Even the author Eric Vuillard himself could not recognize the explosiveness of his new book “An honorable departure” when he published it in France a year ago in January. He wanted to deal with the forgotten war in Indochina between 1946 and 1954 and the subsequent Vietnam War between 1955 and 1975.
Actually, it was another Thirty Years’ War in the 20th century. France and the superpower USA faced small Vietnam and its neighbours.
In 1945, Vietnamese Prime Minister Ho Chi Minh declared his country’s independence, based on the French Declaration of Human Rights. But the colonial power France and later the United States wanted to prevent independence and the advance of the communists by all possible means. The French troops were one of the first armies to use napalm extensively in their bombardments.
With all the caution that historical comparisons always require, the parallels with superpower Russia and its war of aggression against Ukraine are clear today. But like Putin’s Russia, France 70 years ago behaved in Indochina, plundering and torturing and murdering without causing great distress to the people at home. Most soldiers were not French but came from colonial battalions.
Eric Vuillard remembers this war in Indochina. His trademark is historical stories that read like novels, even though nothing is made up. The 54-year-old Frenchman draws on historical sources and sharpens decisive constellations of contemporary history. The book “De agenda”, for which he received the Prix Goncourt in 2017, was about the rise of National Socialist power in the 1930s.
The new work “An Honorable Departure” exposes key moments in the wars in Indochina and Vietnam, pushes colonial and geopolitical interests to power, talks about careerists and profiteers and shows the trail of blood left by the French and Americans in the region.
Vuillard has a nose for revealing quotes and images that say more than long historical digressions. He cites a French minister who bluntly and candidly admitted: “If we granted the colonial peoples the same rights, we would be the colony of our colonies.”
Like Putin’s Russia now in Ukraine, France tried to get the most out of Indochina with as little military effort as possible. But the imperialism of the Grande Nation devoured money. It became increasingly painful that significantly more French troops would have been needed to resolutely push back the Vietnamese communists, the Viêt Minh.
At one point, it was all about creating an “honorable exit,” as the title of Vuillard’s story says. He failed miserably. Likewise, the United States failed in the Vietnam War. They too had to flee the country in 1975. It is known from films and reports how helicopters with two propeller turrets, so-called “Chinooks”, circled above the American embassy and evacuated the last Westerners. Saigon was surrounded by the Viêt Minh.
When Eric Vuillard recounts these dramatic events, he is effectively adding some numbers: In the thirty years total, four million bombs fell on tiny Vietnam, more bombs than the Allies dropped on all fronts of World War II. Four hundred thousand were killed on the side of France and the United States. At least three million people were killed on the Vietnamese side. Ten times as much.
As for vicious warfare and imperialist affectation, yes.
However, in France, as in the United States, there were loud protests and anti-war demonstrations. The French Nobel laureate for literature François Mauriac denounced the occupation and war crimes, even though he was subsequently exiled by many of his compatriots.
The United States had supported the French since the early 1950s and bore much of the cost of the war, just as the Chinese supported the communist Viêt Minh. Eric Vuillard makes no secret of the fact that the Republican US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles even offered France two atomic bombs in April 1954.
This should avert the impending defeat at the jungle fortress of Dien Bien Phu and the end of nearly a hundred years of French colonial rule in Indochina. France refused the monstrous American gift.
For the Cold Warriors, the free world was defended in the hotly fought Vietnam War. However, with the growing number of opponents in the US and in Europe, this war, with its massacres of civilians, fostered a general anti-Americanism that peace activists still carry with them today as symbols of peace.
New German peace fairy Sahra Wagenknecht harbors notoriously anti-American grudges. For them, US President Biden is “as uncompromising” as Putin. She is constantly spreading the legend that it is the fault of the West, and especially the US, that the war in Ukraine never ends.
If you follow the anti-American discourse more closely, you inevitably end up with the Vietnam War. Oddly, however, France’s main culprit in the First Indochina War is rarely a problem. And that is why playing the keyboard of anti-Americanism is widespread not only in Germany, but also in France.
Much is lost in the process: unlike Putin’s dictatorship, there has always been opposition to the Vietnam War in the US, not only from students or culture people, but also from the political and legal sides. The Supreme Court ruled that part of the Pentagon Papers should be published in 1971.
The public learned about the secret military bombings in Cambodia or Laos and about the fabrications by which various governments, including Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, systematically concealed the truth about the war in Indochina. The publication of the Pentagon Papers subsequently accelerated the withdrawal of US troops.
Eric Vuillard may sometimes write a somewhat woodcut historiography, with powerful and powerless, good and bad people, but he tells a differentiated story insofar as he also exposes the limits of his fact-based literature: find the most abhorrent sayings of warmongers like Dulles, Nixon, Kissinger or Putin in well-secured and locked offices and bunkers. No author, as Eric Vuillard laments, can ever openly follow their ideas of war in their true unscrupulousness or then reconstruct them.
Eric Vuillard: An honorable departure. Translated from French by Nicola Denies. Verlag Matthes & Seitz Berlin, 142 pages.
(aargauerzeitung.ch)
Source: Blick
I am Ross William, a passionate and experienced news writer with more than four years of experience in the writing industry. I have been working as an author for 24 Instant News Reporters covering the Trending section. With a keen eye for detail, I am able to find stories that capture people’s interest and help them stay informed.
