History

More On Mao

Posted on by Laughingnomad

We are grounded by the subway strike so have been reading more of the biography of Mao by authors Jung Chang, the author of the wonderful three-generation epic “Wild Swans,” and her British husband Jon Halliday.

What is especially interesting so far, is that this biography reveals much heretofor unknown information about Mao Tse Tung and the Cultural Revolution in China. Mao, for decades, held absolute power over the lives of one-quarter of the world’s population and was responsible for “well over 60 million deaths in peacetime,” more than any other twentieth-century leader. He used terrorism to try to establish China as a world-wide military nuclear power and to seat himself as it’s leader. To do this he wanted to draw draw Russia and America into a world war. Russia, hoping to appease Mao, allowed him to start the Korean War…Korea’s Kim even taking his orders from Mao. Mao sent thousands and thousands of troops into Korea thinking the Americans would never know the difference between Chinese and Koreans…and he was ready to sacrifice untold millions of people. He knew the Americans wouldn’t tolerate the body bags. Stalin (“The Master”) held the line, but when Stalin died, Khrushchev pulled the plug.

The detail illustrates Mao’s premeditated cruelty unprecidented in modern history. The authors had access to the Russian archives, interviewed hundreds of key people that are still alive…Russians, Chinese, Americans and anyone else who had a role during this time.

Values in China are carried forward by the culture…not by any ethical or civic standard. I could feel reverberations of China’s past during our several months in the country.

The Myth of “Nam”

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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The male fantasy of Saigon that was nurtured in Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American” written in the 1950’s is recreated superficially in bars in Saigon with names like Apocalypse Now and B4 75 where, to the pulse of 1960’s music like The Doors, Vietnamese women again run their hands over the backs of young and adventurous American males with a trust fund…love-you-long-time-you-be-my-big-honey…the twenty-something young guy at the next internet terminal says to his friend behind him…only god saved my life last night! “Nam,” says Lonely Planet guidebook, is a myth bound up with sex, drugs and a rock and roll soundtrack…with images of war, of the smell of napalm in the morning and hookers at night.

First of all, Vietnam is nothing like the mythical “Nam” that is portrayed in most of the post Vietnam literature and film which is that if Americans are caricatures of heavy handed bellicosity, then Vietnamese must be contemplative and peace loving. The jungle was no easier a habitat than it was for the Americans. Bao Ninh, a former North Vietnamese soldier who wrote “The Sorrow of War” (that every young boy in every city tries to sell you) described the forests of central Vietnam through which the many branches of the Ho Chi Minh Trail was carved, as alien: “Here when it is dark, trees and plants moan in awful harmony. When the ghostly music begins it unhinges the soul and the entire wood looks the same no matter where you are standing….living here one could go mad or be frightened to death.”

Writings on Vietnam, according to Robert Templer in his “Shadows and Wind” published in 1998 in the UK, doesn’t take into account the diverse mix of religious and political beliefs that are evolving and changing. Vietnamese fighters were not all heroic martyrs as the propaganda in the museums of Hanoi would have you believe; many did not understand why they were fighting. But the creation of “Nam” and the concept of “Indochine,” French colonial nastalgia, was not possible without complicity on the part of powerful Vietnamese officials, according to Templer; creating a playground of colonial and war memories was a way for the government to mend broken ties and sell the country to tourists. It also had the side effect of isolating foreigners and distracting them from the widening ideological, economic and social issues that afflicted the country. Guilt and sadness that inflected the writing of American reporters who produced books on their returns to Vietnam in the 1990’s tended to offer only the most gentle criticisms of the government. As Templer puts it, “the government ensured that journalists and writers spent more time examining a past over which the government could exercise some control rather than a present that is slipping away from them.”

Tourism Vietnamese Style

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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From the 200 kilometers of the Cu Chi tunnels, six layers deep just outside Saigon, the Viet Cong (South Vietnamese communist fighters) planned their campaigns on the South Vietnamese and American bases that ringed the city. The area became one of the most heavily bombed, gassed and defoliated sites as US forces attempted to clear the tunnels. Now, controlled by the sports and recreation department of the army, it serves to summarise the war for tourists. Part of the forest has been turned into a complete wartime environment.

The propaganda is that it was simple ingenuity that defeated the powerful Americans: the guerrillas left shavings from American bars of soap around the entrances to tunnels to disguise their scent from the sniffer dogs and smoke from cooking fires was dispersed through numerous chambers so that spotter planes could not locate it. At the end of the tour visitors are served a VC meal of stringy manioc dipped in crushed peanuts and tea brewed from forest leaves. As visitors leave they can shoot off a few rounds from an AK-47 at a firing range or shop for trinkets made from the brass shells of rifle bullits or model jet fighters crafted from Coke cans. VC uniforms of black pyjamas and checked scarves are offered to those who wish to dress up for the occasion.

Ironies
The North Vietnamese, especialy, are very proud that they won what they call the war against American aggression. This propaganda of heroic resistance is presented in all the museums in North and South Vietnam as the single, unifying theme of Vietnamese history. Well aren’t we proud of our War of Independence …George Washington is our kindly Uncle Ho Chi Minh! What was George Washington REALLY like? I have to admit that with the friendly tour guides-oh so happy to see the Americans react to all this-I bought a Viet Cong hat in Quang Tri only to give it away two days later to an old lady in Lang Co after I had a chance to think about it.

I took a tour of the Reunification Palace where the North Vietnamese crashed the gates of the South Vietnamese government building on that April morning in 1975 that sealed the fall of Saigon. (There is a tunnel system that runs the entire five kilometers to the airport from the Palace.) Some of the pictures on the walls shows the South Vietnamese government officials sitting waiting for the North Vietnamese; other pictures show their arrest.

In my tour group was a young enthusiastic German who was here for two months with his wife while adopting a “prostitute baby.” (Abortion is not much of an option here both because of lack of information and money.) As we moved about the Palace we exchanged remarks…we made a big mistake intervening in Vietnam I said…all countries seem to make big mistakes he said…the Soviet Union in Afghanistan…and both your country and mine lost a war…but now my country just wants peace, he continued, and started singing the music from the 1960’s musical “Hair” which he says is very popular in Europe right now. And we don’t want Mr. Bush to go to war in Iraq…if you go to war with Iraq you cannot win!