Nguyễn Ái Quốc and the Tours Congress

From: Mike High <mikebiking@yahoo.com>
Sent: Thursday, May 18, 2023 1:10 PM
To: Paul Schmehl <paul.schmehl@gmail.com>
Cc: vsg@uw.edu
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Nguyễn Ái Quốc and the Tours Congress

Paul,

I grew up reading TIME and Reader’s Digest and assuming what they were saying was gospel. Coming from a family with a long military tradition, it was hard for me to accept the kinds of things of things that were happening in Vietnam. But, as I began to educate myself—reading people like Douglas Pike, among others—it became evident that our method of fighting was producing far too many civilian casualties. That is, as we felt we were making no headway in winning over the peasantry, we relied on our superior firepower as a “force multiplier.”

This effect was noted very early in the war, as when John Paul Vann and John Porter tried to tell Air Force General Anthis about the civilian casualties that they were finding on the ground. This was killing their counterinsurgency effort, they told Antrim, but he wouldn’t listen. And that was well before we entered the war in force! There is no way to tabulate all of those casualties—and when ground forces did count them, they usually listed anyone in black pajamas as “enemy KIA”—but the accounts we have from the Vietnamese indicate that they were huge.  

Mostly this was “action at a distance” for the Air Force, and their measure of productivity was mostly tonnage dropped. In a landscape with few clearly military installations, they had no other means of quantifying their achievements. 

So, I had to modify my views and become more realistic about the nature of war—not just the American war, but the French war before that, and all the way back. 

It was very hard to get the American people to consider this in the Sixties. Most people were still reading TIME and Reader’s Digest, and both of those publications propagandized a Manichean narrative that was easier to swallow. In some ways, we were very much like the Russian citizenry of today who accept their government’s version of events in Ukraine. I do not make this comparison lightly.

So, I am glad that much was written about My Lai got the attention it deserved, though I agree that it received too much attention. My Lai came to be seen as a “one-off,” though there were surely other such events that were not documented so thoroughly. Keep in mind that the military tried to cover the incident up until it was no longer possible to do so.

My Lai also tends to obscure the most deadly part of the war, which was the indiscriminate use of firepower. That’s something we need to talk about and be aware of, because it affects our use of force in other wars. Whatever else you may say about Iran and Afghanistan, the military was more cognizant of the problems involved as an occupying force. Well, at least some commanders were ….

What about atrocities by the other side? Without trying to be any kind of a Communist apologist, I will say that their resources and hence their tactics simply could not produce the same level of civilian casualties. I think it was reading Douglas Pike that I realized this—the “Viet Cong” killed government officials and even aid workers, but picked their spots. The view of the peasant in the countryside was that you had to stay on the good side of the Viet Cong, because they knew who you were. It was the RVN and the Americans, with all their firepower, that had to be feared, because they had the firepower and didn’t know who you were.  

We should also acknowledge that one of the reasons for the RVNs eventual defeat was the increasing unwillingness of its people to continue the war. We can barely comprehend how war-weary they really were. Of course, the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao—long presumed to be solidly anti-Communist, had pacifist leanings and many did not want to serve in the armed forces. (So it was that in the final months of the war, the ARVN had to send a detachment to An Giang to round up deserters and draft dodgers.) The Buddhists had always deplored the American buildup (as had General Maxwell Taylor!) and were powerful advocates with their “Don’t shoot your brother” campaign. That’s a Vietnamese side of the story that is too often neglected.

:: Mike High

Great Falls, Virginia

USA

BTW, I have a copy of Death by Government, and found Rummel’s assumptions deeply flawed, and not just in the matter of Vietnam. Though I like Stephen Pinker very much, I think it was a huge mistake for him to use Rummel to try to establish his case in Better Angels of Our Nature. I am sympathetic to many of Pinker’s arguments, but using Rummel’s numbers to quantify the number of people who died in past centuries is quite unscientific.

From: Paul Schmehl <paul.schmehl@gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, May 18, 2023 11:14 AM
To: Shawn McHale <mchale@gwu.edu>
Cc: vsg@uw.edu
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Nguyễn Ái Quốc and the Tours Congress

Shawn I have no problem abandoning partisanship, but when communist atrocities are routinely dismissed and American atrocities are amplified,  I think it paints an inaccurate picture of what took place in Vietnam. Even your description mentions specific events (e.g “a certain Navy Seal) but dismisses the communist atrocities with “some were killed by PAVN and NLF”. Then you minimize the communist killings with “Most were probably killed by ARVN and American forces”.

If we don’t study ALL the instances of brutality and illegality equally, how can we say anything at all about the deaths of Vietnamese without distorting history?

You go on to state “Whatever number we use, we should not rely on estimates made during the war by the US military, which were notoriously imprecise.”

I’ve seen this statement, in various forms, made repeatedly. I don’t recall the actual number, but the total enemy dead according to the US military was somewhere in the neighborhood of 950,000. The modern Vietnamese government claims it was (again, I don’t recall the precise number) about 1.4 million. So, if there was imprecision by the US military it was to underestimate the number of dead, if we are to believe the numbers the communists themselves released.

I personally prefer to use R J Rummel’s Death by Government numbers since he provides low, medium, and high estimates based on extensive research. By his estimates, the communists were responsible for an order of magnitude larger deaths than the allied forces.

Frankly, I don’t think it contributes much to the discussion to provide estimates of the dead since they are only estimates. For example, when I researched the Hue massacre, I found that somewhere between 2,800 and 6,000 were killed by the communists. Such a wide range of numbers doesn’t really tell us much that is useful except to speak to the scale of the killings.

What I think does contribute to history is to discuss the iinhumanity of the war on both sides. For example, the massacre in Tet, the massacre of Dak Son, the civilian deaths on Highway 1 in 1972, etc., etc. The 1947 massacre of Vietnamese nationals in Nam Bo. Those should receive just as much attention as My Lai, the Navy Seal incident, the Tiger killings, the South Koreans, etc.

Rather than an Americentric view of the war which focuses almost exclusively on what America did, the focus should be on Vietnam and the impact of the war on its people, regardless of who the perpetrators were. In the historical literature, communist massacres have barely been discussed. For example,  a search for “Hue Massacre” in the Internet TV News Archive returns zero relevant hits. A search for “My Lai Massacre” returns 21 relevant hits. That seems to be a stark imbalance.

It seems to me that the research on the brutality of war has been overtly partisan.

Paul Schmehl

paul.schmehl@gmail.com

Independent Researcher

From: Judith A N Henchy <judithh@uw.edu>
Sent: Thursday, May 18, 2023 10:45 AM
To: mchale@gwu.edu; Dien Nguyen <nguyendien519@gmail.com>
Cc: vsg@uw.edu
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Nguyễn Ái Quốc and the Tours Congress

Shawn,

Here’s the citation for that article that Charlie and Loi published:

Hirschman, C., Preston, S., & Loi, V. M. (1995). Vietnamese casualties during the American war: A new estimate. Population and Development Review, 21(4), 783-812. Retrieved from https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/vietnamese-casualties-during-american-war-new/docview/61456698/se-2

Best

Judith

Judith Henchy, MLIS, Ph.D.

Head, Southeast Asia Section, University of Washington Libraries

Special Assistant to the Dean of University Libraries for International Programs

Affiliate Faculty, Jackson School of International Studies

From: Shawn McHale <mchale@gwu.edu>
Sent: Thursday, May 18, 2023 9:02 AM
To: Dien Nguyen <nguyendien519@gmail.com>
Cc: vsg@uw.edu
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Nguyễn Ái Quốc and the Tours Congress

In 1995,  Charles Hirschmann and Vu Manh Loi, estimated that during  what Americans call the Vietnam War, about 1 million Vietnamese died. Using this as a baseline, and looking at a variety of estimates of civilian deaths made by doctors and others, I then made a rough estimate of 400,000 civilian deaths. I think that number is probably too low, but I was trying to make estimates based on some semblance of honest accounting.    Others have contested Hirschmann and Vu Manh Loi's estimate of numbers killed as too low, suggesting that it is 2 or even 3 million dead.  If the higher estimate of total deaths is used, then the number of civilian deaths would rise as well. 

Whatever number we use, we should not rely on estimates made during the war by the US military, which were notoriously imprecise. We should trust demographers far more. This is all a long way of saying that 400,000 civilians or more were killed. Some were killed by PAVN or the NLF.  Most were probably killed by ARVN and American forces. Such routine killing of civilians was the NORM -- civilians in no-fire zones, "collateral damage," who happened to be in the way of a certain Navy Seal who talked at George Washington University  this past month and took part in the killing of over 10 civilians in a village, and so on.  The killings at Mỹ Lai are a drop in the bucket in contrast to this "routine" killing. They weren't all killed by Ho Chi Minh. 

Let's abandon the partisanship for a moment, and clinically look at war not as political contests, BUT AS WARS. Modern war can be very deadly. Violence kills. No side in a war is innocent. Asymmetries of power can lead to asymmetries in deaths, which is another way of saying that those with more firepower usually kill more.  

Shawn McHale 

George Washington University

From: Dien Nguyen <nguyendien519@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, May 17, 2023 8:30 PM
To: Paul Schmehl <paul.schmehl@gmail.com>
Cc: vsg@uw.edu
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Nguyễn Ái Quốc and the Tours Congress

How did Việt communists manage to slaughter people between 1920 and 1945?  The Vietnam Communist Party, later renamed Indochina Communist Party, was only formed in 1930 as a clandestine organisation. 

Nguyễn Điền 

Canberra 

From: Chau NGUYEN NGOC <yakiribocou@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, May 17, 2023 1:28 PM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: [Vsg] Nguyễn Ái Quốc and the Tours Congress (Cau Thai)- The truth on the help of the French to Nguyen Anh

Dear all,

Just about the following text, I have explanations that demonstrate that it was not true. Nguyen Anh didn't unify the country thanks to the help of the French, an error made by many historians.

Nhà Nguyễn rước người Pháp vào hòng đánh bại nhà Tây Sơn chẳng phải “cõng rắn cắn gà nhà”? Nếu nhà Nguyễn có đóng góp cho đất nước thì đã không để mất nước vào tay người Pháp, để nước ta phải chịu cảnh đô hộ suốt trăm năm? Nếu công nhận Việt Nam Cộng hoà là một chính quyền thì xương máu của bao người đổ xuống trong cuộc kháng chiến chống Mỹ là vô ích? Đảng, Chính phủ đã nhận sai lầm vì cải cách ruộng đất còn chưa đủ sao mà muốn viết lại?...

Details can be read on my Google Drive using this link:https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RfBnluNEB_Si-kKz9tpT3mra-S7WL18A/view?usp=sharing

They are summarized by the following excerpts :

" The series of books History of the Cochinchina Mission 1658-1823 which is composed of 4 volumes recording letters (collected by the priest Adrien Launay) of missionaries who came to evangelize our country (and a little in Cambodia and Laos) who, for two centuries, addressed them to their superiors in Macau,  a branch of the Missionary Society of Rome," tells the truth about what happened.

"The letters [of Bá Đa Lộc, i.e. Pigneaux de Béhaine), opened up to me a new horizon, a textual truth that what was written before about Bá Đa Lộc did not have, even everything I have read is completely contrary to what Bá Đa Lộc wrote in his reports to his superiors in Macau and Rome in this series [...] For example, Bá Đa Lộc said: he returned to Cochinchina by boat with Prince Canh empty-handed, without any weapons, to help the king and subsequently he had not been able to bring to Việt Nam neither ships nor weapons to help King Gia Long - then still Nguyễn Ánh -. Then he described his difficulties at court, the opposition of queens, mother, wife, king, because the prince refused to practice the worship of his ancestors, which he called "the worship of corpses". He had to face difficulties with the court mandarins who advised the king not to let the prince approach him. Bá Da Lộc intended to leave, and was really preparing to secretly flee when King Quang Trung was about to attack the South, etc».

[...]

Pigneaux de Béhaine recounts his return to the country at Cap Saint Jacques empty-handed on July 24, 1789, after the trip to France with Prince Cảnh as follows:

By March 1789, Pigneaux de Béhaine and Count Conway had already been informed that Nguyễn Ánh had already retaken  "5 southern provinces (Sài Gòn, Mỹ Tho, Đồng Nai, Long Hổ and a fifth city which had always obeyed this prince)"  with his renewed military forces and that he was " able to raise an army of 60 to 80,000 men and, according to the news, he will have next May 50 galleys, 2 ships and 4 to 5 hundred warships".

Nguyễn Ngọc Châu (author of two books on Viet Nam)

Visitez mon site https://www.nguyenngocchau.fr

Accédez à mes articles (plus de 17.400 vues) sur le site academia.edu en allant à ce lien https://independent.academia.edu/ChauNGUYENNGOC2

From: Paul Schmehl <paul.schmehl@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, May 16, 2023 3:35 PM
To: Cau Thai <cvthai75@gmail.com>
Cc: vsg@uw.edu
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Nguyễn Ái Quốc and the Tours Congress

I wonder what will happen if the Vietnamese people ever learn the truth about how many of their countrymen the communists slaughtered from 1920-1980?

Paul Schmehl

paul.schmehl@gmail.com

Independent Researcher

From: Cau Thai <cvthai75@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, May 16, 2023 10:42 AM
To: vsg@uw.edu
Subject: [Vsg] Nguyễn Ái Quốc and the Tours Congress

Dear List,

According to writer Nguyên Ngọc, in one discussion 10+ years ago about the society's decline of moral values, when Madame Nguyễn Thị Bình and several others asked those around them the question, “When did we start to go wrong?”, Nguyên Ngọc replied to her, “Dear Older Sister, we started to go wrong since the Tours Congress”. Madame Bình stayed silent.

https://www.viet-studies.net/HuyDuc_NguyenNgoc.html

(Attachment included for members with access issue)

Madame Bình, Phan Châu Trinh's grand-daughter, is well-known in the West; further information about Nguyên Ngọc can be found in these interviews:
Kevin Bowen's "Memories of War, Years of Peace: An Interview with Nguyen Ngoc":

https://www.jstor.org/stable/4229268
Anthony Morreale's "An Interview with Nguyên Ngọc":
https://online.ucpress.edu/jvs/article-abstract/14/2/93/93842/An-Interview-with-Nguyen-Ng-c?redirectedFrom=fulltext

At the Tours Congress on December 30, 1920, Nguyễn Tất Thành aka Nguyễn Ái Quốc voted to establish the Communist Party of France and became one of its founders:
https://en.nhandan.vn/megastory/202106hochiminh/

Nguyễn Tất Thành's decision to join the CPF and to practice Marxism-Leninism in the following decades was a tragic one for Vietnam and its people.

Despite risk of harassment, historians, journalists, writers such as Phan Huy Lê, Nguyễn Đình Đầu, Vũ Minh Giang, Trần Đức Cường, Hoàng Lại Giang, Nguyên Ngọc and others years ago did what was necessary to set the record straight. This marked the beginning of the effort to re-examine Vietnam's history as presented in North Vietnam after 1954 and in the entire country after 1975:

"Nhưng trên không ít diễn đàn, giáo sư và tôi cùng bài báo bị “ném đá” dữ dội. Rất nhiều câu hỏi được chất vấn ngược lại: Nhà Nguyễn rước người Pháp vào hòng đánh bại nhà Tây Sơn chẳng phải “cõng rắn cắn gà nhà”? Nếu nhà Nguyễn có đóng góp cho đất nước thì đã không để mất nước vào tay người Pháp, để nước ta phải chịu cảnh đô hộ suốt trăm năm? Nếu công nhận Việt Nam Cộng hoà là một chính quyền thì xương máu của bao người đổ xuống trong cuộc kháng chiến chống Mỹ là vô ích? Đảng, Chính phủ đã nhận sai lầm vì cải cách ruộng đất còn chưa đủ sao mà muốn viết lại?...

Bên cạnh chất vấn đó, tệ hơn là nhiều ý kiến công kích cá nhân tôi cùng giáo sư Phan Huy Lê, đến độ mạt sát ông là “sử nô”. Cuộc mạt sát kéo dài nhiều ngày.

Tôi bàng hoàng cảm nhận rằng, công khai những khoảng trống lịch sử và đề xuất tìm cách khoả lấp đã là điều khó khăn, đòi hỏi sự dũng cảm, chính trực của sử gia. Nhưng khoả lấp khoảng trống trong quan niệm, trong định kiến của số đông, còn khó khăn hơn gấp bội."

https://vnexpress.net/khoang-trong-lich-su-3769353.html
http://lichsu.tnus.edu.vn/chi-tiet/205-GS-Phan-Huy-LeKhach-quan-Trung-thuc-Cong-bang-ve-chua-Nguyen-trieu-Nguyen

There was a time that the Vietnamese people willingly accepted the CPV's version of history, especially about the Vietnam War and Nguyễn Tất Thành, as truth. It seems that time is over.

Calvin Thai

Independent