Viet-Nam: The Search for Absolutes

Abstract

Viet-Nam poses one of the most demanding moral, political and strategic dilemmas of the mid-twentieth century. Concern over the multiple implications of developments in this Southeast Asian country is manifest throughout the world. But it is, of course, in the United States that debate is the loudest and the positions which are assumed in public discussion the most starkly delineated. The spate of books about VietNam, of which those reviewed in this article are but a small proportion,* frequently reflect American socio-political attitudes as much as they provide illuminating discussion of the problems of past and current Vietnamese history. Common to a number of these books, and to much American discussion of the war, is a search for absolute answers; absolute explanation of the origins of the present tragic struggle, absolute assessments of daily progress, and absolute solutions for what, so often, seems an insoluble problem. There is bittery irony in the fact that Hanoi's view of the war seems distorted by the same absolutist prism. For Joseph Buttinger in his two volume study of recent Vietnamese history, Vietnam: A Dragon Embattled, the absolute emerges in the form of harsh French colonialism and the failures of the late President