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Date: July 29, 2020 at 2:29:45 PM EDT
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Subject: H-Net Review [H-Asia]:  Taylor on Nguyen, 'The Unimagined Community: Imperialism and Culture in South Vietnam'
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Duy Lap Nguyen.  The Unimagined Community: Imperialism and Culture in
South Vietnam.  Manchester  Manchester University Press, 2020.  280
pp.  $120.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-5261-4396-9.

Reviewed by Keith Taylor (Cornell University )
Published on H-Asia (July, 2020)
Commissioned by Bradley C. Davis

The military officers who murdered South Vietnamese president Ngô
Đình Diệm in 1963 and the Americans who urged them on
subsequently propagated a view of this man that has become a cliché
in virtually every book written about the Vietnam War: he was a
tyrant with obscure and self-absorbed ideas whose autocratic and
repressive policies provoked an insurgency against his own
government--he was the architect of his own demise. This idea served
the purposes of nearly everyone: the rulers of North Vietnam, the
Americans, and the South Vietnamese who justified their rule by
having overthrown him.  

During the past twenty years, scholars have published studies that
portray Ngô Đình Diệm in a somewhat less dismal light. But the
thoughts and aims of both the man and his domestic critics have
remained elusive--until now. In _The Unimagined Community:
Imperialism and Culture in South Vietnam_, Duy Lap Nguyen has
dissolved the entrenched stereotype of Ngô Đình Diệm and
developed an analysis of his thought, aims, policies, and opponents
that is fresh and convincing, meanwhile subverting prevailing
interpretations of modern Vietnamese history. He also develops a
fresh analysis of American and South Vietnamese relations in the
post-Diệm era.

This book will be disdained by those committed to the caricature of
Ngô Đình Diệm that was retailed by the military officers who
overthrew him and that remains in fashion among people who write
about the Vietnam War. This book's arguments, while grounded in
historical evidence, are informed by philosophy and cultural
criticism, which may deter some historians. Nevertheless, the
importance of the book is bound to be increasingly understood as the
encrusted stereotypes of the war gradually fade.

Americans who met with Ngô Đình Diệm typically reported that he
talked endlessly, but they never reported what he said. They were not
listening. By taking seriously what Ngô Đình Diệm and his
brother Ngô Đình Nhu actually said, Duy Lap Nguyen opens a new way
to understand the Vietnam War.

Philip E. Catton's 2003 _Diem's Final Failure_ reevaluated the
much-reviled "strategic hamlet" program of Ngô Đình Diệm, and
Edward Miller's 2013 _Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States,
and the Fate of South Vietnam_ reevaluated the relationship between
Ngô Đình Diệm and the United States. And while both of these
authors gave the ideological orientation of the Ngô brothers more
serious attention than others have done, Duy Lap Nguyen's mastery of
modern philosophy has broken through the communist-capitalist binary
of Cold War doctrines to reveal the significance and the implications
of their commitment to what is commonly called Personalism, a
twentieth-century ideology that opposed both communism and
capitalism. In doing so, he reveals the nature of the unbridgeable
gulf that opened between Ngô Đình Diệm and both his urban
Vietnamese critics and the Americans.

Ngô Đình Diệm and his brother Ngô Đình Nhu were inspired by
the early twentieth-century French thinker Emmanuel Mounier's
Personalist critique of bourgeois democracy as serving "the mistaken
concept of freedom" espoused in capitalism, which Mounier understood
as "a non-Christian form of modernity" that replaces God with
ownership and possession of wealth (p. 58). Personalism aimed for a
"freedom" that was neither a Person detached from community, as with
the alienating individualism of capitalism, nor a community detached
from a Person, as with the collectivism of communist dictatorship (p.
80). For the Ngô brothers, according to Duy Lap Nguyen, "Personalism
was not an anti-communist doctrine, but a communism that was more
anti-capitalist than the vulgar Marxism adopted by the Communist
Party" (p. 82). Nhu ridiculed the northern communists for not really
understanding what communism was: they just waved slogans to seize
power. For the Ngô brothers, the conflict was not between communism
and democracy or between international proletarianism and
nationalism; rather, it was a contest between two different visions
of anticolonial communism: Stalinist and Marxist humanist (p. 83). It
is often forgotten that, prior to his brother becoming prime
minister, Nhu was a leader in the South Vietnamese labor union
movement, not simply as an organizer but as a theorist.

This interpretation of the thought of the Ngô brothers runs counter
to nearly everything that has been written about them, but it must be
admitted that there has always been something missing in efforts to
explain their aims. Even if some writers have acknowledged that the
Vietnamese Personalism of the Ngô brothers represented some kind of
middle way between communism and capitalism, no one has pursued the
implications of this line of thought with the consistency and clarity
of Duy Lap Nguyen's analysis, which, well documented, is developed in
the contexts of the Strategic Hamlet Program, developed in 1960-62 to
resist the Hanoi-directed rural insurgency in South Vietnam, and of
the deterioration of the Ngô brothers' relationship with their urban
Vietnamese critics and with the John Kennedy administration.

The supposed infamy of the Strategic Hamlet Program was one of the
main accusations made against Ngô Đình Diệm by his urban
critics, who simplistically equated it with the previously abandoned
Agroville Program, a failed 1959-60 experiment to counter communist
insurgency by concentrating rural populations into new towns. This
accusation was also a major feature of the propaganda issued by
Diệm's enemy based in Hanoi. And it was taken up by the Americans
who were frustrated with Diệm's resistance to their advice.

On the other hand, the rural people whose lives were most directly
affected by the Strategic Hamlet Program benefited from both an
increase of physical security and by a revolutionary shift of local
power from the "notables" of colonial times to a new generation of
locally elected postcolonial leaders. Even American military officers
reported that by 1962 the program was gaining ground against the
insurgency, and North Vietnamese later admitted that it was choking
their activities in the South. But the propaganda barrage from
Diệm's enemies in Hanoi, from his American critics in the press and
in the Department of State, and from the people who overthrew him and
who abandoned the program eventually succeeded in erasing any memory
of the program's success.

The connection between Personalism and the Strategic Hamlet Program
was lost with the deaths of the Ngô brothers and the demonization of
their regime. The Strategic Hamlet Program was designed not only as a
response to the communist insurgency but also as a response to the
threat of American interference in Vietnamese domestic affairs. It
was also a rejection of colonial politicians who had collected in
Saigon and who were allied with American interests. The people who
overthrew Diệm understood that the program was against their
interests, whether would-be urban politicians who saw for themselves
a role in a US-dominated government or military officers who realized
that the program's success diminished their benefits from US military
involvement.

The Ngô brothers, no less than the communist leaders in Hanoi,
understood the importance of the rural population; but instead of
terrorizing the peasantry into obedience as the North Vietnamese
urban-based communist "land reform" of 1953-56 had done, they aimed
to foster a nonviolent revolution in the southern countryside to
create a modernized self-reliant rural society that could resist both
the economic and political domination of both the Hanoi-based
insurgency and the urban-based "free world" elite.

It's no mystery why the fiercest critics of the Ngô brothers were
based in the cities: French-trained remnants of the colonial regime
both civilian and military, the class of entrepreneurs allied with
American economic interests, political Buddhist monks, and American
reporters--for all of these, Personalism was an obstacle to their
influence. From the perspective of the Ngô brothers, these people
represented an urban minority whose interests were opposed to
empowering the rural population and to decentralizing both the
structure of government and the war against the Hanoi-directed
insurgency. On the other hand, the American demand to "democratize"
by bringing the urban elite into the central bureaucracy would crush
the social revolution in the countryside that the Ngô brothers
endeavored to implement as a way to create a more decentralized
rural-based polity capable of resisting the insurgency directed from
Hanoi.

According to Duy Lap Nguyen, the alliance between the United States
and a burgeoning class of urban entrepreneurs and retailers was
cemented in the mid-1950s by the Commodity Import Program, the scheme
by which American funds were channeled into the Saigon government
while creating an urban society dependent upon American consumer
goods. The Ngô brothers were caught in the contradiction of needing
American assistance while believing that the long-term implications
of doing so would create a colonial economic and a political
structure that was against the interests of the great majority of
South Vietnamese. Their only hope was to reorient the economic and
political basis of government away from the cities and into the
countryside before being overwhelmed by the rising American
involvement in their country. This proved to be a vain hope.

Turning to the post-Ngô Đình Diệm era, the second major argument
in Duy Lap Nguyen's book is about the economic, cultural, and
strategic results of the ascendance of American tutelage over the
Saigon government. The key insight here is related to Lyndon
Johnson's "limited war" idea, how it reflected the growing importance
of advertising strategies in American culture, and its effect on the
economy and culture of South Vietnam as well as on American
perceptions of the war. The limited war approach was based on
"image-making as global strategy." The war of attrition that ensued
was "a spectacular form of coercion devoid of real political power
... enormous superiority in the means of violence" was employed in
the absence of a plan to actually prevail (p. 168).

The American strategy for intervening in the Vietnam War, to the
extent that it can be called a strategy, was to persuade Hanoi's
leaders to give up their effort to conquer South Vietnam by
demoralizing them with a spectacle of bombs and air-mobile
operations. There was never a strategy to actually win the war, only
to make the enemy think that it could not win. American perceptions
of the war were thoroughly shaped by this emphasis upon appearance
over reality. Consequently, in 1968 the American people turned
against the war because the spectacle of the Tet Offensive convinced
them that the United States could not win the war when in reality the
Tet Offensive was a major defeat for Hanoi. Facts no longer mattered;
it was the spectacle that counted.  

Duy Lap Nguyen points out that this way of thinking had already led
to the overthrow of Ngô Đình Diệm in 1963 after the American
press had demonized him. His overthrow was not related to the actual
state of the insurgency but rather was to produce a desired public
impression--an American ally had to be eliminated for his refusal to
acknowledge the sovereignty of American public opinion. The young
activist Buddhists who sought his downfall had mastered the American
susceptibility to spectacular persuasion. In 1968, the leaders in
Hanoi inadvertently discovered this as well.

The second part of the book endeavors to bring literary criticism
into an analysis of the Second Republic (1967-75) to suggest that the
effect of American commodity capitalism was to subordinate South
Vietnamese writers to a free market based on the mindless consumerism
of acquiring ever more goods and services. Duy Lap Nguyen's reliance
on Võ Phiến's view of South Vietnamese literature leads to a
contradiction. He accepts Võ Phiến's elitist criticism of this
literature as lacking literary value: authors were forced to write
for a popular readership and "instead of educating the people through
the creation of high works of culture ... had to mix with the masses"
and to prostitute their artistic ability by creating popular cultural
commodities for a mass audience that was too lazy to appreciate art
(p. 197).  

Duy Lap Nguyen cites Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno on literature
as "distraction" to develop Nguyễn Hiến Lê's observation of this
literature as a "wasteful form of gratification ... entirely separate
from the way that literary works had once been appreciated" (p. 201).
This reinforces his citation of Võ Phiến's nostalgia for
literature produced by premodern mandarins and colonial
intellectuals, which led him to see the spread of works of art "to
the masses" as a lowering of standards and to lament the absence of
writers who could write pedagogically to elevate national
consciousness.

But then as an example of this new literature with mass appeal, Duy
Lap Nguyen analyzes the Z.28 novels of Bùi Anh Tuấn; he references
the ideas of Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, Michel Foucault, Jean
Baudrillard, and Carl Schmitt to explain that these novels were a
critique of South Vietnamese urban society under American economic
and cultural ascendancy. Furthermore, according to Duy Lap Nguyen,
these novels portrayed the United States as a poisonous ally that
held South Vietnam hostage to its spectacular "limited" style of
warfare that ultimately made the continued existence of the country
impossible (p. 216).

The question arises: how then do these novels relate to Võ Phiến's
assertion that literature in South Vietnam had nothing important to
say about the fate of the country? Duy Lap Nguyen argues that South
Vietnamese literature reflected the mindlessness of commodity
capitalism and at the same time argues that one of the most popular
novelists critiqued the social effects of this mindlessness as well
as the entire American project in his country.

This apparent analytical dead-end in the analysis of South Vietnamese
literature may lack plausibility, but it nevertheless introduces a
topic that deserves more attention: the literary freedom enjoyed by
South Vietnamese writers, how it was exercised in the era of
commodity capitalism, and what this can tell us about the
urbanization of the country under wartime conditions that made rural
life increasingly untenable.

Duy Lap Nguyen's insight into how "image-making as global policy" led
American leaders to be deceived by their own strategy is particularly
appropriate with regard to Lyndon Johnson, who gave up his political
career in 1968 as a result of a purely spectacular victory of the
enemy as portrayed by the US news media. This was a "turning point"
that came not from a "decisive defeat on the battlefield" but from
"the failure of the planners, as specialists in the practice of
global image-making, to sell the image of omnipotence to its intended
audience" both in Hanoi and in American public opinion (p. 250).

I believe that Duy Lap Nguyen's analysis is basically correct. As a
consummate politician, Lyndon Johnson lived in the realm of spectacle
and American public opinion, which ended his career. John Kennedy
also lived in that realm, which ended the life of Ngô Đình Diệm.
American public opinion and politics continue to flounder between
reality and the spectacle.

Citation: Keith Taylor. Review of Nguyen, Duy Lap, _The Unimagined
Community: Imperialism and Culture in South Vietnam_. H-Asia, H-Net
Reviews. July, 2020.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55242

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.

Since the "100 Latest Messages from the Marxmail List" has been resuscitated, it seems, I'll stick with that. But please don't stop the daily digest from groups.io.