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Even before the ancient Athenians asserted that the nature of humankind is to conquer wherever and whatever one can, we have had to confront the possibility that the impulse towards domination is at work in all forms of human endeavor. Thus it may be said that social organization in this world of ours is generally comprised of big and powerful individuals or groups able to pronounce to the little and feeble ones that this, that, or the other ‘shall not pass,’ while the weak and feeble ones are left to respond, ‘let us be reasonable.’ But when reason is not forthcoming, and the impositions of the powerful become extreme, how does a feeble nation, or a single individual, overcome the inescapable reality of an imbalance of power and of the oppression imbalance entails? Such was the situation of the Vietnamese people, who were colonized by the French from the 1850sto the 1950s.
Offering his own version of the collective Vietnamese response to French oppression, Ho Chi Minh in the 1920s launched a series of literary attacks on French colonials while he was living in Paris. In these early essays, Ho Chi Minh acknowledges French control over the Vietnamese, but refutes the fundamental moral or cultural right of the French to that dominance by exposing their hypocrisy and ineptitude through satirical ridicule. In doing so, he effectively turns the tables on French power, transferring by implication their inappropriate assumptions of superiority to the Vietnamese, whom Ho Chi Minh promotes as superior to the French in all of the important ways.
Ho Chi Minh creates a literary vision of Vietnamese superiority through the use of three rhetorical tropes or strategies. He employs a false sense of journalistic immediacy as a means of substantiating the tales of colonial abuse that he tells. These tales also present what are in all probability fictionalized versions of the Vietnamese people, who are thus depicted as cultural innocents over-lorded by the inept and morally inferior French colonials who bear the full brunt of Ho’s satire. This is not to say that Ho Chi Minh’s literary treatment of French colonials was entirely fictionalized. There were many abuses of the Vietnamese by the French during the period of colonialism in Indochina. To get a better understanding of the overall situation before turning to Ho Chi Minh’s essays then, we should review the history of the French colonization of Vietnam, as well as Ho Chih Minh’s role in finally establishing Vietnamese independence from the French.
When a small flotilla of French and Spanish warships sailed into the port city of Da Nang in 1858, they did so to attack a tribal nation that had been subordinate culturally and economically to China since the 2nd century B.C.[i] Vietnam was affectionately referred to in Peking as the “smaller dragon,” and while independent from China, it remained its tributary until shortly after the French attack on Da Nang. That attack was not exactly unexpected, because French missionaries had entered the region in the 18th century, and in the early 1850s the French government had tried to establish its influence through diplomatic solicitations to the Vietnamese emperor seated in the capital city of Hue.[ii] The attack on Da Nang resulted from the failure of those solicitations. The next year, the French attacked Saigon, a commercial port city a few miles north of the Mekong river delta. After this action, the young and sickly Vietnamese emperor Tu Duc ceded three provinces to the French in 1862. [iii] These provinces became known as Cochin China.
In the 1880s, while their rivals the British were shoring up territorial claims in India, Burma, and China, the French attacked Vietnamese Hanoi and occupied several cities in the Red River delta. Initially, the Chinese sent troops to help its “smaller dragon,” but their own situation in relation to the British was precarious, so they withdrew their support for the Vietnamese in 1885, just after the Vietnamese emperor died, leaving a leadership gap into which the French would step.[iv] Without an emperor, peace factions at the Vietnamese court in Hue effectively ceded control of all of Vietnam to the French, who now added the protectorates of Tonkin and Annam to their Cochin China. This tripartite area of control became known collectively as Vietnam.
The French retained an absolute control of Vietnam until late in World War II, when they lost it to the Japanese in March of 1945. Soon after the Japanese fell, the French tried to regain their colony while fighting Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh troops, who had risen against the Japanese. These Viet Minh troops, with help from the Chinese, finally defeated the French in 1954 at the battle of Dien Bien Phu[v]
Ho Chi Minh was born on 19 May, 1890,[vi] into a poor family that had produced generations of Confucian scholars who held mid-level administrative jobs in the governmental education system. In the family tradition, Ho Chi Minh’s father had received a doctorate of letters based on his performance on the imperial examinations, and was employed by the French variously as a teacher and as a proctor for the exams. Yet it was his misfortune to have also had revolutionary friends who wanted to expel the French. As a teen, Ho Chi Minh served as an informal messenger for these revolutionary friends of his father’s, and while receiving a good education at the prestigious Quoc Hoc school in Hue, dropped out after his father lost his job as a result of revolutionary associations. Ho then taught elementary school until one day, still in his teens, he wandered off to Saigon, where he took work as a cabin boy on a French merchant ship.[vii] For years he traveled in this fashion to ports in Asia, Africa, Europe, South America, and the United States, settling for periods in London, Paris, New York, and Moscow, reading voraciously and picking up languages.[viii] While living in Paris from 1917 to 1923, he fell in with Vietnamese ex-patriates who had been drafted into French service for the Great War of 1914-1918. Along with other members of this embittered lot of people, and in cooperation with French radicals, Ho Chi Minh helped form the French Communist Party.[ix] At the same time, he began to write his essays condemning French colonialism and colonial oppression generally. Since the French Communist Party was not so concerned with such issues, however, Ho Chi Minh wrote to the Soviet leadership seeking help, and was invited to Moscow to be formally trained by the Communist International Movement (Comintern) as an Asian revolutionary operative.[x]
By 1925, Ho Chi Minh was a paid agent of Lenin’s Third Comintern, stationed by the Soviets in Canton, China. He taught at the WhampaoAcademy there, ostensibly training revolutionaries for Sun Yat Sen’s Chinese Nationalist Party. His covert job, however, was to recruit the best students for the Comintern. In this capacity, Ho Chi Min followed the Leninist line of using any means necessary to achieve his end, and so betrayed to French secret agents those nationalist students who would not convert to Communism. He even betrayed his father’s old revolutionary friend, Phan-boi Chau, in order to take over his organization and merge it with the Indochinese Communist Party which Ho Chi Minh had recently founded.[xi] After 1927, however, his political fortunes changed often and dramatically. Sometimes he was in power, sometimes in jail, and at other times, Ho found himself as a Communist agent pulled out of the political hotspot of Southeast Asia, to work in Moscow, Berlin, and Italy.
In 1938, Ho Chi Minh was transferred by the Comintern from Europe to Yenan, China, where Mao Zedong’s Communist Forces had made camp after completing the famous Long March. There, he became a propaganda advisor to the guerilla warfare school. This training became invaluable in 1941, when he started his own guerilla warfare school on the Viet-Sino border, training those who would be the future military leaders and propagandists of the newly formed Viet Minh army. In August of 1945, this group emerged to successfully fight a five-day battle with the Japanese, who had taken over Vietnam from the French in that same year. Victorious, on 2 September 1945, the Viet Minh, lead by Ho Chi Minh, declared the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, a nation free from French rule.[xii] It would be another nine years, however, before the French were made to give up all claims to the region, but Ho Chi Minh’s personal decision making was behind every strategic form of resistance to them from the early 1920s until the French fall at Dien Bien Phu .[xiii]
From the very beginning of Ho Chi Minh’s career as a revolutionary, until the very end of his life in 1969, one of his most powerful revolutionary tools was his typewriter. [xiv] The French began feeling the sting of his particular kind of narrative attacks while he was a young radical communist and nationalist living and writing in Paris, changing his address constantly to avoid being picked up by French agents, who were always hot on his trail. Through his association with French radicals, he had learned the power of the press, and in 1922, even founded his own journal, Le Paria, dedicated to the plight of the French colonial peoples.[xv] He also wrote scores of articles for other revolutionary journals, such as l’Humanite, La Vie Ouvriere, and La Correspondance Internationale. These literary essays had an impact on political affairs in metropole France because the French authorities immediately arrested those caught reading any of the journals in which they were published.[xvi] Such a policy of course spawned widespread interest. They also had an effect on political affairs in colonial Vietnam, because they were smuggled into the colony by returning Vietnamese who stowed them in their luggage. They were also stowed by sympathetic workers into such commodities as toy clocks, packed and bound for Vietnam.[xvii] What is more, in their substance, they achieved high political impact through their believability.
Ho Chi Minh’s technique used to achieve believability was a simple one. He created a sense of immediacy through the imposition of specificity. Thus, he tells us from Paris that in the faraway world of Vietnam, on March 22, 1922, a French customs-house officer in Cochin China nearly beat an Annamese woman to death because she had disturbed his siesta. She had done so in order to intercede for another Annamese woman who had not been paid her wages. For doing this, she was twice slapped hard in the face by the French customs official. When she stooped to pick up her hat, he then “furiously kicked her in the lower abdomen,” until she was bleeding from the mouth. Her old and blind husband had to carry her away, and as Ho Chi Minh notes from Paris, “the woman is now in the hospital.”[xviii] Of course, Ho writes from Paris in July about this March 22 event in Vietnam. Presumably, it would be a miracle of technology and communication of the kind to which the Parisian radical underground of 1920 would hardly have access, were Ho to really have known if the Cochin woman were still in the hospital at that time. One also wonders how he might know the particulars of her stooping to pick up her hat.
Yet Ho typically used specific dates, times, and instances in his writing. The effect on his audience was quite likely that of receiving special news flashes from someone who was right there on the scene as eyewitness. Thus he reports an incident that occurred on April 2, at 4:30 p.m., where an old Vietnamese man employed by the French for 25 years tried to obey a drunken Frenchman’s order that he open a drawbridge. Because the old man did not understand what the Frenchman was saying, however, he was beaten until, as Ho notes, the “poor fellow lost consciousness.”He is perhaps “dead now, Ho surmises.[xix] And yet again, one wonders who among the Vietnamese recorded the event at 4:30 p.m., or who knew that this nameless man had worked diligently for 25 years at his post? Furthermore, this particular incident is filled with specifics of the kind that indict the character of the French—if beating old men is not enough. The “poor fellow” had previously been given orders by his French overseers to keep the drawbridge closed ten minutes prior to the passing of a train. According to those orders, ten minutes prior to the train’s passing, he had to put up a red flag signaling the bridge closure. This he had done, writes Ho. Yet confronting the poor but dutiful fellow was another French official who, unlike him, had taken out his government boat to go hunting—presumably on his government’s dime—or franc. Now this official was ordering the faithful old man to disobey his employers. All the while, Ho animates the scene with fictional steam whistles from the boat, leaping mad Frenchman throwing stones and knocking over red hot braziers, and red caution flags rippling in the wind.[xx] How much of this could have been true?
Likewise, in an essay describing Colonial sadism, Ho Chi Minh creates a scene of Vietnamese domesticity and innocence in order to show French barbarism disrupting it. After the French landed in a small village, Ho writes, most of the fearful population fled into the jungle, but two old and venerable men, one maiden, and one mother “suckling her baby” while holding the hand of an “eight year old girl,” trustingly remained. These were soon accosted by drunken French soldiers seeking “money, spirits, and opium.”[xxi] As in other literary instances provided by Ho Chi Minh, these Vietnamese again had no idea what the French wanted of them, so one confused old man was hit on the head with rifle butts, and the other, for the amusement of the drunken Frenchmen, was slowly roasted by them in a wood fire. Meanwhile, the soldiers raped not only the maiden and the mother, but also the eight-year old girl. The raped mother escaped with her baby, and watched, Ho tells us, as a Frenchman slowly pushed his bayonet in and out and in and out of the eight year old girl’s stomach. He then cut off the girl’s head for her necklace, and her finger for her ring. When other Vietnamese returned to the village, they found the corpse of the disemboweled girl, her fist clenched under an “indifferent sky,” and the roasted corpse of the old man “bloated, grilled, and golden.”[xxii]
This essay of 1922, written so that “our Western sisters…realize both the nature of the civilizing mission” of the French in Vietnam, and the “sufferings of their sisters in the colonies,” [xxiii] contains many specific details that must be fiction, however effective they are as anti-French propaganda. The slow in and out movement of the bayonet into the eight year old girl’s stomach is awfully evocative of the sexual act itself, and as such, seems more like a convenient literary detail than one of the kind to have been reported by the surviving Annamese mother. Likewise, it seems improbable that a drunken soldier would cut off the head of a corpse in order to acquire a necklace, if for no other reason than that decapitation must be a fairly labor intensive operation. Further, the clenched fist of the girl under an indifferent sky suggests a level of existential indignation over her fate that we do not typically find in eight-year olds.
What is perhaps more important than melodramatic propaganda in Ho’s essays, however, is the way in which his details shift the moral imperative for leadership away from the French and to the Vietnamese. An old Vietnamese man works diligently for 25 years for his employer, and is beaten because he cannot understand a French official who tells him to disobey an order. By contrast, the French official who beats him uses a government boat in order to go hunting. Which of the two would any employer want tending the shop? Similarly, a woman tries to help her fellow worker get her pay, and is violently and irrationally treated by the French overseer as a result. What company would want such managers? What mothers such sons? And the village elders and the innocent maidens, mothers, and little girls who remained in the village, unaware that harm could come to them, all represent, on some level, that which is best and productive and revered in society, while the Frenchmen who kill them during a search for alcohol, opium, and money, have clearly given in to the weaknesses that make both individuals and societies unfit.
To further support this message that the French are not fit to rule, lead, or for that matter, be employed, Ho Chi Minh time and again satirically employs language drawing attention to the assumptions of French superiorityto character French inferiority. Thus it is the “good French press” that overlooks French abuses.[xxiv] An official who binds an innocent Annamese man then beats him to death is noted as “worthy of his predecessor” on the job, and may even expect the same kind of “administrative promotion” one day as his predecessor had received before him. A French missionary, or “gentle apostle,” as Ho calls him, suspends a native from the stairwell and beats him to death for a crime that he did not commit.[xxv] Another “civilizing father” beats and tortures an Annamese boy for crimes actually committed by his own “civilizing son.”[xxvi] And overall, the “lofty” and “civilizing mission” of the French, meant to bring “progress and justice” to the Vietnamese, is carried out by such “champions of equality” as variously beat, torture, swindle, mock, and kill those who soon come to know the “beneficent light of high civilization” experienced under the “motherly protection” of France.[xxvii] These fortunate ones, Ho continues, also come to fully understand what the enlightened French mean by their famous motto, “fraternite, egalite, et liberte.”[xxviii]