Shame and Revolution: Vietnam’s potent and storied anticolonialism

Summary

Scroll through the comments section of any popular YouTube video about Vietnamese history, and you will see admiration and respect from around the world for Vietnam’s anticolonial prowess. ‘I’m Nicaraguan and we went up against US imperialism several times and won. Vietnam was a huge inspiration to the Sandinistas! Long live a free Palestine!’ ‘The Vietnamese struggle for independence is one of the greatest David vs Goliath stories in the history of the world.’ ‘How Vietnam managed to endure Chinese domination, French colonialism, and US imperialism is beyond me. What a country.’ These sentiments reflect a heroic narrative of resistance, one that is effectively propagated by the Vietnamese Communist Party as Vietnam’s ‘official history’ in state-sponsored publications, schools, museums and elsewhere. The narrative goes like this: for the past 2,000 years, the Vietnamese people, unified by national pride, time and again expelled more powerful foreign invaders from their land. This tradition of anti-imperial struggle culminated in the rule of the Vietnamese Communist Party whose official political ideology is ‘Hồ Chí Minh thought’, named after the narrative’s protagonist, the first president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Inspired by a vision of communist revolution and drawing on a deep-seated tradition of Vietnamese resistance against Chinese domination, Hồ Chí Minh led the Vietnamese people to defeat Japanese occupation (1940-45) and French colonialism (1858-1954), as well as US imperialist invasion and their Vietnamese puppets (1955-75). The story evokes pride among Vietnamese people. As one Vietnamese translator put it: ‘Do you realise we are the only nation on Earth that’s defeated three out of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council?’ This romantic story is reflected not only in Vietnamese historiography by Vietnamese nationalists but also in classic works of Vietnamese history written in English by Westerners. Frances FitzGera...