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COMMENTARY
January 8, 2011
Untarnished
General Vang Pao has finally been overthrown -- by pneumonia and a heart condition, at the age of 81. He was the undisputed leader of the Hmong people in Laos, and in exile; the "biggest hero of the Vietnam War," according to the late CIA director, William Colby; and among the last of the major figures associated with that war, now fading into history.It is said that the victors write the history, and Vietnam is the exception that proves the rule. The U.S. agreed to be defeated, on behalf of her allies, as a way of extricating herself from a war she was unwilling to win. The conquest of South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia was the last great triumph of the old, Soviet-dominated Communist international, and it would be possible to argue that it was thanks to the U.S. abandonment of those allies that the Berlin Wall did not fall sooner. To this day, the war is remembered or forgotten as a nightmare. As the victors in that war did not prevail in the world at large, and the losers were muted by the fact of defeat, the history remains largely unwritten. By this I don't mean that hundreds of books haven't poured from the presses, recalling and reexamining the events. Rather, there is no narrative structure around which the details can be organized; or at least, no narrative that makes any satisfying sense. The war thus stands, in a peculiar way, as an impediment to our understanding of it: as more than a great and terrible waste of lives, from which nothing was accomplished. By default, the moral of it has become, that if the peoples of former French Indochina were going to fall into the hands of the Communists anyway, they might as well have been left to their fate without sacrificing western lives. This, indeed, was the fate of many other former imperial outposts. We have almost forgotten that Vietnam was a French war before it was finally fully "appropriated" by President John F. Kennedy; that it was a French war because the French, themselves debilitated after the Second World War, were unusually conscientious in considering what would happen to their former subjects after their departure. (By comparison, the British just walked away, leaving India to the massacres of Partition, and turning over vast African realms, almost directly, to barbarous dictators.) And the U.S. came into the fray out of a kind of idealism, to carry the torch from failing French hands. As in Afghanistan, as in Iraq, the Americans actually believed in the cause of democracy and freedom. That is what animated Kennedy, and that is what animated George W. Bush, above and beyond urgent security concerns: "to make the world safe for democracy," and decidedly not to spread a new American empire. As in Italy, Germany, Japan, the whole intention was to create an independent democratic order. Vang Pao was one of their allies, across an immense cultural divide, sometimes so wide as to be unbridgeable, and sometimes so narrow it disappeared. If you read Kipling's famous Ballad of East and West, past its first line, you will find he says, "there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, / When two strong men stand face to face, tho' they come from the ends of the Earth." And Vang Pao was such a "strong man," by the universal standard. Determined to save his Hmong people from enslavement by "the little ants in black pyjamas," he persuaded them to fight in the wild tropical mountain territory, through which North Vietnam had laid the "Ho Chi Minh Trail" to supply the Communist insurgency in the South. He grasped, correctly, that Laos would also fall -- that the murderous Pathet Lao front would prevail over the benign Royal Lao government the moment the North Vietnamese Army was free to impose its will. He had fought the Japanese occupiers in the Second World War; he had fought with the French against "Viet Minh"; he fought loyally for the Lao king; and, even exiled with most of his people in America, he was still fighting -- getting himself arrested under the U.S. Neutrality Act in 2007 for plotting the overthrow of the "Lao People's Democratic Republic" even from the distance of Fresno, California. A magnificent, Churchillian character, who never gave up and, rightly, a hero to his people. Those who take interest will read, for instance, of the accusations circulated against Vang Pao, and the Hmong generally, for opium trading -- by liberal media and antiwar activists at the height of the Vietnam conflict. Whether true or false, these were sleazy garbage: a typical propaganda distraction from a big fact to a small fact or red herring. The big fact was the Hmong people, fighting for their lives and freedom; and fighting bravely and brilliantly, in their own home territory, against insuperable odds. b David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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