Vietnamese Communists Ideology During the Vietnam War

In his article, “To Be Patriotic is to Build Socialsim”: Communist Ideology in Vietnam's Civil War, Tuong Vo challenges a standard view of the civil war between North and South Vietnam – the war is power struggle between the two camps. Based on a newly availble documents and other primary sources, Vu argues that “[V]ietnamese communists never wavered in their ideology loyalty during the period when key decisions about the civil war were made (1953–1960).....a modernizing socialist idology rather than a mere for national unification was driving the Vietnamese civil war from the north” (Vu 2009, 34–35).

In the same vein, Zinoman in his forthcomong article, Nhân Văn–Giai Phẩm and Vietnamese “Reform Communism” during the 1950s: A Revisionist Interpretation, challenge a well established view about a NVGP movement, a surge of domestic political protest that peaked in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam during 1956 that takes its name from two incendiary journals – Nhân Văn [humanity] and Giai Phẩm [masterworks]. He points out that foreign scholars and local intellectuals who interested in NVGP affair succeed “in conveying a plausible image of NVGP as a robust movement of political dissent against the party-state” (Zinoman forthcoming 2011, 3). He argues that it caused from their narrow study upon a most dramatic statements of opposition of NVGP and failure to analyze, in any depth, the content of NVGP’s published writing (Zinoman forthcoming 2011, 4).

Whether intentionally or not, Zinoman makes Boudarel's view on the Hungarian uprising as an example for his allegation we seen above. “Such a selective reading can be misleading.” he writes, “[T]o illustrate the point, consider “Lessons of Poland and Hungary,” an essay by the poet Lê Đạt featured on the front page of the fifth issue of Nhân Văn” (Zinoman forthcoming 2011, 4). Zinoman quotes Lê Đạt’s view in the article on Nhân Văn to assert that Lê Đạt endorsed the murderous repression of the Hungarian uprising and believed that “thanks to the help of the Soviet Red army. The eager mutual assistance of fraternal countries to Hungary is a stinging slap in the face to Eisenhower and his clique” (Zinoman forthcoming 2011, 5, 6). Interestingly, Lê Đạt shared a same view with Vietnamese Worker Party (VWP)'s leaders such as Lê Duẩn who critizied those who did not see imperialist plots (Vu 2009, 47–48). This is quite different from Boudarel's view in his Intellectual dissidence in the 1950s: The Nhân Văn - Giai Phẩm affair that reads “[W]hen the Hungarian uprising was crushed by Soviet intervention, the tone quickly changed.