I was reading a review of Keith Taylor’s A History of the Vietnamese that appeared in the journal Sojourn (29.3 [2014]: 738-53) in which an historian argues that Taylor went too far in his book in deemphasizing the threat of “Chinese aggression” throughout “Vietnamese” history, and says “. . . when foreign aggression has occurred in Vietnamese history, it has most often come from the north, and the pantheon of Vietnamese heroes and heroines before the French colonial period is largely composed of those who fought Chinese enemies.”
Taylor has a response to this same journal in which he note that “‘the pantheon of Vietnamese heroes and heroines’ is the object of a national cult constructed over time, an ideology, not a representation of history.”
It is also a topic that desperately needs to be researched, because I keep coming across references to “the pantheon” as if it is something so obvious and common sense that it requires no further discussion.
However, Taylor is correct. “The pantheon” is an ideological construction. What is more, most of that “constructing” took place in the twentieth century, a topic which Benoît de Tréglodé has examined in detail.
What existed before the twentieth century? Many people today look to works like the Việt điện u linh tập, a fourteenth-century collection of “biographies” of spirits that were given official titles by the Trần Dynasty.
In the twentieth century the Việt điện u linh tập was translated from classical Chinese into vernacular Vietnamese and published. Prior to that time, however, it never appears to have been published, and today there are only a few manuscript versions of the text.
So if the figures discussed in the Việt điện u linh tập represent a “pantheon,” then how did people learn about it? How does some information that is in a manuscript in some scholar’s or government official’s home or office make it into the minds of “the people,” or even into the minds of his colleagues?
Perhaps the clearest evidence for a pantheon prior to the twentieth century might be a temple that was built by the Nguyễn Dynasty to honor “emperors of succeeding generations” (Lịch đại đế vương miếu).
The list of “emperors” that were honored there began with the following: Fu Xi, Shen Nong, Huang Di, Yao, Shun, Xia Yu, Shang Tang, Zhou Wen Wang, Wu Wang, Kinh Dương Vương, Lạc Long Quân, Hùng Vương, Sĩ Vương (i.e., Shi Xie), Đinh Tiên Hoàng, etc.
This was clearly an “ideological construction.” It was also very different from “the pantheon” that people today assume has always existed.
So where was “the pantheon” prior to the twentieth century? Perhaps it was in “the villages.” If it was, then how can we find it?
I think one good way would be to examine which deities were worshipped in villages prior to the twentieth century. There are texts that record such information, but I don’t know of anyone who has systematically attempted to determine exactly which spirits were worshipped where and when.
However, it is obvious that there was no “pantheon” that was recognized in temples and shrines across the land. Instead, while you might have some deities that were worshipped in a few places, for the most part, each village worshipped a distinct spirit.
So it’s clear that “the pantheon” that is so common sense today did not exist prior to the twentieth century. Determining what exactly did exist and how it was transformed into something resembling a pantheon is a fascinating topic that deserves to be researched and written about.
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I am fully in agreement with the words of K. Taylor :
_ ” I do not believe that pre- tent century people can be considered as Vietnamese in the sense we understand that term today ”
_ it’s remarkable ( I would say perposterous ) that ” Vietnamese who are too young the war with the Americans are nevertheless able ( I would say even exhorted ) to remember wars with China going back to centuries ” ; ” this view ” is born from the ” influence of ” modern education and propaganda ”
_ K. Taylor in a review of Mark Moyar’s book ” Triumph forsaken ”
https://books.google.fr/books?id=LyLGBQAAQBAJ&pg=PT31&lpg=PT31&dq=James+Carter+:++%22Inventing+Vietnam.%22&source=bl&ots=n-wYPrBWRi&sig=4V3zS4lchMusIkjos7unIIiz44Y&hl=fr&sa=X&ei=p0ynVKzuM6rD7gaIiYDwDg&ved=0CEcQ6AEwCDgK#v=onepage&q=James%20Carter%20%3A%20%20%22Inventing%20Vietnam.%22&f=false / CHAPTER 1
elaborates on these views :
[ Mark Moyar’s « Triumph Forsaken « offers new perspectives not only on the events of the 50s and the 60s but also on the historical context of these events .Most books about the mid-20th century Vietnamese wars provide a prefatory myth about the Vietnamese being a unified people who for millennia have been ennemies of the Chinese and consequently have become experts at resisting foreign agression . Mark Moyar sees this myth for what it is ,an exuberant nationalist flourish, and instead offers a more sober and accurate evaluation of Vietnamese history as displaying a long , complicated and overwhelmingly peaceful relationship with China , on the one hand , and centuries of division and internecine war among Vietnamese on the other hand .
Fashionable interpertations of modern Vietnamese history have used nationalist propaganda to portray the Vietnamese as incomparable underdogs
of history whose devotion to independance and national unity have made them the bane of any would-be foreign agressors . Moyar ‘s book points to historical evidence beyond the clichés , particularly the cliché of the Vietnamese having suffered unremitting Chinese agression for the past thousand years and the cliché that the Vietnamese were , have been and will always be a united people
and the divisions among them have resulted only from the policies of predatory foreign agressors .
This essay takes a look at these ideas and finds they cannot be sustained
by historical evidence . The argument here makes the following points :
_ premodern Chinese and Vietnamese were closely related as members of a common civilization and shared centuries of common political and cultural history . Times of Sino-Vietnamese warfare were rare and untypical of a relationship that was fundamentally peaceful.]
Thanks for pointing out this article by Keith Taylor. I wasn’t aware of it. It looks like it is probably the clearest and most succinct deconstruction of the Vietnamese nationalist interpretation of the past available. I will try to find a complete copy of it, as googlebooks only shows part of it.
More of Keith Taylor on this theme :
[ The mantra of Vietnamese having suffered during a thousand year of chinese domination then spending the next thousand years resisting chinese agression expresses one of the most entrenched yet the most erroneous doctrines of Vietnamese nationalism ]
Mark Moyar ‘s opinion :in « Triumph Forsaken « :
[ In general amicability characterized the relationship between China and Vietnam during these thousand years . Having been a chinese province and a popular destination for chinese immigrants during the preceding thousand years , Vietnam has thorougly absorbed the custom ideas and religions of China .The actual nature of the relationship between China and the Vietnamese is a story of cultural borrowing and mutually beneficial cooperation ]
Excerpts from
//books.google.fr/books?id=7TGMAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA16&lpg=PA16&dq=james+carter++/inventing+vietnam&source=bl&ots=ROJWzP9t73&sig=AT4f1uqhK41o7ShhJjaITIqsYw4&hl=fr&sa=X&ei=PoO0VOuOI8btUqSeg9gL&ved=0CD0Q6AEwBjgK#v=onepage&q=james carter %2Finventing vietnam&f=false ( in pages 17 and 18 )
M. Moyar and K. Taylor are quite right , in my opinion , on that point of history but the sad side is that they are using it for a dubious cause : trying to rehabilitate South Vietnam’s regime and in the same vein to undermine Hanoi ‘s legitimacy in the Vietnam American war . These endeavours are elaborated in the following pages in the forementioned book ” Inventing Vietnam ” by J. Carter
The irony is that precisely at the moment Taylor has debunked the idea of Vietnam’s traditional resistance to Chinese aggression, it is becoming a mortal threat to the regime in Hanoi…
http://www.rfa.org/vietnamese/in_depth/hating-china-is-th-dange-01102015174756.html
To put things in perpective , Mexico had and presently has much more to suffer from a overbearing neighbor ; to compound the situation , Mexicans and Yankees are from different cultures . To characterize Chinese relatively minor encroachments as a mortal danger is a hysterical overreaction ( VN is in no danger from being overun by China ) .To portray General Phung ‘s sensible reflexion ( China will always be our big neighbor , we ‘ll always have to humor it ) as servant- minded is of the same vein . Lawyer Vu and blogger Lê anh Hùng ( anh hùng= hero ) ‘s angry attitudes vis-à-vis Chinese reminds me of a 60s movie ” the roaring mouse ” ; a Vietnamese saying would call them ” straw heroes ” ( anh hùng rơm )
I’m puzzled by General Phung ‘s despair of Vietnamese ‘s unreconstructed hatred towards Chinese . The government should re- educate the people starting with primary schoolers and teach them the ” revisited ” history à la Keith Taylor . As for the adults , it would be an uphill battle to do to change their minds due to the cognitive dissonance phenomenon . In 20 years , Vn people will have another feelings towards the Chinese .
It would not take too much long time to actuate the change of mind . My experience : I lived in South VN and left in 1974 ; then I considered April 75 as the day of “mât nuoc ” ( I changed my mind since then ). 10 years after , I met in Europe teenagers from south VN who were born shortly before or just after April 75 , they talk of that day of ” liberation day ” ( and that would make me wince )
Anyhow , I heard , due to economic urgings , many VN people working in tourism or food catering occupations are learning Mandarin to have a chance to get jobs . I was in Seoul recently : in the restaurants , many waiters know how to speak Chinese
Perhaps I have not expessed myself clearly enough. When I wrote
“that precisely at the moment Taylor has debunked the idea of Vietnam’s traditional resistance to Chinese aggression, it is becoming a mortal threat to the regime in Hanoi”, I did not intend to say that Chinese aggression is becoming a mortal threat to VN. What I wanted to say was that the debunked idea constitutes a grave danger to the accommodationist Hanoi regime of which General Thanh is a represntative. There are solid reasons to suspect that this regime is much more interested in ensuring its own survival than in defending Vietnam’s national interest…
The best article explaining the predicament of a Hanoi regime caught between China and its own population, happens to be one written by a Vietnam scholar working in Hawaii …
Just google “Alexander Vuving” and “rent-seeking state” and you will find it…
As to the need to teach revisited history, my guess is that only a liberal-democratic government is strong enough in terms of political legitimacy to implement such an overhaul… The current regime is way too weak to even contemplate it…
“. . . có thể dẫn tới tình trạng tư tưởng Dân tộc cực đoan hòng tự tôn chúng ta và đè bẹp các dân tộc khác.”
I’ve long noticed that the concept of “chủ nghĩa dân tộc cực đoan” (“extreme nationalism” or “ultranationalism”) is very important in Vietnam, as it enables people to not have to think critically about their own ideas.
This is how it works:
1) people think that chủ nghĩa dân tộc cực đoan is bad
2) people think that historical figures like Hitler represented chủ nghĩa dân tộc cực đoan
3) people think that they are very different from historical figures like Hitler, and therefore, the way they think is not chủ nghĩa dân tộc cực đoan
4) since people believe that they are not chủ nghĩa dân tộc cực đoan, then they also believe that the way that they think is fine, and does not need to be questioned or analyzed or thought about
Ok, so if you have to be someone who tries to eradicate another nation to be considered chủ nghĩa dân tộc cực đoan, then how do we describe thoughts like this one?:
“Lịch sử Việt Nam là lịch sử của công cuộc dựng nước và giữ nước. Trong hàng ngàn năm giữ nước đó thì Trung Quốc luôn là kẻ thù thường trực của chúng ta, họ đã xâm lược và đô hộ Việt Nam không biết bao nhiêu lần mà kể.”
This is all about “the nation.” “The nation” is the center of history, and “the nation” has been there since the beginning of time.
Isn’t this “chủ nghĩa dân tộc”? What makes it not “cực đoan”? And if it’s not “cực đoan,” then what is it? “Chủ nghĩa dân tộc bình thường” (“normal nationalism”)?
As one can see , blogger Lê anh Hùng is crazed mad with anti chinese hatred because of the zombie-like narrative of 1000 year ” Chinese ” domination which is , Pr K. Taylor dixit [ one of the most entrenched yet the most erroneous doctrines of Vietnamese nationalism ] Mark Moyar shares his views .
Pr Kelly , these earth shaking revisitations by such eminent historians have they produed some effects ? Has the community of Vietnam historians adopted these insights ? I hope they are on the way and change would seep in the minds of Vietnames officials and common people , to deliver them of their awful sufefring as exhibited by Lê anh Hùng
LMK:
“Lịch sử Việt Nam là lịch sử của công cuộc dựng nước và giữ nước. Trong hàng ngàn năm giữ nước đó thì Trung Quốc luôn là kẻ thù thường trực của chúng ta, họ đã xâm lược và đô hộ Việt Nam không biết bao nhiêu lần mà kể.”
This is all about “the nation.” “The nation” is the center of history, and “the nation” has been there since the beginning of time.
Isn’t this “chủ nghĩa dân tộc”? What makes it not “cực đoan”? And if it’s not “cực đoan,” then what is it? “Chủ nghĩa dân tộc bình thường” (“normal nationalism”)?”
An adequate response to these questions requires exploring a more fundamental concept of which nationalism is but a manifestation: the concept of the political, which is also the title of a treatise by the antiliberal political theorist Carl Schmitt.
Schmitt started from the assumption “that in the realm of morality the final distinctions are between good and evil, in aesthetics beautiful and ugly, in economics profitable and unprofitable.”
He then wondered “whether there is also a special distinction which can serve as a simple criterion of the political and of what it consists.”
His answer: “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.”
“The enemy,” he elaborated, “is not merely any competitor or just any partner of a conflict in general. He is also not the private adversary whom one hates. An enemy exists only when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity. The enemy is solely the public enemy, because everything that has a relationship to such a collectivity of men, particularly to a whole nation, becomes public by virtue of such a relationship.”
In the end, Schmitt concluded, the enemy is someone whom we are prepared to kill in order to preserve our own form of existence. “It is the most extreme consequence of enmity.”
The case can be made that viewed from the perspective of Schmitt’s concept of the political, the distinction between exterminatist nationalism and normal nationalism is a matter of degree at best…
I do not think that there are many Vietnamese who have heard of Carl Schmitt or his hostility to liberalism. Yet, their “foreign policy” outlook bears a remarkable resemblance to his basic idea… The pervasiveness of illiberalism in Vietnam’s past as well as present historico-political discourse is what may account for this resemblance, I guess…
In light of my guess and given your reference to Hitler, I am curious whether you have read this article by François Guillemot:
“La tentation “fasciste” des luttes anticoloniales Dai Viêt ” in “Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire”, (No. 104, 2009). The German Leader is mentioned on page 50:
http://postimg.org/image/6yljmg1e3/full/
This is fascinating. Does Guillemot try to explain where this fascination with Hitler came from? Was it because of the information that Vietnamese were exposed to during the war years? Or does he have some other explanation?
Guillemot has offered his explanation for this phenomenon right at the beginning of the article. The fascination of certain Vietnamese nationalist revolutionaries with Hitler grew out of efforts they made during the prewar years to find a third way between Communism and democratic regimes that were considered weak or failing. These revolutionaries tended to view Italian Fascism and German National Socialism, along with comparable movements in Europe and Asia, as embodying the sought-after ideological alternative. “Ce n’est pas surprenant, car dans les années 1930, beaucoup d’intellectuels asiatiques pensaient que le fascisme était source de progrès, de modernité et de libération.”
Hitler, by the way, was not the sole German Nazi that fascinated Vietnamese nationalists at the time. Even a minor figure like Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, leader of the National Socialist Women’s League, did not fail to elude their notice well before the outbreak of the war…
http://postimg.org/image/4o28jqh6z/
http://postimg.org/image/6twje8knf/
Now, place Guillemot’s text next to this striking picture from VICHY IN THE TROPICS by Eric Jennings:
http://postimg.org/image/lr50f8xvv/
I see. This makes sense.
I’ve long found it interesting that the “free” areas of Asia in the 1930s – Japan, Nationalist China and Thailand – all moved in a fascist or militaristic/authoritarian direction in the 1930s. I never thought about the possibility that these ideas were present and attractive to the colonized, but it makes sense.