An essay in universal history

38. THE VIETNAM WAR AND THE SIXTIES GENERATION

If the history of Communism could be counted as anything but profoundly abhorrent and evil, then we would have to accord some honour to the Vietnamese Communist movement. For it defeated not one, but two Capitalist enemies. Under its leader, Ho Chi Minh, a founder of the French Communist Party and then founder of the Vietnamese Party, they first defeated the French colonial masters of the country in 1954, and then repeated the trick against the Americans in 1973…

An important cause of Ho’s success was his exploitation of the West’s hypocrisy in relation to its own ideals. Thus after conquering Hanoi in August, 1945, he quoted the American Declaration of Independence and the Franch Declaration of Human Rights as “undeniable truths”. “Nevertheless,” he went on, “the French imperialists, abusing the standard of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, have violated our Fatherland and oppressed our fellow citizens. They have acted contratry to the ideals of humanity and justice. In the field of politics, they have deprived our people of every democratic liberty…”⁴⁷⁹
Of course, democratic ideals of liberty were far more harshly violated by Communist leaders such as Ho than by any western leader. For, as Revel writes, “the Communists excel in converting ingrained feelings, such as nationalism, and such humanitarian causes as combating racism into instruments for furthering totalitarian expansion, although when they are in power they respect neither the national independence of the countries they control, nor human rights.”⁴⁸⁰ Nevertheless, so long as the western powers clung on to colonies which they had stolen from the native peoples, the Communists retained an important propaganda advantage.
Another stiking aspect of Ho’s success was that it was achieved independently of the great Communist super-power in the region, China, which traditionally had seen Indo-China as a tributary region. “After the Korean War,” writes J.M. Roberts, “the Chinese began to supply arms to the communist guerilla forces in Vietnam for what was less a struggle against colonialism – that was decided already – than about what should follow it. In 1953 the French had given up both Cambodia and Laos. In 1954 they lost at a base called Dien Bien Phu a battle decisive both for French prestige and for the French electorate’s will to fight. After this, it was impossible for the French to maintain themselves in the Red River delta. A conference at Geneva agreed to partition Vietnam between a South Vietnamese government and the communists who had come to dominate the north, pending elections opened in Indo-China what was to become the fiercest phase since 1945 of the Asian war against the West begun in 1941.
“The western contenders were no longer the former colonial powers but the Americans. The French had gone home and the British had problems enough elsewhere. On the other side was a mixture of Indo-Chinese communists, nationalists and reformers supported by the Chinese and Russians. American anti-colonialism and the belief that the United States should support indigenous governments led it to back the South Vietnamese as it backed South Koreans and Filipinos. Unfortunately neither in Laos nor South Vietnam, nor, in the end, in Cambodia, did there emerge regimes of unquestioned legitimacy in the eyes of those they ruled. American patronage merely identified them with the western enemy so disliked in east Asia. American support also tended to remove the incentive to carry out reforms which would have united people behind these regimes, above all in Vietnam, where de facto partition did not produce good or stable governments in the south. While Buddhists and Roman Catholics quarreled bitterly and the peasants were more and more alienated from the regime by the failure of land reform, an apparently corrupt ruling class seemed able to survive government after government. This benefited the communists. They sought reunification on their own terms and maintained from the north support for the communist underground movement in the south, the Vietcong.
“By 1960 the Vietcong had won control of much of the south. This was the background to a momentous decisions taken by the American president, John Kennedy, in 1962, to send not only financial and material help, but also 4,000 American ‘advisers’ to help the South Vietnam government put its military house in order. It was the first step towards what Truman had been determined to avoid, the involvement of the United States in a major war on the mainland of Asia (and, in the end, the loss of more than 50,000 American lives).”⁴⁸¹
Kennedy originally envisaged withdrawing all American help by the end of 1965. But from the time Lyndon Johnson became president after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, the American commitment inexorably increased – but without the results that would justify such an escalation. There were special reasons for this: the incompetence of the South Vietnamese government, its hostility to the Buddhist minority, the advantages enjoyed by guerillas that could retreat into safe-havens in neighbouring Laos and Cambodia, the failure to have the struggle blessed by the United Nations or persuade other western nations (besides Australia and New Zealand) to join it, the fact that the war in all its horrors was broadcast by television into the homes of millions of Americans, eliciting disgust and disillusion, but above all the fanatical determination and courage of the Vietcong and North Vietnamese.
For the first time, many people in the West began to have doubts whether the worldwide war against Communism was really worth fighting. Paradoxically, leftist and neo- or Euro-communist ideas were becoming popular in the West just as disillusion was setting in in the East. When Solzhenitsyn emigrated to America in the 1970s, he speculated that there were more true believers in Marxism in the West than in the East, and that the West would never understand the reality of Communism until they had experienced it on their own backs…
True, economic growth in the Soviet bloc had been reasonable in the 50s and 60s, and technological achievements such as inter-ballistic missiles and sputniks were impressive. But these only served to hide the major advantages that the West still enjoyed over the Communist East in terms of vastly superior economic performance and technological creativity of the West. This forced the Communists to pour proportionately far greater resources into the military and space. In spite of this disadvantage, the East did achieve something like parity in the 1960s – much to the alarm of the Americans – and even began to pull ahead in some spheres in the Brezhnev years. In the long term, however, and in spite of high world prices for Soviet gas and oil in the 1970s, the effort exhausted them: by the time Gorbachev came to power in 1985, Soviet Communism was on its last legs.
Moreover, the ever-increasing disparity in living standards between East and West could not be hidden and eventually undermined the resistance of all but the most isolated and fanatical Communist societies (like North Korea). Stalin had been right (from his point of view) in punishing his soldiers who had caught a glimpse of prosperous Germany in 1944-45 (in case they began to ask why “advanced socialism” was so much poorer); and his successors continued to allow only the most “reliable” of their citizens out to the West. The point where the contrast could be seen most glaringly was Berlin, which is why the Berlin wall was built in 1961 to stop the constant flow of émigrés from East to West. For until its final completion on January 5, 1964, “an astonishing 1,283,918 East Berliners and East Germans had crossed to the West. With the wall in place, the East German police showed no compunction in shooting dead anyone who attempted to scale the wall.”⁴⁸²
The appeal of the West was not only economic, but also cultural. Although the Soviets held their own in the performing arts, such as ballet and classical music, this did not prevent leading performers such as Nureyev and Rostropovich from emigrating to the West, while in popular culture the appeal of blue jeans and the Beatles (and even, in restricted showings for the KGB, the ultra-capitalist and decadent James Bond films) was very wide, especially on the younger generation. The main direction of influence was from West to East. There was some influence in the opposite direction, as in the fashion for revolutionary idols, not so much Lenin and Stalin, as the newer idols Mao and Che Guevara. However, as we have seen, this fashion was not really serious, but was rather a manifestation of the deeper cult of youth and general denigration of authority and all received wisdom and morality.
That anti-authoritarianism began in America, with the student protests against the Vietnam War, the burning of draft cards, and the opening up of serious divisions between the media and the government, on the one hand, and between some senators, such as Senators Fulbright, McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, on the one hand, and President Johnson, on the other. This led to Johnson announcing that he would not be standing as a candidate at the next election. Meanwhile, as political protest descended into hippiedom, the drug culture and the practical (and sometimes public) expression of the slogan “Make love, not war”, it could be seen that the seriousness of the events was not so much in any specific ideas or plans of the youthful “revolutionaries” as in a general sapping of authority in the western world. The new president, Richard Nixon, caught the essence of the situation well in his inaugural in 1969: “We are caught in war, wanting peace. We are torn by division, wanting unity. We see around us empty lives, wanting fulfillment…”⁴⁸³
The Vietnam War was unique in that, perhaps for the first time in history, we see the youth of a country forcing its leaders to change course on a major issue of war and peace. For it was the prolonged demonstrations of American youth against the war that finally wore down the administration, first the Senate and then the presidency, leading to the final withdrawal of American involvement in 1975 and a serious undermining of the nation’s unity and self-confidence worldwide. Nor was it only in America that revolutionary youth seemed to take control (if anarchy can be called control), but also in France (in the events of May, 1968), in Czechoslovakia (where students played an important part in the Prague Spring), in England (where the “Swinging Sixties” were largely led by young people) in China (in the rampaging young Red Guards of China’s Cultural Revolution) and in Cambodia in the 1970s (where the majority of Pol Pot’s soldiers were extraordinarily young).
Not coincidentally, perhaps, the first generation to be born after the Second World War was coming of age at the same time; this was the first generation that had taken no direct part in that titanic struggle between Fascism, Communism and Democracy, who had not shared in sufferings or the ideological enthusiasms of their parents. Not that they did not have their own enthusiasms, but these were of a different kind – essentially anarchical, anti-authoritarian, anti-traditional, unfocussed and frivolous. Of course, youth have always played an important part in revolutions, being drawn by the whiff of violence and sexual licence. But earlier revolutions had an ideological content or vision of the future that supplied testosterone-fuelled zeal with a certain backbone, self-sacrificial discipline and quasi-justification. Not so with most of the revolutions of the Sixties. Whether in Mao’s China or Johnson’s America, the revolutionary young could think of no better ideology than Feminism or the Thoughts of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book to justify their sickening abuse of almost everything that previous generations had considered sacred.
The youth protests against the Vietnam War had the appearance of greater seriousness. For after all, young men were being sent to fight and die in a particularly bitter war on the other side of the world. But some of the same frivolity and adolescent anti-authoritatianism that we detected in the May Events in Paris could be seen – albeit with greater real passion, and over a longer period and with far greater long-term consequences - in the disturbances on the American campuses. Thus there was remarkably little real debate about the true evil of Communism, and the consequences of defeat, not only for the Vietnamese people, but also for the whole world. Too late, after the Americans had withdrawn, did the tragedy of the Vietnamese boat people, or the unbelievably brutal killing fields of Cambodia (one third of the whole population killed in the space of four years of Khmer Rouge rule!) register – or rather, failed to register – with an increasingly inward-looking, cynical and divided American and Western public.
In hindsight, of course, it is easy to assert that the Vietnam War was a foolish venture. Khruschev had said to Dean Rusk in 1961: “If you want to, go ahead and fight in the jungles of Vietnam. The French fought there for seven years and still had to quit in the end. Perhaps the Americans will be able to stick out for a little longer, but eventually they will have to quit too.”⁴⁸⁴
They quit on January 15, 1973, suspending all military action against North Vietnam as the Senate cut off all further funding for the war. “Twelve days later, in Paris, the long-awaited ceasefire agreement was signed by all the contending parties: the United States, North Vietnam, South Vietnam and the Provisional Revolutionary Council of South Vietnam (the Communist Vietcong’s political arm). The United States had given up Vietnam, on behalf of whose government it had fought so long and suffered so much – including the disillusionment with the South Vietnamese leaders….
“The ceasefire agreement of January 27 enabled the Americans to begin to pull out their remaining forces, and to end their effective state of war – although there had never been a declaration of war – with North Vietnam, against which no further bombing raids were mounted. The United States Defence Department, at the time of the ceasefire agreement, published the statistics of the war, first and foremost the numbers of those killed in Vietnam since the United States became involved in the war on 8 March 1965. In order of magnitude the higherst death toll was that of the North Vietnames civilians and soldier, and Vietcong, 922,290 in all. The South Vietnamese armed forces lost 181,483 men, in addition to whom 50,000 South Vietnamese civilians were killed. The United States war deaths were 55,337.
“More than 150,000 American soldiers had been wounded, some terribly. As the American public turned against the war, it also seemed to turn against the search for adequate provition for the veterans, for adequate recognition of what they had been through. On their return to the United States, many of those who had fought felt spurned and scorned, their suffering of no interest to those among whom they lived and worked. The war had been lost; for millions of Americans it had become a source of shame. Those who had fought it felt that they had been cast as villains and pariahs. It took a decade and more before there was a change. At the turn of the century, at the Vietnam War memorial in Washington, visitors walk in shocked silence along the long list of names. That memorial was not created until 1982…”⁴⁸⁵
However, in 1975, “with the consent of Congress, 132,000 Vietnamese refugees were offered sanctuary in the United States. Some faced cries of ‘Go home!’ when they reached the town of their destination – especially if it was an area of high unemployment. But many more were met by town bands that marched in parade to welcome them.”⁴⁸⁶
The loss of Indo-China in 1973 has been compared to the loss of China in 1949. But its impact on the American psyche was much more profound; it could be said to have marked the beginning of the end of American democracy. America is still with us at the time of writing, and still powerful; but the freshness, the faith and the idealism had gone by the time helicopters lifted the American ambassador off the roof of his embassy in Saigon in April, 1975...