VIET NAM: NEGLECTED
ANTECEDENTS
(An unpublished manuscript from about 1969)
By Ira Bodry
CONTENTS: Background Introduction Letter From A Dead Man page 1, 2 Chapter I Stubborn and patient National Resistance page 10 Chapter II Modern Viet Nam: Product of or Reaction to the Spanish Inquisition page 16 Chapter III "Mad Jack" Disguised as Uncle Sam Draws First Blood page 44 ------------ Letters to and from Captain John Percival, Captain, USS Constitution page 58 Chapter IV The American Revolution and War of Independence page 90 Chapter V Resistance to Tyranny is Obedience to God page 95
Chapter IV - The American Revolution and War
of Independence
Lincoln’s opinion that the war in Mexico was one of conquest, designed to catch votes*, begun “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally” by the President**, did not bring him to vote to obstruct its course, much less challenge its ultimate premises and goals. Occupation and settlement by his kin and close neighbors of an empire not yet insular or global was nowise a matter of imposing on a distant, unwilling and populous nation governments selected by or sanctioned from Washington. This process, carried through in violent haste by Polk’s Democracy selected viable continental frontiers and could only be sanctioned by natural outgrowth and colonization after peace had been made. No doubt, American expansion toward California was a natural direction for all the leading interests of the Republic: the commerce and shipping of Boston and New York, now fully awakened by the first Opium War to the radiant, though not yet golden, future of San Francisco’s Bay, the Midwest, Lincoln’s own corner, reaching out for homesteads far beyond the Central Valley of the Mississippi, even beyond the mountains to Oregon, the New South, moving its economy ever westward as the demand for its cotton never ceased to rise, while it joined with the Atlantic South in the frantic hunger for new Slave States to maintain a parity made hopeless by the very growth just alluded to further north; all together, this clanging, clamoring, violent vanguard of the New Age of progress through iron rails, steam power and compulsory freedom for trade*** was as inevitable as the very tides themselves at ebb and flow.
-----------------------------------------------------
*Speech at Wilmington, Delaware. 19 June, 1848. Lincoln’s Works, op. cit. p. 476.
**ibid. pp. 514, 515.
***The same year ‘Mad Jack’ shelled Da Nang, Congress authorized Commodore Biddle to make overtures for “effecting commercial arrangements with the Empire of Japan and the Kingdom of Korea.” The result was nil. After the War in Mexico had changed the tone of the times, Commander Glynn (1847) freed American whaleman by threatening to bombard Nagasaki. Six years later, in the wake of Glynn, Vera Cruz and the Opium War, Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry performed the most portentous deed for the future of the Pacific by compelling the heretofore unapproachable Japanese to open their gates to the New Age under the banner of free trade, with California gold as the carrot and with visible cannon as the stick. The Great Commodore by Edw. M. Barrows. Bobbs. Merrill. 1935. At the very same time the Amazon was forcibly opened by dire threats, against the wishes of the Brazilian government which could not see why it ceased not act there as the U.S. did on the Mississippi. Paraguay’s turn came in 1858, a fleet of 19 vessels involved. Cf. Curtis, The U.S. & Foreign Powers. Pp. 78-83.
Page 90
-----------------
As a trickle of settles staked their landmarks, Indian and Mexican must soon retreat, or be engulfed. For those venturesome rivulets were but beacons to broadening channels swelling up from the oceanic bosom of a nation loudly gushing its way across a continent on metallic auxiliaries, irresistible and final. Tireless and isolated communities of free peasant and artisan cling to the unwilling soil, take root and multiply, making permanent and inexorable what the steam railroad had made likely and attractive.
Geographically and mechanically so much less, the millennium of southward colonization by Vietnamese families* takes deeper root as these hardly, persistent, cultivators overcome and absorb duskier breeds. Cham and Cambodian must here recede as Mexican on the Brazos, scourged and feared “Montagnards” lament with Sioux and Hopi.** First tropical Cham, cousin of the ferocious Malay, the “Cham pirates” of Vietnamese historians, the menace now a relic of magnificent ruins and legends, is driven back to join the lofty Rhade [sic], a roaming hunter unable to expel the pale and diligent collectivists from the North. Then Cambodian, proud in all his lazy dignity of Brahman heritage, is overmatched by the insinuating and competitive Vietnamese. The boundary is pushed to the Gulf of Siam. Not merely the boundary between civilization mainly Indian and that of Chinese Confucian stamp, but a racial boundary as well, since interalia [sic], it is the boundary of the labia major, almost complete absence of the larger lips “whose stylization intrudes at every turn in India”.***
-----------------------------------------------------
*“Nam Tien” – to the South, advance! – brought the Vietnamese down the narrow ribbon parting China Sea and mountain barrier to entrench and nevermore withdraw: at Hue before the Black Plague carried off one Englishman in three as his sovereigns strove to subdue the French in Hundred Years’ War; at Da Nang before Joan of Arc inspired national resistance; at Qui Nhon before the first book printed in England or Columbus learned from Jewish cartographers that he could not sail to Indonesian spice islands by doubling Africa at the Equator; at Camranh Bay before New York so called itself; at Saigon before the first newspaper appeared in the American colonies or any of her revolutionaries had been born.
**We avoid the term ‘moi’, a Vietnamese expression reserved for the despicably barbarous, still used by unenlightened Vietnamese against the ‘Montagnards’, who have just barely begun to learn to cheat. Not only do these most serious men of brave arse conserve primeval dignity, substance of no market value, better than either their Vietnamese nemesis or European visitor, they often excel in useful knowledge. French soldiers owed their lives to Hre and shade herbals. Rene Riessen, Jungle Mission. Crowell. N.Y. 1957. P. 79 (Hre) Andre and Agnes Pagnon, Tu as de la chance (You’re a Lucky One). Gallimard. Paris. 1954. Pp. 187, 215
***Alan Houghton Brodrick, Little China. Oxford. 1942. P. 11.
Page 91
-----------------
Anything but indolent, except when enjoined to make the unbecoming dash into competition and mechanized marketing, the Mexican was, nevertheless, put down as a sluggish idler by such strange company as Waddy Thompson (see p. 74) and Karl Marx. Self –evident Confucian superiority bolstered by invariable historical success as colonizers of rice land would stifle any Vietnamese qualm as he tore Mekong’s profuse delta from faltering Cambodian grasp. Historical evolutionist Marx would hardly have withheld his imprimatur there, as he approved the grab of half Mexico by the U.S.A.: the energetic Yankee would develop California, the ‘lazy Mexico’ could not, and develop it must either by British direction, whose tolerance he was yet to discover, or by American, whom he never ceased to admire at a distance proof against the slightest disillusionment, and preferred in this case as the more progressive investor.*
Admission of common character transcending stature and color between Lincolnian [sic] and Vietnamese farmer states would demolish the wicked myth of a homogeneous Southeast Asia, encompassing along with its Chinese enclaves and local placidity, an entire nation of midget and quasi-medieval Puritans. Paul Doumer, draftsman of a united and French Indochina, who lived to see his extractive machine transform a costly colony into a profitable one fitted for its purpose** observed: “They (of course Doumer will call the Vietnamese Annamites [sic] which we translate as usual) are without doubt superior to all their neighbors. Neither Cambodian nor Lao nor Siamese could resist them. None of the nations which make up the
-----------------------------------------------------
*Both Marx and Engels wrote profoundly on the American Civil War. The former never visited this country, yet his overall analysis and forecasts were correct, while Engels’, outside his own specialty of military affairs, were mistaken, even though he had ‘been there’.
**For Marx’s views on the grab of Mexico see Horace B. Davis in the Monthly Review, a “socialist” periodical for from unfriendly to Marxism. Sept. 1967. P. 14 et seq.
That the issue is not gone from Mexican thinking may be illustrated by the following Mexican cab driver, accustomed to deal with American ladies fugitive from matrimony, told ? who inspired his confidence be her fluent Spanish and African complexion that: “los ladrones yanqui nos quitaron… etc California… ect.” This exhalation against robbery by “Yankee” thieves was reported by the auditor on her return to their metropolis. That purpose, and the mainstay in ‘selling’ a costly and bloody war of conquest to the unenthusiastic deputies of France (1885-1898), was to serve as wedge for opening the way to China’s measureless, but otherwise inaccessible, interior wealth. Later (1900-1930) to demonstrate by modernization the superiority of European methods, once again in the hope and expectation of extending the same deeply to China.
Page 92
-----------------
Indian Empire have their virtues*. You have to go to Japan to find race which is their peer, and which resembles them. Both are highly intelligent, hard working, brave. The Vietnamese makes a fine soldier, disciplined and courageous. He is superior, both as a worker and a soldier to all the other peoples of Asia to which you might compare him…”** Marx, having no land he could call his own, missed the vital connection between revolution and national feeling. Rostow***, although undeserving of mention in the same breath with either the virtuous account-keeping bourgeois M. Doumer, or the author of the Communist Manifesto, from a philosophical or moral point of view, ignored everything beyond the day-to-day images required by Cold War. Even though respectable honesty denies the fatuous entity, ‘Southeast Asia’, by direct observation, without benefit of Doumer, the message is yet to penetrate the dominists [sic].****
It was precisely the high tone adopted by the Empire of the Great South which both marked it as incomparable to the more tropical kingdoms about it, and left President Jackson’s envoy in a condition of spiteful exasperation. (cf. pp. 58 etc.) At the very moment ‘Mad Jack’ dented the hedge of imperial dignity hardly a day’s ride from the throne, the Dragon Throne itself clung to the Mekong upstream beyond Phompenh, all that was left from a decade which had begun with virtual dominance over all Cambodia. Striving against the war elephants of Rama III, King of Siam, Vietnamese authority was not yet prepared to forego absorption of the Khmer. Some Cambodians believe it still hasn’t.****
-----------------------------------------------------
*Doumer probably never came across a Gurkha (a Mongolian, Buddhist tribe from Nepal who put down the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and whom even the Vietnamese could not match as a soldier). The term Indian Empire is instructive, since nowadays it is often forgotten that India, historically, was always an Empire, never a nation’ therefore its consolidation today, except by consent, which is absent, is no less imperialistic because its constituent parts are contiguous and the central authority non-European.
**Doumer, op. cit .p. 40.
***Walt W. Rostow, as a principle advisor to two Presidents, can hardly be omitted from any serious work on Viet Nam, regardless of moral and mental defects.
****Denis Warner, an Australian journalist, had learned before the Dulles administration announced the domino theory to the American people that “even the generic term Southeast Asia was misleading. It implies a unity that simply does not exist, and has never existed.” D.A. Warner, Reporting South-east Asia . Angus & Robertson, ltd. Sydney, 1966. P. 1
*****Rama III intervened to preserve Buddhism, no the Cambodians. The latter rose only when Vietnamese cupidity ordained a general census and registration of lands for taxation and corvee [sic]. That was in 1841, and it was 1847 before peace came within Cambodia.
Page 93
-----------------
Confuse Vietnamese, or earlier Americans, with Indians, East or West, at your peril. Both were aware of this gulf as their own revolutions fermented. An anonymous Britisher [sic] had noted about 1770: “Americans are of a disposition haughty, insolent of rule, disdaining subjective (so plainly in contrast) to the remarkably pliant and submissive disposition of the inhabitants of Bengal”*; while John Dickinson, the reflective American attorney who incited opposition from his Quaker mansion near Philadelphia, and then refused to join when it boiled over into revolution, though none prompter than he to offer many hints for designing the Constitution, insisted: “Thank God we are not Sea Poys, nor Marattas”.** As a prime example from among many of Vietnamese revulsion at such leveling, let us consider the very first international document between Ho Chi Minh’s government and what was no longer the French Empire, nor yet the French Union. General Salan, released the other day by de Gaulle, was obliged to promise General Giap he would use no black or tawny Africans, but the only white men*** from France herself to garrison those Vietnamese towns to be occupied for five years: “…(the occupation troops) will have to be solely from France – uniquement de Francais d’origine metropolitaine – except for those assigned to guard Japanese prisoners of war…”
-----------------------------------------------------
*John C. Miller, Origins of the American Revolution. Little, Brown & Co. Boston. 1943. P. 3 ibid. p. 342. This was part of a campaign against the British East India Company. This expression of preference for white troops occurred in March and April, 1946, when Ho Chi Minh insisted conciliation with France was possible. That it revealed a definite negative feeling towards Africans, both black and otherwise, has already been mentioned in quotes from Doumer and Mus, p. 7 ante, and can be gleaned from Brodrick, p. 34. Virginia Thompson, typical career girl journalist of the Thirties, wrote then: “Hindu judges (in Cochinchine, the only part of Viet Nam officially under the French flag) from V. Thompson, French Indochina. P. 84. In fact, it was not Hindu judges alone but even more the weird “law” of the Third Republic, despising all family and communal ties, viewing the citizen as an individual apart- unrelated to any collective but the abstract State – which aroused astonished resentment and frustration hybrids.
The full text of the document quoted from above, an Annexed Accord to the Preliminary Agreement of 6 March 1946 between the government of the French Republic and the Government of Viet Nam, if found in Devillers, op. cit., p. 226. It bears the signatures SAINTENY, SALAN, VO NGUYEN GIAP. Neither Mr. Hunt, the Texas oil millionaire, nor Roger Hilsman, the guilt huckstering product of excessive Methodism, are aware of this document. The latter may have persuaded President Kennedy that the war in South Viet Nam could not be won if it became a “white man’s war”, thus misplacing the emphasis on account of the burden of American racial past, and opening the mind to the possibility “Asians” might well do whereas a white skin would be sure to fail. Disregarding morality (see p. 33).
Conclusion of footnote***
Page 94
-----------------
CONTENTS: Background Introduction Letter From A Dead Man page 1, 2 Chapter I Stubborn and patient National Resistance page 10 Chapter II Modern Viet Nam: Product of or Reaction to the Spanish Inquisition page 16 Chapter III "Mad Jack" Disguised as Uncle Sam Draws First Blood page 44 ------------ Letters to and from Captain John Percival, Captain, USS Constitution page 58 Chapter IV The American Revolution and War of Independence page 90 Chapter V Resistance to Tyranny is Obedience to God page 95 Editors notes: This unpublished manuscript by Ira Bodry, was written and typed sometime between 1968 and given for publication to Walter Teague in 1970. Unfortunately some of the citations are unreadable and a few may be missing. Where possible such items are indicated. The preparation of this text for the the web and a scanned and notated version were prepared by Walter Teague and other volunteers from 1999 through 2013. This publication is copywrited by Walter Teague, Adelphi, Maryland. (C).
Back to Preface
Back to Walter's page
Back to Personals page
Back to List of Documents
Back to Home page