The War That Never Ends: New Perspectives on the Vietnam War

5. Ho Chi Minh, Confucianism, and Marxism

5 Ho Chi Minh, Confucianism, and Marxism Robert K. Brigham The Vietnam War ended thirtyyears ago, yet a number ofimportant questions remain unanswered. Not the least of these is how Vietnam's Communist Party won peasants to its cause. To many Western observers, the war was all about winning the hearts and minds ofVietnam's rural poor.1 These same scholars and journalists claim that Vietnamese traditions dictated that whoever had the mandate of heaven-legitimacy in the eyes of the people-would win the contest for political control of Vietnam. This mandate could not be demanded; leaders earned it through practice ofthe great Confucian virtues-honesty, simplicity, obedience, and duty. Some Western scholars suggest that the Party used the personality of Ho Chi Minh, the president of Vietnam's Communist Party, to cement the bond between peasants and the revolution.2 They argue that Ho embodied many of the traditional Confucian virtues and that this led peasants to follow his revolutionary movement. Since Vietnam had a hierarchical , patriarchal political tradition, peasants looked for a political leader who behaved in the proper way and who took the correct position. This theory ofthe Party's success utilizes a cultural explanation for the war: the Communists won because they understood the essence of Vietnamese national character better than their adversaries in Saigon did. The Party earned the right to claim the loyalty ofVietnam's peasants through proper conduct and a natural understanding of what it truly meant to be Viet105 106 Robert K. Brigham Ho Chi Minh at Communist Party Congress, 1954. Courtesy ofthe Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech University, Douglas Pike Photograph Collection. namese. Following this logic, the mandate ofheaven belonged to Ho Chi Minh and his followers. The French sociologist Paul Mus perhaps best explains the mandate ofheaven. He concludes that this idea is a Sino-Vietnamese concept with strong ties to Confucianism. According to Mus, chinh nghia [the just cause] was the collective view of what was right and proper. It was the body of public opinion that determined whether your cause had merit. A government that followed chinh nghia-and, thus, gained acceptance Ho Chi Minh, Confucianism, and Marxism 107 by collective will-could legitimately claim the devotion of the people and govern their behavior. It was impossible, for instance, to simply claim the mandate of heaven. The will of the people was not something that could be demanded or forced. It had to come from the alchemy ofsocial, supernatural, and psychological factors that had helped shape collective opinion in Vietnam's countryside for hundreds ofyears. Mus wrote, "The major premise presents itself neither as a circle of things nor of persons but as the balanced total of opinions professed on the things that matter by the persons who count in the eyes of the community as a whole:'3 In other words, confirmation of chinh nghia brought moral and ideological power that transcended all individual power. For Mus and others, because Ho Chi Minh embodied the correct way, peasants willingly followed him. Through his own actions, Ho brought to the Party the power to claim the peasants' loyalty. As the prizewinning journalist Frances FitzGerald, a follower of Mus, writes, "To many Vietnamese ... Ho Chi Minh was perfectly sincere, since he always acted in the correct manner, no matter what it cost him. And it was the very consistency ofhis performance that gave them confidence that he would carry the revolution out in the manner he indicated:'4 According to Mus, Ho used Vietnam's long-standing Confucian practices to condition peasants to accept the Party's discipline, much like a son accepted his father's rule.5 This view is also shared by one ofthe leading Vietnamese intellectuals ofthe twentieth century, Nguyen Khac Vien. In one ofhis most important works, an essay titled "Confucianism and Marxism;' Vien suggests: "For ten centuries Confucianism was the intellectual and ideological backbone ofVietnam:' He also argues that Confucianism was even more influential in shaping Vietnam's modern revolution than Marxism's "law ofhistorical developmenf'6 He consistently maintains that the similarities between Confucianism and Marxism were profound. Both stressed social order, both believed that there were laws governing historical forces, and both emphasized duty and obligation to a society over individual rights. Vien concludes that these similarities made it easy for the vanguard ofthe anticolonial movement to accept Marxism. In his view, once the revolution focused squarely on Vietnamese political...