![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This paper examines Frances Fitzgerald’s Fire in the Lake in the context of wider ethnological research in Vietnam stretching back to the Francophone era of Paul Mus in the 1930s and 1940s. It argues that Fitzgerald’s heavily criticised book was important for raising uncomfortable issues of political legitimacy in the US military involvement in Vietnam as well as feeding into wider debates on social revolution in Vietnam and Indochina more generally. The paper concludes by arguing that Fire in the Lake has helped shift the focus in the study of Vietnam from a western-oriented, orientalist focus on American military and political mistakes towards an emphasis on the Vietnamese rebuilding of a postcolonial society anchored in Confucian precepts and values.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Christopher Goscha and Nathaniel Moir for comments on an earlier version of this paper
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, 217–27.
2. Hoffman, “An Account of the Collision.”
3. Vien, Tradition and Revolution in Vietnam, 46.
4. Chaliand, Revolution in the Third World, 90.
5. Lind, Vietnam, 176; and Kimble, “Deja-vu 1.”
6. Young, “Who were the Real Nationalists in Vietnam?” Young served with the CORDS program in South Vietnam. One recent website review reflected some anger with the way Fire in the Lake was used in university courses. ‘this book has been required reading in all “revisionist” undergraduate history seminars and lectures since its first publication in 1972,’ wrote one critic, ” … As I watch the people of Vietnam being pimped by their government to enrich its coffers and those of the Nike Corporation, I think of how stupid, ignorant and ultimately vile this book is and was.” www,antoinedonline.com/Product.aspx?productCode = 0009780316159197. Accessed 9 September 2018.
7. Part of the last cohort of 300 women to do so with a Radcliffe diploma rather than a Harvard degree. Stanley, “The Way It Was at Radcliffe.”
8. FitzGerald quoted in Bass, The Spy Who Loved US, 145.
9. McAlister and Mus, The Vietnamese and Their Revolution.
10. Meyers, John Huston, 305–11. Marietta Tree briefly appeared in Huston’s 1961 film The Misfits in a scene with Clark Gable.
11. Ranelagh, The Agency, 223.
12. Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 239. Desmond Fitzgerald ’s relationship with Bobby Kennedy was rather more fractious.
13. Personal communication from Frances FitzGerald.
14. Schlesinger Jr, Journals, 1952–2000, 290, 713; and Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago.
15. See for example Barnett, The Roots of War, 48–9.
16. Morris, Uncertain Greatness31–2.
17. Cited in Ferguson, “Kissinger Diaries.’
18. Hughes, Fatal Politics.
19. The authority of this school declined markedly in France itself after the independence of Algeria in 1962 and mainly ended up influencing authoritarian right-wing regimes in Latin America in the 1970s. See Paret, French Revolutionary Warfare; and Robin, Escadrons de la Mort, l-ecole Francaise.
20. Hellman, American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam, 75.
21. For one recent study of the new left in the US at this time, including the terrorist weather underground see Burrough, Days of Rage.
22. In contrast to earlier sub-branch of research known as Vietnam War Studies looking to explain why the US lost the war.
23. Reflecting to some degree a mindset shaped by what Amy Kaplan has identified as ‘ambiguous spaces that were not quite foreign nor domestic’ in which it also created ‘vast de-territorialized arenas in which to exercise military, economic and cultural powers divorced from political annexation.’ Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire, 15.
24. Ninkovich, Modernity and Power.
25. See in particular Packenham, Liberal America and the Third World. In a pioneering book in 1970 addressed mainly to political science colleagues, the British scholar Peter Calvert wrote that defining ‘revolution’ was a problem given that it was such a ‘mystical concept’, though he urged fellow scholars to at least retain the word as a ‘political term.’ Calvert, Revolution, 140–141. M.J. Heale notes that by the 1960s many politicians were becoming increasingly wary of being tagged as ‘McCarthyite’ while the anti-communism of right-wing televangelists was subsumed by a broader attack on ‘secular humanism’, Heale, American Anticommunism, 199.
26. FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, 209. On this point, Fitzgerald was influenced by Susan Sontag’s essay Trip to Hanoi.
27. Hallin, Uncensored War, 58.
28. Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism”; and Fisher, “The Illusion of Progress.”
29. Kuklick, Blind Oracles.
30. Latham, “Redirecting the Revolution?”
31. Weigley, The American Way of War.
32. Isaacs, Scratches on Our Minds, 212.
33. Knightley, The First Casualty, 410.
34. Stewart, Vietnam’s Lost Revolution.
35. Several other organisations were working on the resettlement programme ensuring that the exact role of the MSUG was hard to assess. Price, Cold War Anthropology, 302–303. See also Fisher, ”‘A World Made Safe for Diversity’”.
36. Price, Cold War Anthropology, 304.
37. Ibid 311. Though Price criticised Hickey’s apparent involvement with military and political strategy when he advocated the South Vietnamese regime end its opposition to the political group championing the Highlanders’ interests, the Front Unifie de Lutte les Races Oppresses (FULRO).
38. Hickey, Village in Vietnam, 57.
39. Balandier, Political Anthropology, 20.
40. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 252.
41. Bayly, “French Anthropology and the Durkheimians” and “Conceptualizing Resistance and Revolution in Vietnam.” Bayly’s emphasis on Durkheim has been challenged by Laurent Dartigues, who has suggested that ethnologists such as Levy-Bruhl were more significant in French colonial ethnology and the work of colonial administrators and missionaries. Dartigues, “La Sociologie de Paul Mus, entre theory et sens sur l’alterite vietnamme.”
42. Cummings, “American Orientalism,” 53–55; and Newman, Owen Lattimore and the ‘Loss’ of China.
43. Pelley, Postcolonial Vietnam, 73.
44. Chandler, “Paul Mus (1902–1969),” 153.
45. Dartigues, “La Sociologie de Paul Mus.”
46. The project was most developed in Francophone West African with small groups of black intellectuals espousing negritude; it would only unravel in the aftermath of World War Two with the demise of French imperial authority. Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State.
47. Goscha, ”‘So what did you learn from war?’” 574.
48. Logeval, Embers of War, 191; Clayton, The Wars of French Decolonization, 186–187; and Sheppard, The Invention of Decolonization.
49. Goscha, ”‘So What Did You Learn from the War?’” 579.
50. Mus was sent away empty handed from a meeting with De Gaulle in 1945, on the grounds, the general explained, that the French were ‘stronger.’ Ibid., 592. See also Porch, Wars of Empire, 206–7.
51. Thornton, Doctrines of Imperialism, 185.
52. Mus, Viet-Nam: Sociologie d’une Guerre.
53. Van Norden, “Mencius.”
54. Hegel, The Philosophy of History.
55. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, 53–4.
56. Ibid., 55.
57. Spence, God’s Chosen Son.
58. Fairbank, “The Peoples Middle Kingdom”; and Miller, “The Late Imperial Chinese State,” 1.
59. Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution, 258–263 and passim.
60. Bayly, “French Anthropology and the Durkheimians.”
61. Shaplen, The Lost Revolution, 352; and Shaplen, Time out of Hand, 3.
62. The Lost Revolution, 49.
63. Halberstam, The Making of a Quagmire.
64. Schlesinger, The Bitter Heritage
65. Ellsberg, “The Quagmire Myth.”
66. Halberstam, Ho, 49, 60.
67. Ibid., 77.
68. Lind, Vietnam the Necessary War, 176.
69. Ho, 107.
70. Halberstam, The Children.
71. See note 9 above.
72. McAlister Jr, Vietnam, ix.
73. Ibid., x.
74. Ibid., xi.
75. Ibid, xi.
76. Ibid, 336–7; Goscha, The Penguin History of Vietnam, 397; and Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolution. A similar Eurocentric view of revolution emerged in the 1968 documentary In The Year of the Pig, directed by Emile de Antonio, in which Mus briefly appeared talking about the cohesion and resilience of Vietnamese villages. The Year of the Pig ostensibly focused on Vietnam but ended up not in Indochina but the landscape of American revolutionary myth. Hellman, American Myth, 94.
77. Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake, 27.
78. The shift of French debate towards colonialism in the 1950s was impelled by the strong emphasis placed by many French intellectuals on moral choice, an approach that seemed racially constrained by the ideological orthodoxies of the French Communist Party. Judt, Past Imperfect, 283–4.
79. FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, 118.
80. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 67; and FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, 470, n.1.
81. FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, 433–4.
82. Michaels, “Delusions of Survival.”
83. Walter, Colonial Violence, 102.
84. See the observations of the military expert William Lederer after a ninth visit to Vietnam. Lederer, Our Own Worst Enemy, 21–2.
85. Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture, 15.
86. Luthi and Purtschert, “Colonialism without Colonies.”
87. Lewis, “Re-Examining Our Perceptions on Vietnam,” CIA Historical Review Program, released 2 July 1996.
88. FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake, 449.
89. Hiebert, “Vietnam Says No to Pluralism”; and Vasavakul, “Vietnam”; Thayer, “Political Legitimacy of Vietnam’s One-Party State.”
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Paul B. Rich
Paul B. Rich is editor of Small Wars and Insurgencies. Educated at the universities of Sussex, York and Warwick has written extensively on insurgency, counter-insurgency, terrorism along with the politics of race in Britain and South Africa. His books include Race and Empire in British Politics, State Power and Black Politics in South Africa and The Routledge Handbook of Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies (co-editor). His most recent book is Cinema and Unconventional Warfare (2018).