Out of the Quagmire

WE have all heard the story. The peaceful rice farmers of Vietnam had succeeded in throwing off their French masters, and were in the midst of building a new type of agrarian society—when the United States, in a fit of imperialist frenzy, decided to support a corrupt regime in Saigon and impose, on the uncomprehending natives, an alien vision of human life. But in spite of its genocidal tactics, taken from old Nazi manuals, the U.S. failed to conquer the resilient people. The Vietnamese expelled the invader, and returned happily to the work of implementing the principles of Lenin, principles which, Frances Fitzgerald helpfully explained, “coincided to a great degree with those of the Vietnamese peasants.”

The fairy tales of Miss Fitzgerald and Noam Chomsky are still being recited today. The journalist-jongleur Christopher Hitchens recently asserted that Henry Kissinger, who did what he could to give the Vietnamese people a chance to live in freedom, is a war criminal. To have championed the cause of liberty in Indochina—how cruelly myopic of Kissinger. Anyone who has read Fitzgerald’s book, Fire in the Lake, knows that the Vietnamese people did not want to live in freedom. For it was the little-known achievement of the Vietnamese to have anticipated, by many centuries, the theories of Das Kapital. “Marxism-Leninism,” Fitzgerald wrote, “accorded to a surprising degree with traditional Vietnamese notions of government and society.” The rice paddies, she assured us, “had already been collectivized and nationalized before the coming of the Marxists.”

About the Author

Michael Knox Beran

Michael Knox Beran, a lawyer and writer, is the author of WASPs: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy.

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WE have all heard the story. The peaceful rice farmers of Vietnam had succeeded in throwing off their French masters, and were in the midst of building a new type of agrarian society—when the United States, in a fit of imperialist frenzy, decided to support a corrupt regime in Saigon and impose, on the uncomprehending natives, an alien vision of human life. But in spite of its genocidal tactics, taken from old Nazi manuals, the U.S. failed to conquer the resilient people. The Vietnamese expelled the invader, and returned happily to the work of implementing the principles of Lenin, principles which, Frances Fitzgerald helpfully explained, “coincided to a great degree with those of the Vietnamese peasants.”

The fairy tales of Miss Fitzgerald and Noam Chomsky are still being recited today. The journalist-jongleur Christopher Hitchens recently asserted that Henry Kissinger, who did what he could to give the Vietnamese people a chance to live in freedom, is a war criminal. To have championed the cause of liberty in Indochina—how cruelly myopic of Kissinger. Anyone who has read Fitzgerald’s book, Fire in the Lake, knows that the Vietnamese people did not want to live in freedom. For it was the little-known achievement of the Vietnamese to have anticipated, by many centuries, the theories of Das Kapital. “Marxism-Leninism,” Fitzgerald wrote, “accorded to a surprising degree with traditional Vietnamese notions of government and society.” The rice paddies, she assured us, “had already been collectivized and nationalized before the coming of the Marxists.”