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“There would have been no Communist China today if that country had not been a landless peasant society drained by absentee landlords, corrupt officials, and an inept government which did not deserve to survive.” (The Emergence of Malaysia. Ronald McKie. 205) The same could be said of Viet Nam.

Writing in 1963, Ronald McKie expresses his love of “Negro Jazz, not just because of its wonderful human virtuosity, but because it is the kind of music a man must try to like if he is to keep in touch with young people.” (The Emergence of Malaysia. Ronald McKie. 205)

The Genius of China: 3000 years of science, discovery, and invention by Robert Temple with an introduction by Joseph Needham. This book documents the fact that the Chinese invented the decimal system in mathematics, discovered the circulation system and so much more. The book was published in 1985 so it would be awhile before this information made into the mainstream of American teaching, if at all. “The first evidence of the proper use of decimals in Europe is found in a Spanish manuscript of 976 A.D., approximately 2,300 years later than the earliest Chinese evidence.” The Chinese first discovered “that the circulation of the blood in the body” two thousand years before the Europeans. The first magnetic compasses were an invention of the Chinese in the 4th century BC.

Following World War II peoples who had been ruled by the European powers for up to 500 years demanded their independence. When it was denied they revolted. The major opponent of independence was the United States. It had the economic, political and military power to support the colonial empires. It did so even if this meant supporting repressive and fascist governments. (John David Orme, Political Instability and American Foreign Policy: the middle options. 1-2) Asian and African colonies of European countries argued that they fought for European independence so they should receive independence. Also, since the Japanese defeated the Europeans in World War II, and the Japanese subsequently were defeated by the Americans, Asian countries should become independent.

Exhausted by the Indochina War the French stated that their contribution to the defense of Europe would be lacking if the war didn’t end. Thus, the Viet Minh planned military victories to enhance their position at Geneva. (Roger Hilsman. To Move a Nation. 100) Scheduled to begin April to resolve the Korean War. However, the topic quickly turned to Indochina. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 358) Did the Chinese and the Soviet Union pressure Ho Chi Minh to negotiate at Geneva? Nonetheless, the Saigon French adamantly opposed any “compromise that would recognize Hanoi’s authority over any part of Vietnam.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 363) Partition came up at the conference and all of the Vietnamese rejected it. However, this was the only way the anti-Vietminh could survive. Many hoped for US involvement to save them. The US did give public pronouncements that indicated a support for an independent, anti-communist Vietnam with no French control. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 364) The conference lasted from April 26, 1954 to July 21, 1954. It wasn’t until the Battle of Dien Bien Phu ended that the Geneva Conference dealt with it. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 369-370) The French representative refused to talk with the Vietminh representative. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 370) “The Communist powers at Geneva appeared solidly united. They seemed to know what they wanted, coordinated their tactics, and concealed the differences that in fact did exist among them.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 371-372) The Soviets and the Chinese accepted that controlling all of Indochina was not possible. The just wanted to end the war. It Chou-En-lai who “persuaded the Vietminh to totally withdraw from Laos and Cambodia. The Vietminh were disheartened that the Soviets and Chinese did not back them fully on their demands. The Vietminh delegates believed that, “the cease-fire demanded by the French as just a step toward the withdrawal of the Expeditionary Corps, to be followed by elections, which they were certain they would win, would then make them masters of the whole of Vietnam.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 372) “The demands raised by Foreign Minister Pham Van Dong at the beginning of the conference confirmed the impression that the Vietminh, confident that they would defeat the French, were not at all interested in a peace at the price of concession.” However, they were forced by the Soviets and the Chinese to “accept less than what they thought they should have obtained.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 373) “The anti-Communist Vietnamese authorities did not feel obliged to honor the pledge of the French at Geneva that all public institutions and services were to be handed over to the Hanoi regime in working order. The French government, however, did honor it, and subsequently paid Hanoi the sum of 265 million francs in reparations.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 419-420) “According to the Geneva Agreements, the country was to be reunited in 1956 by national elections to be held, in an undefined way, under the supervision of an International Control Commission (ICC), which was also to police execution of the truce terms, However, the ICC, composed of representatives of Canada, India, and Poland, proved itself unable to correct treaty violations by either side, and the reunification elections were never held. After signing the agreements calling for the partition and subsequent elections over the strong protests of the Bao Dai government, France withdrew from Vietnam and disavowed further responsibility. The South Vietnamese government, together with the United States, did not approve the accords. Both promised, however, not to use force to upset them. Both insisted that elections should be held under United Nations supervision.” While the North Vietnamese committed themselves to the Geneva Agreements Diem claimed they had military forces in the South which violated the Agreements. The North also tried to stop the almost one million refugees fleeing to the South. The North initiated terror campaigns “against traditional leadership elements.” (Bain 4) Communist Vietnamese agents left behind “by the departing Viet Minh also threatened to obstruct freedom of choice.” Senator Mike Mansfield detailed this in a report after visiting Vietnam and Laos in 1955. (Bain 4) He claimed the Viet Minh essentially had a “fifth column.” (Bain 5) Mansfield’s report that a possible further conflict would be a threat to world peace. (Bain 5) “In the years after partition, the governments of both the North and South consolidated their positions.” (Bain 5) Two parts to the Geneva Agreement 1. “implementation of the cease-fire and the regrouping of the French and Vietminh forces in their respective zones.” This was the only agreement signed. The line for the division of forces would be along the 17th parallel. Civilians would be allowed to move the area they desired. There would be no reprisals against former enemies and “a ban on the introduction of fresh troops, military personnel, arms, munitions, and military bases.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 378) 2. The so-called Final Declaration set out to arrange uniting the country. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 378-379) It was an obtuse document. One part, was when the elections would take place. Again, the wording was convoluted. Nevertheless, elections were to take place in July 1956. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 379) One argument frequently offered is that the United States never signed the Geneva Agreements and so, was not obligated to abide by them. Buttinger disagrees, arguing that no one else signed the agreements either. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 379) Diem protested vigorously that the Geneva Agreements handed “over to the Communist the entire North of the country and more than four provinces of the center.” In addition, the State of Vietnam, essential South Vietnam claimed the entire country for itself. Therefore, the Diem government rejected the Geneva Agreements. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 380) The conference allied for a future war by partitioning the country into opposite leaderships. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 382-383) After the Geneva Agreements and the Viet Minh victory at Dien Bien Phu American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles expressed the belief that a war would begin in two years. (Noam Chomsky. At War with Asia. 32. Op. Cit. Philippe Devillers and Jean Lacoutre, End of a War: Indochina, 1954. 142) The United States response the the Vietminh agreeing to concessions at the Geneva Conference was confusing. John Foster Dulles “wanted a settlement without concessions to the Vietminh, and it expected the French to give up control of Indochina yet continue the war. . . . (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 373) Washington agreed to the Geneva conference yet refused to cooperate in achieving its stated purpose; it accepted China’s presence but ignored its delegation; it promised military intervention but backed down when Britain and France refused to conclude an agreement that would have wrecked the conference before it ever opened. Washington even denied that intervention had ever been planned. Yet the threat of intervention was repeated firmly enough for French Foreign Minister Bidault to make it the cornerstone of his strategy at Geneva, only to have it destroyed when Dulles, on June 8, categorically declared that he did not intend to ask Congress to authorize U.S. intervention in Indochina. . . . . To top it all, Dulles continued to describe the search for a compromise at Geneva as appeasement although he had secretly become reconciled to a compromise based on partition.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 373-374) Dulles made an agreement with the British that the US would be allowed to “arm the non-Communist half of Vietnam and no elections were to be held as long as a Communist victory seemed a certainty.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 374-375) “In July [1954], at Geneva, the two independent nations of North and South Vietnam had come into being.” (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 1) “Vietnam regained full independence at the time of the Geneva Agreements of 1954, which ended France’s eight-year struggle to reassert colonial control. . . . Vietnam was provisionally divided along the seventeenth parallel. The North fell to the Communist-controlled government of the “Democratic Republic of Vietnam” (DRV), which had been organized in August 1945 by the Viet Minh, a Communist front movement led by Ho Chi Minh.” (Bain 3) The Viet Minh’s initial victory was brief, however, Nationalist elements strongly contested its authority, and the ensuing conflict enabled the French to quickly re-establish their rule in the south. By the end of 1946, the French forces had driven the DRV government from Hanoi into the mountain jungles. When they returned victoriously to Hanoi in 1954, the Viet Minh still called their government a “democratic republic” and claimed to invite non-Communist participation. But they frankly admitted their Communist orientation and eliminated most non-Communist leaders in a bloody purge.”(Bain 3) The French controlled southern Vietnam and in 1949 created a State of Vietnam ruled by anti-Communists with the former emperor Bao Dai as the leader. (Bain 3) “After the Geneva Agreements, however, Bao Dai was displaced through a plebiscite by his nationalist premier, Ngo Dinh Diem, and the “State of Vietnam” became the “Republic of Vietnam” with a president and an elected legislature. The governments of the North and the South each claimed to be the only legal government of all Vietnam.” (Bain 3-4) “According to the Geneva Agreements, the country was to be reunited in 1956 by national elections to be held, in an undefined way, under the supervision of an International Control Commission (ICC), which was also to police execution of the truce terms, However, the ICC, composed of representatives of Canada, India, and Poland, proved itself unable to correct treaty violations by either side, and the reunification elections were never held. After signing the agreements calling for the partition and subsequent elections over the strong protests of the Bao Dai government, France withdrew from Vietnam and disavowed further responsibility. The South Vietnamese government, together with the United States, did not approve the accords. Both promised, however, not to use force to upset them. Both insisted that elections should be held under United Nations supervision.” While the North Vietnamese committed themselves to the Geneva Agreements Diem claimed they had military forces in the South which violated the Agreements. The North also tried to stop the almost one million refugees fleeing to the South. The North initiated terror campaigns “against traditional leadership elements.” (Bain 4) Communist Vietnamese agents left behind “by the departing Viet Minh also threatened to obstruct freedom of choice.” Senator Mike Mansfield detailed this in a report after visiting Vietnam and Laos in 1955. (Bain 4) He claimed the Viet Minh essentially had a “fifth column.” (Bain 5) Mansfield’s report that a possible further conflict would be a threat to world peace. (Bain 5) “In the years after partition, the governments of both the North and South consolidated their positions.” (Bain 5) Two parts to the Geneva Agreement 1. “implementation of the cease-fire and the regrouping of the French and Vietminh forces in their respective zones.” This was the only agreement signed. The line for the division of forces would be along the 17th parallel. Civilians would be allowed to move the area they desired. There would be no reprisals against former enemies and “a ban on the introduction of fresh troops, military personnel, arms, munitions, and military bases.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 378) 2. The so-called Final Declaration set out to arrange uniting the country. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 378-379) It was an obtuse document. One part, was when the elections would take place. Again, the wording was convoluted. Nevertheless, elections were to take place in July 1956. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 379) One argument frequently offered is that the United States never signed the Geneva Agreements and so, was not obligated to abide by them. Buttinger disagrees, arguing that no one else signed the agreements either. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 379) Diem protested vigorously that the Geneva Agreements handed “over to the Communist the entire North of the country and more than four provinces of the center.” In addition, the State of Vietnam, essential South Vietnam claimed the entire country for itself. Therefore, the Diem government rejected the Geneva Agreements. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 380) The conference allied for a future war by partitioning the country into opposite leaderships. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 382-383) After the Geneva Agreements and the Viet Minh victory at Dien Bien Phu American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles expressed the belief that a war would begin in two years. (Noam Chomsky. At War with Asia. 32. Op. Cit. Philippe Devillers and Jean Lacoutre, End of a War: Indochina, 1954. 142) The United States response the the Vietminh agreeing to concessions at the Geneva Conference was confusing. John Foster Dulles “wanted a settlement without concessions to the Vietminh, and it expected the French to give up control of Indochina yet continue the war. . . . (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 373) Washington agreed to the Geneva conference yet refused to cooperate in achieving its stated purpose; it accepted China’s presence but ignored its delegation; it promised military intervention but backed down when Britain and France refused to conclude an agreement that would have wrecked the conference before it ever opened. Washington even denied that intervention had ever been planned. Yet the threat of intervention was repeated firmly enough for French Foreign Minister Bidault to make it the cornerstone of his strategy at Geneva, only to have it destroyed when Dulles, on June 8, categorically declared that he did not intend to ask Congress to authorize U.S. intervention in Indochina. . . . . To top it all, Dulles continued to describe the search for a compromise at Geneva as appeasement although he had secretly become reconciled to a compromise based on partition.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 373-374) Dulles made an agreement with the British that the US would be allowed to “arm the non-Communist half of Vietnam and no elections were to be held as long as a Communist victory seemed a certainty.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 374-375) Prior to Geneva there was a conference in Berlin where John Foster refused to “compromise” with the communists and “opposed any conference attended by Communist China.” This caused a rift between the US, France and Great Britain. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 365) Scheduled to begin April to resolved the Korean War. However, the topic quickly turned to Indochina. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 358) Did the Chinese and the Soviet Union pressure Ho Chi Minh to negotiate at Geneva? Nonetheless, the Saigon French adamantly opposed any “compromise that would recognize Hanoi’s authority over any part of Vietnam.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 363) Partition came up at the conference and all of the Vietnamese rejected it. However, this was the only way the anti-Vietminh could survive. Many hoped for US involvement to save them. The US did give public pronouncements that indicated a support for an independent, anti-communist Vietnam with no French control. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 364) As the Battle of Dien Bien Phu began the French sent General Paul Ely to the United States to ask for US aid to help the French “until the Geneva Conference had produced an acceptable settlement.” The French had lost interest in fighting the war. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 365) The conference lasted from April 26, 1954 to July 21, 1954. It wasn’t until the Battle of Dien Bien Phu ended that the Geneva Conference dealt with it. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 369-370) The French representative refused to talk with the Vietminh representative. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 370) “The Communist powers at Geneva appeared solidly united. They seemed to know what they wanted, coordinated their tactics, and concealed the differences that in fact did exist among them.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 371-372) The Soviets and the Chinese accepted that controlling all of Indochina was not possible. The just wanted to end the war. It Chou-En-lai who “persuaded the Vietminh to totally withdraw from Laos and Cambodia. The Vietminh were disheartened that the Soviets and Chinese did not back them fully on their demands. The Vietminh delegates believed that, “the cease-fire demanded by the French as just a step toward the withdrawal of the Expeditionary Corps, to be followed by elections, which they were certain they would win, would then make them masters of the whole of Vietnam.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 372) “The demands raised by Foreign Minister Pham Van Dong at the beginning of the conference confirmed the impression that the Vietminh, confident that they would defeat the French, were not at all interested in a peace at the price of concession.” However, they were forced by the Soviets and the Chinese to “accept less than what they thought they should have obtained.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 373) “The anti-Communist Vietnamese authorities did not feel obliged to honor the pledge of the French at Geneva that all public institutions and services were to be handed over to the Hanoi regime in working order. The French government, however, did honor it, and subsequently paid Hanoi the sum of 265 million francs in reparations.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 419-420) Geneva Conference 1954 In February of 1954, the Russians proposed that the French end the Indochina War without conditioning that upon the Chinese ending their aid to the Vietminh. (Randle 25) There were rumors that the French Premier, Mendes-France made an agreement with the Russians before the Conference. Randle finds that “baseless.” (Randle x) The Agreements were vague “at crucial points.” So claims of violations of the Accords are “meaningless.” Considering the many conflicting interests over Indochina having a firm agreement was difficult. Peace would not come about. (Randle x) The Russians sought a peaceful settlement of the Franco-Vietnamese War in 1953. They promoted a policy of “peaceful coexistence.” The Chinese told the French that they “would not oppose a solution to the Indochinese War that might entail Vietnam’s remaining with the French Union.” (Randle 4,18) Furthermore, the Russians proposed “a meeting of the Big Four foreign ministers.” Britain and France agreed. (Randle 18) The Americans were not so sure but “eventually agreed.” (Randle 19) At a meeting of Britain, France, the US, and the USSR. The conference took place in Bermuda. The Russians wanted the Chinese to be represented but the United States resisted. IndoChina was on the agenda. (Randle 20) The Geneva Accords of 1954 involved “participating powers” which were not the United States or South Vietnam. The seventeenth parallel was chosen as the dividing point between of the two “zones.” There “was and end to hostilities; the independence and neutrality of Laos and Cambodia; and the setting up of international machinery to supervise the implementation of the agreements - an International Control Commission (ICC) of India, Poland, and Canada reporting to the two co-chairmen, Great Britain and the Soviet Union.” The two zones should not interpret this set of events as a license to resume the war. The two zones also were not meant to be a division into two countries. Elections would take place under “international supervision” in 1956. (Roger Hilsman. To Move a Nation. 103) Significantly, there were not rules or provisions for the elections. In addition, Hilsman claims that the Poles obstructed and confused the actions of the ICC. (Roger Hilsman. To Move a Nation. 104)

Americans violently quarreled between capitalism and Socialism before World War I broke out in Europe in 1914. Ernest Freeberg wrote an excellent biography of Socialist Eugene Debs who opposed U.S. entry into the war. Debs, a union organizer, would be imprisoned for violating the Espionage Act which was used by President Wilson to suppress civil liberties and opposition to the war. When the U.S entered the war the country was split as to support for Debs or hang him. From this the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) formed. Socialist Conflict over the war American socialists believed in 1914 that it was important for America to say out of the war. And most Americans agreed. However, the German sinking of the passenger ship Lusitania by a German submarine, began to turn Americans against the Germans. Eugene Debs responded with anger but believed that war was not the answer. Socialist throughout the world viewed war as “a symptom of the disease of capitalism and that socialism would be its cure.” The European capitalist countries fought over “global markets.” However, when the war broke out many Socialists fervently supported the war for “national defense,” and accused German American Socialists of supporting the Kaiser. The Socialists believed that war allowed capitalists to prosper. However, when the U.S. did go to war against Germany in 1917, the Socialists split, some supporting the war and other remained against it. Civil Liberties were curtailed to the point that questioning the war, not necessarily opposing it, meant one could be imprisoned. Even the famed criminal defense and civil libertarian lawyer Clarence Darrow supported jailing dissenters. However, after the war, he believed that President Wilson would restore “all the old protections.” A lesson for now and the future; that did not happen.

Death of Thomas Hughes He was one of the Best and the Brightest of the Kennedy Johnson Administrations but expertly criticized US support of corrupt and unpopular governments in South Vietnam. He, and James Lowenstein, believed that popular support was had by the Communists of Vietnam.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. His point of view and things is Marxist although he himself is not a Marxist and things. In 2010 he published Death of the Liberal Class. As for foreign policy Hedges, who lived in the Middle East for many years, is fluent in Arabic, and has read the Koran, anyone familiar with the region knew that, contrary to Vice President Dick Cheney’s assertions, U.S. soldiers invading Iraq would not be greeted as liberators, “that the oil revenues would never pay for the reconstruction, and that democracy was not going to be implanted in Baghdad and radiate outward across the Middle East.” The following are my highlights of what I found the most significant in the book. Late Nineteenth Century The late nineteenth century was the pinnacle of liberal activism and ideas. Workers organized, there were campaigns for women’s rights, “universal education, housing for the poor, public health campaigns, and socialism.” World War 1 destroyed human beings faith in their fellow human beings. It consolidated state and corporate control of the country. “It created mass culture, fostered through the consumer society the cult of the self, led the nation into an era of permanent war, and used fear and mass propaganda to cow citizens and silence independent and radical voices within the liberal class.” Early Twentieth Century “The social demands of unions in the early twentieth century that gave the working class weekends off, the right to strike, the eight-hour workday, and Social Security, have been abandoned.” It is common now for universities, commercial artists, and self-help gurus (Oprah Winfrey). “The repeated anti-Red purges of the twentieth-century United States, during and after both World Wars, and continuously from the 1950s until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, were carried out in the name of anticommunism, but in reality proved to be devastating blows to popular social movements.” Before the United States entered World War I it was living with the consequences of the Civil War, pacifism. William Jennings Bryan and others “championed” pacifism and argued that the U.S. stay out of the suicidal First World War. Before the First World War Americans elected “populists and reformers.” After the war, the propaganda which switched American political thought “not only bolstered support for the war - including among progressives and intellectuals - but also discredited dissidents and reformers as traitors.” “The war, sold with simple slogans such as the war to end all wars or the war to make the world safe for democracy, did not so much emasculate intellectuals, artists, and progressives as seduce them. . . . The nation descended into a collective war madness.” Throughout this corporate coup scholars succumbed to “slight the research and to slant the advocacy for reasons either of personal career or of political or bureaucratic opportunity.” “Congress passed the Espionage Act in 1917, which criminalized not only espionage but also speech deemed critical of the government.” “No other president in American history did more to damage the independence and freedom of the press, or set back the cause of social reform, than Wilson.” President Wilson appointed George Creel to be get the U.S. mentally prepared for war. As head of the Committee for Public Information (CPI) he corralled the newspapers giving them propaganda packaged as news releases manipulating public opinion. Patriotism of those who opposed the war was questioned. This propaganda practice is based on the works of such thinkers as Sigmund Freud and his son-in-law Edward Bernays, who founded the field of advertising and public relations. The Liberal Class Anger and betrayal are the words Hedges uses to explain the frustration of millions of Americans. These feelings “spring from the failure of the liberal class over the past three decades to protect the minimal interests of the working and middle class as corporations dismantled the democratic state, decimated the manufacturing sector, looted the U.S. Treasury, waged imperial wars that can neither be afforded nor won, and gutted basic laws that protected the interests of ordinary citizens.” Thus, the liberal class is out of touch and refuses to defy the corporate assault.” This leaves the far right of American politics an opening to be the answer for common peoples problems. We now have a myth of “democratic liberalism.” The liberal class promotes “electoral politics and constitutional reform instead of serious actions to reign in the corporations and the government. Liberals rely on laws for change but fail to recognize that those can be changes just as easily as they can be passed. This all began with the election of Ronald Reagan. The corporate state overwhelmed the liberal class as the “liberals did not protest the stripping away of the country’s manufacturing base, the dismantling of regulatory agencies, and the destruction of social service programs.” “Fear is a potent weapon in the hands of the power elite. The fear of communism, like the fear of Islamic terrorism, was used to suspend civil liberties, including freedom of speech, habeas corpus, and the right to organize-values the liberal class claims to support. In the name of anticommunism, the capitalist class, terrified of the numerous labor strikes following World War II, rammed through the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, culminating with a congressional override of President Harry Truman’s veto. It was the most destructive legislative blow to the working class until NAFTA. It was fear that in 2001 allowed the state to push through the Patriot Act, practice extraordinary rendition, and establish offshore penal colonies where we torture detainees stripped of their rights. Fear led us to embrace the endless wars in the Middle East. Fear allowed us to stand meekly by as Wall Street helped itself to billions of taxpayer dollars. The timidity of the liberal class leaves it especially prone to manipulation.” After World War II an unofficial blacklist of supposed communists in government and society was created. Hollywood writers, actors and directors, journalists, union leaders, former Vice President Henry Wallace and other government employees, teachers. “The purge was done with the collaboration of the liberal class. Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), for example, backed the witch hunts.” The dismissal of suspected communists from their jobs throughout the United States were done mostly without hearings. “They were usually abruptly terminated. Those on the blacklist were effectively locked out of their profession.” “Henry Wallace, who ran for president as a third- party candidate . . . in 1948 and had been Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president, was subjected to a vicious assault by the press and the liberal establishment. Wallace was discredited and finally exiled from political life as a communist sympathizer. The complicity of the liberal class was, in part, a product of insecurity, especially since many reformers and liberals had flirted with communism during the Depression, given the breakdown of capitalism in those years. But it was also the product of craven careerism and desire for prestige and comfort.” “The liberal class is expected to mask the brutality of imperial war and corporate malfeasance by deploring the most egregious excesses while studiously refusing to question the legitimacy of the power elite’s actions and structures.” Their embrace of Transcendental Meditation, Hare Krishna, Zen Buddhism and the I Ching “would have dismayed the Wobblies or the militants in the old Communist Party. . . . There was no political vision. Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, with its narrator’s search for enlightenment, became emblematic of the moral hollowness of the New Left. . . . The political and moral void within the counterculture meant it was an easy transition from college radical to a member of the liberal class.” The liberal class abandonment of the working class and its embrace of corporations “will soon give way to a systems collapse.” The liberal response to the election of Ronald Reagan was awful. The did not “protest the stripping away of the country’s manufacturing base, the dismantling of regulatory agencies, and the destruction of social service programs. . . . . They busied themselves with the boutique activism of political correctness.” It was the white liberals who, with nothing else to do as the “oppressed” began to speak for themselves, created the “political correctness movement. The inane brilliance of this was that, by inventing disadvantaged groups, nobody could say that they didn’t have the right to speak for them.” Taft-Hartley Act Unions, following the Taft-Hartley model, “remained virulently anticommunist, spoke in the language of militarism and the Cold War, and were largely unsympathetic to the civil rights and antiwar movements.” Hedges asks how could such a man be admired and carry such influence when there had been such a struggle over the decades by the working class for the right to organize, “have decent wages and the forty-hour week. How was it possible to pass the Taft-Hartley Act, which, in one deft move, emasculated the labor movement?” Militant unions were attacked but anticommunist unions remained. Those anticommunists unions abandoned class struggle and “collaborated with the capitalist class and merged with the liberal establishment.” Academia Chris Hedges who I am reading is a leftist. And he writes that academia became dominated by the “charade of protest” and the “charade of radical analysis.” These theorists invested their energy in multiculturalism, with branches such as femnist studies, queer studies, and African American studies. . . . . multiculturalism, rather than leading to a critique of structures and systems that consciously excluded the poor and the marginal, became an in itself.” “Political debate was replaced by multicultural discourse. Public values were subordinated to tortuous textual analysis. There was nothing worth investigating, these postculturalists insisted, outside of the text. . . . They wrap ideas in a language so obscure, so abstract, so preoccupied with arcane theory that the uninitiated cannot understand what they write. They make not attempt to reach a wider audience or enrich h public life. . . . they have produced nothing of substance or worth. . . . so much academic jargon that it is unreadable.” The New Left The 1960s protests Hedges found hedonistic and worshipped the “cult of the self that corrupted earlier twentieth-century counterculture movements.” The anti-war protesters and the American working class split as the former had college deferments and the the latter went to Vietnam. As a result the New Left looked to third world revolutionary movements for inspiration. The labor movement, including the workers, “they considered bought off by capitalism.” As the New Left and the Black Panthers diverged form the American working class they became enamored with the violence promoted by Mao Zedong, Josef Stalin and Leon Trotsky. They also followed the Beat generation which disrespected “authority [and] focused on self-indulgent schemes for inner peace and fulfillment.” This included the use of hallucinogenic drugs. “The New Left of the 1960s turned out to be a mirage. . . . it existed in a historical vacuum. The counterculture of the 1960s, although it attracted a wide following a the height of the Vietnam War, never replicated the power of the Popular Front of 1930s, which had included the working class and mixed social, labor, and political movements. . . . Protests did not challenge corporate power but were media spectacles.” Ralph Nader The attack on Ralph Nader who began his public career as an honored consumer advocate is illustrative of the power of corporate America and “the complicity of the liberal class in our disempowerment.” By the time Reagan was elected “the government was firmly in the hands of corporations” who did not care about the facts Nader and others presented. Further criticism of Nader circulated around that he lost the 2000 election for Al Gore. But it was “fraud by the Republican Party” and “an incompetent, corporatized Democratic Party” that lost the election, for both Nader and Gore. Nader argued that there were few differences between Republicans and Democrats. The Democrats went along with Bush’s war in Iraq. “They stood by as Bush stacked the judiciary with “Christian” ideologues. . . . They permitted American children to get fleeced by No Child Left Behind. They did not protest when Federal agencies began to propagate “Christian” pseudoscience about creationism, reproductive rights, and homosexuality. . . . strip American citizens of constitutional rights under the Patriot Act . . . and thrust impoverish Americans aside through passage of a corporate-sponsored bankruptcy bill. And then the Democrats helped transfer hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to Wall Street. Nader points out the “the system is broken. . . . After Unsafe At Any Speed” came out in 1965 “it took only nine months for the Federal Government to regulate the auto industry for safety and fuel efficiency. Three years after the collapse of Bear Stearns, however, there is no adequate financial reform.” “The corporate media, which abet out vast historical amnesia, do nothing to remind us how we got here.” Martin Luther King Martin Luther King said, “The purpose of the slum is to confine those who have no power and perpetuate their powerlessness.” King would be attacked by some of his associates and of course the liberal class for his anti violent message because he stated that the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world” is America. President Richard M. Nixon “Once Richard Nixon began to use illegal tactics against the liberal establishment, the commercial press fought back.” The collective and accumulative history of working class rebellion and resistance was ignored by the press. In addition, the power elite “colluded with Richard Nixon to crush McGovern in the 1972 presidential election.” I.F. “Izzy” Stone It was I.F. “Izzy” Stone who in his I.F. Stone’s Weekly, challenged the official American orthodoxy about the Vietnam War. He began by noting that “one bullet embedded in one destroyer hull is the only proof we have been able to muster that the . . . attacks took place.” In addition, he found in a State Department publication meant to justify the expansion of the war that in the early 1960s only 179 of 7,500 weapons “captured from the Vietcong came from the Soviet bloc. The remainder . . . came from U.S. arms provided to the South Vietnamese.” Howard Zinn “Howard Zinn was a threat not because he was a violent revolutionary or a communist but because he was fearless and told the truth.” Noam Chomsky Quoting Noam Chomsky as saying, “No one wants to say it anymore, but the Communist Party was the spearhead for labor and civil rights organizing.” The Media The media is intimated to cooperate with the government and corporate America in relation to war and thus, creating a “culture of permanent war. In the months leading up to the war in Iraq, there were many credible critics, including former U.N. inspectors such as Hans Blix, who questioned the lies use to justify the invasion and occupation, but the media refused to include independent voices. . . . Liberals are reduced to arguing over tactics.” “There are more African American men behind bars than in college. . . . The cell block has replaced the auction block.” The powers that be in the United States have purposely designed “prisons and urban ghettos” to control African Americans. But the liberals speak of a “postracial America.” Obama “Obama seduced by power and prestige, is more interested in courting the corporate rich than in saving the disenfranchised.” An executive he admired was the president of FedEx who is a union-buster. He maneuvered Congress into passing a law “banning the Teamsters Union from organizing workers at FedEx.” Conclusion Hedges opposes violence as the kind he saw in the former Yugoslavia as it disintegrated because “it always results in the brutal sacrifice of innocents and the destruction of the culture and traditions that make us human.” Hedges believes that democracy is “designed to challenge the status quo, has been corrupted to serve the status quo. The abject failure of activists and the liberal class to push corporate, industrialized states toward serious environmental reform, to thwart imperial adventurism, or to build a humane policy toward the world’s poor stems from an inability to face these new configurations of power.” Despite being promoted as a democratic dream the Internet actually accelerates “our division into antagonistic clans, where we are sucked into virtual tribal groups that chant the same slogans and hate the same enemies.” Interviewing Martha Hennessy, the famed activist Dorothy Day’s granddaughter, who said, The heartlessness was introduced by Reagan. Clinton put it into place. Clinton put it into place. . . . Americans have retreated into collective narcissism. . . . There are more elements of fascism in place than there were in the 1930s.”

One of the great myths of world history is that between 1815 and 1914 the world was at peace. However, there were many wars with Europe itself and don’t forget the numerous colonial wars and wars in the Americas for control of the continents.

NATIONALISM - FRANCE France conquered Vietnam through colonial wars from 1858 to 1883. Vietnamese nationalists “never accepted the names imposed on their divided country by the French.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 5) “The land which in the wake of French political and military intervention became known as Annam (Tongking and Cochinchina were regarded as somehow connected with Annam) was in fact a highly centralized state officially renamed Vietnam back in 1802.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 5) DOUMER The Cochinchina Colonial Council was a minority of Cochinchina residents and they exerted an enormous amount of power and took quite a bit of funds from the treasury. This the Governor General Doumer hated. He therefore replaced it with a council he controlled. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 109-110) Doumer was “ruthless” in his demands that the Vietnamese support French policies. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 112) Doumer served as governor general from 1897 to 1902. Doumer built railroads which he believed would help the Cochinchina economy grow. However, there turned out to be little to transport. As a result this turned out to be a boondoggle. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 114-115) “The final verdict on the Indochinese railroads must state that they benefited neither France nor the Vietnamese people. They were of profit solely for the men who built them, the contractors and engineers, and for the banks that granted the loans for their construction.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 115) “Institutionalization” of the “white functionary”. Meaning no Vietnamese could become an administrator. Buttinger describes this as an evil. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 115-116) “Doumer’s unshakable self-confidence and lack of self-criticism nurtured his mistaken belief that the modern infrastructure he created would make Indochina rich even in the absence of a modern economy. He remained stubbornly ignorant of the social and political consequences his fiscal and economic policies were bound to produce.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 116) “From the time the French troops had first occupied Saigon in 1859 until the arrival of Doumer in 1897, the French presence in Vietnam had meant thirty-eight long and bloody years of pacification.” (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 30) Doumer set out to crush any Vietnamese resistance to French rule. He created a “network of communications, with fiscal reforms, and with political centralization.” Now the Vietnamese nationalists had to deal with the overwhelming power of modern technology. (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 30) He was so successful that he could claim that none of his troops had been killed. In addition, Doumer made Indochina economically independent of France. (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 31) Nevertheless, the Vietnamese nationalists looked at his accomplishments as “utterly artificial and irrelevant.” (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 31.) Much of this had no relevance to the life of the peasants. He did nothing to promote education. He did acknowledge that the French “upset the institutions of a country of ancient civilization.” (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 31.) Doumer did impose “unbearable forced labor, heavy taxes, excessive centralization, notorious cruelty by the colonials - - all that harassed the masses and exacerbated mandarins and scholars. Increasing nationalist agitation was the result.” (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 31.) Paul Beau Jean Baptiste Paul Beau replaced Doumer in 1902 and served until 1908. “Nationalist agitation grew more overt after Vietnam had suffered three successive disastrous harvest and subsequent devaluation of the piaster.” And this under French rule. Beau “launched his so-called floral conquest.” He instituted reforms in education and medicine. He called for association in Indochina over domination. (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 32.) “Beau’s apparent efforts to improve native education impressed a great number of nationalists.” The French had destroyed the traditional Vietnamese educational system. (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 41.) However, the staunch French colonists in Indochina balked. Japan’s victory over Russian in their war in 1905 “awakened dormant national feelings and healed the native’s injured pride at being subdued for years by the West.” (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 32.) Vietnamese intellectuals now strived for modernization in order to “evict the French.” (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 32-33.) Then there were the “pro-French mandarins who honestly expected benefits for their country from cooperation with France.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 118) Phan Boi Chau Phan Boi Chau wrote, “People’s rights derive from their enlightenment. France as a republic, America as a republic, stem from the enlightenment of their subjects; the constitutional regimes of Japan, Britain, Germany are also the result of their peoples’ enlightenment.” (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 58.) The winner of the “competition for scholars and mandarins held every three years at Vinh” was Phan Boi Chau. He refused to become a part of the French government in Vietnam. He wanted to fight “foreign rule.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 117-118) Chau was the first in a new set of resistance leaders and”he was the author of a pamphlet written “with tears of blood,” dealing with the suffering and humiliation of his people.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 118) “The man who for the next twenty-five years personified the political character of Vietnamese national resistance was Phan Boi Chau. Born in 1867, in the province of Nghe An, a cradle of rebels, Chau began the political career for which he had carefully prepared himself in 1900. . . . Chau was the first prominent Vietnamese nationalist who realized that Asia would continue to be a victim of Western exploitation unless the East added modern Western knowledge and political ideas to its ancient store of knowledge. Between 1900 and 1905, the national movement fell under his spell. . . . he wrote a defiant pamphlet, Letters Written in Blood which was secretly printed and distributes in 1903, tried to form small, armed groups to fight the French, and traveled throughout the country rallying young and old to his cause. “In 1905, Chau went to Japan, where he met and was deeply impressed by exiled Chinese intellectuals who were to play a significant part in the movement led by Sun Yat-sen. Even greater was the impression made on him by Japan’s modern leaders. He was convinced that Japan was destined to play a decisive role in outing the white man from Asia.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 155) With the wave of nationalism in the early 1900s due to an economic downturn in Indochina Phan Boi Chau “exploited” the moment. He was a “master in psychological maneuvering. . . . In 1900 with a few other patriots Phan Boi Chau had already founded his New party, which was the embryo of Vietnam’s first modern political party, the Association for the Modernization of Vietnam, which Chau also founded, in 1905.” (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 33.) The Japanese victory over Russia in the 1905 war convinced Vietnamese and other Asian peoples that “the only way for the East to assert itself against the Beast was by acquiring the scientific, technological, and general knowledge of the West.” Phan Boi Chau agreed with this from his exile in Japan. Vietnamese students also traveled to Japan for study. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 121) Japan mesmerized Phan Boi Chau with its Westernization and “remarkable progress.” He encouraged Vietnamese scholars and students to witness Japan’s achievement. (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 33.) They “vowed to imitate Japan “ in modernizing Vietnam. They called themselves the “Tokyo group. They emphasized national development and education the latter which the French let decline. They appealed for “mass education” in Vietnam. Kinh Nghia Thuc was there first school and developed into the Dong Minh Free School Movement.” This was short lived as the French crushed it. (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 34.) The school immediately began teaching quoc ngu which had been “invented by European missionaries in the seventeenth century.” This was revolutionary as it had been the standard to teach Chinese characters or French. (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 42.) Nevertheless, Vietnamese nationalists looked at quoc ngu “as a tool for religious propaganda, a sort of memorial of shame, and perhaps a dangerous trap set up by the Western conquerors for the annexation of Vietnam.” (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 43.) However, “a few progressive scholars . . . realizing bitterly the weakness of both Chinese and its sister chu nom, had begun to adopt quoc ngu late in the nineteenth century.” It troubled them that this was a western invention, however, other scholars decided to use it as a new language for Viet Nam. In fact, Phan Chau Trinh said “without the overthrow of the Chinese characters we cannot save Vietnam.” A powerful act since Chinese characters had been a part of the Vietnamese language for two thousand years. (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 43.) This became an act of modernization. (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 44.) The new Vietnamese scholars “called themselves enlightened.” They “had to break with the past. . . . They regarded themselves as awakening from the deep of an unproductive system of education and rejected the old four the new. . . . they did not hesitate to tear up their old academic degrees; Phan Boi Chau disavowed his enviable degree as number one graduate in a regional contest.” (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 45.) Thus, French colonization caused Vietnamese modernization and interestingly the overthrow of the French. The Dong Kinh school referred to Japan as the “eldest yellow brother.” It was believed that Japan would be the “brother-keeper” of the rest of Asia. (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 54.) In addition, the Vietnamese read ancient Greek scholars, Enlightenment figures, and famous political leaders of recent European history. (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 54.) The overseas Vietnamese were “shocked at the contrast between stifling tyranny at home and the freedom abroad. . . . Phan Boi Chau sent a number of his students to study in Hongkong, Thailand, and Germany, also.” (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 55.) In addition, Vietnamese scholars admired “science and technology for [sic] Europe and America.” They explained this by writing that there is a Congress in charge of politics and a press expressing the “will of the people.” (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 55-56.) The Vietnamese scholars reprinted old texts in quoc ngu and those the French might consider revolutionary were surreptitiously printed and distributed. (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 48.) They also blamed the French for Vietnamese peasant ignorance. (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 58.) However, Phan Boi Chau remained a monarchist until the overthrow of the Manchus in 1911. He proposed “more competent and patriotic” leaders for Vietnam. (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 58-59.) Phan Chau Trinh Phan Chau Trinh believed that the French educational system caused a moral decline of the Vietnamese. He demanded democracy for Vietnam, “in the image of the French Republic.” He was furious at the working relationship the mandarins developed with the French colonizers.” (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 58.) The most popular book, The Manual of Modern Civilization, became “a sort of manifesto,” contrasts “old Vietnam and contemporary Vietnam, with emphasis on the ignominious decadence of the latter.” (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 48.) The anonymous author describes the decadence as, “ignorance of the world situation, a tragic rejection of foreign technology, superstitious worship of the Ancients, and a feudal respect for the mandarins at the expense of the common people. . . . the author makes six recommendations for the education of the masses: (1) use of quoc ngu, (2) revision of books to bring them up to date, (3) alteration and improvement of the examination system, (4) promotion of the national elite, (5) development of industry and trade, and (6) promotion of the press.” (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 48-49.) Westernization was emphasized by the “Dong Kinh group.” This was revolutionary as the recent emperor Tu Duc referred “to Westerners as white demons.” (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 49.) To the Vietnamese they were nothing more than servants to the French. (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 50.) Nevertheless, the Vietnamese scholars encouraged people to learn French. Even Phan Chau Trinh admired, “French democracy and French technology in the construction of roads and railroads, the repair of dikes and bridges, and the use of steam power and telecommunications. He advocated a frank and egalitarian collaboration between the French and the natives. Toward this goal, the nationalists were to abandon violence and the French were to carry out necessary reforms.” (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 50.) However, the nationalists were stymied by the French refusal to allow “them to import liberal Western thinking.” Even educated Vietnamese did not know “that authors like Montesquieu and Rousseau were French.” (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 51.) Therefore, the Dong Kinh group smuggled materials from China and Japan to out maneuver the French police. (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 51-52.) Studying French and other European texts Vietnamese learned for the first time the words, economy, progress, and revolution. (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 52.) Phan Boi Chau and Phan Choi Trinh supported “study groups” in order to discuss the new ideas. “A modern concept of patriotism was developed, based not on a line allegiance to the kings and mandarins, but on national solidarity and unreserved devotion to the nation’s heroes. New mottoes and key ideas replace the old, for example, “the people being the foundation, monarchs and mandarins may go, the nation will remain forever.” (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 59.) There were public lectures throughout the country. There were many lecturers in addition to Phan Chau Trinh and Phan Boi Chau. “Phan Chau Trinh was the most successful. A true image maker and breaker, he toured the upcountry from north to south, beating the drum to sir up nationalist enemies; and incessantly harassing the backward and corrupt mandarins with his sarcastic verses.” (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 60.) Lecture halls overflowed and the French arrested lecturers. (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 61.) Progressive scholars also promoted women’s rights. Emboldened women gave their opinions at these lectures. All cited great European women in history. (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 64.) Cutting a man’s hair became an important issue in creating a new Vietnam. Tradition in Vietnam dictated that only monks could have short hair. However, “lay people were supposed to wear their hair long.” So, after 1900, progressive scholars cut their hair. This begat the “hairbun-murdering-movement.” “Teams of haircutters roamed the roads leading to major market places. Progressive scholars-turned-barbers and their students would stop any man have a pigeon-nest-like hairbun and politely and politely request, I beg you, let me dispose of this bun of backwardness for you. And to prevent the victim from possible protest, the barber set out at once to do his delicate job while singing a moralizing song.” (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 64.) Similar to the haircut movement earlier in Japan. In the tradition of, or at a similar time as, China, where they cut a man’s hair whether he wanted it cut or not. Nevertheless, the French cracked down on the progressive scholar movement. They closed schools and banned the lectures. The schools were “searched for seditious material. None was found.” The material had been well secreted by the scholars. The French attempted to bribe the scholars by promoting them within the French government system. The promotions were refused. (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 69-70.) Prior to the French conquest Vietnam had “free and universal higher education.” The French replaced with with their own “rigid” system hoping to turn the Vietnamese into Frenchmen. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 120) This process was known as assimilation. There was a plan to open schools everywhere but there were no teachers. “Consequently, after ten years of foreign rule, a formerly literate region with more than 1.5 million inhabitants had fewer than 5,000 primary-school pupils. Higher education had ceased altogether. Assimilation meant preaching “the gospel of French culture to the Vietnamese.” Opponents of educating the Vietnamese believed it would create more rebels. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 120) There was an attempt to integrate the Chinese based system with France’s western style education. Intelligent students were sent to France for higher education. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 121) “A period of intense educational activity accompanied this awakening of the national spirit under the banner of “modernization.” Study groups formed, patriotic merchants supported the publication of small newspapers that proclaimed eventual freedom for a Westernized Vietnam, traveling lecturers assured their listeners that education was a means of liberation and that Vietnam would rise again if it followed the path chosen by Japan. Poor and rich alike contributed to the cost of this movement which culminated in the creation of the Free School of Tongking in Hanoi in March, 1907, largely under the stimulus of Phan Chau Trinh’s campaign for a modernization of Vietnamese thought. Here the new movement could its organizational center and spiritual home. The subjects taught included the natural sciences, political economy, and national culture. Instruction was in Vietnamese, Chinese, and French.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 121-122) The French were furious and found these actions “subversive.” This included reading classic political philosophers such as Montesquieu and Rousseau. Nevertheless, the project continued. The French referred to Vietnamese traveling to Japan to study as the “exodus to the East” and considered it “subversive.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 122) Students and teachers were arrested. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 122) In 1908, “When the peasants of Annam . . . demonstrated openly against high taxes and the thinly disguised forced labor, the blame was placed on the actives of the Vietnamese educators. Hundreds of nationalists were arrested and death sentences pronounced against the leading members of the movement to create a new national elite.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 122) Some executions were carried out other scholars “were sent to Poulo Condore, an island 50 miles off the southern coast of Vietnam, which the French transformed into a concentration camp.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 122-123) These actions set the tone for French rule in Indochina. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 123) The demonstration against the French had heavy peasant involvement. They were upset at high taxes on, among other things, “salt, alcohol, and opium monopolies.” The French [in Vietnam] paid almost no taxes. “The flagrant injustice of the colonial taxation system, which favored the rich at the expense of the poor, the Europeans at the expense of the native population, was one of the chief reasons for Vietnamese discontent.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 123) The French established monopolies that only French citizens could benefit from. The monopoly on salt affected the entire Vietnamese population and their diet. Salt had to be purchased at extremely high prices. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 124-125) The French in Vietnam complained of “laxity of the prosecution of Vietnamese nationalists.” There were no standard criminal court procedures just the whim of the French residents. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 127) The French concentrated on police and military power to crush rebellion. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 127) The local French press constantly complained of guerrillas and “educated natives” as a “menace to French rule.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 127) Continued conflict between the Vietnamese and the French. This caused problems for the home government in Paris. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 128) The French complained of “hardships and frustrations of life in Indochina.” They became particularly upset when their corruption was exposed. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 129) The French colonials who did not do very well in Vietnam were the ones who particularly complained that their economic projects were not supported by Paris. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 130) Criticism of French rule in Vietnam made its way to Paris. Especially concerning was “the brutal treatment and ruthless exploitation of the natives.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 130) “Social conditions in the colony and the failure of French policy to win Vietnamese cooperation were as forcefully condemned in these official reports as in the books by the many writers who had visited Indochina and had returned filled with indignation against the colonial regime.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 130) One writer “found no agricultural prosperity in the colony, at least none created by the French, and he showed that commerce, after forty years of the French “presence,” was still insignificant and industry nonexistent. . . . [another visitor to Indochina] a passionate observer more familiar with native misery . . . the Vietnamese people were forced to pay for Doumer’s economically questionable achievements. . . . nothing was being done to improve improve conditions, while the harsh measures designed to secure the monopolies financial success added to the misery of the people.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 131) “White man’s assumption of racial superiority could corrupt normally decent men.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 131) One writer “described the public works as “ill-disguised deportation,” called the salt tax “a permanent crime of lese-humanite,” [roughly, inhuman] and commented that the enforced sale of alcohol was ruled not by the law of supply and demand but by “the arbitrariness of an administrator who bets his future on the rise of consumption in his regional territory.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 131) There were warnings of “much greater troubles” in Vietnam if the French did not change their behavior. Also, critics of French policy in Vietnam warned of “profound repercussions” over the Japanese defeat of the Russians in 1905. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 131) There were reports “about the denial of justice suffered by the native populations at the hands of the colonial society drew the attention of the entire country.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 131-132) The French declared a belief in “assimilation.” In reality it was “cultural imperialism.” The French called it, “mission civilatrice.” This is other wise called, the “white-man’s burden.” The idea was that the non-whites, the little brownies, would become the equals of the colonialists. The idea was spread that the whites and non-whites had a fraternal relationship. This was balderdash. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 132) Practically, French culture and policies replaced Vietnamese. No Vietnamese held important positions in the government. In reality, assimilation was a joke. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 132-133) Assimilation was replaced by association. “Cooperation was to be achieved through concessions to the native populations that would make them ready to work with the foreign masters of their country. Assimilation was rejected not only as unrealistic, but also because respect for native cultures and institutions was seen as an important condition of cooperation between colonial governments and their subjects.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 135) Association became a military topic after the Japanese defeat of Russia in 1905. It was even then believed that Japan had imperial interests. A French general in Indochina called for the creation of a native army. General, “Theophile Daniel Pennequin, the Commander and Chief of the Army in Indochina, shocked colonial society by calling for the creation of a native army. Fully aware that this required a drastic change in the treatment of the Vietnamese, he called for a policy of genuine association, a colony without conquerors and conquered, in which Vietnamese and Frenchmen were part of the same empire.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 136) “The fact was that the economic needs and political aspirations of the Indochinese people were not reconcilable with the preservation of colonial rule.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 138) “The medical establishments were merely small, understaffed, and poorly equipped clinics and dispensaries, manned chiefly by so-called hygiene officers trained to perform simple tasks like inoculations and first aid. Nor could 175 medical establishments in a country of 25 million be called an impressive achievement.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 140) During World War I 140,000 Vietnamese were sent to Europe to work and fight in the war. This amounted to forced labor.(Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 141) It was legal for Frenchmen to strike a Vietnamese. This shows the absolute disdain and impunity the French looked at the Vietnamese. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 141) There was abuse of Vietnamese in the mines. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 141) In 1916, while France fought a war in Europe and had much less forces in Indochina, Emperor Duy-Tan led a rebellion which failed and he was also exiled, but to the Indian Ocean island of Reunion. (Bernard Fall. Last Reflections on a War. 68) Duy Tan spent 25 years on Reunion Island and “became an electrical engineer there, ran its radio station with the outside world and, in World War II, was one of the leaders of the anti-Vichy Free French underground there.” He became an officer in the Free French Army. After World War II Charles DeGaulle asked him to return to Vietnam to counter the Viet Minh. However, he was killed in a plane crash in Central Africa. (Bernard Fall. Last Reflections on a War. 68) There was a policy of “granting land concessions to French colons and collaborating Vietnamese notables.” Change did not even come close to happening until 1927. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 142) “Ineffective . . . provincial chambers . . . in Tongking and Annam. They never had any but consultative functions. . . . they also had no moral authority as representatives of the people. Vietnamese nationalists regarded them as reactionary delegations of natives under the influence of the French.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 142) The Vietnamese were “disillusioned” with Sarraut. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 142) Vietnamese had fewer rights than the colonial subjects in other countries. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 144) In 1913, “Agents of the Association for the Restoration of Vietnam, founded abroad by Phan Boi Chau and Prince Cuong De, became active in many parts of the country. they operated from their new base in China, which they succeeded in building up after the start of the Chinese revolution [1911], an event that strengthened the spirit of national resistance in Vietnam as much as had the rise of Japan after 1905. On March 24, 1913, bombs were discovered in the vicinity of several public buildings in Saigon. On the twenty-eighth of the same month, unarmed peasants marched on Cholon, at the gates of Saigon, apparently intent upon voicing their grievances. . . . the French brutally dispersed the marchers, arrested hundreds of nationalists suspected of being the leaders of the emergent movement . . . On April 12, the nationalist “underground” murdered a high Vietnamese official in Thai Binh; on the twenty-sixth, a bomb was thrown in Hanoi, killing tow French officers and causing such panic among the French and such violent demands for action against the nationalists . . . Criminal Commission . . . sentenced dozens of Vietnamese to death, including the absent Phan Boi Chau and Prince Cuong De.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 143) Uprising of native soldiers at the military post of Yen Bay in 1930. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 146) “The Commission sentenced 83 nationalists to death, and 546 to imprisonment and forced labor. . . . That same year, 699 persons were summarily executed, 50 in Yen Bay alone. By the end of 1932, the number of nationalists arrested and held in prison was estimated at more than 10,000.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 146-147) “1930 was a year of near-hysteria among the French community in Vietnam concerning the dangers of communism. For the wealthy . . . the threat of communism was a matter for concern.” Their criticism of French oppression died down as the rebellions grew. Without knowing it, perhaps, the Constitutionalists their limited ideas of independence fueled revolution. “They were an elitist group. Whatever, political aims some, such as the Constitutionalist, pursued, they were a group committed to maintaining the French in power. And they failed to recognize why communism could have an appeal to the peasantry of Vietnam.” (Milton Osborne. “The Faithful Few: The Politics of Collaboration in Cochinchina in the 1920s.” In Aspects of Vietnamese History. Walter Vella, ed. 181-182) The French refused to industrialize Vietnam because they were afraid that a middle class would develop as had in India. A middle class would demand political rights, “national aspirations,” economic participation. This could lead to Vietnam breaking away from France altogether. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 168) In fact, the middle class was so small that it had little impact. A larger middle class might have been able to counter the attraction of communism. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 172) Vietnamese had no experience in business because the French would not let them. Therefore, an “intelligentsia” formed of doctors, lawyers, civil servants and “other professionals.” This bred resentment among the Vietnamese. They would have more than their share of influence on the revolution. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 172) The landowners were a “wealthy class created by the French.” They became more economically powerful and in course demanded more political power. However, they were willing to share power with the French in what Buttinger called modus vivendi. The French resisted this and that created a new rebellious group they had to contend with. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 173) The result is the Constitutionalist Party. It was short-lived because it never accomplished anything. Originally, “it demanded liberal press laws, greater opportunities for Vietnamese nationals in government positions, equal treatment of French and Vietnamese officials, liberalization of the requirements for the practice of law, and other such moderate reforms. . . . wanted to make the Colonial Council . . . into a real legislative body. They put up their own candidates, and in spite of the severely restricted electorate-high officials, French-appointed collaborators, and rich landlords were almost the only ones given the right to vote-all their candidates were elected.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 173-174) Constitutionalist Party Frequently referred to as collaborators although this is a misinterpretation of the French, collaborateur, which was admirable in Vietnamese society for working with the French. (Milton Osborne. “The Faithful Few: The Politics of Collaboration in Cochinchina in the 1920s.” In Aspects of Vietnamese History. Walter Vella, ed. 187) They formed the Constitutionalist Party whose aims were to reform French rule over Cochinchina. (Milton Osborne. “The Faithful Few: The Politics of Collaboration in Cochinchina in the 1920s.” In Aspects of Vietnamese History. Walter Vella, ed. 160) They did not understand that to achieve independence they had to sever Vietnam from France. (Milton Osborne. “The Faithful Few: The Politics of Collaboration in Cochinchina in the 1920s.” In Aspects of Vietnamese History. Walter Vella, ed. 162) The Constitutionalists mainly lived in Cochinchina. (Milton Osborne. “The Faithful Few: The Politics of Collaboration in Cochinchina in the 1920s.” In Aspects of Vietnamese History. Walter Vella, ed. 163) Many of the Constitutionalists depended on those Vietnamese who made their fortunes allying themselves with the French colonialists. Their fundamental belief was to work within the system though this would not give Vietnam independence. (Milton Osborne. “The Faithful Few: The Politics of Collaboration in Cochinchina in the 1920s.” In Aspects of Vietnamese History. Walter Vella, ed. 163) During World War I the French produced patriotic literature in Vietnamese to rally them to the French cause. However, the Vietnamese did not see the war that way. “Members of a Vietnamese secret society” attacked the Saigon Central prison which “brought [a] swift and terrible French reaction. . . . Fifty-one Vietnamese who had participated in the attack on the prison were executed by firing squad, with the leaders of the attacking group being forced to watch, six at a time, before they, too, were executed.” (Milton Osborne. “The Faithful Few: The Politics of Collaboration in Cochinchina in the 1920s.” In Aspects of Vietnamese History. Walter Vella, ed. 165) The French continued to fear uprisings, which they referred to as “treachery”, for the rest of the colonial period. (Milton Osborne. “The Faithful Few: The Politics of Collaboration in Cochinchina in the 1920s.” In Aspects of Vietnamese History. Walter Vella, ed. 165-166) This justified their “extraordinary slaughter.” Another attack occurred at the Poulo Condore prison in 1918. The French retaliated by killing seventy-five Vietnamese. (Milton Osborne. “The Faithful Few: The Politics of Collaboration in Cochinchina in the 1920s.” In Aspects of Vietnamese History. Walter Vella, ed. 166) This fear of French retaliation whether by firing squad or the guillotine polarized Vietnamese resistance. The French in Cochinchina reveled in the executions, as well. This led either working within the system as the Constitutionalists proposed or becoming a militarized revolutionary. The latter entailed long and painstaking work and eventually became dominated by Communists. (Milton Osborne. “The Faithful Few: The Politics of Collaboration in Cochinchina in the 1920s.” In Aspects of Vietnamese History. Walter Vella, ed. 167) The Constitutionalists failed to see that their programs left them at the mercy of the French; the Vietnamese would always be subservient. (Milton Osborne. “The Faithful Few: The Politics of Collaboration in Cochinchina in the 1920s.” In Aspects of Vietnamese History. Walter Vella, ed. 174) In addition, they did not believe in overall democracy as did the scholar nationalists. Essentially, they were elitists. (Milton Osborne. “The Faithful Few: The Politics of Collaboration in Cochinchina in the 1920s.” In Aspects of Vietnamese History. Walter Vella, ed. 177) It did not aid the Constitutionalists to believe that collaborating with the French was a good thing, justifying French colonization of Vietnam because it overthrew the mandarins.” (Milton Osborne. “The Faithful Few: The Politics of Collaboration in Cochinchina in the 1920s.” In Aspects of Vietnamese History. Walter Vella, ed. 180) The Constitutionalist Party opposed “social revolution and demands for independence.” It supported the French during “uprisings.” This did not win followers. And the party became a “political corpse.” In 1926 the French disallowed the Vietnamese People’s Progressive Party. Thus, reform was out of the question as it had failed. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 174) The tumultuous year of 1930 proved destructive to Constitutionalist cooperation with the French. The Communists led a revolt against the French in Annam, especially, Nghe An. But Cochinchina saw “unprecedented agitation” also. The Constitutionalists feared the communist uprising as well. Although originally upset at the measures taken by the French to suppress the rebellion of 1930 the Constitutionalists toned their complaints down as time went on. (Milton Osborne. “The Faithful Few: The Politics of Collaboration in Cochinchina in the 1920s.” In Aspects of Vietnamese History. Walter Vella, ed. 181) Vietnamese Nationalist Party, Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang (VNQDD) Another organization was the Vietnamese Nationalist Party, Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang, known as the VNQDD. Membership was made up of intellectuals. Organized Vietnamese soldiers and collected weapons. “Grew rapidly . . . but its leaders, young and inexperienced, were no match for the French Surete. Its chief was a twenty-three year old teacher named Nguyen Thai Hoc, whose passion and illusions interfered with the need for caution. . . . they ordered a general uprising which all major garrisons with Vietnamese troops were to take part . . . 1930. . . . failure. The garrison of Yen Bay in tonguing succeeded in killing its French officers and in holding out for one day.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 175-176) The French “retaliated.”The rebelling soldiers were executed. Others deported with “life sentences of hard labor. Nguyen Thai Hoc and twelve of his collaborators were beheaded on June 17, 1930.” Only the communists, under Ho Chi Minh, were left to take up the struggle. They unified in 1930. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 176) The revolution started on May 1, 1930 and the French slaughtered them. “Six months later, the peasants of the provinces of Nghe An, Ha Tinh, and Quang Ngai destroyed the local machinery of government and set up their own revolutionary regimes.” Local “soviets” were established. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 179) Historians have called 1930 “the Year of the Red Terror.” The French crushed the revolutionary governments in what became known as the “year of White Terror.” They killed up to 10,000 Vietnamese in cold blood and deported another 50,000. 10,000 political prisoners were held at France’s “infamous concentration camp on Poulo Condore.” The French declared communism destroyed.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 180) These events in France “evoked indignation, shock, and shame.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 180) Moderate French in Vietnam supported Emperor Bao Dai who hope to obtain French support. “On May 3, 1933, he upset the traditional mandarin system of rule, took the reins of government into his own hands.” He was only 18 years old. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 180-181) He made Ngo Dinh Diem Minister of Interior. Diem was also put in charge of a reform commission “which accomplished nothing.” Diem resigned and Bao Dai returned to his playboy activities. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 181) “The French conquest was a great humiliation for a people who had repelled some fifteen invasions from China. (Bain, 2-3) Deeply resenting foreign control, the Vietnamese produced a long series of nationalist leaders and movements that struggled for doc lap - independence. The first nationalist groups tried to fight with traditional methods, but with the failure of these, subsequent leaders turned to Western techniques. Among the nationalists, a clash developed between those who followed the individualistic path of Western liberalism and this who followed communism. In the end, the Communists led by Ho Chi Minh gained ascendancy over the nationalist movement t bu means of a superior organization, the use of deception, and the murder of opposition nationalist leaders.” The latter policies alienated many Vietnamese so that “a second government” was formed. Beginning as anti-Communists “supported by the French” they developed their own nationalist identity. (Bain 3) A school called Lycée Quoc-Hoc was founded by a mandarin named Ngo Dinh Kha. The school became, “the hotbed of Vietnamese resistance to all outside influences.” Ho Chi Minh’s father sent his son to study there. Also to study there was Ngo Dinh Diem, the founder’s son. “It was to blend all that was best in French education with a solid anchoring in Vietnamese culture.” (Bernard Fall. Last Reflections on a War. 63-64) Also to study there were Vo Nguyen Giap, and Pham Van Dong. (Bernard Fall. Last Reflections on a War. 64) In the early 1900s, “many Vietnamese (particularly among conservative nationalists) who made the contrary decision of continuing to look toward China for guidance, or even toward the rising Japanese state. Such nationalist leaders as Phan Boi Chau, witnessing the rise of Sun Yat-sen’s Kuomintang, in fact emigrated to China and created the Dong Du [Eastern Voyage] movement which many young Vietnamese followed for over twenty years. A royal prince, Cuong-De, led another small group of nationalists to Japan, some of whom returned to their home country when the Japanese invaded it.” (Bernard Fall. Last Reflections on a War. 65) The school remained a center for revolutionary and nationalist activity. In 1966, “espousing the cause of Buddhism this time, [they] nearly toppled the South Vietnamese regime of General Ky and, with it, almost shook the whole American effort in Viet-Nam to its very foundations.” (Bernard Fall. Last Reflections on a War. 64) “Prominent nationalists rallied around him. . . . During the next three years, some two hundred university students went to study in Japan . . . he wrote his second book [1905 in Japan] , the History of the Downfall of Vietnam. He also met Sun Yat-sen” but Sun wanted the Vietnamese to fight for China while Chau wanted to fight the French in Vietnam. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 156) These new “progressive scholars” embraced Western business practices. They gave up traditional scholarly functions to become farmers “growing cinnamon, tea, and and other economic plants for export. . . . Phan Chau Trinh founded a commercial company and owned a cinnamon tree plantation.” (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 56.) Scholars manufactured “hats, clothes, feather fans, wooden shoes, or bamboo trays.” (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 56-57.) Most, however, failed. (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 57.) Phan Chau Trinh Nationalists demanded changes in Vietnamese behavior as well, similar to the Chinese nationalists overthrowing the Manchus. These included “cutting of long hair and fingernails, the cleaning to teeth, the use of soap, and the wearing of uncomplicated clothing.” (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 59-60.) Ironically, France’s reputation was tarnished through all this. Japan’s on the other hand rose to “unambiguous admiration.” Japan had learned from the West and had defeated Russian in a war in 1905. (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 52.) Consequently, a popular school song of the day said, “Japan, a nation of common culture (with us), Has been the first to hoist the flag of independence; In the inauguration of the modern era, Who can compete with the Emperor of Japan.” (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 53.) The conquest by France led the “progressive scholars” to decry the “backwardness of the country.” However, conservative scholars were not happy. They continued to look to the past, to venerate past scholars. They “still considered the political doctrine of China’s philosophers as immutable wisdom, in contrast to the shortsighted and mercantile art of Westerners.” (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 46.) Phan Boi Chau had been frustrated by the lack of training by the French in mechanics, agriculture and commerce. (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 41.) He went back to Vietnam in 1905. However, he concluded that a “political revolution” was not needed “and that a reformed monarchy could work the same miracles for Vietnam that the Meiji emperors had worked for Japan. [However, the Meiji emperors, and it was one emperor, was not the power in Japan.] Another even more fateful misconception Chau brought back in his intellectual luggage was the idea that Japan would support Vietnamese national aspirations.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 156) Prince Cuong De was the likely new emperor. In 1906 both Cuong De arrived in Tokyo and Chau began his first political organization. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 156-157) In 1907 Chau and his student followers were expelled from Japan. Some went to Siam and others, including Prince Cuong De, went to Hong Kong. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 157) “In 1908, Chau, together with Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Indian and Philippine revolutionaries, founded an East-Asian League . . . against Western imperialism. . . . Trinh started a reformist movement whose much more radical aim was a democratic republic. . . . dominant republican trend in the national resistance movement.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 157) In 1908 “thousands [of Vietnamese] protested . . . against excessive taxation and against the unpopular corvee.” Later, Vietnamese nationalists attempted to poison French soldiers in Hanoi. After that, Hoang Hoa They attempted to invade from Yen The where the French allowed him to rule and thus keep him out of Tongking. (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 70.) The French arrested the scholars and “tried and convicted [them] of advocating the rights of the common people and plotting with the traitor (meaning Phan Boi Chau) for popular rebellion. Phan Boi Chau, then in Japan, was condemned to death in absentia. Phan Chau Trinh, the popular lecturer, was condemned to immediate decapitation but narrowly escaped it through the intervention of a French friend.” Others were guillotined. Others were sent to perform hard labor on the infamous island prison of Poulo Condore. Still others were deported. The Dong Kinh school ceased to exist. (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 71.) After the Chinese Revolution of 1911 which overthrew the monarchy Chau decided to embrace a “democratic republic.” He organized the Association for the Restoration of Vietnam. “Chau even formed a government-in-exile, with Cuong De as president and himself as vice-president and minister of foreign affairs.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 157-158) For twenty years Chau had impact on the Vietnamese revolutionary and independence movement, including organizing the peasants and military actions. Toward the end of World War I there were brief uprisings. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 158) However, Chau was behind the times. There was a need for plans and for action. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 158) “After the war and the Russian Revolution, Chau began to study Marxism. In the early 1920s, the Soviet Union began to organize its anticolonial campaign in the East. A Vietnamese by the name of Ly Thuy (alias Nguyen Ai Quoc, alias Ho Chi Minh), a secretary to a Russian delegation of political and military advisers to the Chinese Revolution stationed in Canton, proposed to Chau and the Vietnamese patriots that they participate in founding a World Federation of of Small and Weak Nations to guide the struggle of these nations against colonialism and imperialism.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 158-159) There were conflicts among the scholar nationalists. Some supported non-violence and a minority supported armed struggle against the French. The pacifists were led by Phan Chau Trinh who wanted to concentrate on education. The revolutionaries, led by Phan Boi Chau, “contended that educational and social modernization were empty unless they first rid the country of the French.” (Vu Duc Bang. “The Dong Minh Free Schools Movement, 1907-1908,” in Aspects of Vietnamese Nationalism. Walter Vella, ed. 73.) Ly Thuy (Ho Chi Minh), “suggested that Phan Boi Chau . . . be sacrificed to the national cause . . . it could stir up the Vietnamese people and arouse world opinion. Chau would undoubtedly be condemned to death, but the French, in order to win sympathy in Vietnam, would probably pardon and release him. . . . One morning in June, 1925, Chau received an invitation to attend the founding meeting of the Vietnamese branch of the World Federation of Small and Weak Nations. As he was about to board a ship for Canton in Shanghai, a group of men jumped him and whisked him off to the French concession in Shanghai. He was shipped to Haiphong and thence to Hanoi. Ho Chi Minh’s intermediary allegedly received 150,000 piasters from the French. Some sources question this version of Chau’s arrest.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 159) “With his capture, conviction, and pardon, Phan Boi Chau’s political career came to an end.” His ideas were now pasee. No longer could the “political elite” lead Vietnam to freedom. Again, it was the peasants who had been ignored. “He [Chau] failed to analyze Vietnamese society, to discuss the conflicting interests of the educated and the illiterate masses, and to formulate concrete proposals.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 159-160) Phan Chau Trinh Phan Chau Trinh did not look to Japan for liberation. “Trinh foresaw that Japanese imperialism aimed at the domination of Asia, and he did not believe in a policy of getting rid of the tiger by letting the panther into the house. Upon his return to Vietnam, Trinh started his own nonviolent movement for a modern and independent Vietnam with a bold open letter to Governor General Beau, dated August, 1906, in which he deplored the abuses and extortions openly practiced by the mandarins under the French regime.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 157) Phan Chau Trinh protested the “brutal treatment of the native population.” The French abused the Vietnamese and held “political prisoners.” Imagine being held by a foreign country as a political prisoner in your own land. Phan Chau Trinh, “asked for more education for his countrymen, for a larger role in the country’s government, for a drastic reduction in taxes, and above all for an economic policy as beneficial to Vietnam as to France. Unless these concessions were granted, he warned, hostility to French rule would continue to grow.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 119) The Vietnamese Emperor Thanh Thai embraced the ideas of Phan Chau Trinh and the French declared him “insane” and “exiled him to Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean. This served to alienate the Vietnamese further. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 119) Japan From 1940 to 1945 the real rulers of Vietnam were the Japanese. The French in Vietnam simply served. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 185) Japanese rule in Vietnam briefly encouraged Vietnamese nationalists. They were under the belief that Japan meant to liberate Asia from the Europeans. However, the Japanese freed captured French forces and allowed them a free hand in destroying “the last guerrilla group, led by an old communist” who was later executed in 1940. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 191) Traditionally referred to as the Japanese interregnum, “the designation implies that colonial administrations . . . suffered no more than a pause in the control they exercised over colonies, a control they quickly recaptured after the war. . . . [However] the French never reestablished sovereign authority over the former possessions in Indochina.” (Truong Buu Lam. “Japan and the Disruption of the Vietnam Nationalist Movement.” In Aspects of Vietnamese History. Walter Vella, ed. 237) Lam concludes that the Japanese accelerated “the end of the old Western dominance over Southeast Asia. (Truong Buu Lam. “Japan and the Disruption of the Vietnam Nationalist Movement.” In Aspects of Vietnamese History. Walter Vella, ed. 237-238) The French cooperated with the Japanese because the official French government at the time, known as Vichy France, was under the control of the occupying Germans in France during World War II. Although French civilians and soldiers administered Japanese occupied Indochina during the war it was the Japanese who controlled policies. (Truong Buu Lam. “Japan and the Disruption of the Vietnam Nationalist Movement.” In Aspects of Vietnamese History. Walter Vella, ed. 239) The Vichy government demanded that the Japanese negotiate with them before making policy decisions about Indochina. The Japanese complied. (Truong Buu Lam. “Japan and the Disruption of the Vietnam Nationalist Movement.” In Aspects of Vietnamese History. Walter Vella, ed. 240) An agreement between France and Japan was signed in Tokyo on August 30, 1940, recognizing “French sovereignty in Indochina and to respect French territorial integrity in that part of the world, in return for which principles France agreed to acknowledge Japan’s preeminence in the Far East.” Nevertheless, the Japanese retained the upper hand in any conflict. (Truong Buu Lam. “Japan and the Disruption of the Vietnam Nationalist Movement.” In Aspects of Vietnamese History. Walter Vella, ed. 241) Although a defeat for the French, the French colonials in Indochina “found themselves in the best of times.” The home country could not tell that what to do. And, as we will see after the war, the colonialists were brutal. As a result the governor general crushed “all Vietnamese attempts at rebellion” and made sure the Indochinese remained under French control. The Japanese did not challenge this. (Truong Buu Lam. “Japan and the Disruption of the Vietnam Nationalist Movement.” In Aspects of Vietnamese History. Walter Vella, ed. 243) “In the early days of their occupation of Indochina, the Japanese were not prepared to support the Vietnamese drive for independence from France. The aftermath of the Langson incident and events in southern Vietnam in 1940 proved the point beyond doubt. Tran Trung Lap, the leader of the Vietnam Restoration League (Viet Nam Phuc Quoc Dong Minh Hoi), and anti-French organization, when he saw Japan’s easy victory in Langson on September 22, 1940, decided to take advantage of the situation and launch his own units against the same battered French garrisons. When the Mikado ordered his troops to cease fire on September 25, the Vietnamese rebellion continued to spread to the entire province of Langson. It was not put down until the end of December, after the French had captured and executed Tran Trung Lap.” (Truong Buu Lam. “Japan and the Disruption of the Vietnam Nationalist Movement.” In Aspects of Vietnamese History. Walter Vella, ed. 243-244) The Japanese did nothing. (Truong Buu Lam. “Japan and the Disruption of the Vietnam Nationalist Movement.” In Aspects of Vietnamese History. Walter Vella, ed. 243-244) There was another uprising in November 1940 in southern Vietnam. “Upon hearing of the Japanese entrance into northern Vietnam and of the threatened Siamese invasion of eastern Cambodia and southern Laos, the Communists staged general insurrection throughout the South, but with particular force in the province of My-tho. The post had been known to the French security service, and when the rebellion actually flared up on November 22, it was easily crushed. The repression was harsh. . . . The Japanese did not intervene on behalf of the Vietnamese.” (Truong Buu Lam. “Japan and the Disruption of the Vietnam Nationalist Movement.” In Aspects of Vietnamese History. Walter Vella, ed. 245) The French made minor changes in colonial administration which allowed more prestige to the Vietnamese. (Truong Buu Lam. “Japan and the Disruption of the Vietnam Nationalist Movement.” In Aspects of Vietnamese History. Walter Vella, ed. 246-247) During the Second World War university students were “heavily indoctrinated.” They could “speak of independence, but only of an independence that allowed for association with France.” (Truong Buu Lam. “Japan and the Disruption of the Vietnam Nationalist Movement.” In Aspects of Vietnamese History. Walter Vella, ed. 248) “With the elite neutralized by a generous policy with the young addicted to athletics and a safe form of nationalism, the colonial administration could concentrate its efforts on crushing those who tried to oppose their administration in any effective way.” (Truong Buu Lam. “Japan and the Disruption of the Vietnam Nationalist Movement.” In Aspects of Vietnamese History. Walter Vella, ed. 249) Interestingly, the Japanese allowed the Filipinos, Burmese and Indonesians some independence. However, in Indochina, the Japanese kept the French in control. (Truong Buu Lam. “Japan and the Disruption of the Vietnam Nationalist Movement.” In Aspects of Vietnamese History. Walter Vella, ed. 250) Ironically, Vietnamese independence activists living in Japan during the war had good relations with the Japanese government. So, “it seems most surprising that Japan appears neither to have expected, nor prepared for, a local pro-Japanese government.” (Truong Buu Lam. “Japan and the Disruption of the Vietnam Nationalist Movement.” In Aspects of Vietnamese History. Walter Vella, ed. 251) It was not surprising that Japan did not aid a Communist led rebellion. There were ideological differences to say the least. And, the Indochinese Communist Party opposed the Japanese invasion of China. The hostility between the two was so strong that Ho Chi Minh in 1939 “advocated that the Indochinese Communist party in effect forgo its ideological exclusivity and form a democratic front with the national bourgeoisie, and even the progressive French, to resist Japanese fascism.” (Truong Buu Lam. “Japan and the Disruption of the Vietnam Nationalist Movement.” In Aspects of Vietnamese History. Walter Vella, ed. 251) Although there were groups in Vietnam who may have cooperated well in the Japanese point of view the Japanese decided to “encourage the least likely elements in Vietnamese politics.” (Truong Buu Lam. “Japan and the Disruption of the Vietnam Nationalist Movement.” In Aspects of Vietnamese History. Walter Vella, ed. 251-252) They supported the Dai Viet Party, Cao Dai, and the Hoa Hao. (Truong Buu Lam. “Japan and the Disruption of the Vietnam Nationalist Movement.” In Aspects of Vietnamese History. Walter Vella, ed. 252-253) The French colonials in Indochina, with their “colonial eggs”, enjoyed a life where the “white man’s superiority was practically sacrosanct.” So, when the Japanese occupied the region in 1940, the colonial eggs exhibited “great courage . . . to collaborate with Asians. Yet, when the mother country collapsed . . . and when Indochina lay helpless before the Mikado’s land and sea forces, the French admirals, generals, civil servants and colonists voluntarily accepted the Japanese occupation: they hoped that by this desperate wager they might save the essential - the presence of the French flag.” And, despite Japan destroying white rule throughout Asia, the “colonial eggs” saw that French sovereignty and “administration continued to function; French citizens were free.” (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 8) Although the war in Europe went well for the colonials; the Fascists were close to defeat, that did not translate into defeat for the Japanese. The hopes of France soon restored to its full glory in Indochina were dashed when, on March 8, 1945, the Japanese overthrew any semblance of French rule. (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 8) “The Japanese, with foreknowledge of their coming defeat, intended, as a final stroke of revenge, to destroy Indochina entirely. And in order to make sure that it should never rise again they loosed the fury of nationalism among the mass of the Annamese population, who in turn set themselves to hunting down the defenseless whites.” (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 9) “The atomic bomb was the miracle that saved their lives. Indeed, the whites had their moment of exaltation, in which they believed that the Annamese would grow meek and harmless once more. They had not understood that they were going to come up against new and unrelenting forces; for at this time they still had no notion of what nationalism and Communism meant.” (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 9) However, a much more ferocious Vietnamese and Indochinese nationalism broke out without Japanese assistance! (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 9-10) And then, all of a sudden, the Viet Minh seized Hanoi and established the People’s Republic of Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh “became the Father of the Nation.” The entire nation celebrated. (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 10) And the French were not safe. They had to sneak out at night to buy food at outrageous prices and many were arrested at all times of the day or night and hacked to pieces or buried alive by the Vietminh. (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 10) Then the British arrived with “their Gurkhas, and they were followed by the French parachute troops.” (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 11) The British did well. The French “paras” thought the self-centered “colonial eggs” as traitors for their collaboration with the Japanese. They were reluctant to help them as they were attacked by the Vietminh. The Vietminh, according to the point of view of the “paras” were more deserving of aid as they fought the Japanese enemy. That friendship if you will ended quickly and “a few weeks later there they were plunged onto the bloodiest of wars.” (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 11) General Leclerc “arrived with his armored division, the famous 2nd DB (division blindee), and as his orders required he sent columns out from Saigon for the peaceful reoccupation of the country. But they were attacked. Presently captured French soldiers were found hacked to pieces, and presently Annamese villages went up in flames. For violence answered violence. . . . In a series of destructive thrusts the French retook Cochinchina, Cambodia, Laos, central and southern Annam. But the Red tieudoi (a platoon in the Vietminh army) and all the guerrilla formations continually reappeared, as though they sprang from their own ashes. (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 11-12) “Nothing made sense. After a few months Leclerc’s own diagnosis was that it was impossible to reconquer Indochina by force. The uprising of the Asian masses, who were carrying on a people’s war according to the principles of Mao Tse-tung, was something that could no longer be overcome. And to try to do so would mean utter exhaustion in endless warfare.” (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 12) The Nationalist Chinese entered northern Vietnam to take the surrender of Japanese soldiers and they were not going to allow the colonial French to return to power or, leave the country considering the long time enmity between the Chinese and the Vietnamese. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt did not want French colonialism restored, “and the idea had been that as soon as it was convenient the Communist Ho Chi Minh should be knocked on the head and Tonkin taken over, either directly by the Chinese or indirectly by their friends. Faced with two evils Ho Chi Minh chose the lesser and called in the French to expel the Chinese, who had already squeezed him dry and who were preparing their take-over.” (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 12) The negotiations with the French failed. “Ho Chi Minh wanted nothing less than a sovereign state, a Red Vietnam based on the dictatorship of the people, whereas the French did not wish to concede independence at all, but at the most the setting up of a humanist, somewhat socialistic state very closely connected with France - an integral part of the French Union.” The French furiously defeated the Vietminh in a battle. (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 12) “On December 19, 1946, in Hanoi, the Vietminh failed in an attempted massacre: now in their turn the French tried to bring off a single great decisive blow. They tried a military operation to crush Ho Chi Minh and his guerrillas within a matter of days. It was an operation on the greatest possible scale. And it too was a failure.” (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 13) “It was supposed to be a triumphantly successful hunt. Ho Chi Minh was to be taken in his hideout on the Chinese frontier, where he had no more than a few thousand fever-stricken and ill armed supporters.” (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 13) “It very nearly succeeded. In order to put an end to the Vietminh once and for all the French high command had made a prodigious effort: they had gathered all the available shock troops and all the war materiel that could possibly be assembled . . . It was a combined operation, planned according to all the rules of their respective staffs. Parachute troops were to be dropped over Backan, wretched little town that served as Ho Chi Minh’s headquarters and there stood almost in the middle of his jungle vastness, a hilly quadrilateral about one hundred and fifty miles square. And at the same moment two columns were to race forward and make contact with the paras, one column being armor, which was to thrust along the R.C. 4 (route colonial No. 4), and the other a column of boats, which was to go up the Clear River.” (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 13) This would finish off the Vietminh. However, the boats and the paras were not able to perform what was planned. Bodard, wrote that missing Ho Chi Minh by one hour meant that the war continued.(Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 13) Ho’s disappearance was so complete that French intelligence thought he died. Even his generals did not know where he was at times. (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 13-14) This was the beginning of what would become a terrible end for the French. They ignored what Bodard calls the “first great rule of the war in Indochina, the rule which states that every undertaking which is not a total success is fated to become a total disaster.” (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 14) The French stuck to “their own cars and trucks” and did not engage the Vietminh in hand to hand combat as the original French conquerors did decades before. This would mean failure. The French tried to keep a major road open for their supplies and to keep Chinese weapons out of the hands of the Viet Minh. Nevertheless, “Chinese technicians and Chinese arms and ammunition passed freely across it, to supply Ho Chi Minh’s growing forces, which eventually amounted to ten solid regiments, based on a complex of military schools, workshops, supply dumps, printing presses, and arms factories - all made of bamboo, all easily moveable. From the air, this jungle seemed deserted; in fact, it seethed with activity.” (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 14) In 1948 the French decided on a policy of “the new idea was pacification.” (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 14) “They were unable to to bring the Vietminh to a pitched battle and destroy them. Henceforward the great idea was to leave Ho Chi Minh in his patch of jungle and to win all the rest away from him.” (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 14) In this war, according to Bodard, “weapons were only of secondary importance. To work upon the people and to win them over the French brought everything they possessed into play; and the Vietminh did the same. The two juxtaposed, intertwined civilizations were at grips with one another in total warfare. At their disposal the French had everything that showed on the surface, the whole of the established society founded upon law. The Vietminh, on the other hand, were just underneath everywhere, present in everything that was hidden. Two sides appealed to two opposing instincts in mankind, the French holding out a normal life, with prosperity and the benefits of the West, and the Vietminh offering pride and revolt. The one side favored the wealthy and those who owned property; the other side the poor. . . . both . . . made use of terrorism. Between the two huge machines the private individual was crushed.” (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 15) The French fought the Communists in Indochina and “the Red concept of the world.” Ho Chi Minh had total devotion from his supporters. “For them Uncle Ho was above all the Patriot, the Hero who was expelling the French. As for themselves they were not quite sure whether they were Communists or not. They avoided asking themselves, preferring to say that they were “Socialists,” just as Ho Chi Minh must be. (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 15) “Nguyen Binh, whom Ho Chi Minh had sent south in 1945 to build the Resistance in Cochinchina, was not a Communist.” Although trained in Moscow and operating in China he would set up, “in the Plain of Reeds, near Saigon, he eventually created a formidable headquarters, complete with camps, depots, workshops, schools, presses, and even a radio station; and his trade routes reached through the jungle as far as Siam. Cruel, indefatigable, pitiless, authoritarian, he was nevertheless generous romantic idealist, and, to the people of the south, he became a hero, almost a saint.” (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 15-16) They were not a fully operating army but groups of guerrilla fighters. They had “intelligence networks that branched out in never-ending complexity. In order to kill the French they lived parasitically upon them, right next to them. . . . The French, thanks to their money, were able to recruit informers, partisans, and Vietnamese soldiers.” (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 16) “In order to deal with so many enemies, therefore, the Vietminh made a systematic use of trickery and cruelty. In this war, as in all wars in which a Resistance is concerned, there was a kind of fascination with death. . . . Assassination was the answer that remained.” (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 16) Although there were bloodthirsty Viet Minh there were communists who killed out of perceived necessity although “the Party preferred to set about the reeducation of the guilty men.” (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 16) “They exploded bombs in the midst of Asian crowds, in the markets and in the cinemas. They paid boys to throw grenades that they made themselves in their workshops: these home-produced bombs, as they were called, did little damage. But sometimes, when they wanted a particularly striking effect, they use really dangerous grenades bought in Bangkok or Singapore, and then a whole dense mass of the cold would be mowed down. One of these bombs slaughtered sixty children in a single school.” (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 16) “The night belonged to the Vietminh. But at dawn the French patrols came out. What quantities of corpses they found. How often a detachment on reaching a village that had put itself under the unit’s protection, would find ranks of heads neatly lined up in the central square. (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 16-17) Some bodies bore warning notices, but there were others, quite unknown, who floated along the irrigation ditches, swollen like bladders, the skin a tightly stretched parchment. . . . Among the bodies, women, old people, children: usually tortured and burned.” (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 17) The French did not find Vietminh dead from their battles. The Vietminh returned to their bases with their wounded and dead. The French had to guess as to Vietminh casualties. (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 17) The war was profitable for both the French and the Vietminh. “Like mushrooms, little straw huts would spring up around it, belonging to concubines, snack sellers, bistro keepers, informers, interpreters, boys and bees (cooks). Even the neighboring Vietminh would take time from ambushes and murders to go marketing next to the enclosure.” (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 17) Bodard describes “martyrs to pride.” A Colonel would not allow his forces to be deterred by the overwhelming forces of the Vietminh. Recent graduates of St. Cyr, the French military academy, died for pride and this did nothing to advance the French militarily in Indochina. These young officers proclaimed that they and their soldiers had “contempt of death.” (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 18) The French officers romanticized the war instead of fighting it. Bodard noticed that in later years those officers who survived became political and economic leaders of France promoted the idealized view of the French army. As such, they would continue to war and “go on to new tragedies, even greater humiliations, and they would end up being lost soldiers.” (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 18-19) Both sides practiced cruelty. “The Expeditionary Force’s Asian partisans, continually threatened with a hideous death, killed the Viethminh with the most sophisticated torments - unless of course they came to an understanding with them. Often it happened that even the French were caught up in this intoxication of torturer and death.” (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 19) “The Viets knowingly urged the French to commit excess, for they were well aware that as far as torture was concerned they were far beyond the French, both in efficiency and skill. For them torture as a form of warfare finally became a technique that allowed them to gain an ascendancy over the people and to win.” (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 20) Most of Indochina is “uninhabited jungle. . . . each side fought in the twilight, without seeing the other; handfuls of men, lost in the enormous landscape, tried to creep up on one another through the darkness and the leaves, to kill at point-blank range. But it was not only the French and the Vietminh who hunted one another down. They had also drawn the little western kingdoms of Indochina, with their scores of different races, into butchery. The jungle turned into a chaos of hatred in which men varying in civilization from the Stone Age to the utmost refinement of Buddhism wiped one another out. All the primitive enmities between clans and tribes were exploited, and between the imperialists and the Communists they exploded spontaneously.” (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 20) “. . . Wars dating from every century were all going on at the same time: the weapons ranged from blowpipes, spears and spells to machine guns and mortars.” There were fights for salt and opium which both the Vietminh and French wanted. (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 20) Cambodia and Laos sided with the French but another Cambodian leader sided with the Vietminh. In Laos the royal family split its allegiances. “Even the savages were drawn into the battle” taking one side or the other. (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 21) “But even among the most backward little tribes the conflict was primarily ideological. . . . Throughout all this vast stretch of country the French were in contact with the petty rulers: everywhere they explained to the natives that the Vietnamese were the enemy, the Vietnamese and the Vietminh.” (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 21) “For in fact the jungle was not impenetrable at all. It was crisscrossed by secret tracks. Ho Chi Minh’s column and his agents traveled along them through the limitless mountains and forests, marching as though time did not exist.” Political commissars established bases from which the communists developed popular support. (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 23) All French military positions could be seen by the Vietminh. However, the latter could not be seen by the French. (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 23) The French promised to free the “savages” from the Vietnamese but the Vietnamese promised to free them from the French. While the French meant with the different people’s rulers the Vietminh built a resistance among the population. “Ho Chi Minh’s agents worked at the level of the common people, saying to the wretched jungle dwellers whom they found undermined with fever, superstition, and undernourishment, “You do not even know it, but you are the People. All rights belong to you. . . . And then, when the forest tribes were sufficiently infected and won over, the Viets began the war of the jungle trails against the French. It had its own rules, laws far more rigid and merciless than those of the war in the rice fields.” (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 23) The Vietminh positioned themselves to attack their enemies flanks and, only at the last second. (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 24) “It was a ghastly kind of hide-and-seek played by blind men in a dark room-the forest. . . . victory lay in . . . finding the one path that the human quarry would take through the maze of jungle tracks.” (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 24) One French soldier stated , “In the first place you have to understand that the jungle is neutral. It doesn’t help anyone. It is always the strongest who wins. Any man who is wounded is done for. You can’t pick him up and carry him. Almost every time you have to leave him behind. . . . You can starve to death out there., with flowers all around you. You can die of thirst in spite of the enormous monsoon rains, because the water just goes straight down the cracks in the limestone. Everything rots, and your flesh rots first of all. You get fevers, and horrible great boils, and the least little scratch sets up an inflammation that can’t be cured. . . . You can’t stop because the enemy is following you and you are following him. you have to go faster than him and get on to his track so that he won’t get on to yours.” (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 25) “As an enemy the Viet is really tough: he can run all night. . . . His fire discipline is terrific.” (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 25) “In the forest, then, there was an infinitely complex struggle. The Vietminh had their successes and their failures, but they were making ground, even if it was only at a walking pace and at the speed of dialectic reasoning - two kinds of slowness. It was antlike labor, and its aim was the setting up of the Red political system. (Lucien Bodard. The Quicksand War. 28) Catholics The French arrival in Indochina in the late seventeenth century caused conflict with the elites. Ostensibly, merchants, they were actually missionaries. The Vietnamese leaders considered the French a part of “worldly conquest” using Catholicism as its tool. Therefore, those Vietnamese who converted to Catholicism were despised. “The early converts came from among the poor and downtrodden.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 65) The Vietnamese emperors jailed Vietnamese Catholics and deported the French missionaries. Some were killed. However, the Catholics “were never in danger of extinction.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 65-66) In the eighteenth century it became clear that the French conquest of Vietnam was not initiated by the French government or people but by private individuals serving their own interests. “The story of French intervention in Indochina is largely the story of the efforts of individuals to engage the power, wealth and prestige of their country to promote their private schemes. The missionaries sided with the vocal advocates of intervention.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 65-66) “The Catholic militias that had fought the Vietminh had disbanded and joined the exodus to the South.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 416) Civilian Catholics fled communism. “These refugees included not only collaborators and profiteers but also officials, professors, and students, journalists and artists who had voiced anti-Communist sentiments, businessmen who had the wisdom to foresee their eventual expropriation, and the many dependents of National Army personnel. Yet many members of the native middle class-shopkeepers, small merchants, lawyers, doctors, and other professionals-stayed rather than give up their established lives.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 416) Also, after the Geneva Conference, “900,000 persons came to the South must be regarded as genuine political refugees.” Most were Catholics. “The Communists have claimed that going to the South was not a personal decision for many of the Catholics, that they left under pressure of the community and as a group. The priests were accused of having spread the word that God had gone South, that those who remained in the North would risk losing their souls and probably their lives, since the North would be destroyed by American bombs. . . . The regime was thus rid of a great many implacable enemies.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 420) In 1784, French bishop Pigneau de Behaine took to France “four-year-old Prince Canh, who became the darling of Versailles.” The French promised to support the young prince in his family’s cvil war against the Tay Son but later found that would be difficult. Bernard Fall. Last Reflections on a War. 43) Monsignor Pigneau returned to Viet Nam and directed a victorious battle against the Tay Son. He and Prince Canh die shortly thereafter and Nguyen Anh defeated the Tay Son. He later became Gia Long. (Bernard Fall. Last Reflections on a War. 43) Gia Long continued to use French military engineering expertise with new designs of citadels. He died in 1820. (Bernard Fall. Last Reflections on a War. 44) “Gia-Long’s successors, however, did not match their ancestor in realism and intelligence. Rather than face up to the realities of growing European intervention as Siam and Japan were reluctantly doing, they attempted to retreat into isolationism and began to expel Western merchants and to persecute Christian missionaries and converts.” Approximately 130,000 Catholics were murdered from 1827 to 1856. (Bernard Fall. Last Reflections on a War. 44) French soldiers landed at Danang in 1856 and then “secured the surrounding Mekong Delta in the following decade.” (Bernard Fall. Last Reflections on a War. 45) “Since the late fifteenth center, Viet-Nam had elected its local governments and this had proved an effective shield against the imperial government’s highhandedness. The Emperor’s writ stops at the bamboo hedge [of the village] is an old Vietnamese saying. The driving French colonials began to tamper with those hallowed institutions, thus breaking one of the most important links in Vietnamese society.” (Bernard Fall. Last Reflections on a War. 45) The French “established a university in Hanoi as early as 1904; vast irrigations systems eliminated the disastrous floods or droughts which had beset Viet-Nam’s agriculture and transformed the country into one of the world’s food baskets; and epidemics were completely wiped out by a network of Pasteur Institutes. (Bernard Fall. Last Reflections on a War. 45-46) “But the French failed to provide the Vietnamese with a real say in the political development of their country, allowed too few of them to obtain an advanced education and too few of them to rise high in the administrative hierarchy of their own country. French-type cities gave the country a veneer of Westernization beneath which a small but vigorous intellectual class grew increasingly impatient with the colonial framework.” (Bernard Fall. Last Reflections on a War. 46) Secret societies grew however only the Communist became an effective clandestine political party. The Indochina Communist Party was created by Ho Chi Minh. Those who could not handle the conflict between the colonials and nationalism went into “exile or an escape into meditation and religion. Super naturalism grew especially in the 1920s with the development of Cao Dai. (Bernard Fall. Last Reflections on a War. 46) The Japanese conquest of Indochina during World War II created the opportunity for the Vietnamese “to shake off the French yoke.” Following the defeat of Japan the Viet Minh were the only organization capable of creating a government. The Viet Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh, contained communists and non-communists. He declared an independent government, the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam, on September 2, 1945. However, the French wanted to reclaim their colony. In addition, “divisions among the Vietnamese Nationalists made a conflict almost unavoidable.” (Bernard Fall. Last Reflections on a War. 46) Negotiations failed as “moderates were swept aside by the extremists in both camps.” The Viet Minh controlled the countryside and “French and the Vietnamese under their control, held all the cities and towns. . . . The French lashed out in ineffectual search-and-destroy operations, but the Viet-Minh, following Marshal Tran Hung Dao’s doctrine, refused to be drawn into a major battle.” (Bernard Fall. Last Reflections on a War. 47) “All Europeans were regarded as thieves who would stop at nothing, including murder, to gain their objectives. To cheat them was not considered dishonorable.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 68) Emperor Gia Long “did not trust any European power.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 73) “An imperial edict of 1825 charged the “perverse religion of the European” with “corrupting the hearts of men.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 73) “The French missionaries who came to Asia after 1820 were generally politically aggressive and confident that their countrymen at home admired and supported their efforts. And indeed, Minh Mang’s persecution of the missionaries aroused French Catholic opinion more than any other event outside of France. After 1840, Catholic propaganda openly demanded French intervention on behalf of the missionaries. . . . [French] naval officers “to afford protection to French missionaries threatened with personal violence, if that could be done without involving the French flag . . .” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 78) The French attacked Tourane killing “hundred times more lives than all the Vietnamese governments in two centuries of missionary persecution.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 79, 80) “Vietnamese Catholics had been implicated in the South’s uprising against Minh Mang . . .” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 80) Nevertheless, a Vietnamese priest traveled to France and met with their emperor, Napoleon. He told the French that “the Vietnamese people would greet the French as “liberators and benefactors,” and it would not take long “to make them all Catholics and devoted to France..” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 83) In 1857 the French invaded Vietnam landing at Tourane. The French were not welcomed by the French. “The Vietnamese people simply vanished, and the French found themselves without the indigenous labor force with whose help they had hoped . . .” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 84) The navy admiral in charge was furious with the French Catholics for misleading him and the French government. The French land forces headed for Saigon to take the rice stores. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 84) Tu Duc slaughtered thousands of Vietnamese Catholics. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 89) “Tu Duc ruled over his unfortunate country from 1847 to 1883. The first year of his rule also was the year of the first French attack on Tourane. When Tu Duc dies, the northern and central parts of his country were about to become the two French protectorates of Tongking and Annam. The South, which the French had already wrested from Vietnam, had become the French colony of Cochinchina. “Vietnam’s nine hundred years of independence had come to an end.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 74) The influence of the mandarins over the peasants had come to an end. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 148) Emperor Ham Nghi - Put on the throne at age twelve. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 148) In 1885, manipulators behind the throne put Ham Nghi “at the head of an insurrection that for months reduced French control of Annam to a few strongpoints and left in its wake a trail of blood and fire. . . . failure . . . Ham Nghi . . . captured.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 148) The uprising occurring in his name “reached the proportions of a truly national war of liberation. . . . No longer was the rebellion led only by court mandarins, but also by private scholars who had never held office, and it was largely due to the scholars’ moral authority that the peasants responded . . . And it was they who continued the struggle after more and more hurt mandarins made dishonest peace agreements with the colonial regime.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 149) “The young ruler fell into French hands through treachery. . . . [he] was deported to Algeria. Everyone of his captured followers was executed.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 149) Survivors went underground to continue the resistance to the French. (Bernard Fall. Last Reflections on a War. 63) By 1885 the rebellion ended. The movement was destroyed. Vietnamese Catholics cooperated with the French after they had been slaughtered by the rebels. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 150) “But the end of 1888, when Ham Nghi was caught and the exhausted survivors of the uprising who fought in his name were slowly wiped out, was not the end of resistance to French rule in Annam. The murder of the man who had betrayed Ham Nghi was the signal for another attempt to regain independence. This time the movement was led chiefly by scholars who had refused to serve or broken with the mandarin regime.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 150) Another rebellion in 1893 led by Dr. Phan Dinh Phung who had “his headquarters on the mountain Vu Quang, a strategic spot that dominated the French-held fortress of Ha Tinh and the narrow foot paths and poor roads connecting North Annam with Laos and Siam.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 150) “For many months the French, whose outposts were constantly attacked by Phung’s small army of 3,000 were clearly on the defensive, unable effectively to control most provinces of North Annam or to protect collaborating mandarins and Catholics. It took the French almost two years of pursuit and terror to break the resistance. . . . His followers surrendered on a promise of pardon, but all except his wife and son were beheaded.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 150-151) However, one guerrilla leader named De Tham fought the French to a standoff and was able to have his own semi-sovereign region in the early 1900s. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 127) “De Tham . . . was a former pirate who became an outstanding nationalist leader after 1883. With his strong army he fortified the province of Yen Tre and invaded the provinces of Bac Giang, Thai Nguyen, and Hung Hao. Despite his treaty with the French he did not become a collaborator. . . . His army was smashed and . . . the French did not get his head . . . until 1913.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 152) Rebels in the delta areas “enjoyed widespread support.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 152) Nevertheless, the rebellion, was defeated in 1892. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 153) “The number of lives lost between 1858 and 1896, in the first phase of national resistance against French rule, makes this one of the saddest periods in Vietnamese history. . . . The sacrifices had been in vain. Not only was nothing won but nothing was learned, either by the victors or the vanquished.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 153) The French did not understand why the Vietnamese fought them. And they did not understand Vietnamese aspirations. Some “warned of new and still more violent conflicts, but these warnings were ignored by the policy-makers and ridiculed in colonial society.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 153) 1900 saw new leaders in Vietnamese resistance to the French. The mandarins “fled to China” where they contemplated what went wrong with their leadership. Confucianism did not hold the answers for defeating the French. “Japanese imperialism was making it first onslaught.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 154) These new Vietnamese revolutionaries did not however think beyond having a new emperor and coming to terms with the French. This did not help the peasants. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 154) The interests of the new Vietnamese leaders had little to do with those of the peasants and this would lead to defeat. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 154-155) Rubber Plantations Rubber production took off in Vietnam in 1907. They were mostly owned by French colonists. The French government subsidized the rubber industry in Vietnam. By 1925 the industry became self sufficient. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 165-166) A destructive consequence of the rubber plantations was the use of “coolie” labor. Most peasants did not want to work on the plantations because life expectancy was short. So, forced labor, “corvee” was used. “Working for the French was a fate to be avoided at all costs. Plantation workers were recruited bu brutalized Vietnamese special agents-cai-who use the vilest methods in rounding up needed workers. . . . disease was rampant, and the death rate was four times the normal rate.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 166) “The guiding principle of French economic policy in Indochina had always been to put immediate profits before long-term economic considerations.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 167) The rubber plantation owners enjoyed great wealth in the 1930s. The communists also grew in the 1930s and won support because they argued what the people knew from experience to be true. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 166-167) Cochinchina Colonial rulers aggressively conquered what became known as Cochinchina. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 92) “In Cochinchina, circumstances had forced the French to set up their own rule. Vietnamese noncooperation, the direct result of the methods the French applied in establishing themselves, led to a war that lasted almost two years, which was followed by years of brutal repression, a response to the guerrilla resistance that began after the defeat of the Vietnamese armies.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 103) “The first governor of Cochinchina, Admiral Bonard . . .was eager not only to come to terms with the emperor of Vietnam, but also to gain the cooperation of the mandarins who . . . had been in charge. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 103-104) The emperor agreed but the mandarins resisted. “They simply disappeared, taking with them or destroying indispensable records, and proclaiming . . . that collaboration with the French was a betrayal of the national cause.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 104) Frenchmen replaced the mandarins. Cochinchina was administered as a military colony. Finally, even the mandarin resistance ended. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 104-105) The French created new classes. One, landowners and other landless peasants. The landowners were a result of French colonial policy. They had no real power other than over the peasants. In royal times the peasants had ownership of the land that was recognized by the emperors. The French converted this to private land ownership leaving the peasants out. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 162-163) The French “ignored custom in favor of the theory that they, as heirs of imperial power in Cochinchina, had the right to dispose of all untenanted and uncultivated land.” The lands were given to “colons, and collaborating, rich Vietnamese. A new relationship developed for the Vietnamese peasant and the land. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 163) “Between 1880 and 1930, the rice-land surface in Cochinchina quadrupled, but the average holding of a peasant was smaller in 1930 than before the coming of the French. And although considerably more rice was grown than ever before, the peasants’ share continued to decline.” The French exporters rice to China and Japan and made an enormous amount of money. The Vietnamese had never exported rice and stored surpluses.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 163) The peasants thusly starved. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 164) Cochinchina had a “special economic and political status.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 107) Merchants, soldiers and well to do Vietnamese dominated the politics and economics of Cochinchina. There were rice exporters and land speculators. There were also political appointees who had no other place to go. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 108) Chochinchina “The Mekong irrigated Vietnam’s richest lands and millions of acres still waiting to be opened up for production that could make Vietnam of the biggest rice exporters.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 109) In order to placate the French and disarm the argument that the Vietminh were just a bunch of communists, the Committee for the South in Cochinchina “gave important functions to official Catholics, Buddhists, independents, and dissident sect leaders who claimed to represent substantial Hoa Hao and Cao Dai groups.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 296) Tongking In 1883 the French began a twelve year “pacification” military campaign that entailed the slaughter of Vietnamese. The Vietnamese surrendered and “signed the Treaty of Protectorate which put an end to the independence of Vietnam.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 98) “At the time this treaty was signed, no one could have foreseen how long French rule would last nor where it would lead. But one thing was certain: neither the people nor the mandarins welcomed their new master or accepted his presence. In announcing the death of Tu Duc, the imperial court expressed Vietnam’s will to regain independence. Tu Duc, the proclamation said, “was killed by sorrow over seeing foreigners invade and devastate his empire, and he died cursing the invader. Keep him in your hearts and avenge his memory.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 98) Getting out of Vietnam would prove to be essential to France as holding onto the country sowed political division and was militarily costly. “France, ever since Vietnam was finally conquered in 1883, to pay so heavy a price for it in blood, money, and political dissension? (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 101) Vietnam becomes France’s richest colony under Paul Doumer who became Governor General in 1896. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 102) Previously Vietnam had been in constant flux under the French. The Vietnamese did not accept French rule and the French exploited the country. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 103) In Tonking the French destroyed Vietnamese resistance and came to an accommodation with the mandarins. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 106) ANNAM The last area for the French to conquer was Annam. The French dissolved the emperor’s cabinet and replaced it with a Vietnamese and French membership cabinet. “the French took over the collection all taxes [in 1897]. The emperor was granted a handsome allowance and the mandarins became French employees.” (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 107) After the war and under Diem, the French remained the controlling power in South Vietnam and still maintained their economic interests. (Joseph Buttinger. Vietnam: a political history. 395

Thom Hartmann recently published his latest in his series, The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: how Reaganism gutted America and how to restore its greatness. Hartmann cites studies that demonstrate Americans pretty much got what they wanted in previous decades going back to the New Deal with Social Security. However, after Reagan’s election it was the 1% that got what they wanted and the rest of us got screwed.

The film The Great War and the 20th Century recounts Lord Grey just before the war began as saying, I am afraid that the lamps in Europe have gone out and we will not see them alight again in our lifetime. I read his memoirs. He doesn’t remember saying that!