From: Dickey, Michael F (michael_f_dickey@groton.pfizer.com)
Date: Thu Aug 22 2002 - 14:24:07 MDT
Samantha said:
> Although I will admit I did not witness it myself, I'm told the Vietnam
> War was considerably murkier than our present one on both counts. In
> addition, if and when we can successfully shift away from a
> petroleum-based economy, our enemies will abruptly have much less power;
> there was no equivalent (widely known) hope for a solution through
> technology in Vietnam.
I was there in that (although quite young) and while Vietnam was
a senseless waste of lives, it was in no wise as murky as the
"war on terror" and it did not generate the extremely dangerous
laws eroding our freedoms that we are seeing now. It borders on
historical revisionism to claim otherwise and it is quite
dangerous to miss the crucial differences.
-----------------------------
I wonder if you would consider Vietnam an equally senseless waste of lives
had the people of South Vietnam ultimately triumphed over the communist
north invaders. Unfortunately they did not, no thanks to the US governments
outright abandonent of souteast asia. Over 1 million people were killed in
the six months following the US withdrawel (more than was killed in the
entire conflict, and this was after the war was 'over') The then freed
soviet arsenal was used to supply the Khmere rouge the ability to overthrow
the pro-western lon nol, and soon to follow was the death of 3 million
cambodians. I can hardly see how fighting to prevent such an event was a
'waste of lives'
An interesting article in New York times by a Vietnamese former anti-war
activist from the vietnam era (he later moved back to vietnam with the
success of the communist north to help 'rebuild' vietnam under this new
idealogy. He was subsequently jailed for objecting to siezing all private
property) Now regrets his support of the communist north.
Of note
"While I was in jail, Mai Chi Tho, a member of the Central Committee of the
Communist Party, addressed a selected group of political prisoners. He told
us: "Ho Chi Minh may have been an evil man; Nixon may have been a great man.
The Americans may have had the just cause; we may not have had the just
cause. But we won and the Americans were defeated because we convinced the
people that Ho Chi Minh is the great man, that Nixon is a murderer and the
Americans are the invaders." He concluded that "the key factor is how to
control people and their opinions. Only Marxism-Leninism can do that. None
of you ever see resistance to the Communist regime, so don't think about it.
Forget it. Between you - the bright intellectuals - and me, I tell you the
truth.""
A Lament for Vietnam
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/asia/032981vietnam-mag.html
By DOAN VAN TOAI
When the Communists took over North Vietnam in 1954, a million refugees fled
to the South. I personally heard stories of their incredible suffering. But,
along with other South Vietnamese, I refused to believe them. A generation
later, I could not believe Solzhenitsyn's book "The Gulag Archipelago,"
either. I dismissed it as anti-Communist propaganda. But by 1979, I had
published my own book, "The Vietnamese Gulag." Can those who have suffered
the horror of Communism ever convince those who have not experienced it?
>From 1945, when I was born in the village of Caivon in Vinh Long province,
100 miles south of Saigon, until I left Vietnam in May 1978, I never enjoyed
peace. My family's house was burned three times in the war against the
French. To escape the fighting, my parents moved from one village to another
throughout my youth. Like the majority of Vietnamese patriots, they joined
the resistance forces fighting the French. As I grew up, I myself saw how
the peasants were oppressed by the local officials of the successive Saigon
regimes, how they were victimized by the French bombardments. I learned the
history of my country's thousand-year struggle against Chinese occupation
and its century-long effort against Western domination. With this
background, my compatriots and I grew up with a hatred of foreign
intervention.
When the students at Saigon University elected me vice president of the
Saigon Student Union in 1969 and 1970, I participated in the different peace
efforts, leading student demonstrations against the Thieu regime and against
American involvement. I published a magazine called Self-Determination, and
traveled in January 1971 to California to give antiwar lectures at Berkeley
and Stanford. For my activities, I was arrested and jailed many times by the
Thieu Government.
During that period, I believed that I was fulfilling my commitment to peace
and the independence of my country. I had faith, too, in the program of the
National Liberation Front (N.L.F.), which led the revolutionary resistance
in South Vietnam. I hated Saigon's rulers, men like Gen. Nguyen Van Thieu,
Gen. Nguyen Cao Ky, Gen. Dang Van Quang - former soldiers of the French
colonial army. These were the men whom the French had recruited in the
1940's to help destroy the Vietnamese resistance. They had risen over the
years to become leaders themselves, but they commanded no respect from the
people. Because of their lack of popular support, they were predisposed to
rely on foreign forces.
As a student leader, I felt I had to pursue the aspiration of the Vietnamese
people for democracy, freedom and peace. Naively, I believed that the Hanoi
regime at least had the virtue of being Vietnamese, while the Americans were
foreign invaders like the French before them. Like others in the South
Vietnamese opposition movements, I believed that our Communist compatriots
in the North would be more amenable to compromise and easier to work with
than the Americans. Moreover, I was hypnotized by the personal sacrifices
and devotion the Communist leaders had demonstrated. Ton Duc Thang, former
President of North Vietnam, for example, had been imprisoned for 17 years in
a French jail. I was hypnotized also by the political programs advocated by
the N.L.F., which included a domestic policy of national reconciliation,
without risk of reprisal, and a foreign policy of nonalignment. Finally, I
was influenced by progressive movements throughout the world and by the most
prestigious intellectuals in the West. My impression was that during the
1960's and early 70's the leaders of the American peace movement shared my
convictions.
These convictions endured through the signing of the 1973 Paris peace
accords and the subsequent collapse of the South Vietnamese Government two
years later. When liberation was imminent, I was the one who told friends
and relatives not to flee. "Why do you want to leave?" I asked. "Why are you
afraid of the Communists?" I accepted the prospect of enduring hardships to
rebuild my country and I decided to stay in Vietnam and continue working as
a branch manager at a Saigon bank, where I had been for more than four
years, writing secret reports about the economic situation in South Vietnam
for the N.L.F. (After leaving the university, I had not been drafted by the
South Vietnamese Government because I was the only son in my family. And I
had not joined the Vietcong because the N.L.F. felt I could serve a more
useful role providing financial reports from the bank.)
Several days after Saigon fell, the Provisional Revolutionary Government,
formed by the N.L.F., asked me to join the finance committee, a group of
intellectuals whose job it was to advise the Government on matters of
economic policy. I complied willingly, taking a pay cut of 90 percent. My
first assignment was to help draw up a plan for confiscating all the private
property in South Vietnam. Shocked, I proposed that we should expropriate
only the property of those who had cooperated with the former regime and
those who had used the war to become rich, and that we distribute it in some
fashion to the poor and to the victims of the war, Communist and
non-Communist alike. My proposals, of course, were rejected. I was naive
enough to think that the local cadres were mistaken, that they misunderstood
the good intentions of the Communist Party leaders. I had many fights with
them, believing as I did Hanoi's previous statement that "the situation in
the South is very special and different from that of North Vietnam." A few
months before the liberation of Saigon, Le Duan, the First Secretary of the
Communist Party, had said, "The South needs its own policy."
In the end, I could not obey the order to help arrange the confiscation of
all private property, a plan that was subsequently carried out. Such a
scheme had nothing to do with fulfilling the aspirations of the South
Vietnamese, and it went against my conscience. I decided to resign. But no
one resigns in a Communist regime. The implication of nonconformity is
intolerable to Communists. When I submitted my resignation, the chief of the
finance committee warned me that my action "would only serve as propaganda
to excite the people; here we never do it that way." Several days later,
while I was attending a concert at the great National Theater (formerly the
National Assembly Hall, which my fellow students and I had occupied so many
times under the Thieu regime), I was arrested. No charges were made, no
reasons were given. After the fall of Saigon, many progressive intellectuals
and former antiwar-movement leaders believed that the new Vietnamese regime
would bring internal democracy and freedom from foreign domination. They
believed that the new regime would pursue the best interests of the people,
honoring its promise to carry out a policy of national reconciliation
without fear of reprisal. Far from adhering to their promises, the
Vietnamese rulers have arrested hundreds of thousands of individuals - not
only those who had cooperated with the Thieu regime but even those who had
not, including religious leaders and former members of the N.L.F.
Vietnam today is a country without any law other than the arbitrary
directives of those in power. There is no civil code. Individuals are
imprisoned without charges and without trial. Once in jail, prisoners are
taught that their behavior, attitude and "good will" are the key factors in
determining when they may be released -whatever crimes they may have
committed. As a consequence, prisoners often obey the guards blindly, hoping
for an early release. In fact, they never know when they may be released -
or when their sentences may be extended. How many political prisoners are
there in Vietnam today? And how many of them have died in prisons during the
first six years of Communist rule? Nobody can know the exact numbers. The
United States Department of State has said there are from 150,000 to 200,000
prisoners; Vietnamese refugees estimate about one mil lion. Hoang Huu Quynh,
an intellectu-al, a graduate of Moscow University, who served as a director
of a technical school in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), recently
defected to France during his Governmentsponsored tour of European
countries. He told the French press: "There are at least 700,000 prisoners
in Vietnam today." Another witness, Nguyen Cong Hoan, a former member of the
reunified National Assembly, which was elected in 1976, who escaped by boat
in 1978, said that he himself knew "about 300 cases of executions" in his
own province of Phu Yen. In 1977, officials in Hanoi insisted that only
50,000 people, who posed the greatest threat to national security, had been
arrested. But Prime Minister Pham Van Dong said, in the French magazine
Paris Match, on Sept. 22, 1978, "In over three years, I released more than
one million prisoners from the camps." One wonders how it is possible to
release more than a million after having arrested only 50,000.
When I was arrested, I was thrown into a three-foot-by-six-foot cell with my
left hand chained to my right foot and my right hand chained to my left
foot. My food was rice mixed with sand. When I complained about the sand,
the guards explained that sand is added to the rice to remind prisoners of
their crimes. I discovered that pouring water in the rice bowl would make
the sand separate from the rice and sink to the bottom. But the water ration
was only one liter a day for drinking and bathing, and I had to husband it
carefully.
After two months in solitary confinement, I was transferred to a collective
cell, a room 15 feet wide and 25 feet long, where at different times
anywhere from 40 to 100 prisoners were crushed together. Here we had to take
turns lying down to sleep, and most of the younger, stronger prisoners slept
sitting up. In the sweltering heat, we also took turns snatching a few
breaths of fresh air in front of the narrow opening that was the cell's only
window. Every day I watched my friends die at my feet.
In March 1976, when a group of Western reporters visited my prison, the
Communist officials moved out all the prisoners and substituted North
Vietnamese soldiers. In front of the prisons, one sees no barbed wire, no
watchtowers, only a few policemen and a large sign above the entrance that
proclaims Ho Chi Minh's best-known slogan: "Nothing Is More Precious Than
Liberty and Independence." Only those detained inside and those who guard
them know what kind of place is hidden behind that sign. And every prisoner
knows that if he is suspected of planning to escape, his fellow inmates and
relatives at home will be punished rather than he himself.
We will never know precisely the number of dead prisoners, but we do know
about the deaths of many well-known prisoners who, in the past, never
cooperated with President Thieu or the Americans: for example, Thich Thien
Minh, the strategist of all the Buddhist peace movements in Saigon, an
antiwar activist who was sentenced to 10 years in jail by the Thieu regime,
then released after an outpouring of protest from Vietnamese and antiwar
protesters around the world. Thien Minh died in Ham Tan prison after six
months of detention in 1979. Another silent death was that of the lawyer
Tran Van Tuyen, a leader of the opposition bloc in the Saigon Assembly under
President Thieu. This well-known activist died in Communist hands in 1976,
although as late as April 1977, Prime Minister Pham Van Dong was telling
French reporters that Tuyen was alive and well in a re-education camp. One
of the greatest losses has been that of the famous Vietnamese philosopher Ho
Huu Tuong. Tuong, a classmate of Jean-Paul Sartre's in Paris in the 1930's,
was perhaps the leading intellectual in South Vietnam. He died in Ham Tan
prison on June 26, 1980. These men were arrested, along with many others
among the most prominent and respected South Vietnamese, in order to
pre-empt any possible opposition to the Communists.
Some American supporters of Hanoi have ignored or rationalized these deaths,
as they have the countless other tragedies that have befallen Vietnam since
1975. It is more than likely that they will continue to maintain their
silence in order to avoid the profound disillusionment that accepting the
truth about Vietnam means for them. Yet if liberty and democracy are worth
struggling for in the Philippines, in Chile, in South Korea or in South
Africa, they are no less worth defending in Communist countries like
Vietnam. Everyone remembers the numerous demonstrations protesting United
States involvement in Vietnam and the war crimes of the Thieu regime. But
some of those people who were then so passionately committed to democratic
principles and human rights have developed a strange indifference now that
these same principles are under assault in Communist Vietnam. For example,
one antiwar activist, William Kunstler, refused to sign a May 1979 open
letter to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in which many former antiwar
activists, including Joan Baez, protested Hanoi's violations of human
rights. Kunstler said, "I don't believe in criticizing socialist governments
publicly, even if there are human-rights violations," and, "The entire Baez
campaign may be a C.I.A. plot." This statement reminds me of the argument
used by the Thieu regime to suppress opposition: "The peace movements and
the opposition activists are all the Communists' lackeys."
There are other illusions about the current regime in Vietnam about which
people should be disabused. Many people believed that Ho Chi Minh was
primarily a nationalist and that the Vietnamese Communists were and are
independent of the Soviet Union. I believed the same before they took over
South Vietnam. But portraits of Soviet leaders now adorn public buildings,
schools and administrative offices throughout "independent Vietnam." In
contrast, one never saw pictures of American leaders even during the
so-called puppet regime of President Thieu. The degree of subordination the
present Government feels toward its Soviet patron is suggested by a famous
poem by the well-known Vietnamese poet To Huu, a member of the Politburo and
president of the Communist Party Committee of Culture. Here we have an
opportunity to listen to a high-ranking Vietnamese weep on the occasion of
Stalin's death: Oh, Stalin! Oh, Stalin! The love I bear my father, my
mother, my wife, myself It's nothing beside the love I bear you, Oh, Stalin!
Oh, Stalin! What remains of the earth and of the sky! Now that you are dead.
It may seem incredible that such a poem could have been written in Vietnam,
which is known for the strength of its family traditions and its feeling for
filial piety. Yet this poem occupied a prominent place in a major anthology
of contemporary Vietnamese poetry recently published in Hanoi.
Moreover, Le Duan, First Secretary of the Communist Party, said in his
political report to the reunified National Assembly in 1976: "The Vietnamese
revolution is to fulfill the internationalist duty and the international
obligation," and to do so, in the words of the 1971 party platform, "under
the leadership of the Soviet Union." The glorification of Soviet life is, in
fact, a major goal of Communist Vietnam's censorship policy.
Immediately after the fall of Saigon, the Government closed all bookshops
and theaters. All books published under the former regimes were confiscated
or burned. Cultural literature was not exempt, including translations of
Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Dale Carnegie. Margaret Mitchell's "Gone
With the Wind" was on the list of decadent literature as well. The new
regime replaced such books with literature designed to indoctrinate children
and adults with the idea that the "Soviet Union is a paradise of the
socialist world."
Another argument made at times by Western apologists has to do with freedom
of religion in Vietnam. One article in the new Constitution of Vietnam,
adopted this year, declares that "the regime respects the liberty of the
believers and also the liberty of the nonbelievers." In regard to this
article, Le Duan has repeatedly proclaimed: "Our present regime is a million
times more democratic than any other in the world." The reality, though, is
suggested by an incident involving the desecration of a Buddhist pagoda, in
which a nude woman, on orders from the Government, entered the pagoda during
a worship service. When Thich Man Giac, a prominent Buddhist leader,
protested, the Government used the opportunity to try to discredit the
Buddhists as enemies of democracy -specifically, of the freedom to
disbelieve. Thich Man Giac, who had served as liaison between the Buddhists
and the Communist Government, escaped Vietnam by boat in 1977 and is now
living in Los Angeles. All of those who supported the N.L.F. in its struggle
should be aware of how they were betrayed and deceived. When Harrison
Salisbury of The New York Times visited Hanoi in December 1966, the leaders
in Hanoi told him: "The direction of the struggle in the South is by the
South and not by the North." Pham Van Dong, Prime Minister, said to
Salisbury: "No one in the North had this stupid, criminal idea in mind" that
the North wanted to annex the South.
Yet in a victory-day celebration speech made on May 19, 1975, Le Duan said,
"Our party is the unique and single leader that organized, controlled and
governed the entire struggle of the Vietnamese people from the first day of
the revolution." In his political report to the reunified National Assembly
in Hanoi on June 26, 1976, Le Duan said: "The strategic task of the
revolution in our country in the new stage is to achieve the reunification
of our homeland and to take the whole country rapidly, vigorously and
steadily to socialism, and Communism."
In 1976, the Provisional Revolutionary Government formed by the N.L.F. was
abolished, and South and North Vietnam were reunified under Commu-nist rule.
Today, among 17 members of the Politburo and 134 members of the Central
Committee of the Vietnamese Communist Party, not a single one is from the
N.L.F. (there are several members who had been North Vietnam Communist Party
representatives with the N.L.F.). Even Nguyen Huu Tho, former chairman of
the N.L.F., holds only the post of acting President of State, a ceremonial
position that involves greeting visitors and participating in festivals. But
his position will be abolished under the new Constitution.
Listen to Truong Nhu Tang, 57 years old, a founder of the N.L.F., former
Justice Minister of the Provisional Revolutionary Government, more recently
one of the boat people. Tang escaped in November 1979 and is now living in
Paris. He told reporters of his experience in a news conference in Paris in
June 1980. Twelve years earlier, he said, when he had been jailed by the
Thieu regime for his Communist activities, his father came to visit. "Why,"
he asked Tang, "have you abandoned everything - a good job, a rich family -
to join the Communists? Don't you know that the Communists will betray you
and persecute you, and when you finally understand, it will be too late to
wake up?" Tang, an intellectual, answered his father: "You would do better
to keep quiet and accept the sacrifice of one of your sons for democracy and
our country's independence. ..."
After the Tet offensive in 1968, Tang was exchanged for three American
colonels who had been prisoners of war held by the Vietcong; then he
vanished into the jungle with the N.L.F. He had visited many Communist and
third-world countries on behalf of the N.L.F. during the war. Tang said in
his news conference: "I was well aware that the N.L.F. was a
Communist-dominated national united front and I was naive enough to believe
that Ho Chi Minh and his party would place national interests above ideology
and would place the interest of the Vietnamese people above the party's. But
the people and I were wrong."
Truong Nhu Tang told of his own knowledge of the way Communist ruling
circles operate: "The Communists are expert in the arts of seduction and
will go to any length to woo you over to their side, as long as they don't
control the Government. But once they are in power they suddenly become
harsh, ungrateful, cynical and brutal." Tang summarized current conditions
in Vietnam: "The family is divided, society is divided, even the party is
divided."
Looking back now on the Vietnam war, I feel nothing but sorrow for my own
naivete in believing that the Communists were revolutionaries worthy of
support. In fact, they betrayed the Vietnamese people and deceived
progressives throughout the world. The responsibility for the tragedies that
have engulfed my compatriots is mine. And now I can only bear witness to
this truth so that all former supporters of the Vietcong may share their
responsibility with me.
While I was in jail, Mai Chi Tho, a member of the Central Committee of the
Communist Party, addressed a selected group of political prisoners. He told
us: "Ho Chi Minh may have been an evil man; Nixon may have been a great man.
The Americans may have had the just cause; we may not have had the just
cause. But we won and the Americans were defeated because we convinced the
people that Ho Chi Minh is the great man, that Nixon is a murderer and the
Americans are the invaders." He concluded that "the key factor is how to
control people and their opinions. Only Marxism-Leninism can do that. None
of you ever see resistance to the Communist regime, so don't think about it.
Forget it. Between you - the bright intellectuals - and me, I tell you the
truth."
And he did tell us the truth. Since 1978, the Vietnamese Communists have
occupied Laos, invaded Cambodia and attacked Thailand, while the Soviet
Union has invaded Afghanistan. In each of these depredations, the Communists
have portrayed themselves, incredibly, as liberators, saviors and bulwarks
against foreign aggression. And each time, world opinion has remained
relatively quiescent.
But in Vietnam, people often remark: "Don't believe what the Communists say,
look instead at what they have done." One South Vietnamese Communist, Nguyen
Van Tang, who was detained 15 years by the French, eight years by Diem, six
years by Thieu, and who is still in jail today, this time in a Communist
prison, told me: "In order to understand the Communists, one must first live
under a Communist regime." One rainy evening in Saigon's Le Van Duyet
prison, he told me: "My dream now is not to be released; it is not to see my
family. My dream is that I could be back in a French prison 30 years ago."
This is the one wish of a 60-year-old man who has spent his entire adult
life in and out of prison fighting for the freedom and the independence of
his country. At this moment, he may already have died in his cell or have
been executed by the new rulers.
The Vietnamese people wish to achieve the real revolution; they do not want
Communism. The measure of popular hatred for the Communists is that
thousands of Vietnamese have abandoned their historical attachment to the
land. Under French colonial domination, throughout the long war years, even
during the catastrophic famine of 1945 when two million starved to death,
Vietnamese simply did not willingly leave their homeland - the land of their
ancestors' graves. The recent outpouring of refugees is a direct result of
the terror of the present regime. Listen to another refugee, Nguyen Cong
Hoan, former N.L.F. agent and member of the new unified Assembly elected in
1976: "This current regime is the most inhuman and oppressive (Vietnam) has
ever known." Hoan escaped by boat in 1977, after abandoning his position in
the Communist Assembly. "The Assembly," he declared, "is a puppet, the
members know only how to say yes, never how to say no."
Among the boat people who survived, including those who were raped by
pirates and those who suffered in the refugee camps, nobody regrets his
escape from the present regime. I am confident that the truth about Vietnam
will eventually emerge. It is already available to those who wish to know
it. As Solzhenitsyn has said, "Truth weighs as heavy as the world." And
Vietnam is a lesson in truth.
DOAN VAN TOAI IS CURRENTLY WORKING ON A BOOK ABOUT VIETNAM CALLED "NEITHER
PEACE NOR HONOR."
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