Imagined Ancestries of Vietnamese Communism: Ton Duc Thang and the Politics of History and Memory (review)

"Who controls the past, controls the future; who controls the present, controls the past." So wrote George Orwell in 1984, the chilling novel in which propagandists continually rewrite history in order to legitimize a brutally repressive political system. Scholars have remarked for years that Orwell's novel, published in 1949, was pretty close to the mark in describing the behavior of totalitarian governments, both rightist and leftist, across the twentieth century. Like Orwell's Big Brother, dictators from Chile to China readily understood the need to manipulate the past to bolster their frequently dubious claims to power.

In his stellar new book, Christoph Giebel examines how one poorly understood regime—the Communist government of Vietnam—wrote and rewrote history periodically after 1945 to serve its ever-shifting needs. More specifically, Giebel describes how Vietnamese politicians and scholars have narrated the life of a single individual, Ton Duc Thang, the president of Communist Vietnam from 1969 until his death in 1980. Imagined Ancestries of Vietnamese Communism: Ton Duc Thang and the Politics of History and Memory persuasively shows that propagandists found Ton's long life remarkably malleable as they repeatedly recast the Vietnamese past. Although the book aims partly to uncover the "real" Ton Duc Thang, Giebel asserts that his study is no mere biography. "Rather," Giebel writes (on p. xviii), the book "is also an investigation into the history of Vietnamese communism: how did the party think of itself and shape its self-identity, how did it portray itself—in concrete and symbolic ways—to the outside, and how did it explain that it had a legitimate claim to power?"

In answering these questions, Giebel has crafted a deeply researched, clearly written, and sharply argued book that demands the attention of scholars in multiple fields. Historians of Vietnam will be impressed not only by Giebel's deft blending of Vietnamese and French sources but also by his skill in opening a window onto the intellectual life of Vietnamese Communism. In addition, the book holds value as a methodological model for scholars interested in the complex relationship between history and memory. Especially notable in this regard is Giebel's willingness to reach beyond his sources to speculate about the connection between political motives and the manipulation of civic memory when "smoking gun" evidence is lacking (p. xxii). Rigid empiricists may find this practice objectionable, but most readers will surely credit Giebel for adroit use of his imagination to fill evidentiary gaps.

For scholars of the Cold War who are not specialists on Vietnam, the book is only slightly less successful. Giebel offers a striking case study into a question of great significance: How did Communist regimes justify their rule and explain the relationship between their national experiences and the transnational movement of which they were allegedly part? In the answer surely lies a key to understanding the robustness and longevity of Communist states. Unfortunately, Giebel leaves it to the reader to draw conclusions along these lines. For all its methodological boldness, the book is curiously timid about spelling out its larger implications. To what extent was the regime's manipulation of Ton Duc Thang's life representative of its more general (mis)use of history? How was the Vietnamese regime's recasting of Ton's life like or unlike the manipulation of history in other Communist states (or, for that matter, rightist or even democratic states)? Giebel provides little guidance.

Imagined Ancestries of Vietnamese Communism consists of three sections, each of which focuses on a particular way in which Communist authorities took liberties with Ton Duc Thang's biography. Part I explores how the regime told the story of Ton's alleged participation in the "Black Sea Mutiny," the 1919 rebellion that broke out aboard French warships supporting White armies against the Bolshevik revolution. Giebel demonstrates that Ton never served in the Black Sea but probably heard stories of the mutinies...