Violence and Vietnamese Anticolonialism

ABSTRACT

The well-known claim that violence marks the end or failure of politics can be misleading. This essay uses the case of Vietnamese anticolonialism to argue that French colonial violence may have marked the failure of politics between colonizer and colonized, but, more interestingly, it also inaugurated two new forms of politics among the colonized: an “exploratory” politics which shifted Vietnamese political thought from monarchist to democratic ideals, and, later, a “committed” politics dedicated to forging fraternity and revolutionary morality. Despite having their own challenges, both forms of politics were ways of channeling indignation from colonial violence toward productive, dignifying ends.

Acknowledgment

I would like to thank Stacey Liou, John Christian Laursen, Daniel Brunstetter, and two anonymous reviewers for New Political Science for their valuable comments and advice. I also thank Kevin Duong for his generous and helpful editorial support.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Nguyen Thi Dinh, “Nguyen Thi Dinh on her political awakening in the 1930s,” in A Vietnam War Reader, ed. Michael Hunt (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 14–15.

² Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 43–47.

³ Arendt argues that even though violence and politics are more often found combined, every decrease in politics invites the increase of violence and vice versa, hence the antipolitical nature of violence. Ibid., 87.

⁴ Arendt concedes that violence may be necessary to open a space for politics. If it had not been for the violence of the student “riots of the spring term” in 1968, she notes, “no one at Columbia University would have dreamed of accepting reforms.” Ibid., 79. Arendt is referring to a weak or dominated group (i.e., students) using violence to open a space for politics in which they can engage in politics with the strong or dominating group (i.e., university administration).

⁵ Indeed, before the 1940s, Vietnamese violence opened a space for politics between the Vietnamese and the French. Following Vietnamese workers’ revolts in 1908, debates in Paris between 1908 and 1911 led to the “decision to dispatch Albert Sarraut to serve as Governor General of Indochina with a mandate to implement far-reaching reforms.” Christopher Goscha, Vietnam: A New History (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 113.

⁶ Similarly, political intellectuals in France saw violence as social regeneration. Kevin Duong, The Virtues of Violence: Democracy Against Disintegration in Modern France (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).

⁷ David G. Marr, Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885–1925 (London: University of California Press, 1971), and Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920–1945 (London: University of California Press, 1981); Hue Tam Ho Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

⁸ Arendt, On Violence, 82.

⁹ Sheldon Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” Constellations 1, no. 1 (1994): 11. Sheldon Wolin has remarked: “historically, the idea of the political and the idea of democracy have shared so many common meanings as to seem almost synonymous.” Sheldon Wolin, “Hannah Arendt: Democracy and the political,” in The realm of humanitas: Responses to the writings of Hannah Arendt, ed. Reuben Garner (New York: Pater Lang, 1990), 180. Some theorists have distinguished between “politics,” as institutions and governments, and “the political,” as “a distinct sphere of human life or a distinct kind of human potential.” Emily Hauptmann, “A Local History of ‘The Political’,” Political Theory, 32, no. 1 (2004): 36. When I say “politics” I mean the same thing as “the political.”

¹⁰ Nick Bromell, “Democratic Indignation: Black American Thought and the Politics of Dignity,” Political Theory 41, no. 2 (2013): 285–311.

¹¹ William Duiker, “Phan Boi Chau: Asian Revolutionary in a Changing World,” The Journal of Asian Studies 31, no. 1 (1971): 77.

¹² Phan Boi Chau, Overturned Chariot, trans. Vinh Sinh and Nicholas Wickenden (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999), 59.

¹³ Quoted in Goscha, Vietnam, 98.

¹⁴ Phan Boi Chau, “The New Vietnam,” in ed. Truong Buu Lam, Colonialism Experienced: Vietnamese Writings on Colonialism, 1900–1931 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 107.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Ho Chi Minh, Ho Chi Minh on Revolution, ed. Bernard Fall (New York: Signet, 1967), 90.

¹⁷ Annam is the name used for Vietnam prior to 1945.

¹⁸ Ho Chi Minh, Down with Colonialism! ed. Walden Bello (London: Verso Books, 2007), 1. Italics mine.

¹⁹ Goscha, Vietnam, 101.

²⁰ Bromell, “Democratic Indignation,” 287.

²¹ Marr, Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 166

²² For discussions of these periods, see the books in footnote 7.

²³ Phan Chu Trinh, “Morality and Ethics in the Orient and the Occident,” in Phan Chu Trinh and His Political Writings, ed. and trans. Vinh Sinh (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 2009), 106.

²⁴ Martina Nguyen, On Our Own Strength: The Self-Reliant Literary Group and Cosmopolitan Nationalism in Late Colonial Vietnam (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2021), 1–20.

²⁵ Ibid. 111.

²⁶ Samuel Popkin, “Review: Colonialism and the Ideological Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution,” The Journal of Asian Studies 44, no. 2 (1985): 349.

²⁷ Translation mine. Report of Edouard, December 20, 1919, in F7 – 13405, SPCE Carton 364, CAOM, cited in Nguyen Phan Quang, Them mot so tu lieu ve hoat dong cua Nguyen Ai Quoc thoi gian o Phap 1917-1923 (More documents about Nguyen Ai Quoc's activities during his time in France 1917-1923), (Ho Chi minh: Nha xua ban Thanh pho Ho Chi Minh, 1988), 177-181.

²⁸ Ibid.

²⁹ Tai, Radicalism, 69.

³⁰ Ho Chi Minh, Down with Colonialism!, 190.

³¹ V.I. Lenin, “Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions,” https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/jun/05.htm (Accessed June 1, 2021).

³² Quoted in Sophie Quinn Judge, Ho Chi Minh: the Missing Years 1919–1941 (University of California Press, 2003), 38.

³³ Marr, Tradition on Trial, 412.

³⁴ Ho Chi Minh, Ho Chi Minh on Revolution, 141.

³⁵ Ibid., 143. Italics mine.

³⁶ Ho Chi Minh, “Wage Resistance War!,” Italics mine, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/ho-chi-minh/works/1946/december/19.htm (accessed July 1, 2021).

³⁷ Le Duan, Hold High the Revolutionary Banner of Creative Marxism, Lead Our Revolutionary Cause to Complete Victory! (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1964), 34.

³⁸ Tai, Radicalism, 172.

³⁹ Ho Chi Minh, Ho Chi Minh on Revolution, 134

⁴⁰ Ibid., 185.

⁴¹ Hunt, A Vietnam War Reader, 18.

⁴² Quoted in Bui Ngoc Son, “The Confucian Foundations of Ho Chi Minh’s Vision of Government,” Journal of Oriental Studies 46, no. 1 (2013): 51.

⁴³ Margaret Kohn and Keally McBride explore this in their book Political theories of decolonization: Postcolonialism and the problem of foundations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 61–68.

⁴⁴ For greater detail of what Ho Chi Minh means by revolutionary morality, see “On Revolutionary Morality” in Ho Chi Minh, Down with Colonialism!, 152–161.

⁴⁵ For a description of Confucianism as an ethics of care see Chenyang Li, “The Confucian Concept of Jen and the Feminist Ethics of Care: A Comparative Study,” Hypatia 9, no. 1 (1994): 70–89.

⁴⁶ Jacob Levy, “Against Fraternity: Democracy Without Solidarity,” in The Strains of Commitment: The Political Sources of Solidarity in Diverse Societies, eds. Keith Banting and Will Kymlicka (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017): 107.

⁴⁷ Xuan Vu, “Oral History of Xuan Vu, Viet Minh War Reporter and Propagandist,” in The Vietnam War: a Documentary Reader, ed. Edward Miller (West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 16.

⁴⁸ Ibid. 18.

⁴⁹ Ho Chi Minh, Down with Colonialism! 130.

⁵⁰ Ibid., xxiii.

⁵¹ Ibid., xxiii. However, more recent historical scholarship has argued that, contrary to previous scholarly portrayals of Ho Chi Minh as moderate and Truong Chinh as the extremist to be blamed for the land reform’s excesses, Ho Chi Minh fostered hatred among classes and “opened the gates for Party cadres as well as many people to engage in indiscriminate persecution, confiscation, cleansing, and needless violence.” Alex Thai, “Nguyen Thi Nam and the Land Reform in North Vietnam,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 10, no. 1 (2015): 44.

⁵² See Nguyen Manh Tuong, Un Excommunié: Hanoi 1954–1991: Procès d’un Intellectuelle (Paris: Que Me, 1992).

⁵³ Elizabeth Frazer and Kimberly Hutchings, “On Politics and Violence: Arendt Contra Fanon,” Contemporary Political Theory 7 (2008): 92.

⁵⁴ Literature on the anticolonial politics of these regions (and others) is vast. The following articles provide examples of what might be described as exploratory and committed politics in response to colonial violence. For Tunisia and Algeria, see Amal N. Ghazal, “Tensions of nationalism: The Mzabi student missions in Tunis and the politics of anticolonialism,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 47, no. 1 (2015): 47–63. For Guinea Bissau, see Amilcar Cabral, “Identity and dignity in the national liberation struggle,” Africa Today 19, no. 4 (1972): 39–47. For Palestine, see Alex Winder, “Anticolonial Uprising and Communal Justice in Twentieth-Century Palestine,” Radical History Review 2020, no. 137 (2020): 75–95. For India and debates between Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore (which can be said to be a form of exploratory politics), see Ananta Kumar Giri, “Gandhi, Tagore and a new ethics of argumentation,” Journal of Human Values 7, no. 1 (2001): 43–63. Gandhi and his followers’ commitment to nonviolent resistance through satyagraha (holding onto truth) can be said to be a form of a “committed politics.”

⁵⁵ Angadipuram Appadorai, “The Bandung Conference,” India Quarterly 11, no. 3 (1955): 207–235.

⁵⁶ Manuel Barcia, “‘Locking horns with the Northern Empire’: anti-American imperialism at the Tricontinental Conference of 1966 in Havana,” Journal of Transatlantic Studies 7, no. 3 (2009): 208–217.