Latest / The Vietnamese with Kenneth Nguyen / 446 - Who Was Vietnam's First Intellectual Export? Viet History Makers - Trần Đức Thảo

Transcript

446 - Who Was Vietnam's First Intellectual Export? Viet History Makers - Trần Đức Thảo · The Vietnamese with Kenneth Nguyen

0:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Welcome back to the Vietnamese podcast with Viet Pistry Makers with Michael Hose Kevin Fam, how are you, brother?
0:08
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm great.
0:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Always good to be back.
0:11
[SPEAKER_01]: I look forward to this episode today because as in episodes past, I've always talked about how my father always said we have no exports, especially in the literature philosophy department.
0:27
[SPEAKER_01]: And the man that we are talking about today is gendered out.
0:31
[SPEAKER_01]: And he actually has exports and makes me still proud to, oh, yeah, research this guy.
0:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Because not only has he, did he have exports, but he had exports that bigger French philosophers than, you know, the average person was consuming his, his thoughts.
0:51
[SPEAKER_01]: And I thought that was phenomenal.
0:54
[SPEAKER_01]: So thank you for picking this person today.
0:57
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, can't, did you know about Jean-Luc Tal?
1:02
[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't know for this.
1:02
[SPEAKER_01]: I did not, I've never heard of him.
1:05
[SPEAKER_01]: And again, I always tell you how happy I am to embark on the series with you because now I'm learning people that, you know, had I known about the canon of philosophical or political theorists and these people that are forming these thoughts
1:27
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that the shame of being Vietnamese growing up Vietnamese for me in the United States in the seventies and eighties would have been minimized substantially.
1:37
[SPEAKER_01]: And this land died in ninety three.
1:40
[SPEAKER_01]: It was very young.
1:42
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, nineteen, seventeen to nineteen ninety three.
1:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Very recent.
1:48
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, well, I hope a younger Vietnamese American folks listening to this will feel proud of Vietnam's philosophical heritage.
1:58
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and not only that, but I think that there is this idea that communism
2:06
[SPEAKER_01]: is like, it's formed in concrete and it doesn't move.
2:12
[SPEAKER_01]: But I think in this episode, we'll find out that the authorities in Vietnam kind of opened up.
2:19
[SPEAKER_01]: They're like, OK, well, we're going to ban him.
2:21
[SPEAKER_01]: So they ban him and they made sure that he was silenced, but they brought his honor back
2:29
[SPEAKER_01]: many years later.
2:30
[SPEAKER_01]: So we'll get it all into all of that.
2:31
[SPEAKER_01]: But I'm really fascinated with his life because of two things.
2:36
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, like I said, we show that there's an export in Vietnamese philosophical thinking.
2:42
[SPEAKER_01]: And we also see the change in authority in Vietnam.
2:48
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think those two big things stood out for me.
2:51
[SPEAKER_02]: For listeners, a simple way to explain who conducts how is, is that I would say he's the most famous Vietnamese philosopher in the eyes of non- Vietnamese people in the eyes of the world.
3:09
[SPEAKER_02]: He is the philosopher that philosophers in the world think of when they think of, oh, who is a Vietnamese philosopher?
3:18
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, this man was so influential in France.
3:22
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, he was acquaintances with the Jean-Paul Saut.
3:25
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, he, he was cited favorably by all two serr.
3:31
[SPEAKER_02]: All these philosophers, we're going to get into it.
3:34
[SPEAKER_02]: But another interesting thing about John Diktow is that he challenged the Vietnamese Communist Party.
3:40
[SPEAKER_02]: So back then, they were called the Vietnamese Workers Party.
3:45
[SPEAKER_02]: So just for a listen, between nineteen fifty one and nineteen seventy six, they were called the Vietnamese Workers Party.
3:54
[SPEAKER_02]: and before that since nineteen thirty it was called the indochinese communist party then after nineteen seventy six it's called the Vietnamese communist party but it's all essentially the same party but anyway he challenges we'll just called the Vietnamese communist party he challenges it and he's unsuccessful
4:15
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, when I say that, oh, we're going to talk about somebody who challenged the Vietnamese Communist Party.
4:23
[SPEAKER_02]: In my mind, I'm thinking, oh, there's a lot of Vietnamese American listeners who are going to be like, yes, good.
4:28
[SPEAKER_02]: We'd like this.
4:29
[SPEAKER_02]: Right?
4:33
[SPEAKER_02]: Talking about, too.
4:35
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
4:37
[SPEAKER_02]: I should also say that he was a Vietnam's, probably Vietnam's greatest remarks as philosopher.
4:44
[SPEAKER_01]: These clearance marches, you know what what will we explore on this sub series is that
4:52
[SPEAKER_01]: two things can be true, right?
4:55
[SPEAKER_01]: We talk about that, like the nuances of like these things, like the Vietnamese Communist government can do good things, but they can also do horrible things that was we'll learn what Jendic Tao is really against the land reform.
5:10
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think the gathering of all of the former ARVN troops
5:17
[SPEAKER_01]: Those are the two biggest sins of the Communist Party, modern day.
5:22
[SPEAKER_01]: But there were things that they did right.
5:24
[SPEAKER_01]: There were things that they are continuing to do, right?
5:26
[SPEAKER_01]: And there were a lot of things that they're doing wrong.
5:28
[SPEAKER_01]: And we are here to kind of talk about that.
5:31
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, exactly.
5:33
[SPEAKER_02]: So before we begin, I just want to quickly say that, again, yes, I'm a professor of political theory, but I am a newbie and there are so many experts and historians who have written about Chanduktao.
5:49
[SPEAKER_02]: For example, my good friend, Envo, she is very well-versed and chonduct out, knows much more about chonduct out than me.
5:58
[SPEAKER_02]: I've been learning a lot from her.
6:01
[SPEAKER_02]: In fact, she's been an Amsterdam for a while.
6:03
[SPEAKER_02]: So for listeners, she's the co-host of Namphong Dialogues.
6:07
[SPEAKER_02]: on the other co-hosts.
6:08
[SPEAKER_02]: That's our podcast.
6:10
[SPEAKER_02]: Another person is Dominique Ankone who's doing a PhD dissertation here.
6:14
[SPEAKER_02]: He's Dutch and he's doing his whole PhD dissertation on Chandukka.
6:19
[SPEAKER_02]: Wow.
6:20
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
6:21
[SPEAKER_02]: And so, Chandukka is becoming more and more well known.
6:24
[SPEAKER_02]: There's another very important scholar named Sean McHale, and today I'm going to draw a lot from Sean McHales article published in, in the Journal of Asian Studies.
6:39
[SPEAKER_02]: And his article is titled, Vietnamese Marxism, Descent and the Politics of Post-Colonial Memory, John Duk-Tao.
6:48
[SPEAKER_02]: So what you hear from me, listener, are not my own ideas.
6:53
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm learning from other scholars, okay?
6:56
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm a newbie and these scholars have spent a lot more time studying Chanduktaal than me.
7:02
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'm learning with you all.
7:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
7:05
[SPEAKER_01]: And when you are learning with us all, you're learning at a cafe.
7:09
[SPEAKER_01]: And when you are learning at a cafe, you're spending time outside of your actual work hours.
7:14
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, I just wanted to ask the audience to, you know, hit that button for the donation on our YouTube channel for this sub series for this particular episode because Kevin does a lot of heavy lifting.
7:29
[SPEAKER_01]: I am, I'm in the gym spot in Kevin as Kevin is doing the heavy lifting.
7:35
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you.
7:36
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, Listener, if you've been enjoying and profiting from these videos and feeling like you're learning, please do donate.
7:45
[SPEAKER_02]: It takes time to do research for these and reading.
7:48
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, I am actually one of those old school people.
7:51
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm pretty much against chat, T-P-T here.
7:54
[SPEAKER_02]: You are not getting a tech T-P-T version.
7:57
[SPEAKER_02]: You are getting Kevin Fam thinking through reading through things, so that's very much appreciated.
8:04
[SPEAKER_02]: All right, let's jump in.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So what I want to do today is go through his life and then while we do that, talk about his ideas.
8:14
[SPEAKER_02]: And so we're going to focus on his life and the events in his life, but a little bit more on his philosophy and his thoughts because he's known as a philosopher.
8:24
[SPEAKER_02]: All right.
8:27
[SPEAKER_02]: It's cool.
8:28
[SPEAKER_02]: So he was born in nineteen seventeen in Hanoi and he died in nineteen ninety three in Paris.
8:37
[SPEAKER_02]: So when he was young, he's attended French language school since he was five years old.
8:45
[SPEAKER_02]: and I'm gonna jump in time and say that in nineteen thirty six he leaves Vietnam and he goes to France and he stays in France until nineteen fifty one so he's there for fifteen years in France so he leaves when he's just nineteen years old so you gotta imagine is a young guy you know we all remember what it was like to be nineteen so and our really informative years are
9:11
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, in our early twenties, right?
9:13
[SPEAKER_02]: So his formative years are in France.
9:15
[SPEAKER_02]: And in France, he's just a brilliant student, really, really smart.
9:20
[SPEAKER_02]: He studies at the Ecole Normale Superior, which is a very prestigious school.
9:27
[SPEAKER_02]: And he receives his, what's called an agorgastion.
9:31
[SPEAKER_02]: in philosophy in nineteen forty three and this is important because the the French agregational that's a thing that Americans don't have but it's really important it's a big deal it's a very very competitive exam that you need to take if you want to teach in France if you want to teach in higher education and and he passes but
9:56
[SPEAKER_02]: They don't let him teach because he's Vietnamese.
10:00
[SPEAKER_02]: So this is like an obstacle for him, you know, him being Vietnamese here.
10:06
[SPEAKER_02]: His thesis was on a philosopher named Edmund Husserl.
10:12
[SPEAKER_02]: And Husserl is the founder of Phenomenology.
10:17
[SPEAKER_02]: We're going to talk a lot about that today.
10:20
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a school of philosophical thought more on that later.
10:24
[SPEAKER_02]: Anyway, then from nineteen forty four onwards he becomes more and more involved in anti-colonial politics.
10:32
[SPEAKER_02]: All right, can you or the student are going to do some historical recap here?
10:36
[SPEAKER_02]: What are some?
10:39
[SPEAKER_02]: What's going on in in the nineteen forties?
10:44
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I think we are having
10:50
[SPEAKER_01]: I think rebellion, right, against the French at this point, we're starting to get people forming in the north.
10:59
[SPEAKER_01]: Rebellion against the French, I believe.
11:02
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
11:02
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
11:05
[SPEAKER_02]: we're starting, I mean, World War II is happening, right, in nineteen thirty nine to nineteen forty five.
11:11
[SPEAKER_02]: And so he is imprisoned for a few months in nineteen forty five for being called a threat to the security of the French state.
11:21
[SPEAKER_02]: So he is involved in anti-colonial activity.
11:24
[SPEAKER_02]: And at the same time, in France, he is studying philosophy.
11:28
[SPEAKER_02]: He's studying phenomenology.
11:30
[SPEAKER_02]: He's a student of Maurice Merlot-Ponti, who is also a phenomenologist.
11:37
[SPEAKER_02]: And like I said earlier, he's acquainted with Jean-Paul Saut, who is a very, very famous existentialist philosopher.
11:44
[SPEAKER_02]: By the way, can have you heard of existentialism?
11:46
[SPEAKER_02]: Does that run?
11:47
[SPEAKER_02]: Sure.
11:47
[SPEAKER_02]: I have.
11:47
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to have heard of Sart too.
11:50
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, well.
11:52
[SPEAKER_02]: Any, any, what would you say existentialism is from your memory?
11:56
[SPEAKER_01]: I think, when I think of that word, I think of like, we as humans really didn't think a whole lot about our existence.
12:07
[SPEAKER_01]: The philosophy of our existence before these thinkers came about.
12:12
[SPEAKER_01]: That's my very basic understanding of existentialism.
12:17
[SPEAKER_01]: When I think about that word.
12:19
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
12:19
[SPEAKER_02]: So in a nutshell, existentialism, there's a famous phrase that Sart says, and he says that existence precedes essence.
12:30
[SPEAKER_02]: What does that mean?
12:31
[SPEAKER_02]: Essentially, it means that there is no essence that comes before us to put it more simply
12:40
[SPEAKER_02]: Our lives have no meaning.
12:44
[SPEAKER_02]: Our lives are completely meaningless and therefore we must create our own meaning.
12:50
[SPEAKER_01]: So when we talk about existential crisis, that means we don't really understand why we're here.
12:59
[SPEAKER_01]: Is that it?
13:00
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yes, but it's not nihilism or nothing matters.
13:04
[SPEAKER_02]: Essentially, we are radically free.
13:07
[SPEAKER_02]: We are so free to create meaning for our lives.
13:13
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, we create our own meaning in our life.
13:16
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, we are born into traditions and many things like that.
13:20
[SPEAKER_02]: But really, we are faced with choices all the time.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And that's the scary thing.
13:27
[SPEAKER_02]: That's a lot of responsibility for us, right?
13:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, really, and a very empowering thing, I think, for the times, right?
13:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah.
13:38
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's the idea that
13:42
[SPEAKER_02]: life is completely meaningless.
13:44
[SPEAKER_02]: Therefore, we must create our own meaning.
13:47
[SPEAKER_02]: And we are free in that aspect.
13:49
[SPEAKER_02]: So anyway, that's Jean-Paul Sott.
13:52
[SPEAKER_02]: And this is the kind of philosophy that's happening in Paris in the forties.
13:59
[SPEAKER_02]: And in the forties, there's a really, really influential journal called L'Athal-Moudain, Modern Times.
14:08
[SPEAKER_02]: and sought and gendered power, our publishing articles in this journal.
14:15
[SPEAKER_02]: And gendered power is going to be the dominant voice for anti-colonialism in this journal.
14:22
[SPEAKER_02]: He's going to be the person who's going to be saying, look, philosophers, we need to
14:29
[SPEAKER_02]: talk about colonialism and struggles against colonialism.
14:33
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, this is huge right here.
14:35
[SPEAKER_02]: Gender Tao even influenced France for non.
14:40
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, many scholars argue this that France for non was influenced by gender Tao.
14:46
[SPEAKER_02]: And listeners, if you don't know France for non, I would be kind of surprised because France for non is the the most famous anti-colonial thinker.
14:55
[SPEAKER_02]: like anti-colonialism is very popular and trendy these days, I think.
15:00
[SPEAKER_02]: A lot of young people are talking about it and they're they're turning to friends for none.
15:05
[SPEAKER_02]: He's have us from Martinique.
15:07
[SPEAKER_01]: Kevin, honestly, I don't, I've never heard of that name.
15:09
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd be maybe in passing with you.
15:11
[SPEAKER_01]: I have and you know something about I think maybe can we do an entire episode on this because it's anti-colonial.
15:18
[SPEAKER_01]: It's related to
15:20
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, Phonon was not the interview, he was from my team, but he, you know, honestly, it's probably their circles I travel in, honestly, because academic, you know, anti-colonialism, but all the young people, anti-colonial people know about France Phonon, and they might be surprised to hear that he was influenced by Chanduk Tau.
15:42
[SPEAKER_02]: Anyway, okay, let's give some more context, nineteen forty five.
15:47
[SPEAKER_02]: The Vietnam
15:49
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, we might say the Vietnamese seize power from the Japanese and the French at the end of World War II.
15:56
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, that's a bit more complicated because one could also say that, well, the French and the Japanese simply were losing in World War II.
16:07
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, the Vietnamese kind of just fill in, right?
16:11
[SPEAKER_02]: But anyway, this is a turning point.
16:13
[SPEAKER_02]: So intellectuals in Vietnam are beginning to think, okay, it looks like the French and the Japanese are on the way way out.
16:23
[SPEAKER_02]: Should we keep on relying on Western ideas?
16:27
[SPEAKER_02]: It looks like Vietnam is going to be independent soon.
16:30
[SPEAKER_02]: It's nineteen forty five.
16:32
[SPEAKER_02]: Maybe we should create a new Vietnamese culture different from the French.
16:36
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, we're seeing Vietnamese nationalism growing.
16:39
[SPEAKER_02]: And so these intellectuals are beginning to think, how can we create a Vietnamese intellectual culture?
16:47
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, what's really interesting here is that the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, this is the state that's led by Ho Chi Minh.
16:56
[SPEAKER_02]: He declares independence when Ken Ho Chi Minh.
17:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Not sure.
17:01
[SPEAKER_02]: God, why I'd kid September two, nineteen forty five, Hoachiman declares independence for the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, also known as North Vietnam.
17:13
[SPEAKER_02]: He, he gives a speech at bad in square, nineteen forty.
17:16
[SPEAKER_02]: And I won't forget it.
17:17
[SPEAKER_02]: Nineteen forty five, don't forget that.
17:19
[SPEAKER_02]: That is the birth.
17:20
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, September two, the huge holiday in Vietnam.
17:23
[SPEAKER_02]: September two, it's got it.
17:26
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
17:28
[SPEAKER_02]: So the DRV is created.
17:32
[SPEAKER_02]: And what happens is that the DRV is trying to become a state.
17:37
[SPEAKER_02]: It's trying to become straw, right?
17:41
[SPEAKER_02]: But the Vietnamese, they are the leaders of the DRV.
17:45
[SPEAKER_02]: And the Vietnamese is led by communists.
17:49
[SPEAKER_02]: But in the early years of the DRV, the Vietnamese are going to be flexible.
17:54
[SPEAKER_02]: And they're going to say, we need to ally with anybody who wants to kick out the French.
18:02
[SPEAKER_02]: even if they're not communists.
18:04
[SPEAKER_02]: And so you start seeing these coalition politics in the first three years or so, uh, three, four years of the Vietnam.
18:12
[SPEAKER_02]: But from nineteen forty eight, nineteen forty nine onward, the party, the communist party starts becoming more and more strict in terms of the intellectual ideas that it's willing to allow.
18:27
[SPEAKER_02]: Why is this something big happens in nineteen forty nine in China?
18:34
[SPEAKER_02]: Any idea?
18:34
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, the revolution.
18:37
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, the Chinese Communist win their civil war in nineteen forty nine.
18:44
[SPEAKER_02]: As a result, the Chinese Communist started giving aid to the Vietnam.
18:51
[SPEAKER_02]: Lots and lots of weapons, money, ideas, ideal, ideological, help.
18:59
[SPEAKER_02]: So Maoism, Mao Zedong is their leader, Maoism is an ideology which follows Mao.
19:06
[SPEAKER_02]: Maoism becomes really influential in Vietnam.
19:09
[SPEAKER_02]: And Maoism is basically listen to the peasants.
19:12
[SPEAKER_02]: The peasants are the main revolutionary group.
19:17
[SPEAKER_02]: And so Maoism is its own, if hugely influential, we could have a whole episode about that.
19:23
[SPEAKER_02]: But anyway, intellectuals, the point is that intellectuals in North Vietnam are beginning to adopt Maoism, this revolutionary ideology.
19:35
[SPEAKER_02]: And the important thing about Maoism is this technique for revolutionaries that's called self-criticism.
19:46
[SPEAKER_02]: Have you heard of this?
19:47
[SPEAKER_01]: I've heard it through you, and I think we talked about when we did Ho Chi Minh.
19:55
[SPEAKER_01]: He was really big into self-criticism and you know, really check yourself.
20:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.
20:00
[SPEAKER_02]: He gets us all from Mal, all from Mal.
20:04
[SPEAKER_02]: We'll talk a little bit about it more.
20:06
[SPEAKER_02]: But at this time, intellectuals in North Vietnam, they're starting to self-criticize.
20:10
[SPEAKER_02]: So they turn away from their older selves.
20:14
[SPEAKER_02]: And they say, look, when I was younger, I would write all this stuff praising the individual and celebrating the romantic individual experience.
20:23
[SPEAKER_02]: But now I realize that was all bourgeois nonsense.
20:27
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, I am a good revolutionary.
20:29
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to serve the people.
20:31
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to serve the party, which serves the people.
20:35
[SPEAKER_02]: Anyway, Chundic Tau is part of all of this.
20:38
[SPEAKER_02]: In nineteen fifty one, in France, he publishes his most famous book, which is called Phenomenology and dialectical materialism.
20:48
[SPEAKER_02]: This is a really interesting point in Chundic Tau's life because as I had mentioned, he studies Phenomenology, which is
20:56
[SPEAKER_02]: I still haven't said what that is, but it's the study of experience.
21:00
[SPEAKER_02]: So phenomenology is when you try to
21:08
[SPEAKER_02]: Reflect on how you experience anything, right?
21:13
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, how do you experience the sunset?
21:17
[SPEAKER_02]: When you're at the beach, you close your eyes and you feel the miss of the ocean, you know, brushing your against your face, the warmth of the sun, maybe a voice, a calmness, you know?
21:29
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, how do you experience it as a person?
21:33
[SPEAKER_02]: So Phenomenology is the study of Phenomenal, like how do you experience these things?
21:40
[SPEAKER_02]: And Dr. Tao first is interested in Phenomenology, but then he begins to realize that it has problems, and that actually Marxism is better than Phenomenology, and that Marxism can resolve problems in Phenomenology.
21:59
[SPEAKER_02]: And we talked about this in our episode on Ho Chi Minh, but Marxism specifically, the philosophy in Marxism is what's called dialectical materialism.
22:10
[SPEAKER_02]: So he thinks that dialectical materialism results problems in phenomenology.
22:14
[SPEAKER_02]: We'll talk more about that later.
22:16
[SPEAKER_02]: But right now, I just want to say that in nineteen fifty one, he publishes his famous book and then he returns to Vietnam.
22:24
[SPEAKER_02]: Why?
22:25
[SPEAKER_02]: He wants to help
22:27
[SPEAKER_02]: He wants to help build a revolutionary Vietnam.
22:30
[SPEAKER_02]: And so when he arrives in the DRV in North Vietnam, he sees that the country has changed.
22:36
[SPEAKER_02]: He's been gone for fifteen years.
22:38
[SPEAKER_02]: He notices that, look, Confucianism and Buddhism were once important, but now they don't seem important anymore.
22:47
[SPEAKER_02]: Right now, the communist state is becoming more powerful.
22:50
[SPEAKER_02]: It's nineteen fifty-one.
22:51
[SPEAKER_02]: And now he's beginning to see all these people engage in self-criticism.
22:56
[SPEAKER_02]: So let's talk about that.
22:58
[SPEAKER_02]: But let me ask you, Ken, do you ever criticize yourself?
23:03
[SPEAKER_01]: all day long.
23:04
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that's a big problem that I have is self-criticism.
23:08
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's to the point of like it's debilitating for me.
23:13
[SPEAKER_01]: And I often think about it being on my mom's side, you know, the northern side of my grandmother, my grandfather.
23:23
[SPEAKER_01]: brought down to all eleven of their kids and everybody is very self-critical.
23:29
[SPEAKER_01]: But I don't know if that stems from any Ho Chi Minh or any of that world.
23:34
[SPEAKER_02]: Do you think it could be beneficial?
23:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Of course, I think self-reflection is always beneficial.
23:42
[SPEAKER_01]: But up to a point, I think there's got to be limits and breaks to all this.
23:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Otherwise, it really is a problem in my life sometimes.
23:53
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah.
23:54
[SPEAKER_02]: So criticism and self-criticism is a technique used by communist revolutionaries in Maoist China, in Vietnam, in the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, in Stalinist Russia.
24:07
[SPEAKER_02]: And basically, it's when individuals, revolutionaries criticize themselves for shortcomings regarding revolution.
24:16
[SPEAKER_02]: And the purpose of criticism and self-criticism is to eliminate
24:21
[SPEAKER_02]: these counter-revolutionary tendencies in you.
24:27
[SPEAKER_02]: So in China, they have what's called the struggle sessions.
24:32
[SPEAKER_02]: Have you heard this term?
24:34
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know what it is, but I have heard of it.
24:36
[SPEAKER_02]: So it refers to class struggle in which individuals are humiliated or persecuted for being class enemies.
24:46
[SPEAKER_02]: So, if you're a revolutionary then you say, here's what I did wrong, here's how I failed as a revolutionary.
24:53
[SPEAKER_02]: There's this not too long ago I was reading a memoir from a French anthropologist and he was kidnapped by the Khmer Rouge.
25:02
[SPEAKER_02]: And he was able to witness one of these criticism sessions.
25:06
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's really interesting because the commander is going to stand in front of all the, all the cadre's and he's going to say, OK, who's going to criticize themselves?
25:16
[SPEAKER_02]: And so one cadre says, OK, I will.
25:20
[SPEAKER_02]: Yesterday I was supposed to take in all the clothes after the laundry after I had dried on the clothes line, but I forgot to take it in.
25:28
[SPEAKER_02]: So then everyone's clothes got wet and that was bad.
25:33
[SPEAKER_02]: That's how I failed.
25:34
[SPEAKER_02]: I won't do it again.
25:35
[SPEAKER_02]: And then the commander's like, okay, and then he looks around expecting somebody else to criticize themselves.
25:43
[SPEAKER_02]: And so what he does is he points with his lips.
25:46
[SPEAKER_02]: He goes like, okay, you, like your turn, you know?
25:49
[SPEAKER_02]: It's interesting that he doesn't go you.
25:51
[SPEAKER_02]: Because criticism is supposed to be voluntary.
25:54
[SPEAKER_02]: You're supposed to volunteer like, you know, it's expected of you.
25:58
[SPEAKER_02]: you know, to be a good revolutionary, but maybe it's also like not good culturally, like you're not supposed to point.
26:04
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, you know, the crazy thing Kevin is that I remember watching documentaries and listening to former officers that were in the Guitau on these re-education camps.
26:20
[SPEAKER_01]: And they all had to do this.
26:21
[SPEAKER_01]: And now, I mean, today is the day like I'm learning where that comes from.
26:27
[SPEAKER_01]: I thought that it only was actually put upon these POWs or these reeducation camp.
26:35
[SPEAKER_01]: People, the officers that had to go through this, the South Vietnamese.
26:39
[SPEAKER_01]: But now I'm beginning to understand that this is something, it's a tradition that's practiced deep within the communist, the veins of their operations.
26:52
[SPEAKER_02]: Absolutely.
26:53
[SPEAKER_02]: So this comes from now, who takes it from Stalin.
26:58
[SPEAKER_02]: So Joseph Stalin invented this.
27:00
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, he's the first to come up with it.
27:02
[SPEAKER_02]: He says, quote,
27:04
[SPEAKER_02]: I think comrades that self-criticism is as necessary to us as air or water.
27:10
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that without it, without self-criticism, our party could not make any headway, could not disclose our ulcers, could not eliminate our shortcomings, and shortcomings we have in plenty that must be emitted frankly and honestly.
27:26
[SPEAKER_02]: So we have to understand, so this is Stalin in nineteen twenty eight.
27:29
[SPEAKER_02]: We have to understand that the communist revolutionaries
27:32
[SPEAKER_02]: They have a goal, right?
27:34
[SPEAKER_02]: The goal is quite clear.
27:35
[SPEAKER_02]: It's to win power from capitalist and it's to collect device the means of production.
27:44
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's really Mao who makes this practice famous.
27:48
[SPEAKER_02]: And like you could always criticize yourself for failing to help the group achieve the goal.
27:55
[SPEAKER_02]: And I just want to read this quote from Mao because it's important.
27:57
[SPEAKER_02]: He says,
27:59
[SPEAKER_02]: Conscientious practice of self-criticism is still another hallmark distinguishing our party from all other political parties.
28:07
[SPEAKER_02]: As we say, dust will accumulate if a room is not cleaned regularly.
28:13
[SPEAKER_02]: Our faces will get dirty if they're not washed regularly.
28:17
[SPEAKER_02]: Our comrades' minds and our parties work may also collect dust and also needs sweeping and washing.
28:24
[SPEAKER_02]: to fear neither criticism nor self-criticism, and to apply such good popular Chinese maxims as, say all you know and say it without reserve.
28:34
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, what do you think of that?
28:35
[SPEAKER_01]: This reminds me deeply of the practice of penance in the Catholic Church.
28:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
28:41
[SPEAKER_01]: And I wonder if Stalin took it from Catholicism.
28:47
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know what Stalin's religious background was, but it sounds very oddly
28:53
[SPEAKER_01]: similar to monks in the Benedictine, in the coasters of the caramelites, where they just whip themselves and they do penance and they do these deep reflective meditations on, you know, it's like stoic stoicism and Catholicism brought into some extreme practice in Russia and China.
29:19
[SPEAKER_02]: I've a lot of thoughts about this, and I think you're totally hitting on something important when you compare communism to a kind of religion.
29:27
[SPEAKER_02]: Really, it really is a kind of a religion.
29:31
[SPEAKER_02]: Marxism, I personally have friends who identify as Marxists, and they hold on to it as with a kind of religious fervor.
29:39
[SPEAKER_02]: Wow.
29:40
[SPEAKER_02]: And when you read the accounts of
29:42
[SPEAKER_02]: people who became Marxist communist revolutionaries, they really describe it as a religious revelation where suddenly everything makes sense.
29:52
[SPEAKER_02]: Everything becomes clear, right?
29:55
[SPEAKER_02]: And there's a sense of purpose, a sense of higher duty, right?
30:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Very similar.
30:03
[SPEAKER_01]: It's very similar.
30:04
[SPEAKER_01]: It sounds like a religious experience because, yeah, yeah, checking yourself is, you know, it's something that I grew up with in the Catholic faith.
30:12
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, we are doing self inventory constantly and we're checking in once a week with the priest to unload our sins.
30:20
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it's not that different.
30:22
[SPEAKER_01]: And Catholicism predates this host Stalinist business in nineteen twenty seven by two, you know, thousand years.
30:29
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's like,
30:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, well, how could it not come for, and I think Stalin might have been, you know, coming from some religious Catholic, I think he has some ties to the church.
30:42
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, if you were to read some, some so-called dissidents, Soviet dissidents, they're gonna say, for example, Cheslan Milose, totally buttering that name, by the way, but he's a Polish dissident, but he argues that the reason why communism became such a force was due to the decline of religion and Christianity.
31:11
[SPEAKER_02]: when people lose Christianity and become more secular, they lose a sense of purpose, meaning.
31:18
[SPEAKER_02]: And so it's really a communist revolution that gives them that.
31:22
[SPEAKER_02]: That's it here.
31:23
[SPEAKER_02]: But anyway, okay, there is one difference though, Ken, I think, between repenting in front of a priest and self-criticism, which is
31:37
[SPEAKER_02]: The, the Catholic one is more private.
31:40
[SPEAKER_02]: You're in a dark.
31:41
[SPEAKER_02]: I've done this.
31:42
[SPEAKER_02]: I was raised Catholic, you know, you're in a, in the dark with a priest and, and you say your sins.
31:49
[SPEAKER_02]: But that's pretty private between you and the priest.
31:52
[SPEAKER_02]: But for the communists, it's public.
31:56
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's a form of social control in that sense.
32:00
[SPEAKER_02]: It's less private.
32:02
[SPEAKER_02]: So on the one hand, it could be very beneficial criticism and self-criticism for revolutionism because what does it do?
32:10
[SPEAKER_02]: It sets the standards for what you're supposed to do.
32:14
[SPEAKER_02]: It encourages commitment and discipline for revolutionaries in their just cause against colonial repression.
32:23
[SPEAKER_02]: It provides a space for revolutionized to discuss, right?
32:28
[SPEAKER_02]: If now it says, like, look, say what you think and everybody can say what's on their mind, I, you know, it sounds like a good thing, right?
32:36
[SPEAKER_02]: You can voice your honest grievances and you could say, look, honestly, you're kind of annoying, but like, you know, comrade, you, you are doing all these things and it's problematic and you could admit you can learn from your mistakes.
32:50
[SPEAKER_02]: You can, you can strengthen what Ho Chi Minh calls revolutionary morality, right?
32:55
[SPEAKER_02]: But on the other hand, where can it go bad, Ken?
33:01
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, when I think about all this, it sounds physical to me, right?
33:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, how I think somebody with the sophistication of an education and the West, when you hear of that methodology, it becomes physical.
33:18
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, I'm going to make up whatever I'm just going to make up, I'm just going to make up things that
33:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Just to make people, just to please people, I'll play this psychological game.
33:28
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that's for me where this all breaks down.
33:32
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, I'm just going to appease my higher-ups.
33:36
[SPEAKER_02]: This is exactly what I argue when I'm doing how he criticizes this.
33:42
[SPEAKER_02]: So when I'm doing, which we discussed in one of our episodes, he said that people start becoming fake and instant-sear.
33:50
[SPEAKER_02]: But, but, again, Ho Chi Minh always said, you need to do it sincerely.
33:56
[SPEAKER_02]: Another problem with criticism self-criticism is that it leads to purges and excommunication and even executions if party members find that certain individuals' criticisms of the party become intolerable, right?
34:12
[SPEAKER_02]: So one might argue that criticism, self-criticism might actually end up fracturing and weakening what could have been an otherwise unified part.
34:23
[SPEAKER_02]: It might alienate moderates from radicals and so on.
34:28
[SPEAKER_02]: So anyway, we've had a long discussion about criticism and self-criticism, which is important because this is what Vietnamese revolutionaries are doing in the north.
34:37
[SPEAKER_02]: In nineteen forty-nine, nineteen fifty, early nineteen fifty's and odd words.
34:42
[SPEAKER_02]: So what you're seeing is poets and writers in the north
34:48
[SPEAKER_02]: Criticizing themselves, they're denouncing their works, their writings written before they entered the party.
34:56
[SPEAKER_02]: And the state, the DRV publishes thousands of these writers' self-criticisms, and they gave them to their cadre to study.
35:05
[SPEAKER_02]: And, guess what?
35:07
[SPEAKER_02]: Gender Tao, he returns to Vietnam in nineteen fifty-one, and he totally embraces this.
35:13
[SPEAKER_02]: He is genuinely sincerely on board.
35:16
[SPEAKER_02]: He's like, yep, I'm down with self-criticism.
35:19
[SPEAKER_02]: So what he does is he joins a rectification class in nineteen fifty-one and nineteen fifty-two.
35:26
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's like almost a year, right when he returns.
35:29
[SPEAKER_02]: And by the way, Fancoi was also in the class.
35:33
[SPEAKER_02]: We talked about Fancoi in another episode.
35:37
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, Chandaktao, he abandoned his Western clothing and he wears a peasant, brown shirt and pants and get this.
35:46
[SPEAKER_02]: I love this right here.
35:47
[SPEAKER_02]: So one of his
35:51
[SPEAKER_02]: someone who he was acquainted with says, Jondik Tau slept without a mosquito net, even though we were in the jungle.
36:00
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, Jondik Tau is like, look, I was in France, I was doing Western things, but now I'm really here for the revolution.
36:09
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to abandon my suit and tie.
36:11
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to wear peasant clothes.
36:13
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to sleep without a mosquito net.
36:15
[SPEAKER_02]: He quickly got malaria from that.
36:18
[SPEAKER_02]: But he's trying to get rid of the Western Bourgeois habits that he has
36:26
[SPEAKER_02]: adopted, and he's trying to become Vietnamese in his mind.
36:30
[SPEAKER_02]: When he finishes his rectification course, he goes back to academic work, but this time to serve the revolution.
36:39
[SPEAKER_02]: So he becomes dean of the history department at the National University in Hanoi.
36:44
[SPEAKER_02]: And at this time, the state, they're trying to mobilize all their intellectuals to help the state.
36:51
[SPEAKER_02]: So, the DRV sets of research, organizations to write Vietnam-centered histories.
36:58
[SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, everything, no matter who you are, you can contribute to the revolution.
37:05
[SPEAKER_02]: And then, in nineteen fifty-three, nineteen fifty-six, what happens?
37:09
[SPEAKER_02]: The land reform.
37:10
[SPEAKER_02]: We've talked about this before.
37:11
[SPEAKER_02]: And in other episodes, Dob Zuyan, for example, and Fan Koy, they are going to criticize the mistakes of the land reform.
37:21
[SPEAKER_02]: And by the way, just to refresh the memories of listeners, well, actually, let me get you to do it, Ken.
37:25
[SPEAKER_02]: What was, what was the land reform?
37:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I think the party was like, okay, well, these are people with a lot of money.
37:35
[SPEAKER_01]: We are going to take back the land and we're going to redistribute it to everyday people.
37:41
[SPEAKER_01]: But I'm not sure if they really got to redistributing it.
37:44
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe they did.
37:47
[SPEAKER_02]: So essentially, that's right.
37:48
[SPEAKER_02]: So this is happening in the north.
37:50
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's important to say the north, because the communist party leaders, they knew that their influence of the Vietnam was not so strongly south.
38:00
[SPEAKER_02]: It was much stronger in the north.
38:01
[SPEAKER_02]: So they do it in the north.
38:04
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, the leaders of the land reform admit to making mistakes.
38:11
[SPEAKER_02]: So, Vaughan's app, he famously gives a speech where he admits that they made mistakes.
38:18
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, this is wild, Ken.
38:20
[SPEAKER_02]: If I ask you, how many people do you think, how many so-called landlords were executed, killed in the land reform?
38:29
[SPEAKER_02]: Give me a number.
38:29
[SPEAKER_02]: What number have you heard of it?
38:31
[SPEAKER_02]: I've heard like it's a million.
38:34
[SPEAKER_01]: Are you serious?
38:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
38:36
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the number I remember.
38:37
[SPEAKER_01]: Is it lower or higher?
38:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Dude.
38:39
[SPEAKER_01]: All right.
38:40
[SPEAKER_02]: So this this is this blows my mind.
38:44
[SPEAKER_02]: I have heard people say one hundred thousand.
38:48
[SPEAKER_02]: I have heard people say fifteen thousand to forty five thousand and I have heard people say eight hundred.
38:57
[SPEAKER_01]: Now it's all over the board, right?
39:01
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, from eight hundred to one million can.
39:06
[SPEAKER_02]: I've heard a million, yeah.
39:09
[SPEAKER_02]: So listeners who are interested in this debate about numbers, one thing you could do is go on to Google Scholar and type in an article by Gareth Porter and the article is called Myth of the Bloodbath.
39:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Look, if there's just what I want to say,
39:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
39:30
[SPEAKER_01]: That a million people perished.
39:34
[SPEAKER_01]: But it wasn't a million people that were landowners.
39:37
[SPEAKER_01]: But it was the campaigning of the land owner.
39:42
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's like the sweep of all these people that were in the net of of of of, you know, landowner or business merchant class people that were swept up in in the execution of.
39:57
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's like the totality.
39:59
[SPEAKER_01]: So maybe fifty to a hundred thousand actually owned land.
40:04
[SPEAKER_01]: And the rest were like people with money or affiliated with intellectual sort of ties.
40:10
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not sure.
40:12
[SPEAKER_02]: So one thing that seems to be common knowledge or that many people talk about is they say that there were quotas of landlords that had to be executed.
40:25
[SPEAKER_02]: However, Gareth Porter and this is obviously a controversial article that I mentioned myth of the bloodbath.
40:33
[SPEAKER_02]: But he says that it was the opposite.
40:36
[SPEAKER_02]: The communist party was putting limits on how many on how many landlords could be killed because if you didn't put limits, the peasants wanted to kill way more.
40:46
[SPEAKER_02]: They're communist and we're like, okay, no, that'll take too long to put them on a child.
40:50
[SPEAKER_01]: That makes sense.
40:52
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you think about the peasant class, there's like millions of these people and they're just like, let's get, let's get to businesses, take care of this.
41:01
[SPEAKER_01]: That makes sense.
41:02
[SPEAKER_02]: If we're doing the willow, I don't know who's right, but listeners can check it out.
41:08
[SPEAKER_02]: So on page eleven, Gareth Porter argues that even if you look at no dinzians,
41:13
[SPEAKER_02]: numbers that he gives for those executed.
41:16
[SPEAKER_02]: It's about eight hundred to two thousand.
41:19
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, way, like, ZM would have an interest in ZM in giving a little later, either numb, right?
41:24
[SPEAKER_02]: Anyway, the point there is that very controversial.
41:28
[SPEAKER_02]: So, at this time, Vietnamese in the North intellectuals, they start to express unease at the party.
41:35
[SPEAKER_02]: They're beginning to say that the party is beginning to make mistakes.
41:39
[SPEAKER_02]: and they're beginning to say that intellectuals should start having more autonomy, that the party shouldn't try to control them so much.
41:48
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's important to say that they did not initiate criticisms of the party.
41:54
[SPEAKER_02]: There are simply following party members who had started criticizing the party.
42:00
[SPEAKER_02]: It's also important, this context, it's global.
42:03
[SPEAKER_02]: What happens in the nineteen, nineteen, fifty-six is that Krushev, who's the Soviet leader, he gives a famous speech, the secret speech where he denounces Stalin.
42:14
[SPEAKER_02]: And he says,
42:15
[SPEAKER_02]: All of our problems were because of this cult of personality.
42:19
[SPEAKER_02]: We've been like worshiping Stalin like a god.
42:22
[SPEAKER_02]: That's not that's not true Marxism.
42:25
[SPEAKER_02]: We should not worship people like gods.
42:28
[SPEAKER_02]: And so this speech becomes like rocks the whole communist world.
42:32
[SPEAKER_02]: And so we're seeing this wave that it's called de-stallinization in the late fifties.
42:39
[SPEAKER_02]: This is even before the hundred-flourous movement breaks out in China.
42:43
[SPEAKER_02]: That's gone on in nineteen fifty-seven, but this is nineteen fifty-six.
42:47
[SPEAKER_02]: So, John McDowell, he becomes part of this movement that we've been talking about in this series with Dazuyan Fancoi, which is, which is called the Nyanvanzai Fum movement.
42:58
[SPEAKER_02]: It's named after the two journals, Nyanvanzai Fum, the humanities and masterpieces.
43:04
[SPEAKER_02]: So, John McDowell, he contributes two articles to Nyanvanzai.
43:08
[SPEAKER_02]: And in these articles he says, we need, we communists need more democracy.
43:14
[SPEAKER_02]: And he criticizes the communist party for the mistakes it made in the land reform.
43:20
[SPEAKER_02]: And he also criticizes the party for having too much bureaucracy.
43:25
[SPEAKER_02]: too much sectionalism, so too much division, and the cult of personality.
43:31
[SPEAKER_02]: Again, he's like, we shouldn't be worshipping people like gods here.
43:35
[SPEAKER_02]: So he says that after we defeated the French at the end of two years ago in nineteen fifty-four,
43:43
[SPEAKER_02]: all the sicknesses appeared in the party.
43:47
[SPEAKER_02]: And so we need to fight against them.
43:48
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'm going to give a quote from Janduk Tao.
43:52
[SPEAKER_02]: We should hear from him.
43:54
[SPEAKER_02]: So he says in these articles, quote, the freedom that the people want to develop decisively is not the bourgeois freedom of the old society.
44:06
[SPEAKER_02]: The freedom of a minority that exploits the majority.
44:10
[SPEAKER_02]: The freedom that they want to develop is the freedom of the entire people to criticize the leadership because the leadership is precisely the leadership of their own.
44:22
[SPEAKER_02]: That freedom is the right of the citizenry that is recognized and protected in our system.
44:30
[SPEAKER_01]: What do you make of that?
44:33
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, for the sake of the audience,
44:36
[SPEAKER_01]: look, can you read that one more time so we can all really think about what you just asked.
44:42
[SPEAKER_02]: The freedom that the people want to develop decisively is not the bourgeois freedom of the old society.
44:49
[SPEAKER_02]: The freedom of the minority that exploits the majority.
44:53
[SPEAKER_02]: The freedom that the people want to develop is the freedom of the entire people to criticize the leadership.
45:02
[SPEAKER_01]: What do I make of that?
45:04
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that that is an ideal that I think modern America wants.
45:11
[SPEAKER_01]: I think modern societies want that.
45:15
[SPEAKER_01]: But I think there's an argument, you know, a classic argument saying that not everybody in a society is informed enough to know
45:26
[SPEAKER_01]: How to vote?
45:28
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, right?
45:29
[SPEAKER_01]: That's sort of when I think about the difference between
45:34
[SPEAKER_01]: And I've been thinking a lot about this and I actually want to bring this up that this question is related to.
45:39
[SPEAKER_01]: So I went just went back to Vietnam and people, you know, Vietnamese Americans who are living in Vietnam was like, hey, this one party system is not that bad, you know, because all the guys that are kind of making decisions are people who really know the best for the country.
45:53
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's not a lot of like messiness that we have to deal with as regular citizens.
45:58
[SPEAKER_01]: In America, there's two party system and everybody's voting and a lot of people don't know what they're
46:03
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot of ignorant people are voting.
46:06
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's this debate that reflects back to what you're talking about right now.
46:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Is do we keep it to a smaller minority to vote or do we open it up to everybody, including people who really are ignorant to the fact?
46:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
46:24
[SPEAKER_02]: This is a classic debate in political theory about, is democracy good or bad.
46:30
[SPEAKER_02]: On the one hand, democracy is good.
46:32
[SPEAKER_02]: You need democracy because throughout history, a few individuals claiming to rule for other people have benefited themselves at the expense of the many.
46:44
[SPEAKER_02]: So the solution is democracy.
46:46
[SPEAKER_02]: But on the other hand,
46:48
[SPEAKER_02]: Most people are ignorant and incompetent and conformous and they vote against their own interests.
46:53
[SPEAKER_02]: Democracy is kind of like drunk driving where you let, you know, it's like you let drunk people drive.
46:58
[SPEAKER_02]: Why would you do that?
46:59
[SPEAKER_02]: Who seems to pay in America?
47:03
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's an endless debate.
47:04
[SPEAKER_02]: It's democracy, good or bad.
47:06
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, in Vietnam, at this time, what you have in the quote that I just read was that there's this acceptance of a communist party leadership.
47:18
[SPEAKER_02]: And they are Leninist, meaning that they believe in a vanguard party.
47:24
[SPEAKER_02]: So the vanguard is kind of the leading revolutionary, the leaders basically.
47:30
[SPEAKER_02]: You need leaders, right?
47:32
[SPEAKER_02]: Because the people, the masses on their own, they're ignorant.
47:35
[SPEAKER_02]: They're never going to do a revolution on their own.
47:37
[SPEAKER_02]: They need educated.
47:39
[SPEAKER_02]: professional revolutionaries to lead the way.
47:42
[SPEAKER_02]: And here, Chandak taught seems to accept that.
47:44
[SPEAKER_02]: He says, we want freedom to criticize the leadership.
47:48
[SPEAKER_02]: Notice, he did not say we want freedom to make political decisions.
47:54
[SPEAKER_02]: Hmm, what's for the leadership to do?
47:56
[SPEAKER_02]: We just want freedom to criticize our leadership.
48:00
[SPEAKER_02]: It's also very confusion, by the way, in confusion, political thought, the leaders rule, the rulers rule, and the people follow, but the people also can criticize.
48:12
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, in fact, you're being loyal if you criticize the leader.
48:18
[SPEAKER_02]: But you should complain, like a good leader should listen to the people's complaints.
48:24
[SPEAKER_01]: But Kevin, I hear this a lot in Vietnam today is that the politicians have to carry out the things that the people want.
48:36
[SPEAKER_01]: And I scratch my head, I'm like, well, how do they know what the people want when the people can't voice?
48:44
[SPEAKER_01]: And hold on, hold on.
48:45
[SPEAKER_02]: So can you recently in Vietnam?
48:49
[SPEAKER_02]: Have you asked any Vietnamese people, do you have any opportunities to voice what you want to the government?
48:57
[SPEAKER_01]: I never asked that because I just assume they don't have a way.
49:03
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, you should, you should.
49:05
[SPEAKER_02]: Anyone who goes to Vietnam, you should ask a Vietnamese person if they had that opportunity.
49:10
[SPEAKER_02]: I have asked that and they tell me they do have the opportunity.
49:13
[SPEAKER_02]: There are there are town hall meetings where they're allowed to voice
49:18
[SPEAKER_02]: or what they want, so ask for yourself and ask Vietnamese people.
49:24
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you're a Vietnamese person listening to this, living in Vietnam, write it in the comments, do you have that opportunity?
49:31
[SPEAKER_02]: So, Lee in the West are assuming
49:35
[SPEAKER_01]: that they're that they're voiceless.
49:37
[SPEAKER_01]: Is that it?
49:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Or you are kept?
49:40
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm assuming, okay.
49:42
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm assuming that Vietnamese people in Vietnam are voiceless, but what I've heard on the street is that Vietnamese people
49:50
[SPEAKER_01]: The enemy's government is really afraid of the people and I've always been like, how are they afraid of the people when you don't ever hear about town halls or voting or you know, you think it's more authoritarian, but I think yeah, there's a disadvantage.
50:06
[SPEAKER_02]: Let's make no mistake here.
50:09
[SPEAKER_02]: There are people who have been arrested and who have gotten in trouble by the state for publishing things that the state deems anti-state.
50:23
[SPEAKER_02]: So for sure, there is a lack of freedom of the press relative to the United States.
50:31
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I don't even know if we can say relative to the United States today.
50:34
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, there have been thousands of book bannings in the United States for sure at universities as well.
50:42
[SPEAKER_02]: So I don't even know.
50:44
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't even know.
50:48
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
50:49
[SPEAKER_02]: So anyway, so Chanduktao is going to say that the Vietnamese are free in the sense that they got rid of French colonialism, but they're not free in the sense that they're lacking the rights of free speech, basically.
51:05
[SPEAKER_02]: So he says there's another kind of freedom that we need.
51:08
[SPEAKER_02]: So he says quote,
51:09
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's an individual freedom he talks about.
51:12
[SPEAKER_02]: This is really interesting.
51:13
[SPEAKER_02]: He says, quote, in our society, individual freedom has been regenerated and transformed into a real value.
51:22
[SPEAKER_02]: The individual serves the collectivity, but the collectivity also must construct the individual.
51:30
[SPEAKER_02]: That's interesting, right?
51:32
[SPEAKER_02]: So he's saying that the two, the individual freedom and collective freedom go together and that they can help each other.
51:40
[SPEAKER_02]: They're not at odds.
51:44
[SPEAKER_02]: I think what he's doing here is really a dialectical move.
51:48
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like they benefit each other.
51:52
[SPEAKER_02]: So he criticizes the party for its lack of free speech.
51:55
[SPEAKER_02]: He says, quote, backwards and conservative elements in the party have prevented the masses from expressing their opinions obstructed the rectification of errors causing great harm.
52:10
[SPEAKER_02]: A powerful apparatus built to wipe out the enemy reaches the point of not being able to see the enemy and turns on its friends, taking them to be the enemy and indiscriminately destroying them.
52:26
[SPEAKER_01]: And for that, you get kicked out of the kingdom.
52:29
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so he is really saying similar things to Windminton, where they're criticizing the party, they're saying like, look, the party has become too dogmatic, too authoritarian, and it's just becoming paranoid.
52:43
[SPEAKER_02]: It's seeing enemies everywhere.
52:45
[SPEAKER_02]: And anytime somebody gently criticizes and gives constructive suggestions, they take it as, oh, you're against the party, right?
52:54
[SPEAKER_02]: But these people, it's wrong to call them dissidents.
52:58
[SPEAKER_02]: It's wrong to call them dissident.
53:00
[SPEAKER_02]: Why?
53:00
[SPEAKER_02]: Because a dissident is someone who opposes the ideology of the party.
53:08
[SPEAKER_02]: A dissident is someone who opposes the party.
53:14
[SPEAKER_02]: But these people, they're saying, we support the party.
53:17
[SPEAKER_02]: We're just giving you criticism so that you can do your job better.
53:26
[SPEAKER_02]: So, however, to make more nuanced here, in the West, a dissident was a term applied to anybody in the Soviet world who said things criticized the party and then faced repercussions by the party.
53:45
[SPEAKER_02]: So that's also another term of the word.
53:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's go back to this whole Vietnamese modern society today.
53:50
[SPEAKER_01]: So you can go to a town hall meeting and say things respectfully, voicing your diametrically opposed viewpoint and get away with it, but you just can't publish it and fight sort of subversively or you can't fight in a way that challenges authority without giving authority
54:16
[SPEAKER_01]: a chance to kind of like regulate you.
54:19
[SPEAKER_02]: Like how is my my understanding is that you cannot my understanding is that if the party perceives that somebody is trying to diminish its power, then that person's going to be in trouble.
54:34
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
54:35
[SPEAKER_02]: But if you're now to help the so that's I.
54:39
[SPEAKER_02]: I suppose that if you frame it in a way, look, I'm not challenging the authority of the party.
54:44
[SPEAKER_02]: I agree with the party, et cetera.
54:46
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm just saying here are some specific issues that you can do better on, like maybe the party will be more amino.
54:53
[SPEAKER_02]: By the way, listeners, if you're interested in this whole issue of free speech and Vietnam, there's a great book by Ben, oh my gosh, I'm here for get the nickname.
55:05
[SPEAKER_02]: It's called speaking out in Vietnam.
55:08
[SPEAKER_02]: It's by speaking out in Vietnam.
55:18
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm awful.
55:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, while you're looking that up, I mean, there's also this idea of, yeah, sorry, sorry.
55:23
[SPEAKER_02]: It's by Ben Kirk, the idiot, speaking out in Vietnam, public political criticism in a communist party, ruled nation by Cornell University Press, published in
55:36
[SPEAKER_01]: As we're seeing today, I think that there's all kinds of messy politics in the United States.
55:45
[SPEAKER_01]: And go ahead, go ahead.
55:48
[SPEAKER_01]: No, sorry, sorry.
55:49
[SPEAKER_01]: Continue.
55:50
[SPEAKER_01]: And who's to say, right?
55:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, which system is actually going to prevail at this point?
55:56
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
55:57
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's again, I noticed that I still have a whole section that I wanted to talk about with Dr. Nuktau's philosophy.
56:06
[SPEAKER_02]: So I hope we're not nearing that end here, but go for it.
56:10
[SPEAKER_01]: We're nearly at the end, but I mean, we can always do a part two.
56:13
[SPEAKER_01]: This has been a very interesting.
56:15
[SPEAKER_02]: No, I don't think we need.
56:18
[SPEAKER_02]: Let's give some time to this.
56:21
[SPEAKER_02]: Let me finish his bio here, which is that it's not clear what happens after he publishes these criticisms in nineteen fifty six.
56:31
[SPEAKER_02]: He's not mentioned in the official histories, but eventually his self-criticism is published in nineteen fifty-eight.
56:39
[SPEAKER_02]: Anyway, he falls into obscurity in the next thirty years.
56:42
[SPEAKER_02]: He gets sick and he goes to France in the late eighties and he passes away in nineteen ninety-three.
56:49
[SPEAKER_02]: What I want to do now is turn to his philosophy.
56:53
[SPEAKER_02]: So he's a Marxist, but his first love was phenomenology, the study of experience.
57:00
[SPEAKER_02]: And so what he's going to do, what he's really famous for as a philosopher.
57:05
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think he's brilliant here.
57:07
[SPEAKER_02]: He theorizes the colonial relationship using phenomenology.
57:12
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think this is really fascinating.
57:14
[SPEAKER_02]: So I do want us to talk about this.
57:19
[SPEAKER_02]: Ten minutes, OK.
57:22
[SPEAKER_02]: He's gonna say that the French and the Vietnamese experience colonialism differently.
57:30
[SPEAKER_02]: Is that a radical thing to, but I think that's a truth.
57:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, if I'm a white guy in power, I'm definitely gonna experience it differently as a peasant on the ground in Vietnam.
57:42
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, it's for sure.
57:44
[SPEAKER_01]: Sounds pretty obvious, right?
57:46
[SPEAKER_02]: But this is actually, but it's actually quite radical
57:51
[SPEAKER_02]: If you're, if you're saying this in nineteen forties in France, so in nineteen forty five he publishes a famous essay called on Indo-China, Sur-Landoshi, and he's going to say that when the French and the Vietnamese debate about colonialism in Vietnam in Indo-China,
58:13
[SPEAKER_02]: The disagreement is not about facts, or reason, or arguments.
58:19
[SPEAKER_02]: The disagreement is really rooted in experience.
58:22
[SPEAKER_02]: So the French and the Vietnamese can be given the same facts.
58:26
[SPEAKER_02]: but they're gonna arrive at opposite conclusions.
58:30
[SPEAKER_02]: So you cannot resolve the conflicts through argument alone because the opposition between the French and the Vietnamese is, quote, rooted in the mode of existence in two ways of living to understand the world.
58:46
[SPEAKER_02]: So to a French person, Vietnam is simply part of the French empire.
58:52
[SPEAKER_02]: Right?
58:52
[SPEAKER_02]: If you're French, you're gonna be, oh yeah, Vietnam, oh yeah, it's part of our empire.
58:56
[SPEAKER_02]: But if you're a Vietnamese person, France is outside of Vietnam.
59:02
[SPEAKER_02]: Vietnam is its own country.
59:06
[SPEAKER_02]: So his contribution to philosophy here is what is called the concept of horizons.
59:14
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think this is really interesting.
59:15
[SPEAKER_02]: So he says that we all experience things based on the horizons we have.
59:21
[SPEAKER_02]: And what this means is it's simply the limits of our mental perceptions and experiences.
59:28
[SPEAKER_02]: So when you go to the beach and you look at the horizon, you can only see so far.
59:36
[SPEAKER_02]: Right?
59:36
[SPEAKER_02]: That is the limit of your perceptions.
59:40
[SPEAKER_02]: And so we all have our own experiences and our present experience is informed by our past experiences.
59:49
[SPEAKER_02]: Right?
59:50
[SPEAKER_02]: So if something happens to you and me, Ken?
59:54
[SPEAKER_02]: We're going to immediately incorporate it and make sense of it in terms of our past experiences.
1:00:01
[SPEAKER_02]: So the French will assimilate all new facts and experiences into a French horizon.
1:00:08
[SPEAKER_02]: For example, for example, if a French person learns about some evil things that French colonizes did in Vietnam, they're going to simply say, oh yeah, but that's against the law, you know, it's like I had apples.
1:00:26
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's a few bad apples.
1:00:28
[SPEAKER_02]: But for the via music, they're going to experience it much more differently.
1:00:31
[SPEAKER_02]: They're going to say, no, it's a systematic thing, right?
1:00:35
[SPEAKER_02]: And so, so in in this essay, Sue Londerson in nineteen forty six, he's going to say that like the French will admit that the French
1:00:48
[SPEAKER_02]: The French will admit that French colonialists abuse the Vietnamese.
1:00:52
[SPEAKER_02]: But they're going to say that those French do not represent the true France.
1:00:57
[SPEAKER_02]: And the true France built roads and schools.
1:01:00
[SPEAKER_02]: But the Vietnamese are going to say, but we Vietnamese do not benefit from those roads.
1:01:06
[SPEAKER_02]: Who drives the cars?
1:01:07
[SPEAKER_02]: It's all the French and the landlords.
1:01:10
[SPEAKER_02]: And we Vietnamese do not lack schools.
1:01:14
[SPEAKER_02]: We were very literate.
1:01:15
[SPEAKER_02]: And then the French came and made us illiterate.
1:01:19
[SPEAKER_02]: So we don't need your schools.
1:01:22
[SPEAKER_02]: And the Vietnamese are going to say, without you colonizers, we could have just imported machines that we needed from Europe.
1:01:31
[SPEAKER_02]: And we could have modernized in a few years.
1:01:34
[SPEAKER_02]: You are preventing our modernization.
1:01:37
[SPEAKER_02]: We have had our ways of doing agriculture for a long time.
1:01:41
[SPEAKER_02]: We know how to farm rice.
1:01:43
[SPEAKER_02]: We don't need you to modernize this.
1:01:47
[SPEAKER_02]: We would have modernized Japan in less than eighty years.
1:01:51
[SPEAKER_02]: It's you who have prevented us.
1:01:53
[SPEAKER_02]: You see how these different perspectives are playing out here.
1:01:58
[SPEAKER_02]: The Vietnamese are going to say,
1:02:00
[SPEAKER_02]: We are being forced to purchase from France products more expensive than those that we could have manufactured ourselves at home.
1:02:10
[SPEAKER_02]: And so, everything that the Vietnamese experience and realize, it's from their own horizon.
1:02:19
[SPEAKER_02]: And so, Chandrakhaos says, when the Vietnamese say these things,
1:02:24
[SPEAKER_02]: They have no bias, like no disparaging bias.
1:02:28
[SPEAKER_02]: They're not hating on France.
1:02:30
[SPEAKER_02]: They're just reporting on how they experience, right?
1:02:34
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
1:02:35
[SPEAKER_02]: And so, okay, so I can, we can wind down.
1:02:38
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm not going to summarize the whole article, but I urge listeners to read it.
1:02:42
[SPEAKER_02]: You can read it in English, just type in on Indo-China,
1:02:49
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'll end with this last quote of how he ends his essay here, and I think this is interesting.
1:02:54
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's kind of long, but I'm going to ask you, Ken, to summarize it in your own words, like a good student.
1:03:02
[SPEAKER_02]: So listen, so here's how he ends this essay, he says.
1:03:09
[SPEAKER_02]: Once freed from this extraordinary machine of repression, which colonial domination represents, the masses will finally be able to have their rights prevail.
1:03:22
[SPEAKER_02]: From a spiritual perspective,
1:03:24
[SPEAKER_02]: the possibility of an original civilization opens up.
1:03:28
[SPEAKER_02]: The most diverse currents will come to converge with the traditional culture, which has maintained itself in this country as a special case within the far eastern world.
1:03:41
[SPEAKER_02]: In a word for France, what is that stake are a few interests, which are quite particular and decides rather illusory.
1:03:49
[SPEAKER_02]: But for Vietnam, what is that stake is its life as a whole, which must either freely flourish or be trampled upon once more.
1:03:59
[SPEAKER_02]: For those who are capable of rising above particular horizons and taking a human perspective, the conflict that is unfolding in coaching China represents in one respect, interests that are utterly mediocre and in another respect, a wealth of meaning so great that no hesitation is possible.
1:04:20
[SPEAKER_02]: A young country liberating itself has the absolute right, the right to existence.
1:04:26
[SPEAKER_02]: All right, so that was kind of debts, but what did you get from that?
1:04:29
[SPEAKER_01]: That's beautiful.
1:04:30
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I think that's the existence of Vietnam today.
1:04:33
[SPEAKER_01]: They are doing their own thing.
1:04:34
[SPEAKER_01]: They're, they're sovereign country and they are moving along international development the way they want to with, you know, free and clear, I mean, arguably free and clear of any super power dominating them.
1:04:50
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
1:04:51
[SPEAKER_02]: So what I find fascinating about this quote is that he started off by saying, we all have our own horizons.
1:04:58
[SPEAKER_02]: Like I have my Kevin experiences, the way I interpret things in the world.
1:05:03
[SPEAKER_02]: It's from Kevin's past experience and you have your past experiences.
1:05:07
[SPEAKER_02]: But he says it's possible to have a human perspective to go beyond our personal horizons and have a more universal horizon.
1:05:17
[SPEAKER_02]: And one thing I want to say
1:05:21
[SPEAKER_02]: that I think is important here, and it's relevant for our current times, is that he says right here, for France, what does that stake our few interests?
1:05:32
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, you know, for France, it's just a few material interests, like resources in Vietnam.
1:05:37
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not so important, but for the Vietnamese, it's everything.
1:05:42
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a them living on the land and so on.
1:05:45
[SPEAKER_02]: Actually, I'm not even sure if I want to go here, but you know, you know, I will, I will go here.
1:05:51
[SPEAKER_02]: So this is relevant for when we talk about discourses of colonialism and anti-colonialism in Israel, Palestine.
1:06:05
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, what we're seeing right now is just really horrific.
1:06:09
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, we're seeing, I mean, I think there's a general consensus that there is a genocide happening in Gaza right now.
1:06:17
[SPEAKER_02]: Among leading Israeli historians, right?
1:06:22
[SPEAKER_02]: And so no matter who you are and what you think about the whole thing, you know, you can accept Israel's existence as a state.
1:06:32
[SPEAKER_02]: But you can also say that there are certain lines being crossed here.
1:06:37
[SPEAKER_02]: One point that I want to share is what I heard from a young Israeli, which was that when the French were in Vietnam or Algeria,
1:06:51
[SPEAKER_02]: The Vietnamese and the Algerians can attack the French colonialists and kill the French colonialists.
1:07:02
[SPEAKER_02]: And eventually the French colonialists are going to say, OK, our lives and our children's lives are more important than these resources that we're trying to exploit in our colonies.
1:07:15
[SPEAKER_02]: We'll leave.
1:07:18
[SPEAKER_02]: But the trickier issue with Israel Palestine situation is that many Israelis see themselves or think that they are indigenous, that they don't think they are colonized with.
1:07:35
[SPEAKER_02]: So if we apply gender-to-house phenomenology to the Israel Palestine experience,
1:07:43
[SPEAKER_02]: One challenge for pro-Palestinian people is that if you try to call the Israelis colonizes, yeah, in an objective sense, they are settler colonialism, they call themselves colonizes.
1:07:57
[SPEAKER_02]: However, they also see themselves and experience themselves as being indigenous.
1:08:03
[SPEAKER_02]: And so in this case,
1:08:06
[SPEAKER_02]: doing what Vietnam or Algeria did to France might not pan out the same way, you know, because in that sense, the Israeli is going to say, okay, we're not going to leave because we're colonizes, it's now war for us.
1:08:21
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'm just here reporting on what and Israeli said, which I think holds true for many Israelis, you know, that perception of themselves on the land.
1:08:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, we're dealing with very different things.
1:08:38
[SPEAKER_01]: They believe that this is their land.
1:08:42
[SPEAKER_01]: They're returning back to their land.
1:08:45
[SPEAKER_01]: And so this is not French being on Vietnamese land.
1:08:49
[SPEAKER_02]: The French did not think they were indigenous to Vietnam, right?
1:08:55
[SPEAKER_02]: So this is my way of saying that conductile is relevant for us to make sense of what's happening today.
1:09:07
[SPEAKER_01]: brilliant ending.
1:09:08
[SPEAKER_01]: This is one of my favorite endings the way you wrapped it up was brilliant Kevin.
1:09:14
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much for today.
1:09:15
[SPEAKER_01]: I am I thoroughly enjoyed you putting in that sort of Palestinian Israeli example and you know it's giving me a lot to think about today.
1:09:27
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you, Ken.
1:09:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for listening to the Vietnamese with Kenneth Wyn.
1:09:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Special thanks to Brittany Tran, to Jane Wyn, Catherine Wyn, Tina Fam, Sydney Jamie, and Crystal Tran.
1:09:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Please find us on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok at the Vietnamese podcast.