Counterculture Kaleidoscope: Musical and Cultural Perspectives on Late Sixties San Francisco

3. The Exotic Persona: Absorbing the Postcolonial Political Pill

Chapter Three The Exotic Persona Absorbing the Postcolonial Political Pill On September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh proclaimed Vietnam independent from its French colonizers. The French had ruled Indochina—including Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and the colonies of Tonkin, Annam, and Cochin China—for over ‹fty years, and, despite their ostensible agreement with the concept of freedom, the French were loathe to relinquish the ideological and practical fruits of colonialism. The French, however , were not alone in having a stake in the Indochinese peninsula. Historian George Herring explains that as one of the world’s main producers of natural rubber, oil, tin, tungsten , and rice, and as a home to numerous American naval bases, Southeast Asia, with Vietnam at its center, was a strategic linchpin in America’s economically driven policies as a growing superpower. So when French troops returned to Vietnam in 1950 in an effort to suppress Ho Chi Minh and the Vietminh’s nationalistic revolution, the United States supported France’s efforts, albeit quietly.1 America faced something of a bind: even in the midforties, President Roosevelt had realized that any overt allegiance to 52 colonialism would imperil economic power pursuits among colonized countries seeking independence through nationalistic movements. The dif‹culty with supporting nationalism in Vietnam, though, was the element of Communism. Ho Chi Minh’s Marxist ideology, Mao Tse-tung’s overthrow of Chiang Kai-shek in China in 1949, the increasing power of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union following World War II, and the possibility of control of Southeast Asia’s precious commodities shifting into non-Western, noncapitalist, and hence non- “democratic” hands, were clearly out of line with U.S. interests and political rhetoric. Few political historians deny that the anti-Communist mind-set in America had escalated to the point of serving as justi‹cation for demonizing any potential threats to America’s economic and political interests at home and abroad. Renowned Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis, in a fairly noncontroversial history of American strategies for “containing ” the Communist threat, explains that both conservative and liberal political administrations used this ability broadly to put down threats in the name of national security.2 Until June 1954, when the French granted independence to Vietnam, the United States covertly bore a signi‹cant portion of France’s war costs against the Vietminh while overtly supporting the new and tenuously U.S.-friendly South Vietnamese government with economic and technical assistance. After the French left, the United States took hold of the reins and spread Western propaganda across South Vietnam and pumped millions of dollars into South Vietnam’s economy (and American corporations) through imports of Western goods. Militarily, the United States also stepped up its in›uence by awarding huge weapons contracts and military budgets to increase the presence of American military supplies , advisors, and eventually soldiers in an increasingly resistant South Vietnam. In the early sixties, President John F. Kennedy was so forthright in his anti-Communist agenda and The Exotic Persona 53 desire to appear tough to the world that his foreign policy openly declared that the “walls of freedom” be patrolled and protected by actively containing Communism rather than waiting for it to come to American shores. At the very least, this preemptive stance translated into a massive buildup of nuclear weapons and missile technology and unparalleled amounts of money designated for nation-building in countries inclined toward capitalist-style democracy.3 The containment policy, which, as Gaddis points out, every president from Roosevelt to Reagan subscribed to in one way or another, was built on a disturbing ideological chassis born out of racism, arrogance, and ignorance. In Vietnam, containment not only underscored a new brand of imperialism that authorized America to do such things as indiscriminately decimate the Vietnamese countryside with herbicides and defoliants produced by American corporations like Dow Chemical, but it also ushered in a new brand of colonialism that ultimately sanctioned the murder of millions through a failure to distinguish between Vietcong and civilians.4 Being allied with a neoimperialist and neocolonialist approach to dealing with foreign countries, the containment policy also had implications that shaped the political, social, and cultural atmosphere of America. In general, anti-Communism mobilized the American populace against a shared enemy and upheld the primacy of the status quo over anything deemed “radical.”5 It was one side of a two-sided phenomenon, and that dialectic was built up...