In reading Huy Đức’s Bên Thắng Cuộc, I saw that in some parts he made extensive use of the newspaper, Sài Gòn Giải Phóng [Liberated Saigon].
I had never read that newspaper before. I checked and saw that there are a few libraries in the US that have issues of this newspaper from 1975 on microfilm. And then as luck would have it, today I found it in a section of un-cataloged microfilms in our library.
I’ll try to post more about it in the days and weeks ahead, but just to get things started, here is an interesting comic from the 26 June 1975 issue.
On the left are people trying to get health care and go to school in a world where these services only are provided to those who can pay, and on the right is the opposite world, one where health care and education are provided for free.
Very interesting. Nowadays it’s hard to get health care in either of the worlds that these images are meant to represent. If only Canada had been a world power. . .
And a final note to all young historians: Get off your butts (and away from your computers) and go to libraries/archives. The best materials out there are still the ones that have not been digitized and are not on the Internet!
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Hi, I am sure you know Cao Tu Thanh. He has given an interview criticizing Ben thang cuoc. Do you think this is a case of an intellectual selling out to the state?
http://phapluattp.vn/20130116111922940p1021c1088/ben-thang-cuoc-logic-su-hoc-chua-phu-hop.htm
Just last week there was a kind of debate on an email list about a new book that has just been published which talks about atrocities committed by the US in the Vietnam/American War.
http://www.amazon.com/Kill-Anything-That-Moves-American/dp/0805086919
The exchange got kind of hot pretty fast – some talked about how important it is for Americans to face the bad things they have done, others argued that Americans have already done that a lot and that this ignores the atrocities that Vietnamese on both sides committed and puts all blame on the Americans, etc.
Most of the people who were engaging in this discussion were (white) Americans and at one point a Vietnamese asked, “The war has been over for decades, so why are you all still so emotional about it?”
When it comes to Vietnamese history, “emotions” are a major issue. Too much has happened to too many people and there are too many emotional sores and attachments for people to be able to step back and look at things in a “scientific/academic” manner.
That said, the world is changing (very fast), and it’s becoming harder and harder for anyone to try to monopolize an interpretation of history. That change is also very painful for some people.
Life is great, but it’s not easy. So I always swing back and forth between disliking people’s ideas and acknowledging that people who’s ideas I don’t agree with have their complex reasons for putting forth those ideas.
But in the end, ideas last longer than any of us people do. So all I’ll say is – let’s try to focus on the ideas and not let the people bother us (something I’m not always successful at. . .).
Wow, how did I get so philosophical???
I saw someone talking about how Cao Tu Thanh was using new terms to put forth old arguments, or something like that. I find that interesting – to see how ways of thinking transform but don’t really change. Analyzing and deconstructing ideas/ways of thought/arguments is all helpful. If you have any input on that, I’d love to learn what you know.
Thanks a lot for taking the time to reply. I found that some bloggers do not answer to their readers, but your kindness is moving as readers.
I have read Cao Tu Thanh’s many articles and was told he is a “tough” and “liberal” intellectual in Vietnam. So I was surprised with his view on Ben Thang Cuoc. At the very least, he clearly knows his view would be used to discredit the book. So he might have politely declined the interview. He did not.
The fact that even someone, who is usually seen as being independent-minded, voices their dislike of a book like this is very interesting. To me, it seems to indicate that many people in Vietnam are not yet ready to reinterpret the recent past. Secondly, they would be reluctant to be seen as being co-opted by the communist state in all those years. In other words, they want to feel good about themselves rather than being criticized in any way.
Cao Tu Thanh has just said that his answers are cut and he was not pleased. So perhaps he still retains his independence:
http://thongcao55.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/bai-goc-uoc-nha-nghien-cuu-cao-tu-thanh.html
Ok, well now it gets pretty hard to analyze what he said because we really don’t know what he said. . .
I’m interested in the “quoc te hoa” and “hien dai hoa” idea. I guess the introduction to his recent translation is the place to go for that. It’s a good topic to look at, but from what I an tell here (and again, who knows how much of this we can trust) the way he is thinking about this is very simplistic.
Since the 1990s or so, the concepts of “colonizer” and “colonized” have been extensively problematized and deconstructed among historians in North America (and probably other places too).
“Colonizers” were a heterogeneous group, as of course were the “colonized,” and in between these two extremes were many people, businesses and groups that benefited from colonialism and through whom the colonizers had to work.
Therefore, today in scholarship in North America terms like “negotiated” are used in talking about colonialism much more than “forced.” So when I see Cao Tu Thanh talking about the French as an example of “forced internationalization” (quốc tế hóa cưỡng bức) and Phan Boi Chau’s efforts to learn from Japan in order to resist as an example of “voluntary internationalization” (quốc tế hóa tự nguyện), I have to say that this way of looking at things is much less sophisticated at this point than what scholars in other countries who study about colonialism have been talking about for the past 20 years or so.
For instance, where in this dichotomy do the superficial people that Vu Trong Phung criticized in his writings fit? If you read Vu Trong Phung you see a world in which Vietnamese compete with each other and try to demonstrate that they are superior to each other because they drink French wine or do something else superficial like that. This is “voluntary internationalism” but it’s not for the noble goal of “resisting the French.”
Starting even earlier than the historical scholarship on colonialism that deconstructs the colonizer-colonized boundary is an even larger body of scholarship that people refer as “post-colonial scholarship” that examines issues like the complex thought processes of the people whom Vu Trong Phung described.
Vietnamese historians have missed out on all of this stuff. So to cut and paste a comment by Cao Tu Thanh and to apply it to this context, “không khắc phục được sai lầm [what I’m talking about is not really a “sai lầm,” but it’s just that there are much more sophisticated ways of looking at the past now] sử học này thì còn lâu chúng ta mới có được một bộ quốc sử đúng nghĩa ít nhất là về thế kỷ XX.”
Cao Tự Thanh’s response seems measured and not unreasonable. “Nhưng chỉ tư liệu thì không thể làm nên diện mạo của lịch sử.” “But documents alone cannot be the basis for history’s aspects.” I think he’s arguing that “Bến tháng cuộc” is not successful as a work of historical scholarship. That’s different than saying that the book does not have value to the historian. The value of the book (which I hope to get my hands on) is that presents an alternative documentation to a period when history (in Vietnam) has relied on documentation that has been preserved and compiled by the ruling dynasty.
To return to Khai’s original post – it’s fascinating to look at period newspapers, because there often are bits of evidence that enrich, reposition and sometimes refute the accepted dogma of a time, or more precisely the dogma of the current understanding or memory of a time.
The early post-liberation newspapers in Saigon are interesting because they have to perform their function as vehicle of state propaganda, yet they are forced to try to find ways to entertain a little bit because the readership of that city was used to the lively journalism of the pre-liberation times. It’s also worth checking out the Tin Sáng paper – I think the only paper with some continuity between the pre- and post-1975 worlds.
And I hope Tây Bụi won’t mind me promoting his blog at this point (http://taybui.blogspot.com/) because there are some great examples there of information from period newspapers that “enrich, reposition and sometimes refute the accepted dogma of a time, or more precisely the dogma of the current understanding or memory of a time.”