Published by Pambazuka News on October 16, 2013 and Counterpunch on October 15, 2013
Vo Nguyen Giap, the celebrated Vietnamese patriot who centralized the
importance of independence and national liberation in the twentieth
century has now joined his ancestors. He passed away on 4 October, 2013
in Hanoi at the age of 102.
This week we want to join the people of Vietnam and the rest of the
world to remember the spirit and sense of independence and unity that
was displayed by General Giap. General Giap and Ho Chi Minh are
remembered as citizens of the world who opposed colonial rule. Vo Nguyen
Giap was born 25 August, 1911, in central Vietnam's Quang Binh province
at a moment when France was seeking to firmly establish colonial
domination over the society.
For the peoples of Africa the struggles of the peoples of Vietnam for
independence have similarities and many lessons for the independence and
solidarity of humans everywhere. Vietnam officially became part of the
imperial expansion of France at the same moment as the imperialist
partition of Africa. For centuries, the peoples of Vietnam had jealously
guarded their independence from militarily superior neighbors. France
had officially claimed political and economic control over the peoples
of South East Asia in a moment when it was necessary for France to find
ways to project economic and political power after the humiliation of
the Franco-Prussian war, 1870-1871. In the period of imperialist
expansion across the planet, 1870-1920, France imposed military and
economic control over Indo-China, following the combined western
military foray into China and the Sino-French war (1884–1885). With the
British in India, the Dutch in Indonesia and the French in the rest of
what was called Indo-China, imperial Europe set out to contain and
dominate China. Africans will note that these wars in Asia were going
on at the same time when the imperialists were meeting in Berlin to
partition Africa. French Indochina was formed in 1887 and included the
territories and peoples who today live in what is called Vietnam, Laos,
and Cambodia. The political fortunes of these societies were to be
sealed in the long wars for independence and resistance against imperial
western forces.
GENERAL GIAP AND THE BATTLE OF DIEN BIEN PHU
It was at the battle of Dien Bien Phu where General Giap led the
Vietnamese army to victory over the imperialist French military in 1954.
There are three very good reasons for freedom fighters to remember this
epic battle. The first reason is that the Vietnamese demonstrated
superior military and political strategies, so that despite military and
logistics support from the USA, France was decisively defeated.
The second reason was that many of the Africans who had been conscripted
into the French army fought against the independence of the Vietnamese.
Some of these fighters were to be later elevated and supported in
military coups to undermine African independence. One such leader was
the ‘Emperor’ and General Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African
Republic. The third major reason was that after Dien Bien Phu, France
decided to make a stand in Africa to defend its status as an imperial
power.
Educated by his people to fight against colonial rule, Giap joined up
with Ho Chi Minh at an early age to confront imperialism. Together they
had built and consolidated the Vietnam Independence League, which the
imperialists hated and sought to crush. His own family had been tortured
and murdered by the French colonialists in the period of the last
capitalist depression. When France was weakened by the second
imperialist war, the Japanese colonialists took over the region in order
to intensify its war of colonial domination over the entire region.
Giap returned to Vietnam from China in 1944 and worked to repulse the
Japanese. France sought to re-impose domination over Vietnam when
Vietnam had declared its independence in 1945 after defeating Japan in
September 1945; Ho Chi Minh announced the formation of the Democratic
Republic of Vietnam.
After the Second World War (World War II), France attempted to
reestablish control over Vietnam and challenged the peoples of Vietnam
to stand up and fight for their independence. The Vietnamese took up
this challenge and decisively defeated the French, driving them out of
South East Asia.
Giap had studied the military history of Asia and Europe and had learnt
the positive and negative lessons from offensive warfare in World War
II. He understood the importance of political will in battle and at Dien
Bien Phu the army of the Vietnamese people called Viet Minh surprised
colonial French forces by surrounding them. Giap was disrespected by the
French generals, especially Henri Navarre who believed that a person
such as Giap who had not studied in a military academy could stand up to
the ‘superior’ French forces. As one writer Jules Roy wrote about this
epic battle at Dien Bien Phu, France believed in their blind service ‘to
the most stupid imperialism in the world, which disguised its refusal
to lose its dividends and markets as a crusade against communism.’
Giap had not studied at a military staff college but had in his own
words ‘studied in the staff college of the bush.’ Giap brought to this
battle against French colonialism the combination of guerilla and
conventional warfare. The patriotic Vietnamese forces, who wore sandals
made of car tyres and lugged their artillery piece by piece over
mountains, managed to encircle and crush the French troops in a bloody
engagement. Digging miles (kilometers) of trenches, the Vietnamese
dragged heavy artillery over steep mountains and slowly closed in during
the 56-day battle that ended with French surrender on 7 May, 1954. In
the book on this battle by Jules Roy, ‘The Battle of Dien Bien Phu,’ the
reader is exposed to the mediocrity of the French generals who sought
to cover up their incompetence with ideas that the French were superior
to the Vietnamese. French generals were humiliated and despite the
military defeat, the sense of white supremacy never allowed them to
accept the idea of the independence of the people of Africa and Asia.
One such French imperial military commander was General Marcel Bigeard.
His career is important in the history of imperial domination in so far
as he went on to fight to preserve French imperial domination in Algeria
and also lost there. General Marcel Bigeard became an inspiration for
US military officers and right up to his death in 2010 he kept up a
healthy communication with general David Patraeus of the US military.
Giap’s victory over the French weakened imperial rule in Africa, Asia
and Latin America and inspired national liberation forces everywhere.
From the point of view of Third World solidarity, this defeat of France
in Dien Bien Phu in 1954 gave added impetus to the meeting of the
anti-colonial forces at Bandung in 1955 and inspired the peoples of
Algeria and Egypt to fight for independence. The seizure of the Suez
Canal and the demands by the peoples of Egypt for independence in 1956
were significantly influenced by the inspiration from General Giap.
Interviewed much later in life he said of the epic battles, ‘We had to
use the small against the big; backward weapons to defeat modern
weapons. At the end, it was the human factor that determined the
victory.’
DEFEATING THE US IN VIETNAM
It was this same principle that guided Giap and Ho Chi Minh to stand up
to American imperial forces. After the defeat of France, the US moved in
to impede the unification of Vietnam by undermining diplomatic efforts
at Geneva while supporting puppet regimes in what was called Saigon, the
capital of South Vietnam. The big and heavy US generals adopted the
same arrogance to Giap that that been the position of the French
military and political establishment. As the Minister of Defense and
chief military strategist for the peoples of Vietnam, General Giap was
responsible for coordinating the resistance to US military bombings and
occupation of Vietnam.
US generals made the cardinal error of underestimating the military and
political skills of General Giap and Ho Chi Minh. The battles of the
United States against the independence of Vietnam represented a turning
point for the history of the United States. Firstly, it was in Vietnam
where the US military establishment learnt that superior technology and
weaponry cannot guarantee victory. Secondly, the attempt to crush the
independence of Vietnam created a financial and monetary crisis from
which the United States has not recovered. It was primarily because the
US became overstretched from the wars in Indo-China when it had to end
the convertibility of the dollar to gold (the cornerstone of the Bretton
Woods agreements of 1944). The international financial system has not
been stable since this change of fortunes for the military and financial
establishment of the United States.
The United States military continued to underestimate the brilliance of
General Giap and had approached the wars against the Vietnamese as small
skirmishes where the mighty US would test its high tech weapons and
bombs in preparation for more important battles in Europe against the
Soviet Union. For the strategic thinkers in Washington, the battles in
Vietnam were simply a proxy war for the war against the communists in
Moscow. For the Vietnamese however, they were no puppets of Moscow and
were fighting dearly for their national independence. The history of the
crimes of war against Vietnam needs to be written in many languages so
that the permanent war machine of the US can be vigorously opposed.
Millions of tons of bombs were dropped on the Vietnamese peoples in one
of the most sustained bombing campaigns of any war; and chemical and
biological weapons were used against the people. General Curtis LeMay
boasted about the massive bombing campaign that, ‘we’re going to bomb
them (the Vietnamese) back to the Stone Age.’ LeMay advocated a
sustained strategic bombing campaign against North Vietnamese cities,
harbors, ports, shipping, and other strategic targets.
In 2010 when I visited Vietnam, we were scheduled to visit General Giap
but this visit was later cancelled because in his 99th year, he was not
in the best of health. When I visited the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi
Minh City and one of the most striking features of the Vietnamese memory
of this war is their call for forgiveness while never forgetting the
criminal actions that were carried out against innocent civilians.
Edward Herman in his summation of the lessons of the US war against the
people of Vietnam noted:
‘The final toll in Indo China will never be known, but it continues to
grow. The death toll may be as high as four million; the numbers injured
and traumatized also run into the millions. Since the formal conclusion
of the war in 1975, thousands have been killed and wounded by some of
the millions of unexploded bombs still littering the ground. There are
also many victims of the ecocidal Agent Orange program, and the land
destroyed by that and other chemicals may never recover.’ [1]
That General Giap and the Vietnamese believed in forgiveness is one more
important lesson that the peoples of the world can take away from the
people of Vietnam.In the aftermath of this epic struggle, the society of
Vietnam was unified and this unification in 1976 laid the necessary
foundations for economic transformations.
GIAP AND THE LESSONS FOR INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY
The history of the struggle of the Vietnamese people and their victory
over US imperialism is an inspiration for those who want another world
beyond capitalism. The failure of the US militarists who believed they
could subdue the Vietnamese people is everywhere evident in the vibrancy
and focus of Vietnamese citizens. Yet, even today, the US militarists
cannot accept their defeat, writing reams of books to find excuses for
their defeat. Instead of celebrating the military genius, the United
States Army School of Advanced Military Studies of the United States
went into overdrive to teach their officers how to ‘teach judgment.’ The
arrogance of Henri Navarre and the French officer corps had been
inherited by the US military strategists who wrote books upon books
without grasping the basic fact that Giap was teaching them. Colonel
Huba Wass de Czege the articulator of ‘teaching judgement’ groomed the
next generation of US general who thought that certain officers should
receive a ‘broad, deep military education in the science and art of
war.’ Up to the present the officer corps of the United States continue
to ignore the lessons taught by General Giap and continue to mumbo jumbo
such as ‘Systemic operational design: learning and adapting in complex
missions.’
General Giap represented the vibrancy of a people who gained confidence
from the knowledge that they were able to withstand the military might
of the biggest military machine on earth. In the process, the Vietnamese
pointed to the fact that political mobilization and heightened
political consciousness can be a counterweight to imperial military and
economic might. This failure of the US has been manifested beyond the
battlefield into the ideology of development versus transformation. On
the walls of the War Remnants Museum in Vietnam, the Vietnamese display
the words of US military henchman turned director of World Bank, Robert
McNamara: ‘We were wrong, terribly wrong, and we owe it to a future
generation to explain why.’
France was defeated at Dien Bien Phu and tried to make a stand in
Africa. Today, the United States is invoking the so-called war against
terror to maintain a military posture that is inconsistent with the
financial and economic capabilities of that society. In the last years
of his life General Giap became a fervent environmentalist and linked
the security of the planet to environmental repair. Citizens in all
parts of the world who want a new relationship with other humans and
with the planet earth can learn a lot from the long life of Vo Nguyen
Giap.
ENDNOTE:
1.Edward S. Herman, ‘Back to the Stone Age: Lessons of the Vietnam War.’ http://www.nnn.se/vietnam/lessons.pdf

Horace Campbell is Professor of African American Studies and Political Science at Syracuse University. His recent book is Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya. He is author of: Rasta and Resistance From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney; Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation; Pan Africanism, Pan Africanists and African Liberation in the 21st Century; and Barack Obama and 21st Century Politics. Follow on Twitter @Horace_Campbell.
- Order Horace Campbell's recent book, Global Nato and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya
- Welcome to horacecampbell.net. Horace Campbell is Professor of African American Studies and Political Science at Syracuse University, New York. His recent book is Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya. He is the author of: Rasta and Resistance From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney; Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation; Pan Africanism, Pan Africanists and African Liberation in the 21st Century; and Barack Obama and 21st Century Politics. Follow on Twitter @Horace_Campbell.