Book review: Imperialism and Culture in South Vietnam
The military officers who murdered South Vietnamese president Ngô Đình Diệm in 1963 and the Americans who urged them on subsequently propagated a view of this man that has become a cliché in virtually every book written about the Vietnam War: he was a tyrant with obscure and self-absorbed ideas whose autocratic and repressive policies provoked an insurgency against his own government - he was the architect of his own demise. This idea served the purposes of nearly everyone: the rulers of North Vietnam, the Americans, and the South Vietnamese who justified their rule by having overthrown him.
Duy Lap Nguyen. The Unimagined Community: Imperialism
and Culture in South Vietnam. Reviewed by Keith Taylor
During the past twenty
years, scholars have published studies that portray Ngô Đình Diệm in a somewhat
less dismal light. But the thoughts and aims of both the man and his
domestic critics have remained elusive—until now. In The Unimagined
Community: Imperialism and Culture in South Vietnam, Duy Lap Nguyen has
dissolved the entrenched stereotype of Ngô Đình Diệm and developed an analysis
of his thought, aims, policies, and opponents that is
fresh and convincing, meanwhile subverting prevailing interpretations
of modern Vietnamese history. He also develops a fresh analysis of
American and South Vietnamese relations in the post-Diệm era.
This book will be
disdained by those committed to the caricature of Ngô Đình Diệm that was
retailed by the military officers who overthrew him and that remains in fashion
among people who write about the Vietnam War. This book’s arguments, while
grounded in historical evidence, are informed by philosophy and cultural
criticism, which may deter some historians. Nevertheless, the importance of the
book is bound to be increasingly understood as the encrusted stereotypes of the
war gradually fade. Americans who met with
Ngô Đình Diệm typically reported that he talked endlessly, but they never
reported what he said. They were not listening. By taking seriously what
Ngô Đình Diệm and his brother Ngô Đình Nhu actually said, Duy Lap
Nguyen opens a new way to understand the Vietnam War.... read more: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55242
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