January, 2010

Review of Mark Philip Bradley, Vietnam At War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

1.

In our history books we refer to “the Vietnam War,” which fixated American attention for a decade, if not more. Some common associations and recollections of that period from the tumultuous Sixties to 1975 are of Presidents Nixon and Johnson, our POWs and MIA, napalm and Agent Orange, the antiwar movement, William Calley and the My Lai atrocity, the 1968 Tet Offensive, and the vets grappling with PTSD after their unceremonious return to the U.S.

It is the virtue of University of Chicago historian Mark Philip Bradley’s Vietnam at War to focus on how the Vietnamese perceived and responded to their successive struggles, wars, and cataclysms: from the long decades of French colonialism, to the post-World War II battles after France’s reconquest, to the supposedly temporary division of North and South Vietnam pending reunification after an election in 1956, to the rise of the National Liberation Front in the south, to the full-scale land invasion by the United Sates in 1965, and that war’s 1975 aftermath.

For an American who has read some of the books from “our side” (veterans’ accounts, political memoirs) or seen any of the U.S. films on the war period, this book would be a worthwhile investment of time and energy. More of us, from several generations, need to reckon with the history and present of a people whom we formerly dehumanized as “gooks” and “slopes,” but with whom we nevertheless “inter-are,” in the formulation of Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh.

2.

With the French domination of Indochina since the late 19^th century, the Vietnamese were faced with excruciating questions: How could this horror come to pass? Why were the Vietnamese able to be dominated and exploited by the French? Bradley notes that, “[d]espite the self-serving French claims to be carrying out a mission civiliatrice in Vietnam, colonial policies affected the lives of Vietnamese peasants in devastating ways and significantly increased the potential for class tension and disorder in the countryside.” [16] Multiple perspectives and answers emerged from the early 1900s to address this degradation of Vietnamese society. Modernizers, reformers, radicals, and revolutionaries all developed accounts of why it had happened and what must be done to gain freedom from colonial rule. In 1926 one of these early critics of the French, Nguyễn Ái Quốc, later to become Hồ Chí Minh, stated, “The liberation of the proletariat is the necessary condition for national liberation.” [6]

During World War II, Japan took over France’s control of Vietnam, during which an estimated 2 million Vietnamese died from famine. During this time the Việt Minh asserted itself as a national independence movement led by Hồ and sought a broad coalition for “national salvation.” Bradley comments, “Throughout the Second World War, the [Việt Minh] sought to portray themselves in Confucian and patriotic terms that they believed would resonate with wide sectors of the Vietnamese urban and rural population. The leadership consciously drew on Confucian models of personal ethics and selfless sacrifice to society. [Hồ Chí Minh’s] carefully crafted public persona projected all the desirable qualities of the Confucian ‘superior man’: rectitude, sincerity, modesty, courage, and self-sacrifice.” [36] After the Japanese were defeated, the Việt Minh declared independence with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The French, however, were intent on regaining what had been theirs, particularly in the southern part of the country, where they had made profitable investments in tea, coffee, and rubber. Thus, the groundwork was laid for the “French War.”

3.

The French lured the former emperor Bảo Đại to be their figurehead and the United States became involved by largely subsidizing France in her colonial aims. Bradley argues that the “racialist lens through which the Americans viewed the Vietnamese heightened the strategic importance of the French war for American cold war diplomacy. If the Vietnamese were incapable of self-government and susceptible to external direction, as most US policy makers believed, evidence of the communist orientation of the leaders of the Democratic Republic meant they could be little more than puppets directed from Moscow or Beijing, with alarming implications for the American cold war rivalry with the Soviet Union.” [55] Joseph Stalin had no trust in Hồ; but the recently victorious Communist Party in China was supportive of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s aspirations. By 1953, the French had lost 150,000 men (note that 58,000 American service people died in Vietnam) and in less than a decade after World War II, the DRV dealt the French a death blow at the battle of Điện Biên Phủ in 1954.

According to Bradley, “Without question the DRV emerged from the French war with increased prestige. The regime had defeated the French—an outcome almost unimaginable to many contemporary Western observers when the war began—and had built a strong and seasoned military force. [Hồ] became an almost larger-than-life figure. Even those Vietnamese who opposed his socialist regime acknowledged his political skills and could not deny the larger symbolic resonances of the victory at [Điện Biên Phủ].” [68] Further, Hồ’s DRV strategically emphasized the victory over the French in a narrative of sacred struggle that gave pride of place to revolutionary sacrifice.

4.

However, with the Geneva Accords between Vietnam and France, independence was delayed temporarily until elections and reunification of the North and South could be held in 1956. Hồ was confident of victory in the proposed election, which never came to pass, as it was ignored by Ngô Đình Diệm, backed strongly by the U.S. that was opposed to any prospect of Communist leadership in a united Vietnam. The U.S augmented its previous investment in French control: “More than $1 billion in subsidized US exports flowed into the South between 1956 and 1960 to ensure the availability of inexpensive consumer goods in urban areas….The size of the US aid programme and its embassy in Saigon was second only to the American commitment to South Korea.” [84] Diệm brutally repressed any opposition in the south, which led to the rise of the southern National Liberation Front, backed by the DRV, which Bradley notes, “provided a viable and popular means not only to challenge the [Diệm] government but also to imagine an alternative state and society for southern Vietnam.” [101] The Kennedy Administration continued to increase U.S. commitment with advisors and military aid, and still Diệm was unable to maintain control. A crisis erupted in 1963, with Buddhists taking the leadership in protesting Diệm’s oppressive regime. By November 1963 Diệm was assassinated during a military coup (with U.S. foreknowledge); within a year, the Tonkin Gulf Incident was exploited by Kennedy’s successor Lyndon Johnson to attack the DRV. A year later, Operation Rolling Thunder had begun and hundreds of thousands of troops were arriving in South Vietnam.

5.

During the war 25% of all U.S. economic aid went to South Vietnam. The United States’ presence in South Vietnam radically transformed the lives of the Vietnamese. American-style consumerism and pop culture found its adherents in the Vietnamese middle-class, leading to generational conflicts. Bradley notes that “[t]he bombing, shelling, and ecological warfare that characterized American military strategy in southern Vietnam took a huge toll on the fabric of rural society, literally depopulating huge swaths of the courtside as villagers moved to refugee camps and urban areas.” [140-141] The U.S. shored up South Vietnam’s successive corrupt governments but after the Buddhists were crushed in 1966, there was no chance of another political force to challenge the government except the National Liberation Front. South Vietnam’s governments were opposed by the NLF, not all of whom were supportive of or interested in a socialist future. Some members of the NLF were bothered by domineering Vietnamese coming from the north to direct the southern struggle against the US and its SVN “puppets.”

In war-time, people think simplistically of two sides: ours versus theirs. Bradley points out that the NLF was more complicated than either the American proponents or antagonists of the US war were able or willing to see: “Without question, the Front had deep southern roots and spoke to profound discontent with the political and social order under Ngo Dinh Diem. It also quickly became dominated by Hanoi, a role that the North went to great pains to hide. For many in the southern movement who saw the NLF as a continuation of the larger struggle for Vietnamese independence and had given their allegiance to the DRV in the French war, this was not a particular problem. But for others it would be.” [100]

6.

Bradley chronicles how the U.S. war gradually came to an end: the pivotal 1968 Tet Offensive, Nixon’s program of Vietnamization, and peace negotiations in Paris. By 1975, the North Vietnamese army entered Saigon, and the war was over. Vietnam at last became unified. Though the now Socialist Republic of Vietnam had grave problems to face, their wars weren’t over, as the country became belligerents with Cambodia (under the Khmer Rouge) and China (Cambodia’s principal ally). Vietnam’s ultimately decade-long occupation of Cambodia further drained an already weakened economy. In 1986 a policy of đổi mới was instituted, which sought to liberalize the economy. Yet, Bradley observes, “With its new-found economic prowess, however, have also come problems: a growing gap between the wealthy and the poor, rampant corruption within the state and party over the spoils of the economic reforms, gender differentials in employment and political participation, and a significant deterioration in providing health care and educational access for all its citizens, what the Vietnamese socialist regime for all its peacetime problems did best.”

[178]

7.

Throughout his succinct survey, Bradley stresses the tensions, contradictions, paradoxes, and ironies the Vietnamese experienced as they attempted to grapple with the questions of where they’ve been (vis-à-vis their colonized past), what they are (in the post-war period with a socialist government and economic renovation), and where they want to be in the future.

In the United States the meanings of our Vietnam war are still researched, discussed, distorted, evaded, and contested. Bradley’s book on our former allies, enemies, and victims can inform, complicate, and enrich our own grappling with who were then, as well as who we are now—in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A review of Kathleen and Bill Christison, Palestine in Pieces: Graphic Perspectives on the Israeli Occupation (Verso, 2009).

When several of us went to work with the International Solidarity Movement in 2003, my friend Pat Geier observed that her going raised the anxiety level of her friends in Louisville. Because she was headed into a possibly dangerous conflict zone, her friends began to pay more serious attention to what was going on there. That said, I can strongly recommend Kathleen and Bill Christison’s recent book Palestine in Pieces to anyone who has made a first trip to Palestine as well as to those people who’ve had their anxiety and awareness raised by such travelers.

For example, I think of Matt Miller and Nima Sheth who spent a week on the West Bank in 2008 and a day in Gaza in 2009; Kelly McBride who visited the West Bank for three days in 2009; and J’Ann Allen and Sandra Tamari, who just returned from Cairo where they and 1400 other internationals had gathered to march to Gaza. I’m guessing that each of them knows at least a score of people who were made more aware of the injustices the Palestinians face daily.

Years ago, the Christisons were analysts with the Central Intelligence Agency. Their journey into solidarity with the Palestinians’ struggle for freedom has been a long, gradual, and humble one. Having made seven visits to the West Bank and Gaza since 2003, the Christisons bring to this book familiarity on the ground, critical analysis, and passion commensurate with the oppression inflicted on the Palestinians. It’s instructive and intriguing to read how a couple once ensconced in the foreign policy establishment came to such clarity about this asymmetrical conflict.

The title of the book bluntly calls attention to the results of the Israel’s occupation. To see the realities created on the Palestinians’ land by Israel’s settlers and army is to come close to despair about the possibilities of a meaningful two-state settlement. The reason is the occupation has so fractured the Palestinians’ economic, social, cultural, and religious lives that they are living separated from their compatriots and, often, their own means of employment, access to health care centers, and ability to cultivate their agricultural fields.

Several chapters introduce the reader to the interlocking modalities of the occupation’s domination of the Palestinians: carving up their land by establishing Jewish-only settlements (or colonies) and erecting the illegal Separation Wall; proliferating checkpoints and roadblocks that impede Palestinians’ freedom of movement; demolishing people’s homes; and subjecting cities, towns, and villages to the severe measures of curfew, closure, and siege.

Three representative passages:

Security is not an adequate or an appropriate excuse for wanton killing, for expropriating massive tracts of Palestinian land, for imprisoning millions behind walls and razor wire, for bulldozing thousands of homes belonging to innocent people never charged with or even suspected of terrorism. What exactly is the reason for spilling sewage from Israeli settlements onto the land of neighboring Palestinian villages? What indeed is the security excuse for planting settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank in the first place? What is the reason for dropping 1,000-pound bombs or lobbing artillery shells onto homes and apartment blocs in the middle of the night when it is a certainty that the vast majority of the casualties will be civilian?

The hypocrisy of the demand for sympathy for Israel’s position, when Israel is the human rights violator and the brutal oppressor, is stunning. (p. 20)

***

At the root of the vast matrix of roads and checkpoints that cripple the Palestinian economy and Palestinian lives is the network of Israeli settlements throughout the West Bank. Without the settlements, there would be no segregated roads, no checkpoints and, most likely, no Separation Wall. The checkpoints protect the roads; the roads protect the settlements; the settlements are a colonial implantation, relentlessly expanding, intended to grab land and keep it for Israel. Like the “critically inferior” Palestinian road system that must pass underneath Israeli roads, all Palestinian interests, all Palestinian security and viability are subordinate to this essential Israeli objective of Jewish expansion across all of Palestine. (p. 86)

***

There are hardly words to describe the human suffering and degradation deliberately imposed on Palestinians by Israel’s occupation. The Israeli threat to Palestinian lives and livelihood, individually and collectively—indeed to Palestinian national existence—through theft of land and the siege of towns and villages, through walls and roads and blockades that strangle, through the crippling of economic opportunity, through deliberate large-scale killing, together resemble a hunting expedition to cage and ultimately eliminate animals from a natural habitat. Israeli leaders, Israeli settlers, Israeli soldiers treat Palestinians not as a collective of human beiges, but as trapped animals whose fate is of little or no concern. (p.137)

One of the dedicatees of the authors’ book is Rachel Corrie, the U.S. college student who was killed by an IDF soldier in his bulldozer, as she attempted to prevent a Palestinian family’s home from being destroyed. In 2003 she had come to Gaza to work with the International Solidarity Movement. In an email to her family, she confessed, “I’m having a hard time right now.   Just feel sick to my stomach from being doted on very sweetly, by people who are facing doom.  I know that from the United States it all sounds like hyperbole.  A lot of the time the kindness of the people here, coupled with the willful destruction of their lives, makes it seem unreal to me.  I can’t believe that something like this can happen in the world without a bigger outcry.   It hurts me, again, like it has hurt me in the past, to witness how awful we can allow the world to be.” Like Corrie, the Christisons have experienced such kindness, incredulity, and indignation, and these formative contacts with the Palestinian reality have given birth to their strong political commitment.

Palestine in Pieces is a penetrating work of demystification and conscientization. May something inside this book—a story, a photo, a fact—hurt something inside the reader as she feels arise in her the conviction: This must not be.

by Sara Talken

The Book of Mev really opened my eyes to new levels of poverty. I always knew that poverty existed in third world countries but I never knew to what extent. Mev’s photojournalism really helped me understand just how severe the poverty in the Caribbean and South America really is. I am a visual learner. Seeing pictures and diagrams of how things work is my ideal way of learning. Seeing Mev’s pictures in this book really helped me to comprehend the severity of these people’s situations. Like the cliché says, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” the looks on the children’s faces and the sadness I could see in their eyes really hit home with me. These pictures spoke a stronger message to me than any lecture I’ve heard about the poverty in El Salvador or any article or news report about the poverty in third world countries. I admire Mev for creating such a touching and thought-provoking tool to show the world about the effects of poverty.

Mev came from an affluent suburb of St. Louis, yet she didn’t look down on the people who had less than she did. I can relate to Mev in this way. I grew up in a wealthy suburb of Kansas City. People at my high school received brand new BMWs for the fifteenth birthday. It is not a big deal, for some people, to go into Nordstrom and spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on clothes, shoes and accessories that will be out of style in a year or two. I’ll admit that I have gotten caught up in this storm of materialism and I would use shopping as a stress reliever or a way to get rid of my boredom. Now that I am in college and have burst out of my “Johnson County bubble,” expensive clothes, shoes, cars, and houses are no longer what encompass my thoughts. Sure, I’d love to live comfortably one day, but my eyes have been opened to a whole new world of people through my college experiences. I was taken aback by the amount of homeless people that wandered the sidewalks around the SLU campus. Also, the number of African American people really caught me off guard because where I am from an area where the dominant race is white/ Caucasian. I had never witnessed true diversity before college and I was quite sheltered and naïve about the world outside of Overland Park, Kansas.

My dream of becoming a doctor inspires me to change the way all people are treated, just as Mev wanted fairness and equality for all. I do think the fight against worldwide poverty is something everyone should participate in, but this cannot be accomplished until each country works to fix their own poverty problem. The United States falls into this category. There are hundreds of thousands of people that live below the poverty line in our country. I know that this needs to be addressed in much more detail than is being done. One issue that falls in my field of interest is the universal health care plan proposed by the Obama administration. I believe that each person has the right to care, no matter what their financial status. This isn’t exactly a way to fight the issue of poverty, but it is a step in the right direction for equality for all people. I feel that if Mev was alive today, this is a topic she would have a lot to speak about.

Mev lived a very inspirational life. Her devotion to the poor and having their stories heard in order to bring them a better life gives guidance to others who want to follow in Mev’s footsteps. Her journey was not an easy one, but having someone to look up to give hope to others with dreams like Mev.

–Sara is a pre-med junior at Saint Louis University.