The Politics of History: Dominoes? What Dominoes?‏‏

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

As a wee lass growing up in the industrial fartland of America I was exposed to TV news reports about a war overseas that was not really a war. When I asked why this non-war was going on I was told that there was fear of dominoes falling to communism. Kids today might imagine their favorite pizza chain collapsing under the brutal oppression of Ho Chi Minh but that was not what really was at stake. It was not until later in life that I learned about fears that the Philippines and Japan might be brought under the big red bumbershoot. If that had happened we would not have hybrid Toyotas or Nintendo GameCubes. The horrors are too grim to contemplate.

In reviewing the history of Vietnam I became curious about the institution of strategic hamlets. They were part of a program by the South Vietnamese government to regain territory that had been lost to Viet Cong insurgents. Although at least one commentator has referred to them as concentration camps, they were not as confining as German work/death camps or American internment facilities. The effectiveness of the program was questioned by American intelligence who saw them as easily overrun by the nationalist opposition.

A propaganda movie, Night of the Dragon, made for the American market in 1971 shows us a model hamlet in operation. The movie depicts a small military operation to flush out a nest of commie subversives in the neighborhood of a village. It gives us a glimpse of what the conflict was like inside the protective envelope of the American military presence. Although the movie shows us the victims of Viet Cong atrocities, it omits mention of the Phoenix Program of atrocities on behalf of the government under the guidance of American intelligence.

What fascinates me about the Youtube posting of Night of the Dragon is the quality of the comments that people made. One of them takes the film to be an accurate depiction of Vietnam and protests liberal historical revision. The film portrays the motive behind the insurgency as a desire to take over the lucrative rice trade. That speaks more to the fear on the part of government officials of losing that trade. If preferred history is faulty will accurate history automatically fall into the domain of revision?

Liberal historians would have us believe that Diem was corrupt and out of touch with the people of his country. Some of them might even consider the possibility of an American hand at work in the assassination of Diem and the subsequent political infighting that provided space for intensification of insurgent activity. That would be revisionist, so we will not go there.

Night of the Dragon does not tell us anything about Diem's conflicts with Buddhists that led to his rift with the Kennedy administration. The callousness of remarks by Diem's wife sister in-law over Buddhist self-immolation caused quite a stir in the Western world. Diem's people conducted raids on Buddhist monasteries because they saw the Buddhists as sympathetic to the cause of the insurgency. The Viet Cong were more likely to view Buddhism as a native institution than Diem's Catholic faith.

Are political perspectives at play in how social groups interpret history? Do people tend to select the version of history that suits their personal sense of aesthetics?

Links: The Youtube copy of Night of the Dragon. A liberal "revisionist" perspective on the conflict in Vietnam. Phillip Catton on strategic hamlets. Nardin and Slater on historical revision over Vietnam.

Comments

[luzribeiro.livejournal.com]

Tuesday came and went, and no Caesar post. I was beginning to worry that something had happened to you.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Monday was a holiday in the US. It is the traditional day of commemorating women giving birth.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

What did you birth Monday?

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

Which reminds me that tomorrow is a big holiday in my country (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unification_Day_%28Bulgaria%29), especially in my town. It commemorates the only time we had the guts to do something that was right (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unification_of_Bulgaria) - totally on our own, against all odds, and in defiance of everybody else's interests (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unification_of_Bulgaria#International_response_to_the_Unification). And then to stand by it and stake everything to defend it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-Bulgarian_War).

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

Are political perspectives at play in how social groups interpret history? Do people tend to select the version of history that suits their personal sense of aesthetics?

Of course they do.

For instance American accounts (including your own) tend to ommit the role of French colonialism in the whole mess because (if you're a Leftist) "America is Evil!!!" or (if you're a right-winger) America is the only country that matters.

Where as if you ask the Vietnamese the whole thing was about imperialism (Both French and American) from the beginning.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

My personal perspective does not omit the French attempt to reassert hegemony. Nor does it omit the role that Vietnam played in the months preceding the Japanese attacks on Hawaii and the Philippines.

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

*Shakes head sadly*

You really need to drop that Leftist = America is Evil shtick. I don't know a single liberal who thinks that way. At all. Disliking the military-industrial complex or the irrationally conservative positions the U.S. government takes on liberties isn't even ballpark to what you're claiming.

It's as tiresome as declaring all conservatives to be quasi-fascist plutocrat-enablers.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Good point. Conservatives never give the Left credit for founding the US in the first place.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

They also omit that the Japanese played a major role in the rise of the Viet Minh, not to mention both Jiang and Mao aiding them. They might mention Mao doing it, but how many of them would note that here Chinese Nationalists were no different? Of course there's also the usual selective memory of the Indochina Wars that came after, to say nothing of this being a Soviet victory in a Communist proxy war. Likewise people generally neglect that Hanoi depended as heavily on foreign aid as Saigon did, the main difference is that Hanoi's army was able to shoot effectively when others shot back at them, Saigon's was not.

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

the role of French colonialism

French colonialism->manifest destiny->American exceptionalism->Mark Rubio's speech.


in the whole mess because (if you're a Leftist) "America is Evil!!!"

No country can cast the first stone, ourselves especially.

Where as if you ask the Vietnamese the whole thing was about imperialism (Both French and American) from the beginning.

Yeah, Ho Chi Minh has a point about that...

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Where as if you ask the Vietnamese the whole thing was about imperialism (Both French and American) from the beginning.

Yup. There's fascinating footage of a movie Ho Chi Min sent to President Roosevelt just before WWII was ended, showing Vietnamese troops carrying an American flag behind a marching band playing the Battle Hymn of the Republic. They were appealing to him to support their bid for post-war independence from the French.

Sadly for them, Roosevelt was dead when it arrived, and Truman really didn't like Commies. The later conflict the Viet Cong called The American War.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

There was a domino effect of sorts. Vietnam took over Laos, Cambodia, and of course Saigon finally did fall when it had to stand or fall on its own merits of which there weren't any. Of course this is because at least in the US Military's take on why the USA got involved it had to do with Laos, not Vietnam (which overlooks Eisenhower's aid to the French at Dien Bien Phiu) and it's also to do with the Franco-American colonial war being replaced by a Sino-Soviet Proxy war that the USSR actually won. For all the good that did it.

However if you're asking if people pick the version of history that suits their aesthetics......how many versions of WWII popular histories point out that it was a joint Soviet-Nazi war on democracy until Hitler's ideology overtook his common sense and he trundled himself to doom on the steppe? How many histories of Israel begin with Arthur Balfour and the British Empire, not Hitler and the death camps? How many histories of France and Germany acknowledge that the Belgians weren't the only bunch to run the Congo as a murder factory? How many histories of India and Pakistan acknowledge that the Indians who fought for the British Empire in WWII were just as Indian as Chandra Bose? How many Japanese histories credit the Rape of Nanking as actually happening? How long will it be before the PRC recognizes that Jiang Jieshi actually fought the Japanese and not them?

History, at least of the nation-state, is nothing but the Big Lie made into an art form. The task of the historian is to take a blunt axe to the Big Lie to expose the truth within it.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

The "dominoes" of Indochina were on the battle plan of Ho Chi Minh. What concerned Washington more were the Philippines and Japan.

As for Israel, some blame Emperor Julian for promising the restoration of ancient Jerusalem. He probably wanted to come off looking like another Cyrus.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Speaking of Israel, how many treatments of Palestinian nationalism treat Arafat and the PLO as representative of Palestinian public opinion? Or Hajj Amin Al-Husseini for that matter? Their actual status as either very weak in terms of such appeal or outright foreign proxies and/or foreign impositions (which Al-Husseini was by the most charitable reading) tends to be passed over even though it's directly relevant to why a peace in that scenario was never likely and isn't really going to be now.

This also applies to say, Russia and Ukraine, where Ukrainian nationalism was appealing to peasants who didn't know what a Ukraine was, and often glove in hand with some variant of foreign invaders. Which of course is a reason that Ukrainian independence wasn't going to work too well. Then there's the whole issue of the Soviet Borging of the Baltic States, which is generally glossed over in terms of appeasement and totalitarian expansion, when the Soviets actually gained all three working hand in hand with Hitler, at a time when they were going so far as to try to become a full-fledged Axis Power.

Then we have an even more complicated issue as to whether or not the US Constitution was a legal document or a thinly veiled coup d'etat that usurped the Articles of Confederation without officially stating it was this. As well as for that matter the general US pattern of glossing over the USA's Indian Wars east of the Missisippi, the US Marine Corps serving as the USA's equivalent of the Colonial Army in Caribbean Islands and Central America, and of course the Soviet Empire of the Cold War being the fault of the USA for failing to realize that Soviet collapse was never going to be a problem. The scale of Soviet victory was the problem. The USA brought the global Soviet Empire on itself in an uncharitable reading of Lend-Lease, while the Soviets brought the Nazis on themselves with an uncharitable reading of Rapallo and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Case in point:

(http://underlankers.livejournal.com/pics/catalog/424/1678)

One of the most important factors in bringing about WWII, and there are images of things like this that show what the totalitarians would have been able to do had the Nazis a fraction of the Soviet willingness to manipulate alien ideologies to their own ends:



But of course allying with the Nazis was only done by the Bush family. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and its associated byproducts never happened:



In short, politically correct history isn't just for conservatives who want to pretend that the Civil Rights movement never happened and Communism infects everything, especially out precious bodily fluids.

[devil-ad-vocate.livejournal.com]

I spent a few hours at the Officer's Club at Ft. Myers in 1970, listening to inebriated colonels and generals talking about Vietnam. The consensus then - as it had been for at least the previous two years - was "it's a shitty little war, but it's the only one we've got."

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

The military depend on combat action in order to promote officers. Less combat leads to fewer promotions.

[rimpala.livejournal.com]

I don't know the whole story, but every time I see modern Vietnam I see a peaceful country that mostly minds it's own business, who's biggest problems are directly related to our involvement with it: destruction from agent orange and fatalities related to landmines.

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

This proves that all people are ignorant.

[luvdovz.livejournal.com]

How kind of you to include yourself too.

[dwer.livejournal.com]

false statement is false.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

No. It only proves that Liquorice BItch is ignorant. (On the other hand, it appears to be a hack.)

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

That's a lame and lazy logic. But you already knew that.

[rimpala.livejournal.com]

Not sure if ignorant, or if just trolling

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Many thanks to the student who noticed the mistake about Diem's sister in-law. Either nobody else picked up on it or those who did were too shy to say anything.