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The Political Education of Doan Van Toai
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11490 |
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BOOK WORLD
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10 / 1986 |
2,825 Words |
| Author
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Guenter Lewy
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THE VIETNAMESE GULAG
Doan Van Toai and David Chanoff
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986
$18.95
In May 1978, a young Vietnamese, who before 1975 had made a name for himself as one of the leaders of the anti-Thieu student movement, arrived in France. From June 1975 until November 1977, Doan Van Toai had been imprisoned by the new communist regime. More fortunate than most, Toai had been able to bribe his way out of the country following his release form jail, and the world now had one of the few eye-witnesses to life in the prison system of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The fact that Toai had served time in prison for opposing the Thieu-Ky regime and, after the fall of Saigon, had been associated with the Provisional Revolutionary Government lent special poignancy to his revelations. There was extensive media coverage and his lecture tours had a strong impact, especially on the Vietnamese refugee communities in Europe and the United States. In 1979 Toai told his story in a book which was published in France under the title Le Goulag Vietnamien. Translated into English, and somewhat modified by the participation of the writer David Chanoff, this book is now available to American readers.
The Vietnamese Gulag, it should be noted right away, is much more than a prison log. About half of the book deals with Toai's life before the victory of the communists in 1975, and these autobiographical pages, written with honesty and without an attempt to rearrange the author's political thinking, shaped as it is by his strongly anti-communist ideas, provide us with important insights into the recent history of Vietnam. They also help explain the collapse of the Saigon regime in 1975.
Toai grew up in a family with strong nationalistic convictions. As a student in high school he participated in a clandestine movement against the dictatorial rule of Ngo Dinh Diem, but compared with the nonentities, playboys, and corrupt butchers who took over after the ouster and killing of the mandarin strong man in 1963, Diem's government later appeared to many in a new light. "For all his faults," Toai recalls, "in retrospect he began to seem like a patriot. At least one could say that he hadn't kowtowed to the United States." Like many young Vietnamese, Toai felt disgusted and humiliated by what he perceived as the "recolonization" of his country. Tens and soon, hundreds of thousands, of American GIs "invaded" Vietnam. They urinated from their tanks and littered the streets with Coca Cola cans. Bars and prostitutes multiplied rapidly. Theft from American warehouses became a national industry. Corruption touched everything, and the very concept of public trust or guardianship, so prominent in Vietnam's past, began to disappear. The French had at least brought with them an ancient culture which many Vietnamese had appreciated in some ways. The country's traditional social structure had been left largely intact. The American presence, on the other hand, was vulgar and all-pervasive. The democratic ideal, which was invoked to justify the domination of the new foreigners, was grotesquely caricatured by Saigon's military rulers, who jailed and often tortured their opponents just as Diem had done before them.
Small wonder that an increasing number of students, Toai included, were attracted to the National Liberation Front (NLF). Many of the students distrusted the communists
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