnam National
University in Hanoi.
For me, keeping at bay the forces that pour trillions into corrupt
banks and wars while destroying the means of civilized life is
Vietnam's last great battle. That the party elite respects, perhaps
fears, a people who, through the generations, have devoted themselves
to throwing off oppressors is evident in the state's often ambivalent
responses to unauthorized strikes against ruthless foreign employers.
"Are we in a Gorbachev phase?" said a journalist. "Or maybe the party
and the people are watching each other for now. Remember always,
Vietnam is different."
On my last day in Saigon, I walked along Dong Hoi, no longer a street
of hustlers and beggars, bar girls and shambling GIs looking for
something in the cause of nothing. Then, I would stroll past the
Hotel Royale and look up at the corner balcony on the first floor and
see a stocky Welshman, his camera resting on his arm. A greeting in
Welsh might drift down, or his take-off of an insane colonel we both knew.
Today, the balcony and the Royale are gone, and Philip Jones
Griffiths died two years ago. He was perhaps the most gifted and
humane photographer of any war. Single-handed, he tried to stop a
"search and destroy" operation that would kill a huddled group of
women and children, eliciting from an American artillery offer the
memorable response: "What civilians?"
One of his finest photographs is a Goya-like picture of a captured
NLF soldier, terribly wounded and surrounded by the large boots of
his captors, yet undefeated in his humanity. Such is Vietnam.
.
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