‘Symbiotic Insurgency’ in Vietnam Ten Years After

Abstract

A DECADE has passed since Chatham House published my Government and Revolution in Vietnam' as its one treatise on the second Indochina war in succession to Donald Lancaster's Emancipation of French Indochina 2 on the first. On all hands the book was acknowledged, graciously or grudgingly, to be important for discussion of the obscurities and of the rights and wrongs of what was fast becoming the decisive campaign of the cold war. But publication fell ten days before the communists' 1968 NewYear offensive; as a result, although the book stopped short on the eve of that spectacular event (which brought the phase of the struggle it covered to an end), the reviews of it reflected a swing in Western, especially American, public opinion 'against the war '-against conscription to man the televised shot and shell. Two thirds of the five-score reviews were complimentary, but the proportion of critical ones was greater among those which appeared later, after the peace talks had got going in riot-torn Paris, than among those which appeared early. The book was not primarily about the communist movement in Vietnam but an account of the country's modern political development in face of the communist challenge for power, and of my five years' observation on the spot of the performance of American technical assistants, civilian or military, drafted to succour South Vietnam's post-1954 administrations; ambitiously, I tried to place my observations in the wider political culture of the Sino-Vietnamese world, though not in the history of the international communist movement, fully explored for Chatham House in the recent past by the late J. H. Brimmell.3 With such a controversial subject, it was natural for polemical reviewers to look first at which side I was on and to praise or blame me for my materialist analysis of Vietnamese Marxism-Leninism. Two critics found in my reason for not examining