North Vietnam Had an Antiwar Movement, Too - The New York Times
North Vietnam Had an Antiwar Movement, Too - The New York Times
------------------------
From: Paul Mooney <pjmooney@me.com>
Date: Fri, Aug 25, 2017 at 7:02 PM
To: VSG <Vsg@u.washington.edu>
The latest in the NYT’s Vietnam ’67 series. Paul
North Vietnam Had an Antiwar Movement, Too
AUG. 25, 2017
The North Vietnamese Communist Party leader Le Duan strengthened the “counter counterrevolutionary” campaign to quell dissent against the war.
Nehon Denpa News/Associated Press
When we think back to the signal events of the antiwar movement in 1967, we recall the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s powerful April 4 speech denouncing the war, the thousands of returned registration cards during the “Stop the Draft” week, and the March on the Pentagon that brought record numbers of demonstrators to the nation’s capital.
That year also witnessed global protests condemning the war, as demonstrations in European capitals and the International War Crimes Tribunal issued powerful rebukes against American intervention in Southeast Asia. News coverage of the war also shifted that year, including the first call by The New York Times for a halt to the bombing and the initiation of peace talks.
Less well known, but just as significant, was the antiwar “movement” in North Vietnam. Less a movement than a heterogenous array of voices, it included a wide swath of North Vietnamese society, within the government and among the general public.
Some had never wanted to go to war to liberate the South in the first place, and had sought instead to build the North and reunify the country through political means. Educated in the Soviet Union, some of these individuals even occupied prominent positions in the Vietnamese Communist Party. By 1967, these officials were calling on their government to begin negotiations to put an end to the devastating war. When one such party member, Hoang Minh Chinh, disseminated his political views in an essay he called “Dogmatism in Vietnam,” he became the ruling clique’s No. 1 enemy.
Party members were not the only people who expressed criticism of the war. Artists and writers had long used their talents to make political statements, placing them directly in the cross hairs of the ideological police. The doctrines of socialist realism, as strong in North Vietnam as it was in Communist Europe, demanded that all art glorify the party’s policies. When film directors, writers and poets portrayed the horrors of wars or presented nuanced depictions of battle, their art became subversive as the anti-American struggle for liberation and national salvation raged on. When Vu Thu Hien, a screenwriter and the son of Ho Chi Minh’s personal secretary, wrote an ambiguous scene of camaraderie between Vietnamese cadre and French colonial troops in his script for “Last Night and First Day,” he blurred the line between “friend and foe.”
While some artists stridently bucked socialist realism dictates, others merely denied having a political agenda when they refused to toe the ideological line. In Hanoi’s music scene, the only acceptable form of song or ballad was government-sanctioned revolutionary or martial music; playing anything else was illegal in times of war. So-called yellow music (as opposed to revolutionary red) was banned for being retrograde, sentimental or foreign-inspired. When the musicians Nguyen Van Loc, Phan Thang Toan (who went by the name Hairy Toan) and Tran Van Thanh formed a band and began playing prewar love songs and other romantic music at weddings and parties, they knew they were breaking the law. But in their view, they were not “doing politics”; they were simply playing music they liked.
Just like the Johnson administration, the party under General Secretary Le Duan did not tolerate overt manifestation of dissent. While Washington unleashed Operation Chaos, a secret campaign to undermine antiwar activism in the United States, Hanoi carried out its own repressive effort to stamp out domestic dissension. Starting in the summer of 1967, Le Duc Tho, the party’s organizational chief, and Tran Quoc Hoan, the minister of public security, carried out mass arrests of supposed “traitors” and “treasonous elements,” whom they labeled “revisionists.”
The dreaded security police rounded up hundreds of North Vietnamese citizens, including party officials, senior military officers, journalists, lawyers, writers and artists. Once they were detained, Tho and Hoan found them guilty of trying “to sabotage the foreign policies of our Party and our Party’s policy of fighting the Americans to save our nation,” and “ instead supported a policy of rightist compromise and conciliation.” The “Revisionist Anti-Party Affair,” as the 1967 campaign came to be known, would also be known as the “Hoang Minh Chinh Affair,” named after its first arrestee.
Artists and “yellow musicians” were deemed no less dangerous. The filming of Hien’s “Last Night and First Day” never began; the screenwriter was accused of “shamelessly propagating the idea of general humanism [and] of a general human character beyond class affiliation.” Hien was arrested in late December 1967.
The yellow musicians were likewise found guilty of “poisoning the young generation with pessimistic and reactionary songs, promoting a retrogressive and sex-oriented lifestyle." Nguyen Van Loc and his self-professed apolitical band members were arrested in 1968.
The silencing of these North Vietnamese “antiwar” voices was intimately connected to the strategy deliberation for the upcoming 1968 military campaign. In an attempt to break the stalemate and win the war, Le Duan called for Communist forces to launch coordinated surprise attacks across the cities and towns in South Vietnam, powerful enough to incite a mass insurrection to topple the Saigon government. President Ho Chi Minh and Minister of Defense Vo Nguyen Giap opposed Le Duan’s ambitious Tet Offensive, stating that Communist forces lacked the requisite strength to incite a nation-wide general insurrection. They paid dearly for their dissent.
While Ho and Giap were exiled to Beijing and Hungary, respectively, security forces rounded up and imprisoned their personal assistants and deputies, all under the guise of cracking down on antiwar dissenters. In total, 30 party and senior military officers aligned with Ho and Giap were arrested, even those who were actively involved in the planning for the Tet Offensive. When Senior Col. Le Trong Nghia, who was part of the planning for the Tet attacks but loyal to Giap, was detained in early 1968, he worried what his absence would mean for the success of the upcoming offensive. His captors, on the other hand, were consumed with another matter: finding the link between Ho, Giap and the other “treasonous elements” on the Revisionist Anti-Party Affair that threatened Le Duan’s war.
The antiwar movements in the United States and North Vietnam were not identical, but there were commonalities. Both antiwar scenes possessed a diverse array of actors. While historians are beginning to appreciate the heterogeneity of and understand the intersections between the various groups and organizations on the American side, we have not begun to unearth the multiplicity of voices and their interconnections on the Vietnamese sides.
The other striking comparison is the governments’ response to the antiwar scenes in their countries. Both Hanoi and Washington resorted to extralegal measures to undermine and silence dissent.
While Johnson expanded the powers of the C.I.A. to carry out a domestic espionage campaign, Le Duan strengthened the “counter counterrevolutionary” campaign under the Party Organizational Committee and the Ministry of Public Security. In the eyes of both governments, there was no such thing as healthy dissent in times of war.
Paul Mooney | Freelance Journalist | Berkeley (510) 984 8780 | pjmooney@me.com | www.pjmooney.com | Twitter @pjmooney | Skype pjmooney
----------
From: Paul Mooney <pjmooney@me.com>
Date: Sat, Aug 26, 2017 at 9:06 AM
To: David Brown <nworbd@gmail.com>, VSG <Vsg@u.washington.edu>
Hi David,
Apologies. I didn’t realize the byline wasn’t included. The author of this article, as you guessed right, is
LIEN-HANG NGUYEN.
Best regards,
Paul
----------
From: Greg Nagle <gnagle2000@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Aug 26, 2017 at 9:33 PM
To: Paul Mooney <pjmooney@me.com>, Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Very interesting. I was aware that both Ho and Giap had opposed the Tet offensive but had not known how widespread the opposition was. It does offer interesting counter history if the north and NLF had pursued other routes.
I might offer that as catastrophic as the north's and NLF's losses were in Tet and later fighting to the end of 1969, the fighting did a lot to turn the US public against the war, convincing them that it could not be won. But at Hamburger Hill the Viet losses were at least 10X those of the US there. Why did they choose to dig in on such a hilltop with little strategic value. hammered by 270 US airstrikes and much else? ( I spent a week in the area last year)
And the NLF lost most of their best cadres in Tet with severe consequences later>
Militarily Tet seemed pure foolishness, if for no other reason than poor communications between their attacking units.
And I have read the north lost 50% of its strength in the spring 1972 offensive when they also tried to attack strongly defended positions protected by US airpower.
Was there an alternate route to victory?
What might Giap have done in 1968 i f given the choice?
I get tired of reading about the great Vietnamese victories, Their official history of thewar is pure bunko.
But they "won".
And even more amazing is how well they seemed to get over their grievous losses, In many engagements with the US they were slaughtered with 10X as many Viet deaths at La Drang as the US suffered.
Of course Ho had said that even if they lose 20X as many they would prevail. And they did.
I do wonder what many Viets think now. This is a conversation I have had with a few in Hanoi but not something I press them to explain.
----------
From: Greg Nagle <gnagle2000@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Aug 27, 2017 at 7:38 AM
To: Mark Ashwill <markashwill@hotmail.com>, Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
I read her book and wonder what your issues are with her?
One has to wonder if Vietnam could have won without the ghastly losses they suffered, I would defer to Giap and Ho on that question although they are not here to query>
Giap faced the same problem at Dien Bien where he did not want to squander his few trained troops while he was being pressed by the Chinese and others to throw it all into a one shot frontal assault.
He decided he needed to prepare better and pulled his artillery back. He chose the route of biting off the French strong points slowly.
His book on the battle is revealing since he understood his own mistakes in previous offensives>
What he really thought about the American war is unclear to me.
----------
From: Ngo Thanh Nhan <nhan@temple.edu>
Date: Sun, Aug 27, 2017 at 8:07 AM
To: vsg@u.washington.edu
The novel "Nỗi buồn chiến tranh" -- perhaps, Sorrows of War was controversial when it first came out.
Ngô Thanh Nhàn
Center for Vietnamese Philosophy, Culture & Society
Temple University
----------
From: Greg Nagle <gnagle2000@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Aug 27, 2017 at 8:23 AM
To: Ngo Thanh Nhan <nhan@temple.edu>
Cc: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Yes it was and it was one of the only accounts I read about what it was like to live through a bombing raid which killed 90% of your brigade, It happened a lot, I am amazed at what they were able to endure. I am saddened and humbled, and astonished at how the Vietnamese in the north seemed able to put this behind them, I was even more astonished to see all the US flag hats and shirts,
----------
From: Deo Huu <deochienhuu@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Aug 27, 2017 at 7:25 PM
To: VSG <vsg@u.washington.edu>
While it was certainly interesting to confirm that there was at least some dissent in the North about the war, the shocking part of that article was the implication of moral equivalence between Le Duan and LBJ et al in regard to the treatment of dissenters. While it was decidedly dangerous to register dissent in Hanoi, there was nothing remotely like that in the USA. Many famous antiwar people, from Joan Baez to William Kunstler to dozens more, were very vocal, got tons of publicity, and nobody came to take them away or destroy their careers. Several antiwar groups existed very openly, there were myriad demonstrations from small to huge with no one arrested, I attended some myself and still have pictures taken in New Haven for one that went on there in 1969. Service members were encouraged to desert, from the US to Canada and from Europe to Sweden, and a substantial number did so, using organized underground networks to do it. For that matter, there was of course a lot of antiwar and antigovernment activity in South Viet Nam, although that died down a great deal after Tet '68 and the Hue Massacres become widely known. (No more monks self immolated after that, until some did in the years after Saigon fell, in protest to the policies then in place.) LIEN-HANG NGUYEN has written very well about the war in other places, but this particular piece is disappointing.
R J Del Vecchio
Independent Researcher
----------
From: phuxuan700@gmail.com <phuxuan700@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Aug 27, 2017 at 9:48 PM
To: Paul Mooney <pjmooney@me.com>
Cc: VSG <Vsg@u.washington.edu>
Dear List,
To shed some light on the 1967 “Revisionist Anti-Party Affair”, I'd like to share the Open Letter (in Vietnamese) from surviving victims and victim's relatives:
"Chúng tôi, những nạn nhân còn sống và thân nhân những nạn nhân đã qua đời trong một vụ án không được xét xử cách nay vừa tròn 50 năm được gọi tắt là “Vụ án Xét lại chống Đảng”, một lần nữa phải lên tiếng vì sự thật và công lý, vì lương tâm và nghĩa vụ, vì một đất nước thượng tôn pháp luật.
BỐI CẢNH LỊCH SỬ
Năm 1956, tại Đại hội 20 Đảng cộng sản Liên Xô, Bí thư thứ nhất Nikita Khrushev đã đọc báo cáo quan trọng về chống tệ sùng bái cá nhân Stalin và chủ trương “cùng tồn tại trong hoà bình” giữa hai hệ thống cộng sản và tư bản. Đường lối mới đã được hầu hết các đoàn đại biểu tán đồng tại Đại hội các đảng cộng sản và công nhân quốc tế họp tại Moskva với 81 thành viên tham dự năm 1960.
Đoàn đại biểu Đảng Lao Động (Cộng sản) Việt Nam (viết tắt ĐCSVN) do Chủ tịch Đảng Hồ Chí Minh cùng với Bí thư Thứ nhất Lê Duẩn và các ủy viên Bộ Chính trị Trường Chinh, Nguyễn Chí Thanh tham dự đã ký vào bản Tuyên bố chung Hội nghị trên. Đường lối mới này đã bị Đảng cộng sản Trung Quốc (ĐCSTQ) kịch liệt lên án, gọi là “Chủ nghĩa xét lại hiện đại”.
Sự thay đổi trong nhận định về quan hệ quốc tế đã phân hoá nội bộ một số đảng cộng sản. Trong ĐCSVN cũng xuất hiện hai luồng quan điểm khác nhau. Một bên ủng hộ “cùng tồn tại trong hoà bình”, phản đối đường lối giáo điều tả khuynh của ĐCSTQ, chủ trương hòa bình thống nhất đất nước, phát triển kinh tế đa thành phần.
Bên kia, theo đường lối của ĐCSTQ, chủ trương chống “chủ nghĩa xét lại hiện đại”, duy trì xã hội chuyên chính phi dân chủ, đẩy mạnh cải cách xã hội chủ nghĩa, xóa bỏ hoàn toàn cơ chế kinh tế thị trường, kiên định chủ trương thống nhất đất nước bằng bạo lực..."
https://www.diendan.org/viet-nam/vi-lich-su-va-cong-ly-chung-toi-len-tieng-1
Calvin Thai
PS: .Please let me know off-list for the PDF format of the Open Letter.