Vietnam: A New History (vi)

from Christopher Goscha and Vietnamese studies

This fifth chapter, The Failure of Colonial Republicanism, is a lecture. Just now I read the first page aloud in less than 3 minutes. You could trim the 27 pages to deliver the entire chapter in 1 hour and 1 quarter or down to a 50-minute class meeting.

The book’s introduction, 14 chapters, and conclusion, averaging 30 pages each, add up to the once-a-week lectures of a semester course over 4 months, allowing for academic holidays. Lecture means reading.

Before we could print and sell them the lecturer would read his book aloud. Now the lecturer writes a book, stepping up to his lectern to address the world.

My mind’s eye watches Christopher Goscha step onto the platform where Max Weber, speaking from his own, wrote that we become scientists of those instead doing politics, the exercise of power through bureaucracy. Call us stand-up tragics, passing on insight by speaking of the blind.

“Already, in 1931, a well-informed French police inspector warned his superiors that they ‘no longer have anyone with us’.”

In this lecture Chris tells the story of the life of the leaders of every Vietnamese anti-colonialism. Every last one set out at first to work with the French.

“The problem was the inability of republican officials across the political spectrum to grasp the importance of implementing . . . moderate political reforms . . .”

For fuck’s sake all of Indochine, spanning Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchine could have enjoyed peace all century by local government under capital as now and maybe the grandeur of empire. But nobody in Paris was giving anything away.

“French decision-makers, whether conservatives . . . or liberal humanists . . . clearly had excellent intelligence services and analysis at their disposal.”

Read the block quotation in the photograph to see what Chris means. Read Paul Mus and Joseph Buttinger and Bernard Fall to see if excellent intelligence made any difference for the United States of America either.

“This closing of the French official mind . . . would have disastrous consequences for the Vietnamese people during the rest of the twentieth century.”

Tragics. We are stand-up tragics writing about the old fools for the slack-jawed youth. Max lectured in 1918 from his own small nation about to vanish under waves of idealists hardened by the carelessness of those in charge.

This was the sixth Viet Nam letter of 6 so far addressing Vietnam: A New History by Christopher Goscha. The first went out April 16, 2022, the second on May 18, 2022, the third on June 20, 2022, the fourth on August 20, 2022, and the fifth on October 17, 2022.

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.

The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.