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B U R E A U O F P U B L I C S E C R E T S
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IN THE CROSSFIRE
Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary
Introduction
“History is written by the victors.” With the increasing spectacularization of
modern society, this truism has become truer than ever. The most radical revolts
are not only physically crushed, they are falsified, trivialized, and buried
under a constant barrage of superficial and ephemeral bits of “information,” to
the point that most people do not even know they happened.
Ngo Van’s In the Crossfire is among the most
illuminating revelations of this repressed and hidden history, worthy of a place
alongside such works as Voline’s The Unknown Revolution and Harold
Isaacs’s The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution. It is also a very moving
human document: dramatic political events are interwoven with intimate personal
concerns, just as they always are in reality. In this respect Van’s book is
perhaps more akin to Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia or Victor Serge’s
Memoirs of a Revolutionary.
The two-stage Vietnam war against French and then American
occupation (1945-1975) is still fairly well known; but almost no one knows
anything about the long and complex struggles that preceded it, including the
fact that many of those struggles were inspired by an indigenous Trotskyist
movement that was often more popular and more influential than the rival
Stalinist movement under Ho Chi Minh. While Ho’s Communist Party slavishly
followed the constantly shifting policy lines ordered by his masters in the
Kremlin (which often called for alliances with the native landowners and
bourgeoisie in the name of “national unity,” or at times even with the French
colonial regime when France happened to be allied with Russia), the Vietnamese
Trotskyists expressed more consistently radical perspectives. The situation was
somewhat analogous to what was going on in Spain during the same period. In both
cases a radical popular movement was fighting against foreign and reactionary
forces while being stabbed in the back by the Stalinists. One significant
difference was that in Spain the popular movement was predominantly anarchist,
whereas anarchism was virtually unknown in Vietnam.* Many Vietnamese rebels thus
understandably saw the Trotskyist movement as the only alternative, the only
movement fighting simultaneously against colonialism, capitalism and Stalinism.
In any case, spontaneous popular revolts often bypassed
whatever ideologies were officially in play, implicitly calling in question the
whole social order even when their explicit demands were much more minimal. What
stands out is the readiness of ordinary people to create their own forms of
action — workers forming underground unions and carrying out illegal strikes,
peasants seizing land and forming “soviets,” prisoners organizing resistance
networks, women breaking out of their traditional roles, students and teachers
putting their learning to subversive use, neighborhoods organizing themselves
into “people’s committees,” streetcar workers creating an independent militia,
and most astonishing of all, 30,000 coal miners forming a workers-council
“Commune” that manages to hold out for three months before being destroyed by
the Stalinists. These are not the proverbial “masses” meekly waiting for some
leader or “vanguard party” to tell them what to do. They are participants in one
of the most broad-based and persevering revolutionary movements of the twentieth
century.
Ngo Van took part in that movement as a young man, and in his
old age, half a century later, he became the preeminent chronicler of its
remarkable victories and tragic defeats.In Part I of this book Van recounts his experiences growing
up in a peasant village; working as a teenager in Saigon; discovering the true
nature of the colonial system; becoming aware of movements that were fighting
it; cautiously seeking out other dissidents; attending clandestine meetings;
establishing underground networks; disseminating radical publications;
organizing strikes and protests; taking part in insurrections and partisan
warfare; being jailed and tortured by the French; and facing the murderous
betrayals by the Stalinists, who systematically liquidated the Trotskyists and
all the other oppositional movements in the aftermath of World War II.
Constantly harassed by the French colonial police in Saigon
and risking assassination by the Stalinists if he ventured into the countryside,
Van emigrated to France in 1948. As described in Part II, he became a factory
worker, struggled with tuberculosis, took up painting, and discovered new
political perspectives. His encounters with anarchists, councilists and
libertarian Marxists reaffirmed the most radical aspects of his previous
experiences while verifying his increasing suspicions that there were
significant problems with Trotskyism as well as Stalinism. From that point on,
Van carried out his activities as an independent radical more or less in the
council-communist tradition, whether in taking part in rank-and-file worker
struggles or in writing articles on East Asian politics and history.
After his retirement in 1978, Van devoted the next seventeen
years to researching and writing his monumental history, Vietnam 1920-1945:
révolution et contre-révolution sous la domination coloniale. Following the
publication of that book in 1995, he wrote a parallel autobiographical account
of the same period: Au pays de la Cloche fêlée (2000). When that was
done, he returned to his more “objective” history of modern Vietnam. (I might
mention here that in addition to his works on Vietnamese history, he also
authored two studies of radical currents in ancient China and put together a
collection of Vietnamese folktales. See the Bibliography for information on
these and other publications.)
After completing the second volume of his Vietnam history,
Le Joueur de flûte et l’Oncle Hô: Vietnam 1945-2005, Van returned to his
autobiography, envisioning a continuation that would cover his years in France.
Unfortunately he did not live long enough to complete this latter project. He
died January 2, 2005, at the age of 92. Later the same year his publishers,
Insomniaque, issued a memorial volume, Au pays d’Héloïse, comprising the
few chapters he had completed (mostly about his life during the 1950s) along
with several articles, numerous photographs and a selection of his lovely
paintings, many of which are reproduced in the present volume.* * *
Anticolonial movements have long been a source of political
blackmail. People who become aware of the horrors of colonialism usually know
little else about the countries involved and have often been ready to applaud
any purportedly “progressive” leadership, supporting practices they would never
dream of defending if they took place in a modern Western country. Radical
social critique has been discouraged by the argument that criticizing even the
most brutal Third World regimes is “playing into the hands of the imperialist
powers.” Moreover, in many cases apologists have been able to argue that despite
regrettable defects, those regimes are the only possibility, there are no
apparent alternatives.But this is not always the case. Readers of The Tragedy of
the Chinese Revolution are aware that China did not have to go Stalinist
(i.e. Maoist); there were other currents and other strategies that might have
led to different results. The same is true of many other countries, including
Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh’s Communist Party was not the only serious oppositional
movement; it ultimately made itself so only by ruthlessly destroying all its
rivals. Ngo Van’s books bear witness that there were many other possibilities.
There is nothing eccentric or exaggerated about those books.
They are scrupulously accurate and thoroughly documented, and you can find
verifications of most of the material in many other reliable sources. But to do
so you would have to search long and deeply, wading through the immense mass of
lies and distortions that have surrounded this topic. Van has brought it all
together into a coherent and comprehensive account in his two-volume historical
chronicle (as yet untranslated), then narrated the same events in a briefer and
more personal manner in the autobiography that we are presenting here.* * *
I met Ngo Van in Paris in 2001, along with his friend Hélène
Fleury, and during the next few weeks saw them several more times. Although I
could hardly get to know Van all that well in such a short period of time, we
almost immediately became very dear friends.Those who had the pleasure of knowing him will agree that
despite the horrors he had endured and his lack of illusions about the violent
nature of the present social order, Van was the sweetest and most gentle person
one can imagine. His rebelliousness arose not only out of a justified rage at
poverty and meanness and oppression, but out of his profound love of life. He
was an all-round and wide-ranging person: a bon vivant at home in the
lively give-and-take of Parisian bars and cafés, but also capable of quietly
appreciating nature and solitude; a factory worker who was at the same time an
artist and a connoisseur of classic literature; a radical agitator who was also
a radical historian; a resolutely antireligious person who was nevertheless
graced with an almost Buddhist stoicism and equanimity and who ultimately became
a scholar of East Asian religious movements; a modest, unassuming man of the
people who yet possessed a great nobility of character. It was a pleasure to
know him, and it’s been a pleasure to work with Hélène and the other translators
in presenting his work to English-speaking readers.
KEN KNABB
August 2010
___________________
*See Translators’ Notes.
Introduction to Ngo Van’s book In the Crossfire: Adventures
of a Vietnamese Revolutionary (AK Press, 2010).
In the Crossfire is a translation of Ngo Van’s Au pays
de la Cloche fêlée (Paris: L’Insomniaque, 2000) and of excerpts from Ngo
Van’s Au pays d’Héloïse (L’Insomniaque, 2005). It has been edited by Ken
Knabb and Hélène Fleury and translated by Hélène Fleury, Hilary Horrocks, Ken
Knabb and Naomi Sager.
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