Victorious Insurgencies: Four Rebellions that Shaped Our World

2. French Vietnam: A War of Illusions

2 French Vietnam A War of Illusions The Setting: French Vietnam Many Americans think of Vietnam primarily or solely as a place where American troops once fought. Some journalists and academics write about Vietnam as if that word refers to something that happened to Americans, or even as a series of events that unfolded inside the Beltway.1 But long before Americans arrived in Vietnam, the French were there, and their experience set the stage for everything that followed. Lying between China andAustralia, Vietnam and the other countries of Southeast Asia constitute the crossroads of the Pacific Basin and the Indian subcontinent. Many people, probably most, in this area have been and still are poor, but the region itself is potentially quite rich, with great quantities of rubber, petroleum, rice, metals, and much else. The compelling desire to possess these strategic resources eventually induced the Empire of Japan to attack Pearl Harbor. On the eve of World War II, in all Southeast Asia, only Thailand was independent. The American flag flew over the Philippines; the British had Burma, Malaya, and Singapore; the Dutch administered sprawling Indonesia (called then the Netherlands East Indies); and the French ruled, in varying degrees, over French Indochina, which included Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, the latter subdivided into Tonkin, Annam, and Cochin China. Within a year after World War II, the Philippines were independent, followed within a short time by all the European possessions in the region—except for French 70 ■ Victorious Insurgencies Indochina. Of the prewar colonial powers, only the French remained committed to retaining their vast empire and sustaining that commitment by armed force; it was a commitment they were to pursue from the steaming forests of Vietnam to the burning sands ofAlgeria. And because of this commitment, France became the first Western power to confront a Maoist-style revolutionary war. With an area of 127,000 square miles, Vietnam is the size of Finland , or of Missouri andArkansas combined. The country is long and narrow. Its northernmost point lies on the latitude of Miami and its southernmost point on the latitude of the Panama Canal. The northsouth axis of the country stretches more than one thousand miles, roughly the distance between Rome and Copenhagen, or Boston and Jacksonville. But Vietnam is very slender, 300 miles at its widest, 50 miles at its narrowest. The country is in effect two great deltas, that of the Red River around Hanoi and of the Mekong River around Saigon. Eighty percent of the population lives in these two areas. Hence the Vietnamese compare the geography of their country to two rice baskets on a shoulder pole. The great distance between north and south, made greater still by primitive communications, produced regional subcultures. And regionalism was reinforced by frequent internal warfare between two Vietnamese states, each based on one of the deltas, with their mutual boundary usually somewhere around the eighteenth parallel. For several centuries before the partition in 1954 (at the seventeenth parallel), one single Vietnamese state had controlled all the country’s territory for only about thirty years. “The political, psychological, moral and economic differences between the North and the South” constituted “a profound reality,” and therefore the division into North and South Vietnam (1954–75) was “normal, not exceptional.”2 Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution HannahArendt once observed that the dominant form of revolution in the twentieth century consisted of armed uprisings organized by relatively small groups of full-time revolutionaries.3 An instructive example of a minoritarian and elitist revolutionary movement, and the ability of such a movement to disguise its true nature, is provided by the Communist Party of Vietnam. French Vietnam ■ 71 A distinguished Indian historian of Western imperialism wrote that, in the first three decades of the twentieth century at least, French rule in Vietnam was as good as that in any colonial area in the world.4 It was the French themselves who fostered the indigenous revolutionary elite that formed a Communist party, fashioned an ideology of independence, attracted peasant support, and eventually expelled France from Vietnam. By the end of World War I the French had created , by means of state schools and religious academies, a sizable stratum of European-educated Vietnamese.And during that conflict, many Vietnamese served with the armies of France in Europe and learned much about the great outside world; they returned home to find conditions in their country very disillusioning...