Cauldron of Resistance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and 1950s Southern Vietnam

1. Anticolonialism in Vietnam’s Wild South

Chapter 1 Anticolonialism in Vietnam’s Wild South A group of rebel forces drawn from the millenarian Buddhist organization ,Buu Son Ky Huong,was among the last holdouts against France’s colonizing army in the Mekong Delta.The organization appeared in the delta in the 1840s and quickly grew in popularity as its charismatic leader Doan Minh Huyen offered healing amulets amidst the latest in a series of devastating cholera epidemics that swept through the swampy terrain over the course of the nineteenth century.Buu Son Ky Huong doctrine represented an amalgamation of Vietnamese and Khmer practices,magical incantations, and folk readings of Buddhist scriptures. It attracted adherents from southernVietnam ’s diverse communities and promised to inoculate them against foreign conquest and natural calamities alike. In the early 1860s, Buu Son Ky Huong followers joined a hodgepodge of other local resistance forces to wage guerrilla war against colonizing forces.As the French tightened their stranglehold on Saigon, Buu Son Ky Huong rebels retreated into the dark, dense, boggy jungles surrounding the Mekong River where they managed to evade French authorities for another six years.1 The prominent role Buu Son Ky Huong rebels played in resisting French colonization, and the challenge France faced as it sought to subdue them, stemmed from southern Vietnam’s frontier character, wild in both 14 Chapter 1 human and geographic terms.The Mekong Delta had for centuries been marked by geographic, economic, social, ethnic, and cultural heterodoxies so rich that one scholar has deemed it “the least coherent territory in the world.”2 Between the 1500s and the mid-1800s, when France imposed colonial rule,the region experienced a layered settlement pattern that brought together a range of diverse peoples, including Khmer, Chinese,Vietnamese, and a number of ethnic minorities. Successive waves of human migration contributed to the fluid and overlapping nature of identities that came to define southern Vietnam.3 Throughout the precolonial era, the lack of any powerful centralized government, a plethora of opportunities for trade and commerce with the outside world, and the relatively weak influence of rigidly hierarchical Confucian philosophy encouraged an individualistic pioneer spirit amongst southernVietnam’s diverse population. The heterogeneous, entrepreneurial character of southern society was only reinforced by the territory’s unique geography. Its stark transitions from coastal plains to mountain highlands and the mazelike waterways of the Mekong Delta facilitated the emergence of distinct local communities with their own hierarchies and traditions, sometimes dominated by figures unaffiliated with the state. Despite the presence of a strong, often oppressive colonial administration from 1867 to 1945, such local power bases remained a hallmark of southern society throughout the colonial era. By the end of the SecondWorldWar the wild south responded to the dislocations caused by French colonial rule and Japanese occupation by balkanizing into competing armed administrative units.4 Building on southern Vietnam’s existing tradition of syncretic Buddhism and on the region’s Chinese-influenced practices of organizing politically via secret societies, several millenarian Buddhist organizations like the Buu Son Ky Huong that sought to alleviate the social, spiritual, and economic dislocations wrought by French colonialism gained strength in the early colonial era. Between the 1920s and 1940s, while nationalists in northern and central Vietnam developed Western-influenced anticolonial organizations such as Ho Chi Minh’s Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) and theVietnamese Nationalist Party (Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang, orVNQDD ),millenarian groups took root as the south’s most powerful agents of anticolonialism.Thus, in the complex and often violent anticolonial politics of Vietnam’s wild south, where so much of the French and American wars would play out, the Cao Dai, Hoa Hao, and Binh Xuyen politicoreligious organizations were among the most important actors.Their growing popular support and control of as much as a third of the territory of Anticolonialism in Vietnam’s Wild South 15 the south posed profound challenges to the efforts of the French, the Japanese , Ho Chi Minh’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and eventually the American-backed government of Ngo Dinh Diem to bring southernVietnam under centralized control. Whether for the French colonial state or its postcolonial successors, the wild south was not an easy place to govern. Indeed civil war—with the Cao Dai, Hoa Hao, and Binh Xuyen at its center—was just as apt a descriptor as colonial war or Cold War for the condition of southernVietnam in the 1940s and 1950s.5 The Emergence of...