Jay Palevsky and I hunted down Jordan Plitteris on Facebook four decades after our last encounter. We were students at George Gershwin Junior High School 166 in the East New York section of Brooklyn. Jordan and I did our best to disrupt our classes in the most charming or clever manner possible. We finally connected in 2010 and then had lunch on a sunny Sunday afternoon at Gladstone’s on the beach in Los Angeles. When Jordan learned that I was to be in Vietnam, he connected me with Steven Herman.

This, from Steve’s bio: “A veteran journalist in Asia, Steven L Herman is the Voice of America bureau chief and correspondent based in Bangkok. His articles, columns, opinion pieces and reviews have been published in numerous newspapers and magazines including the Far Eastern Economic Review, Japan Times, South China Morning Post and the Wall Street Journal. Steve was elected for five consecutive years (1998-2002) to serve as Chairman of The Foreign Press in Japan (FPIJ).” His full bio can be found here.

We talked about Vietnam over dinner at the Essence Hotel Hotel in Hanoi.

Brian: The impression that I get is, of course, part of it is generational. A lot of those people died and so if you’re 18 years old, you’re more interested in how Kobe Bryant is doing with the Lakers, the latest American movies, and whether you got the newest smartphone. And perhaps there’s a cultural attitude of forgiveness, and an economic reality that you just have to move on, there’s a lot of American money coming into the country. But to me, after the horror of what was experienced, it is fascinating to me there is that attitude of forgetting.

Steve: Think when the Vietnam War ended, okay? Forty years ago. So unless you’re in your late fifties, you don’t have any direct experience of the Cong. And the only people that would remember who are younger would be that neighborhood got bombed, or Daddy didn’t come home. But that was the norm at the time, right? That was the experience that everybody around you was having, too. But the big picture is this: the Americans (and you can argue before that the French) were a mere blip on the radar screen of Vietnamese history. The Americans were adversaries for fifteen years. The animosity here is toward the Chinese. (Laughter.)

I know, I’ve heard that.

Because the Chinese are the giant neighbor to the north that’s been trying to eat Vietnam for 1,000 years. So whether or not people remember the war, they’re aware of the long-term of Vietnamese history. And they realize that China has posed, does pose, and will pose a perceived existential threat.

In Afghanistan you have the Pashtun looking down on Uzbeks, who are looking down on Hazaras. Is there any cultural feeling that Chinese consider Vietnamese inferior. Is there any kind of ethnic sensitivity like that?

Number one, I don’t think probably that the average Chinese gives Vietnam much thought. But if you’re a Chinese historian, an academic, a military strategist, or whatever, you look at the traditional orders of China, what the Chinese empire was, what happened to the Chinese empire, and how the tribute states of China need to be allied with China for China’s long-term stability. That’s the way the Chinese would look at it. There are books that have been written about this. I’ll tell you a story that was told to me by a young woman in her 30s whose father was shot in the leg by an American in the secret war in Cambodia in the 1970s. He was recruited into the NVA, the North Vietnamese Army, didn’t have much of a choice, and when he was able to access, for the first time, American technology (and I’m talking about stuff like wristwatches, okay?) and realized that the domestic and the Russian technology was utter garbage compared to the technology of his adversary, he then no longer believed in all the propaganda that he had been fed by the Communist Party. And to this day, he is a huge admirer of America and what it stands for. And is critical of the party that he fought for. Although he is a very proud Vietnamese. And I’m sure that is the attitude of very many people of that generation because it’s one thing to support the cause of a revolution, but after the revolution ends, then you have certain expectations of your leaders in peacetime. And I guess a lot of people here might ask whether the revolution, the victors of the war have been able to deliver on the promises they made to the people. And it’s been 40 years. Even in democracies, we have disillusionment with our leadership after a short period of time when the euphoria ends. So you can imagine looking around the world at one-party systems after many decades, and the same leadership still in place, what are the attitudes. In some of these places, they change rather quickly, in other places they change less quickly.

Me and Steve after a delightful dinner at the Essence Hanoi Hotel.

The irony is at the time, from McCarthy through the late 1960s and Nixon, we were warned of the the red menace, you know, “The Communist Chinese are in league with the Vietnamese and therefore we have to stop the march of communist aggression.” And in fact the Vietnamese hated the Chinese.

Right. Well, then there’s North Korea, where I’ve also spent some time.

Really? That would be fascinating.

Yeah. I was there for ten days in 2013 as a guest of the KPA, the Korean People’s Army, an elite unit.

Now there’s a place to settle down with a nice girl (we had been talking over dinner about the experience of dating in Asia for longtime western expats). (Laughter.)

Oh yeah. But I have no doubt that there are many in the government who desire normalized relations with the United States. And the reason is from the formation of the DPRK, until the collapse of the Soviet Union, they were able to play their two benefactors off one another, Beijing and Moscow. Like the Vietnamese, the North Koreans do not want to be a tributary state of China. And the sort of historical animosity and suspicion that exists here in Vietnam toward the Chinese has been… My observation is that it also exists in not only North Korea, but also South Korea. So it’s a Korean nationalistic perspective. And so, having normalized relations with the west would allow them not to be so dependant on China for so many things. So we have to realize that whatever people may think, of what designs China has on its neighbors over the long term, because of its insecurities, China never wants to be in the position that it was in during the 19th and early 20th centuries when it was colonized and divided up and was weakened, and there was a fear that 4,000 years of Chinese history was coming to an end. So I think it’s very easy to understand that Chinese mindset.

So we agree that if you are not in your late fifties, it’s irrelevant, it’s just family stories. Relevant, but, you know… And particularly if you have only been born in the last 25 years, a whole different thing. So generational things. For those who were of fighting age or older during the war, what’s their attitude?

I think mostly these people are at retirement age, practically. If you were in your 20s or 30s, in the 1960s and 70s, you’re probably now interested in what life is going to be like for your grandchildren, right? People marry young here. And I don’t think that there’s necessarily a lot of looking to the past. Obviously you’ll find this in any military around the world if you were a veteran, especially if you were on the winning side, that you’re quite proud of your service. And we see the same thing in the United States. People are very proud of their service regardlass of the outcome of the conflict. They may not necessarily agree on everything with the contemporary government, but they still remain very proud of their service. So I think, from what I can tell, most of these veterans are… The fact that you lived.

And won.

Yeah.

Actually, that’s an interesting point. Unlike many people the United States has fought against, they won. They can almost be magnanimous about it.

Yeah. There’s a tremendous resiliency here. And it’s been, like I said, dealing with the Chinese over 1,000 years and briefly having to grapple with the French and the Americans. I find Vietnam to be very vibrant, dynamic, quite bullish on this country in the long term. Because of the character of what I see in the people here. And I can’t necessarily say that about every country I visit. I won’t name names, but, yeah, there is something here that is special.

This is a naive touristy thing to say, the only evidence I’ve seen of communism is two or three shops selling propaganda posters.

No, there’s a lot more.

Tell me about communism in Vietnam.

I am not an expert. This is only my second visit here. There are giant propaganda billboards all over the country when I’ve been out in the countryside. There are offices of the communist party in every neighborhood. It’s a one-party state. What percentage of the economy is still in the hands of the party? I’d have to doublecheck my facts, but I think 40% of the businesses are party-owned. You’re talking about infrastructure, and then from what I can tell, looking at signs by the factories I was passing by in these industrial areas, they were joint ventures with the party itself. So yeah there’s no doubt that the party has quite a dominant presence throughout the country.

And how do they handle elections here?

This is a traditional communist state and–

You’re voting for your party candidate or your local council party member?

I don’t even know if…even China has experimented with some local elections. I’m not sure that there’s anything like that here. Certainly there’s no contested elections.

So, for example, our waitress, very pleasant young woman and she’s got a good job, seems well presented. At what point does she get in trouble with the communist government of Vietnam for saying what?

If she wrote a blog criticizing the government, she’d go to jail.

Really?

Yeah.

That’s heavy stuff.

Yeah. You can look it up, I dont know what the number of bloggers that are presently in jail for blogging…

Cam Ranh Bay, an important base for the American military during the Vietnam War http://www.stripes.com/news/changing-times-door-may-open-to-us-military-at-former-vietnam-war-hub-1.289509

So can Americans look back through some political filter and say, “See, we told you, we were trying to save these people from this kind of totalitarianism, authoritarianism, and yeah they’ve grown the economy a bit but they’ve had to suffer through this for forty years and goddamn, we gave it our best effort to try to save them from it.”

I think, I don’t think it’s possible to take a one end of the filter look at Vietnam right now in terms of US geopolitical interests. It’s very interesting, fascinating to me, that there have been overtures by the government of Vietnam to the United States looking for closer ties, including possibly the use of Cam Rahn Bay, and there’s no doubt, as I mentioned before, that the Vietnamese see China as much more of a threat than the United States. And from the US perspective, I guess there’s an open question about how we should engage with Vietnam. We have a new ambassador here, who I believe is the first openly gay ambassador.

Really? What’s his name?

I follow him on Twitter. Ted Osius III. So the question is, some people might say, “What right does the United States, after meddling in Vietnam to the point of a long and tragic war, which did not cause the communists to collapse, what right do we have to intervene in any way into this country?” And others would say, “Well, we have American principles that need to be upheld and we need to apply these principles fairly to all countries we deal with, including the issues of freedom of expression and human rights.” And there’s no doubt that there are serious problems in that area here. And the United States government does criticize, okay? But to what degree should it affect this relationship with Vietnam? And then the other thing to look at is maybe we should be more pragmatic and if we’re looking at American geopolitical interests and for those who believe that interest is trying to keep a rising China as a maritime power in check, and to reassure allies and friends and others in the region, including neutral states, such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, that we don’t have treaties with, as we do with countries such as Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines, Australia, that if push comes to shove, that we’re going to be there to stand up for our treaty partners and for others who would be the victims of aggression from a Chinese navy in the future. So, yeah, it’s a complicated, multi-faceted puzzle. And Vietnam is at the absolute core of that in this part of the world.

Ted Osius III, US ambassador to Vietnam. http://www.ibtimes.com/ted-osius-iii-becomes-asias-first-openly-gay-us-ambassador-1748399

In the beginning of Nick Turse’s book, Kill Anything That Moves, he shares the story about Ho Chi Minh helping the American war effort during World War II, office of special services (OSS), and he gives a speech to a half million in Hanoi, opening with the words to our declaration of independence…

And we ignored it.

And we ignored it and we said, “Let’s help the French” and then the rest is history.

Right.

At that moment, because it’s very easy to fantasize, “This man was a great democratic patriot and if only we didn’t ignore…” at what point do you think that Ho Chi Minh really wanted to pursue American-style democracy such that if the United States said, we’re going to help these people, they helped us, the French should stay the hell out, the colonialism thing is over and we’re going to–

Which is the pressure we did put on the British at the end of World War II.

We did.

Yeah. You know, hindsight is 20/20 and looking at alternative history is pure speculation. With those caveats, I think what we can say is that I don’t think that there were a lot of things, from my study of history of the late 1940s, early 50s, about US policy toward Asia, it was just benign neglect. We were, I think, at the end of World War II when there was this big cutback in military forces, military preparedness, and…

That’s the way it used to be done right? You build a standing army when you’ve got a war and then when the war’s over, the standing army gets cut down.

Yeah. Right. Like we have nuclear bombs now. Okay. And then the threat was the Soviet Union from 1949, was that when the Soviets tested? So I think we were rebuilding Europe, we had hemispheric issues to deal with at that time, stuff that was happening in South America was much more important that what was happening in Asia. Now you look at that and it’s like, that would be considered a joke right now. We, like when the Korean war broke out, the United States was totally caught unprepared. Militarily and strategically. So when we’re looking around late 1940s, early 1950s, Vietnam, it was French Indo-China, right? How many specialists did we have in the US military or in the State Department about Indo-China at that time? And one thing you learn in dealing with the government bureaucracy, is that the problems that get the attention are the immediate crises and sort of things that may be bubbling in the long term don’t really move up the food chain very quickly or very easily. So I highly doubt that there was any… And again, you’d have consult with a specialist about this history, who has gone through all the archives, but I just don’t see that Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, at that time, that we gave him much thought.

I think that’s true. And, well said. But the moment he made that speech, do you think there were democratic instincts which became…

I would be, I don’t know. The answer is, I don’t know. But I would be… I would have my doubts. Because the way that the party and Ho rose to power was not through any sort of (laughter)–

Making friends.

…democratic parlays, it was by being a ruthless power, Machiavellian in the extreme. And there’s a lot out there about Ho’s, all of these, the formation of these communist parties from their time in Europe and under the French. And I…

Ho got his ideas from hanging out in cafes in Paris, right? (Laughter.)

Well, right, right. So you know, socialism was quite in vogue–

It was.

–among many intellectuals in all parts of the world in the 20s, 30s, and 40s…

Sometimes someone phrases it in a certain way and it becomes clear. Lenin was actively agitating against colonial forces, which is an obvious thing for communists to do, but if you then were under colonial rule and you see this Dutch East India Company, and the French rubber companies, and you see all these French…

The democratic nations were not where you turn to for allies for, as a revolutionary fighting colonialism.

King Leopold II of Belgium, whose humanitarian organizations served as a front for the enslavement of millions in the Belgian Congo.

Democratic nations either in a beneficient way or in a brutal, vicious way, as with the Belgian Congo, etcetera, were saying, “We basically want your poor people to be our indentured servants.”

Yes. And with the Belgians they were basically slaves. Period. Full stop. They were slaves. Property owned by the king, if I recall.

That’s right. King Leopold. Your national sovereignty ain’t happening. No respect for your culture, onward Christian soldiers, you’re an inferior race. So suddenly you have this revoluationary socialist ideology coming along that says, regardless of whether you believe Das Kapital, that basically the bottom line is, what did you tell me? The bottom line is I’m going to throw off the Western colonial powers? Hmm…

Yeah. And the communist internationale was in the franchise business and was looking to expand into new markets. Yeah, there was definitely a meeting of the minds there. But yeah, if you look back on history you can see that there were all sorts of opportunities that were lost and I’m not a big fan of traditional political science because I don’t consider it to be science, and I tend more to believe in the chaos theory of politics, where, you know, there’s the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings over China that can change the weather eventually in North America. And I think it’s been the same thing in history where one small event, an accident or an archduke getting assassinated or a bullet missing a president of the United States or a dictator getting up on the wrong side of bed in the morning and deciding he’s going to invade a neighbor because he had a fight with mistress number seven the night before… A lot of things happen for not rational reasons that end up having a tremendous effect on world history. And so, you know, we can speculate all day about if this had happened or this didn’t happen, yes, the outcome of the world may have been very different and millions of people might not have died, but in another case maybe something else would have happened that could have been even more catastrophic.

——–

This interview was transcribed and fact checked by Afterparty intern Kayley Ingalls. Thanks, Kayley!

They don’t get to see magnificent new vistas or stay in hideous, cheap guesthouses…but they are an integral part of the project and seem to be having fun with it. The biggest task for now is transcription, but they are encouraged to expand to write historical backgrounders, and provide context via images and short essays and captions. They are smart, passionate about the project, eager to learn, and a delight to work with. Here are our intern bios:

————

Kayley Ingalls  received her BA in International Studies in 2012 from the University of Chicago. Though her coursework includes African Politics, the Modern Middle East, and the Politics of Islam, she wrote her thesis on fairy tales and their increasing use as a vehicle for discussing the Holocaust. A good-natured stickler for grammar, she enjoys studying the subject casually and taking the odd class on mechanics and usage. Since graduating, she’s tried her hand at working as a Library Assistant and teaching summer school at an exclusive private school in Oakland, California.

Right now, she spends most of her time working as a paralegal and volunteering with a legal clinic in San Francisco. She dreams of exploring the world and hopes to find her place in it eventually, whether it be in writing, editing, law, or something she has yet to dream up.

In my travels through Vietnam, I’ve talked to young people for whom the “American War” is ancient history, and to elders who lived through Japanese atrocities, French colonial capitalism and the civil war with the US-supported South. The first part of my interview with the 77-year old professor Dao Quang Hung can be found here. In Part Two of our discussion over daughter Mizen’s dining room table (she also acs as translator), we discuss US foreign policy and his perspectives on what drove the communist North to take catastrophic casualties. My questions are in italics. Some of the conversation can be uncomfortable as he describes military tactics used to kill Americans. We start with Hung’s exposition on how the North viewed America’s vastly superior military.

——–

Dao currently lives with his family in the south, in Vung Tau.

America is the largest country in the world. The best science, the best army, the best economy, a lot of land and natural resources. Vietnam is a small country, 1/20th of America.  Why drop millions of tons of bombs, more than you dropped in all of World War II?

In a war, whichever side has power is the winner But power here is not about weapons or number of troops. It is also the method and strategy and the passion for battle that brings victory. Vietnam has this historical legacy of nonstop fighting for the rights of its people. America has a lot of bombs, guns, weapons, tanks, ships, Marines. North Vietnam ’s army is not that big. Weapons are very simple but Vietnam has fought spiritual battles for 4,000 years against the north (China) and those experiences were passed from ancestors through the generations.

(Mizen adds, “When the enemy attacks the house, the woman will still fight, even with a broom.”).

Yes, there is a certain moral code that runs to every farmer or village woman, to fight, to protect the land, to fight and win, because you love your country and you love your people.

Vietnamese political activists jailed at the infamous Hoa Lo Prison, which was then used to jail American pilots who dubbed it “Hanoi Hilton.”

Under the French war, we lost everything, we were a colony and they had their own (brutal) style. When the Americans came, we considered America as a new form of colonist, the worst devils, worse than the French. Uncle Ho has a famous saying, that nothing is more precious than freedom.

Before we enter into the American war, Ho and Giap went to Russia for help against America. Russia worried that America has an extraordinary army and navy and weapons, how can Vietnam win? General Giap said if both sides spread out on the battlefield face to face, Vietnam will be wiped out. But we have a strategy and we know how to win, and in reality we did. Mentally, spiritually, Uncle Ho has to raise the call and say he doesn’t care how much we sacrifice and how long it takes, despite all this sacrifice we have no fear for this war. We are united together to fight this battle, no discrimination about religion, man or woman, it created a force that we called ‘people’s war.’

You are an intelligent, educated man. What went through your mind when you heard Ho speak?

My own thought after this call to nationalism was, something stirred up in me as motivation, pride in my country, and I thought, he has no fear of this war and he knows that we will win.

Which part of it was national pride and the salvation of your people, and which part motivation by Marxism-Leninism to create a socialist state?

It was all about freedom, love of country, patriotism, 99% was that. Marxism is not clear, just a purpose to look forward to in the future.

In 1954, then, with people who were equally patriotic, why did they flee to the south?

After the French failed, in 1954 northern people fled because some of them were in the Vietnam army set up by the French, some worked with the French and were afraid of vengeance, some were Catholic who listened to priests who said God is not in the north anymore, so move to the south, some loved the country but were cheated or misled.

Khe Sanh was near the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). I walked through the tunnels dug and occupied by the North Vietnamese Army. According to Wikipedia, during the battle for Khe Sanh, “B-52s alone dropped more than 75,000 tons of bombs on the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) 304th and 325th Divisions encroaching the combat base in trenches.”

When we started to fight Americans, a US Air Force general (Curtis LeMay) said he will bomb Vietnam back to the stone age. McNamara said he will talk to VCs with a billion bullets, and then the Americans tried to stop provisions of weapons from the north to the south. At Khe Sanh, they put troops there and a military base and said that nobody can attack this base. But Vietnamese overwhelmed it with thousands of troops, overran the base, unafraid. Americans used airplanes to provide cover but the planes were shot down. We attacked them and shot them day and night. If they continued it would be another Dien Bien Phu.

If Americans stay, people thought Americans would win. But look at the numbers. First there are 60,000, then 100,000, then 200,000, then 400,000 then 530,000 American soldiers plus one million South Vietnam troops. American has to change three generals. Westmoreland, Abrams, if you are winning, you don’t have to change your generals.

Even if you bomb Hanoi and win, it will cause a third world war because Russia and China will not just sit by. Americans used to claim that they would stay in South Vietnam forever, but in reality they couldn’t, and they had to withdraw. How can you win, when your people don’t support the war.

A lot of generals came to Vietnam after the war and had the same question: How did you win, and they asked General Giap. It’s very simple, he said, it was because Americans had not known much about the Vietnamese people,. A thousand years ago, a skillful Chinese military general Sun Tsu said know yourself, know the enemy, and in one hundred battles, you have a hundred victories. Americans sent troops, with a thousand ways to attack Vietnam. Americans want to kill us like they killed the Indians, want to destroy us. In the same way, we questioned ourselves whether we can win or not. Our first challenge was Nuih Tan mountain in Danang. One night, we took it as a first challenge or a first trial. We took it so we can see if we can win or not. One hundred American soldiers, and in one night we killed all of them in that base. After that, we determined that we had the confidence to win this battle with Americans.

We lost five million dead and injured, millions have Agent Orange infections. A lot of suffering. In Vietnam, we have unexploded ordnance under the ground and they try to get at them, and it will take another 300 years to get rid of them. If we talk about crimes committed by Americans here, it is incalculable. Vietnam still accepts those sacrifices. We still fight to the last breath because we want to follow Ho’s words that nothing is more precious than freedom. If we paid the cost 2-3x more than what we sustained, we will continue to fight.

One of the many war monuments throughout the country.

I was teaching. Uncle Ho predicted that before America leaves Vietnam, it will destroy Hanoi, like it destroyed North Korea. If Hanoi can survive and resist the bombing, then America will surrender.

Uncle Ho predicted they will use B-52s to bomb Hanoi so we wrote a book for all air force soldiers how to resist the bombing. By the first Haiphong and Hanoi bombings, we had been preparing for a year and had 100 anti-aircraft batteries, but were defeated by  evasive methods affecting our radar targeting. On the second night, they shot down a B-52 in Hanoi. To win the battles, we had to fight 12 days and nights. Hanoi residents spread out from the city to the villages. I had two kids by that time.  We watched it like fireworks. I saw the plane explode as it was shot down.

There is a book by an former Sandinista guerrilla in Nicaragua where she laments the fact that their original ideals were largely unrealized. Where has communism succeeded in Vietnam?

Just one thing: from hell to heaven. During war times, there was no education, no medicine.

But was that the horror of war or was that the difference between colonial capitalism and communism?

If anyone in a village had a half chicken to eat, the whole village knows. We were provided 2.5 grams of meat for food. We no longer have to run away from fighting, bombs, and we can focus on living. We are still struggling with life, to become noble. we are still struggling to build up what we want.

What do you like and what don’t you like about Vietnamese communism? 

Whether communist or capitalist, the first thing I like are the leaders who sacrificed for the liberation of the country. The communist leaders who sacrificed for us, who brought us from hell to heaven. I respect them and love them. Certain people have taken advantage, like a worm in the soup bowl. Nothing is perfect in any country, among one hundred communist or capitalist leaders, who is perfect?

In 1945, when Uncle Ho proclaimed freedom for his country, we had to go through another thirty years to fight and shed blood to have true independence and freedom. And so the same for a perfect communist, socialist country, we have to struggle and build. No party or person is perfect. Compare it to a human body, a healthy and unhealthy side.

What would you want to say to the American people?

Americans have to respect the charter of the United Nations, international law.

You can help another country, but you have to be sure of how you help them, by bringing happiness, not criminal misery, bombs and killing. That’s not help. Make them bloom like a flower, don’t bring destruction and chaos.

Americans should be responsible for its crimes: millions killed, Agent Orange, bombs, 300 years of unexploded ordnance. We need help.

You say In God We Trust on your money, and presidents still lay hands on the bible. Then obey one of the ten commandments from the Lord: Do Not Covet. You shall not covet. The final commandment.

As much of his family have become Christian, I asked about Marxist restrictions on freedom of religion.

It’s not about Marxism; if the religion is about pure faith in God, there is no judgment. We have a history of Christians, Catholics from France and America send spies that carry politics along with their bibles. That’s why they have to watch out. During the French war, Le Hew Tu, father of the French church, had his own army and wiped out a village and all its people. He allowed the French army to put cannon on top of the church.

As a Christian, ask if you love your enemy. If you claim yourself as Christian, you have to love your enemy and not covet. Don’t cause war, and make yourself rich by causing war. It’s OK to get rich, just not by causing war. Now Americans are always attacking: is that how you love your enemy?

Grandfather Dao, daughter Mizen, son-in-law William, and Jimmy.

I met William through Kickstarter backer Adam Edwards. William motorbiked me around Vung Tau, to the locations of old French cannon, and historic religious sites. His delightful wife Mizen introduced me to her father, Dao Quang Hung, and we had four hours of sit downs in their living room. He lived through it all, from the Japanese occupation,  French colonial oppression, the American War and even a bit of a conversion from Marxist scientist to Jehovah’s Witness. Here is the first part of our interview. Watch this blog for additional segments.

——–

Tell me first about yourself. Where were you born, what did you study, what did you do professionally?

I was born in 1938, in Hanoi, during the second world war. I remember when I was 5 or 6 years old, we had to run back to the countryside to stay away from the bombs. In 1946, I turned 7 and there was already a big war in Hanoi against the French.

What are your first memories about being under French colonial rule?

At seven. of course, I did not understand politics. Only the memory of what I saw every morning when I opened the door and saw carts carrying dead people passing my house, their skin charred from the bombs.

When, as a young boy, did you develop a political sense or consciousness as to what was happening, a personal point of view?

What I felt was pity and love for the people that died in front of my house. One of my neighbors had three children, and I saw their starving mother lying and dying right on the street. I watched her husband take off her shirt and roll her body into a mat.

What were the reasons for the starvation?

The Japanese and the French both prevented the farmers from planting to have food. The Japanese came during WWII and instead of sewing the crops to make rice, they destroyed the crops and they wanted the farmers to plant to produce war materials. Two million died. You would go out of your house in Hanoi and see dead people everywhere. A lot of provinces around Hanoi, poor people died and had to move to Hanoi to live as beggars. My mother raised rice and cooked porridge to help these people and Hanoi provided them a place to stay.

Unexploded ordinance or UXO. Sixty thousand Vietnamese have died from UXO since the end of the American war.

Did the French carry out policies to continue the starving crisis?

The French negotiated with the Japanese to open the streets to allow Japanese troops to come in. Before the Japanese, the French already were here, invading, conquering, killing revolutionaries in Vietnam. The French should kick the Japanese out, but instead they negotiated, making Vietnam like a hard pressure rock from two sides, one neck with two shackles.

President Roosevelt insisted that the French would not be allowed to return to colonize Vietnam after the war. But he passed away before it’s conclusion.

FDR was a good man. He meant to free the colonies. But he passed away. Truman was different, he was an evil man, against independence.

Why?

First, communism is a choice for each country. Wrong or right? That’s a different story. Whatever the citizens desire. On the other hand, Ho Chi Minh wasn’t yet a communist.

But Ho Chi Minh joined the Comintern in the twenties while studying in Paris, went to Moscow and identified as a Marxist in much of his writings and statements.

In 1920, there was a monarchy, there was capitalism. We are an agricultural country. Monarchy, capitalism, each causes suffering and sorrow. Ho Chi Minh wants to relieve the suffering. Capitalism was good for rich people but not for the poor and farmers, who were treated like slaves, tortured. He wants to free everyone, no different levels, farmers and teachers, engineers all equal.

If the US supported Ho in 1945, would he be communist?

By the time Ho Chi Minh made that speech (famous Declaration of Independence to a half million people in Hanoi after the end of WWII), he was not communist yet. The top of the speech (which quotes the American declaration of independence) says democratic republic, freedom from the French, no more king, no more slaves.

Ho Chi Minh’s Comintern membership card from the 1920’s.

Wouldn’t his membership in the Comintern, his travels to Moscow, his Marxist interpretations of history cause Americans to think he was a communist?

True communist theory is a beautiful picture about how people might live. How can they consider communists as enemies?

Americans saw millions dying under Stalin, Eastern Europe being invaded and controlled by the Soviet Union, Ho speaking the same rhetoric, and Americans now considered the Soviet Union a potential threat. Isn’t it logical that they see Ho in the same way?

The Third Communist International (Comintern) had the purpose of releasing colonist countries, so people seeking independence would go to Russia to find ways that they can be released from colonialism.

What do you recall of the French?

First, the deepest impression is of August 19 (1945) revolution, after the years of starvation, ninety percent of Vietnamese were illiterate, ninety-five percent were farmers, poor suffering farmers. They were treated like slaves, and worked like slaves. Their lives were worse than animals. Uncle Ho stood up and called for the people to fight the French and kick the Japanese out. I remembered I stood along the pavement and saws thousands of people, they are holding anything they had, a knife, a stick, a hammer to run to the provinces to the factories, to attack them. While they were marching, they were calling out “Defeat the French,” political chants. The French factories and offices were wiped out and Ho set up a new government.

What was your experience under French occupation from 1945-1954 as a boy, then a young man?

The French attacked Vietnam in 1885 with only 500 troops. They won because the Vietnamese had only simple weapons like knives and no guns. The monarchy negotiated with the French making it easier to be defeated. During that time Viet people tried to rise up and constantly pushed back against the French for a hundred years. They hated the French. They lacked a clear political way against the French. Uncle ho offered a clear direction.

So, you had no weapons. You had no unifying ideology and Ho came along and offered one. Something that explained colonial capitalism, its behavior, its exploitation of labor, virtually enslaving your people, often controlling via starvation and brutality.

Yes, that’s what I’m saying.

One of the visible reminders that Vietnam is one of the few remaining formally Marxist countries in the world is the presence of posters and billboards such as these. Limits on freedom of the press, speech, religion and the existence of only one political party are less visible to outsiders but a daily reality for nationals.

The French were attacked by Japan, and had no power over Indochina; they ran away. During that time, the Japanese had the power. The Viet Minh (Vietnam Doc Lap Dong Minh, or Vietnam Independence League), stood together, with the (US) Allies to oppose the Japanese. The Vietnamese took power from the Japanese, not the French. In 1945, Ho proclaimed independence, then the French tried to attack a second time. During that time, the allies allowed the Chinese to come to Vietnam to get the weapons from the Japanese. That ended up destroying the newborn government from Uncle Ho because they want to set up their own government system. I saw the 200,000 Chinese soldiers as they came to every corner of the North, saw them in Hanoi.

In the south, the English troops came over to get the weapons from the Japanese. and Vietnam’s army was weak, still young, as was the government system. Ho does not want war, after the war with the Japanese, so Ho had to be very skillful in handling them. Ho had to be patient and swallow his anger, even though Chinese killed people in Hanoi, raping women and killing children. President de Gaulle, during these transitional moments, was supported by America and England.

(Grandfather Dao’s daughter Mizen, our translator, exclaims, “It sounds like an 18-year old getting repeatedly raped.”).

Stalin’s forces brutally controlled and repressed eastern European countries like Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, so there was a sense among American and western European democracies that the Soviets and their expansion had to be resisted.

Russia had 20 million people killed and 2,000 cities destroyed. When Russia invaded, it was to attack Hitler. And the fascists were not only in Germany. So to oppose fascism, those countries have communist groups as well. Russia came over to help and kick ass on Hitler but also expand the battle where Hitler invaded. There were then no governments, so of course the communist cells wanted to run the government, and of course they were supported by Stalin.

In 1945, Americans supported the French to come back to Vietnam. Vietnam tried to have a policy communication with the US, but the US put it aside. In 1950, the French kept losing battles and the US provided more money to pay for the French to create a south Vietnamese army. The more the French fought, the more they fell. The US kept providing funds, eighty percent by the end, and then it was finished at Dien Bien Phu. US General Taylor said no one can take that base and the French military brass said no one can defeat them. But General Giap defeated the French there.

The French were brutal overlords in Vietnam. Political prisoners, i.e. anyone speaking against the colonists, were tortured, starved and held in filthy prisons. These are cages for uppity prisoners, unbearable in blazing heat.

When Dien Bien Phu was going to fall, the French asked help from America. The military war-mongers intended to drop hundreds of bombs to kill Vietnamese, but they couldn’t do it (dropping an atomic bomb to save the besieged French troops was proposed at one point by a senior American military official). If they did, it would expand the war to Russia and China and it would be another Korean War. America would have loved to join the battle, as it was a way of opposing communists, and Uncle Ho was now a communist.

Was there an economic purpose as well as political purpose for Americans to join the fight?

Sure, we have an oil industry here, it was all basically about economics. I have a question for you. What does the word politics mean to you?

I paused and said, “It is the way individuals, organizations and governments maneuver for there own self-interest or position.”

In Vietnam, we have a saying, nothing comes for free. Yes, the Russians got access but they helped the revolution against the French, while the Americans opposed it. The US spends a hundred billion dollars here, sends half a million army troops to defeat VC, not just simply to help the South Vietnamese government. As well, when the Chinese helped the northern government before, they had their own agenda.

If the US conquered Vietnam, all of Southeast Asia would be in US hands for sure. And they would threaten China. US military bases in Vietnam, nuclear weapon bases. According to Marx, politics, for both Marxists and capitalists, politics is using different methods, even devious ways, to protect your own rights. On the theory, causing war ends up protecting your own rights or self-interest.

What do you think the US was thinking, why did they not support that 1954 Geneva peace agreement, why did they support the war between 1954 and 1964, when President Johnson began to increase troops?

We have a saying here. Buffalos and cows hit each other and the mosquitos and flies die. The domino theory was true based on the theory of communism that once you are free you want to help free countries from capitalism.

A similar situation happened in Nicaragua. As soon as the Sandinistas won, they wanted to support the guerrillas in El Salvador, even though it ultimately destroyed their relationship with the United States.

(Our translator Mizen jumps in, “Why do you have to put your nose in your neighbors’ business, you don’t really know what is happening in that house.”).

China invaded Vietnam many times. It became like a national enemy, a traditional enemy. Vietnam can still separate who is the enemy. The Chinese people are not the enemy to us, it is the political war-monger who likes to conquer, to invade Vietnam (in 1979). Chinese people are nice, gentle people. Our enemy is not them, but the government. And the same for America. American citizens love peace, they don’t want to invade another country. But those in power are the enemy.

——–

Part Two of the interview will be posted shortly.

A lot of the old leftie conspiracy theories that used to impress our girlfriends in high school turned out to be true, with a little help from the Freedom of Information Act. I visited the Gulf of Tonkin this week as I worked my way down the Vietnam Coast from Hanoi.

The incident that got LBJ to go on national TV to ask Congress and the American people to support the acceleration of the Vietnam War never happened.

On August 4th, 1964, the USS Maddox reported that it was under attack from North Vietnamese patrol boats. James Stockdale, the American pilot who would become a Vice Admiral, serve time in the famous Hanoi Hilton (Hoa Lo) prison and run for vice president on Ross Perot’s ticket, was flying over the Gulf that day. Years later, Stockdale admitted that he “had the best seat in the house to watch that event, and our destroyers were just shooting at phantom targets—there were no PT boats there…. There was nothing there but black water and American fire power.” His superiors told him to keep that information to himself. Secretary of Defense at the time Robert McNamara admitted in the masterful Errol Morris doc ‘Fog of War‘, “It was just confusion, and events afterwards showed that our judgment that we’d been attacked that day was wrong. It didn’t happen.” President Johnson later said, “”For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there.”

Not that it mattered. The Johnson administration was looking for a pretext to justify escalation, and was repeatedly sending warships and aircraft into the Gulf as both provocation and in active support of South Vietnamese military operations. After the phantom attack, coastal cities were bombed.

McNamara: We introduced what was called “Rolling Thunder,” which over the years became a very, very heavy bombing program. Two to three times as many bombs as were dropped on Western Europe during all of World War II.

I visited Vinh, which was destroyed by the bombing. You see a stark difference between the beautiful old imperial and colonial towns like Hue and Hoi An, and cities like Vinh rebuilt with East German and Soviet aid. The French destroyed Vinh in their battle against the Viet Minh in the late forties, early fifties, the US in the sixties.

—————-

An Afterparty project backer took offense at one of the reasons I gave for Vietnamese forgiveness and their uniformly kind treatment of American visitors. That is, that they won the war. In Joseph Galloway’s 1999 New York Times book review of the Naval Institute Press’ “The Wrong War: Why We Lost In Vietnam,” he writes:

(Jeffrey) Record, who served a tour as a civilian State Department adviser in the Mekong Delta and was later a legislative assistant to Senators Sam Nunn and Lloyd Bentsen, declares at the outset that in his view the main causes of the American defeat in Vietnam were a misinterpretation of both the significance and nature of the struggle; an underestimation of the enemy’s tenacity and fighting power; an overestimation of United States political stamina and military effectiveness; and the absence of a politically competitive South Vietnam.

Record goes on to quote Gen. Colin Powell, a two-tour Vietnam veteran: ”Our political leaders led us into a war for the one-size-fits-all rationale of anti-Communism, which was only a partial fit in Vietnam, where the war had its own historical roots in nationalism, anticolonialism and civil strife.”

I am visiting numerous museums as I roll south. The inspiring and horrifying Land Mine Action Center (over 40,000 killed and 60,000 maimed from mostly US unexploded ordinance, since the end of the war, or 10x our 9/11 casualties), the Ho Chi Minh Museum, Hoa Lo prison, the DMZ facilities, the Citadel in Hue, the military museums. Exhibits documenting a thousand years of struggles for independence from the Chinese, then the French, then the Japanese and the puppet Vichy regime, then the French again, then the United States.

McNamara, again from ‘The Fog of War:’ Kennedy announced we were going to pull out all of our military advisors by the end of ’65 and we were going to take 1000 out by the end of ’63 and we did. But, there was a coup in South Vietnam. Diem was overthrown and he and his brother were killed. I was present with the President when together we received information of that coup. I’ve never seen him more upset. He totally blanched. President Kenndy and I had tremendous problems with Diem, but my God, he was the authority, he was the head of state. And he was overthrown by a military coup. And Kennedy knew and I knew, that to some degree, the U.S. government was responsible for that.

—————-

The farmer, the mother, the teacher fighting American forces in the rice paddies knew and cared little about Das Kapital or The Communist Manifesto. They had been fighting foreign invaders for decades, for centuries, for millennia, and they were ready to fight to the last man or woman.

McNamara, quite a reviled figure during the Vietnam War, but a man capable of extraordinary introspection, went to Vietnam in the nineties. He tells this story:

The former Foreign Minister of Vietnam, a wonderful man named Thach said, “You’re totally wrong. We were fighting for our independence. You were fighting to enslave us.” We almost came to blows. That was noon on the first day.

“Do you mean to say it was not a tragedy for you, when you lost 3 million 4 hundred thousand Vietnamese killed, which on our population base is the equivalent of 27 million Americans? What did you accomplish? ….”

“Mr. McNamara, You must never have read a history book. If you’d had, you’d know we weren’t pawns of the Chinese or the Russians. McNamara, didn’t you know that? Don’t you understand that we have been fighting the Chinese for 1000 years? We were fighting for our independence. And we would fight to the last man. And we were determined to do so. And no amount of bombing, no amount of U.S. pressure would ever have stopped us.”

French colonialists and companies undermined Vietnam’s subsistence economy by forcibly expropriating vast amounts of land and reorganizing farmers into large plantations. By the 1930’s, French Indochina was producing sixty thousand tons of rubber annually, five per cent of world production. Vietnamese worked  long hours in debilitating conditions for slave wages. Malnutrition and malaria were common on the plantations. In the years between the two world wars, one Michelin-owned plantation recorded seventeen thousand worker deaths. Meanwhile, Ho Chi Minh was in Paris studying revolutionary philosophies in vogue in French cafes and universities. He wasn’t there because he got off on Engels. He was there to adopt a framework for leading his people out of the humiliating repression of French colonial capitalism. He was a nationalist, returning to drive out the French and Japanese. Working alongside the American OSS, moving American leaders like FDR to furiously insist the U.S. support Vietnamese independence and oppose French colonialism, much as the U.S. opposed British colonialism post-WWII. Ho began his independence address to a half million newly liberated Vietnamese in Hanoi with the words of the American Declaration of Independence.

As with radical Islamists who know fuck-all about the Koran, but have had brothers, neighbors and uncles killed by western bullets, missiles, bombs, drones, there was a history of grievance that American leaders ignored. Walking Vietnamese streets in Hanoi, Vinh, Dong Ha, Hue and Hoi An, I see rare signs of Marxist-Leninist triumphalism. The occasional billboard, a tribute to military heroes, the iconic flag, a rare photo of Marx on a shop wall, a statue of Lenin in a park. Young people have accepted that they can talk whatever shit they want with their friends, but will be visited by the state police if they get too public with their discontent. There is too much state control of industry, but a growing, mostly market-driven economy. It is a young country that is eager to move on, feeds on American culture and technology and, considers the Chinese (manufacturer of cheap American consumer goods, produced by underpaid, exploited laborers) their biggest threat.

Finally, this, from Galloway.

In the end it all boils down to one question: Could we have won a military victory in Vietnam? Record’s answer is: Yes, but not at any price even remotely acceptable to the American people. One thoughtful former infantry battalion commander told me he had reflected long and hard about what would have resulted from unlimited war, including an invasion of North Vietnam: ”We could have won a military victory without question. But today my sons and yours would still be garrisoning Vietnam and fighting and dying in an unending guerrilla war.” The war was ours to lose, and we did; it was for the South Vietnamese to win, and they could not.

Thanks to the lovely and beloved Fernando Coelho for the intro and to the supernaturally patient and generous Camelia ben Naceur for transcribing this hours-long Panama City encounter with artist, ex- PDF officer and intellectual Luis Huertas. And this is only part one! Background on the meeting will be added for the book.

The real history of the Panama Canal, Volume One. Volume Two will cover the building of the Canal, the remarkable rise of Omar Torrijos and the violent fall of Manuel Noriega.

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LH : You know, I’m the inventor of a game, “Lucido’s Centenarios” about the history of Panama. I’m not a normal Panamanian. I’m an engineer, a space engineer, I’m a pilot who studied medicine. I’m fifty-two. I finished high school at the age of sixteen.

I wanted to go to the US to study aerospace engineering in Texas but they wouldn’t support me as a minor. I had to wait in Panama to reach seventeen and a half to go to the United States. In the meantime, I studied medicine. It was pretty difficult to get in the National Faculty Of Medicine at that time, there was only one place in Panama to study Medicine, and I spent three years there. At the age of nineteen I decided to leave medicine because that was not my vocation. I didn’t want to be a doctor, but I enjoyed it. At that age, I’m of the Apollo generation. I want to go to space… all that stuff… Top Gun, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, I’m that guy. It’s something from our age, how old are you?

BG : Fifty-nine.

LH : OK ! it’s in the… in the neighborhood.

BG : In the neighborhood. (laughs)

LH : Then, I had a lot of pressure in my mind to be a pilot and aerospace engineer and I found a way to go to live in to Brazil. I graduated in the Brazil Air Force…

BG : Really ?

LH : In the Air Force Academy of the Brazil Air Force in Pirazununga, Sao Paolo. Then I learned to speak Portuguese, and was a pretty good way to know Udila (sister of mutual friend Fernando Coelho) three or four years ago.

BG : Yeah.

LH : I knew Udila here in Panama. I graduated from the Academy in 1986. I joined the National Panamanian National Guard. When I was in Brazil, the Panamanian National Guard changed to PDF, the Panamanian Defense Force and Noriega became the Commander in Chief. You are familiar with the story of the bloody hell Noriega created politically as Commander in Chief for the…

BG : Yes but I continue to look for fresh ways to understand it.

LH : Panama is a country built on our national resources, our natural… geography, the place in the world, the strategic position, that’s the only resource Panamanians had. When this resource began, 25 September 1513… that’s the day Vasco Núñez de Balboa discovers that the other side of the Atlantic Coast… there was a sea… at that day, Panama becomes an isthmus. And, when Panama becomes an isthmus, the resource began and the problems too…

The first way to cross the country was the Camino Real. in middle of the jungle. After that, in sixteen-something, Francis Drake tried to reach the Atlantic side of the Camino Real, via the city “Nombre de Dios.”  But “Nombre de Dios” was a pretty difficult to defend place, and the Spanish changed the Atlantic entrance to another city, Portobello.

BG : Near Colon.

LH : Near to Colon… and Portobello was a better place to defend because it’s a gulf and you can put a fort in the entrance of the gulf, with cannons. Terrible for the pirates and corsairs to get in the gulf past Portobello. So they find a river, the river Chagueres… and the river Chagueres goes to the isthmus on to the half of the passage that begins the Camino de Cruzes way…

BG : I see.

LH : And the story of Panama as inter-oceanic resource began with that… with  both Caminos, Camino Real and then Camino de Cruzes.

In Panama, there was no civilization… there were no Mayas, no Aztecas, no nothing, just small tribes, no one with the sense of territory as a property, you know ? They don’t have complicated societies, it was pretty simple and the Spanish, they had to win each tribe. They don’t fight with a country or a nation, they fight with groups of Indians.

The City of Panama was founded in 1519… just six years after Balboa crossed. At the time Panama City was founded and grew with foreigners, the Indians and the slaves.

BG : Yes.

Panamanian American Jazz Legend Billy Cobham shooting photos of the Panama Canal area. He was a major help in my visit to the country.

LH : OK? And the Europeans who live in Panama, they don’t make Panama their homes, they build places to stay for a while, different from all the countries, as the United States for instance. In the United States the people who come to live…

BG : They moved permanently.

LH : They MOVED! They were fine, looking for a place to grow, to make their happiness, pursue their happiness. In Panama, the Spanish conquerers, they saw this land as opportunity for riches and to Como, what’s the name… you know some Spanish?

BG : Poco.

LH : Forgive me for my English, my English…

BG : It is very good, very good! Congratulations !

LH : My wife always told me that my English sucks!

BG : (laughs)

LH : Because my wife speaks English pretty well.

BG : It’s fine.

LH : OK… the sense of the nationality, Panamanians don’t grow with the foreigners who come to Panama.The foreigners who come to Panama, they segregate themselves from the indigenous and from the slaves.

BG : Did the slaves come from the West Indies…

LH : Yes.

BG : …or directly from Africa ?

LH : It was both, because in this Spanish Empire, they have ordinances and permissions to create slaves. They don’t permit everybody to trade the slaves.You need a kind of license.

BG : Yeah.

LH : I don’t remember why, but in Panama slavery was pretty minimal until the eighteenth century. They mixed pretty slow, the mestiso, the combination between the European and indigenous in Panama, you can see these families, indigenous features in their physical appearance but never from black people. The indigenous and the slave, they didn’t mix until the 1800’s.They don’t develop the conception of being Panamanians. Even the word Panamanian did not exist at that time

BG : So, at that time was it a part of Columbia ?

LH : Panama was part of Spain until 1821… In 1821, because Spain was losing all its Empire. Panama was part of New Granada.

BG : New Granada?

LH : New Granada was Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Ecuador and Peru These countries known as Bolivarian countries because we were part of the same uh… Virreinato… you understand what Virreinato was in the past ?

BG : No.

LH : OK. The Spanish Empire in America created Virreinatos… Something like States.

BG : Right.

LH : And there was the Virreinato de la Plata, there was Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina and Chile… and the other, the Virreinato de la Nueva Granada, Peru, Bolivia, Venezuela and Colombia, Ecuador, Panama.

BG : Yeah.

LH : Panamanian histories were not with North, Central America. This is a big difference between Panama and Central America. Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Salvador and Mexico, that was another Virreinato, I don’t remember the name of this Virreinato. Virreinato is a sub-kingdom, something like that… there was a Virrey, in each Virreinato.

Panama, at that time, in the Spanish occupation lived from the transit of the inter-oceanic route and the economy, all the good or the bad came from that business. Pizarro, to go to Peru to get the gold of the Incas thru here to Spain,then England developed the corsairs…

BG : The British Government did that?

LH : There was two types of piracy. The Pirate and the Corsair. The Corsair had the permission of the Queen to attack the Spanish.

BG : Ah, like a sort of mercenary?

LH : Yes ! That was the “Patente de Corso” the Corsair Patent to assault the Spanish ships. Francis Drake was one of the most famous corsairs because he had the permission of Queen Elizabeth. There is a history about their being lovers but nobody can prove that… (laughs) and probably never will…

The pirates were independent guys without any permission of the government to do the same. The attacks of the pirate and corsair were so big that in the eighteenth century ships began to make the journey to the south, to go around the Americas to go to Spain because the routes through Panama were too dangerous.

BG : Whoa.

LH : At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Panama became independent from Spain, the United States began to try to own the route to Panama. President Andrew Jackson actually sent people to Panama to make studies of the coastal route for the Canal…

BG : The French as well…

LH : Well, yeah… I have to…this is pretty complicated

BG : So this is before the French ?

LH : Yes.

While hitching through the Portobello area of Panama, an old gent picked me up with his daughter and granddaughter. We had fun in the back seat shooting photos.

BG : When did someone look at the geography and say, ”This could be done?”  How early did someone start to get curious that this may really be possible?

LH : From Balboa.

BG : From Balboa…?

LH : Balboa discovered the resources of the sea of the other side. At that time began the problem. There was so big a challenge to do an inter-oceanic road thru Panama that there was a lot of speculation in the sixteenth, in the seventeenth century there. The King of Spain prohibited studies about the Panama Canal, because there was a lot of speculation that the value of the land will increase to other powers. And the Spanish don’t want to make war with other countries because of the Canal. But, for Panama, the problem began in 1821 because we became independent from Spain, we become a part of Colombia. And Colombia began to make  concessions.

BG : Concessions meaning licensing to…

LH : Yes! Exactly! The government makes a concession to a guy, to build the Canal. He has about five, six or ten years to build it… if he can’t, he loses the licensing and they gave it to another man. Until Panama becomes independent in 1903, Colombia ALWAYS, ALWAYS somebody had the licensing to do that.

BG : How did Panama become independent ?

LH : In 1855, the United States establishes the Monroe Doctrine.

BG : That’s right.

LH : And with the Monroe Doctrine there is a, there is a pre… the name of the treaty is “Mallarino-Bidlack”… for that treaty, United States becomes for the first time the guardian of the inter-oceanic passage.

BG : The guardian…

LH : The guardian.

BG : …of what ?

LH : The inter-oceanic area in Panama… this treaty, by this treaty Colombia makes an exchange with the United States because, for the United States the inter-oceanic passage in the Panama area was vital to the commerce between its east and west coasts.

BG : Oh , OK.

LH : Then there’s another… there’s a complication with the “Mallarino-Bidlack” with England… United States and England made an agreement to block Europe from building a Canal in Panama. The United States declared that was their privilege. And Colombia made the “Mallarino-Bidlack” treaty with the United States in 1855. United States bought the rights to build in Panama, you know, before that,  American= was a… ah, OK! For us Americans everybody is American, not just United Staters (laughs).

BG : That’s right.

LH : For us, Americans is everybody in America. This is a pretty difficult word for us say: Americans.

BG : Yes, yes…

LH : There is a lot of confusion for that problem… eh… when I was young, I remember, you know, I was, no, I was a child, once my mother say to me that, ”No, you’re American too”… “Mummy, I’m American? ” because all the stuff I hear says that Americans were the guys from United States! It’s hard to believe that shit at the age of five… But there is a natural, eh… in Spain is the word : “Presentimiento.” It’s hard feelings.

BG : Hard feelings.

LH : Haha… because the Americans when they pass thru Panama, they treat us as shit.

BG : Yeah.

LH : At the top of the society at the time, the owners of commerce and services, they didn’t deal with that. Who had to deal with it were the people without resources, workers and slaves. In Panama, slavery stopped in, I believe, 1852, first of January. In Colombia, there were a lot of black people… without money, in poverty. This was the time of the gold fever in California….

BG : Right, the gold rush.

LH : And there were a lot of Californians and people around United States who are going to California thru Panama, using the railroad. The difference between doing it through Panama and through Mexico, the other way, was a month.

BG : Wow.

LH : You spend about three days from New York to Panama, one day to cross Panama thru the Railroad… and the other four or five days to California. You make it from one side to other in about… think about two weeks, less than two weeks. And through Mexico was about one month.

Well, at that time an American guy doesn’t want to pay the Panamanians because he was drunk. Jack, Jack Oliver’s the name, and the Panamanian’s last name was Luna… don’t remember the first name…

Well, for that began a big fight, but a big fight. The Americans lose more people than the Panamanians, I think ten dead, I don’t remember how many… but the damage was enormous. The United States officially ask for indemnities.

BG : All right.

LH : The families… for the damage… and the Colombian government had to pay something like 2 or 3 million dollars for that… I don’t remember the exact amount but it was enormous and a scandal, see… and it was the first big problem with Panama and the United States.

OK! I told you there was always a licensing about the…

BG : Right, the concessions.

LH : …the concessions to build the Canal. Well! One time, the concession went to a nephew of Napoleon. This guy owns the licensing to build the Canal in Panama and with this guy began the serious stuff… this guy sells this licensing to Ferdinand de Lesseps, the guy who will build the Suez Canal.

BG : Ha.

LH : Famous French guy, pretty good guy, he came to Panama, began to build the Canal in 1881. They try, but after ten years they go to the bancarrota…

BG : Bankruptcy.

LH : Because a lot of stupidity, corruption, and… misusing of the… capital of the enterprise… they build about two turns of the Canal… they were pretty close. A majority of Panamanians believe that the French company went bankrupt because they want to build a level canal. But that was only the first try of Lesseps… after a few years, he realizes, that the only way to build a Canal through Panama will be with locks, not a full level canal… and Lesseps hires Eiffel to design the locks.

BG : The guy who builds the Eiffel Tower.

LH : This guy designed the locks for the French canal. But this was a totally private enterprise, built with the money of poor people, they collect money from everybody. When the bankruptcy of the Canal hit, there were a LOT OF people who lost everything.

There was a guy, Philippe Bunau-Varilla, and another guy in the United States, William Nelson Cromwell, a lawyer in New York. He represented the French company in United States… and Bunau-Varilla was the engineer of the Panama Canal at the French company. When the company went to bankruptcy, he begin to buy every share of the company, and Nelson Cromwell and Bunau-Varilla owned the majority of the shares of the company in 1903. Since the French had about ten years without building shit, the concession to this company will end in 1904. In 1904, the shares bought by Varilla and Cromwell will be valued at….see? OK?

BG : I get it.

LH : And they began to conspire.

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Part Two will be posted later this week.

Parts three and four of the the Afterparty interview with former Sandinista and now democracy activist Benjamin Lugo. You can read the first parts here: http://thevisionproject.com/2015/01/05/benjamin-lugo-on-the-betrayal-of-the-sandinista-revolution-and-the-tenuous-hope-for-nicaraguan-democracy/ Thanks to Afterparty project intern Anaka Allen for transcribing the interview.

PART 3

Dictatorship

Brian: What was the decision-making process for (Nicaragua President and former Sandinista guerrilla leader) Ortega to finally say, they were defeating the contras militarily, “No, let’s do this election and let’s do it fairly.” What was underneath the decision?

Lugo: They felt they could win.

B: They thought they could win.

L: And then by legitimizing themselves through an election process, then they could ask European people, the United States, for money.

Hand rolled cigar shop in Granada, Nicaragua

B: They had been turning people off for a while, European social democratic countries that might be willing to support them, and did they see this as a way to say, “We know we’re going to win because we are going to manipulate public opinion and the election and divide all the potential opposition?”

L: After the war, it would take some pressure off from them because they could say to the world, “What’s wrong with all of you? People are supporting Nicaragua, people are supporting us and our policies. You have to show respect for our policies.” So in a sense they allowed international observers by the hundreds: the Organization of American States, United Nations, European Union, Canada; groups of observers with a lot of resources, vehicles, communication equipment. But, they thought that they could win. And the polls were favorable to them. Because even now, you go and ask people, they say we always support Ortega. It’s not true, but they say it. The same thing happened back in 1990, because they thought they could win it and people would be saying that in the polls. And the international observers are the ones that did not let the Sandinistas get away with the denial of the victory of Violeta Chamorro. They couldn’t do it. Carter was the one that told [Ortega], “You have to admit this. We already have all the figures with us. You lost.” So he said, “Okay.” So he gave a press conference at 6 o’clock in the morning the following day. He was crying, and most of his people, too. Because they never thought…After that lesson they learned, from 2008 to this day, they have never allowed international observers for the elections. And that is something that brings us to today.

We, in Nicaragua, are living under a dictatorship. Ortegista in this case.

B: A dictatorship, which is a strong term, is characterized by what?

L: Two things. The origin is not legitimate because it is coming from a fraud, and then an unconstitutional candidacy, he cannot be a candidate again. He had already been president twice, and it is not allowed, the continuous reelection, in this country. So he disregarded that through a supreme court ruling and then he committed fraud in 2011. [Laughs] And besides not being [of] a democratic origin in the sense that he won the election, in practice, he does not act democratically.

B: Is there some parallel between his style and Hugo Chavez’s style, where Chavez had a lot of populist sympathy and then gradually controlled the supreme court, controlled the legislature, changed the law and had more and more intimidating power? Is that a model for him?

Campesino statue in Managua, Nicaragua

L: [Mockingly] A periodista asked me what did I think about the socialismo del siglo XXI, now that Chavez was passing away. I said to him, “What socialismo del siglo XXI? Somocismo del siglo XXI is what we have here.” That’s what we have. Time’s changed. They say that we’re not in 1979, there’s a different story now. But these attitudes of staying in power, just for staying in power, is bad news in a sense that no matter what, to stay in power is the goal. You don’t care whether you have the support of the people or not.

Socialismo del siglo XXI is a set of socialist principles put forward by the late Hugo Chávez among others, ostensibly promoting democratic election rather than violent revolution.  Critics challenge Chavez’ electoral practices.  Somocismo refers to the dictatorial system of the Somoza family. 

B: When I asked Carlos Chamorro, while he was editor of Barricada, why the Sandinista government restricted or shut down the opposition press, he answered, “We are under aggression and we have to do whatever it takes to succeed.”  At the time, the attitude was, ‘elections, sure, that sounds fine’, but above elections is social justice.

L: The happiness of the people. So that people can be happy. Yes, but that’s a degradation, a betrayal of what was proposed in ’78. Because it was through freedom, it was through democracy, and it was through the free enterprise regulated by the strong government, but we thought we were going to be able to make changes in Nicaragua. Then the rest is like Stalinist, especially now, we control everything because we are the guardians—

B: So why did the Nicaraguan people put up with it, why do they allow it?

L: We never allowed it. Who allowed it

B: Well Ortega is in power so, it’s allowed.

L: No, it’s not allowed.

—————-

Walking through Managua my first day in Nicaragua, I wandered onto a rally celebrating the 35th anniversary of the revolution and the establishment of the Managua police department. Daniel Ortega spoke in the rain. He and his wife drove past me at one point.

B: My first full day in Managua, I walked down Bolivar Avenue, and I saw the huge Hugo Chavez tribute in the roundabout. Now, it’s one thing to pay some tribute, “the guy’s giving us cheap oil and he’s been a friend to our country,” but this statue is like sainthood.

L: Yea they want to make him appear like a god. For them, he was like a god because he gave them the money they never thought they could have, and tried to come back to power through elections. But he’s got control of every single branch of government: the judicial power, the electoral one, legislative branch and the executive branch. He’s got it all, you know; a monopoly of power. And he uses the resources of the country in a discretionary way and also he closed down a couple of political parties in 24 hours. All these political parties that exist right now, they exist today, but tomorrow, they may not exist..

B: In the United States, we keep going to war, sometimes you wonder, is there something in the national psyche that drives certain kinds of behaviors? You look at Russia, you have the czars, and then you have the Bolshevik Revolution, and then you have Stalin acting like a czar. So is there something in the Nicaraguan psyche that draws that kind of behavior because it’s been around so long?

L: No. The Nicaraguan people are people that deserve better. We have fought, we have sacrificed, and we deserve to change the way the country has been, is governed. So we have been out of luck, I think. In that sense, I have no regrets for my people. We have fought every step of the way against dictatorships. And we still haven’t finished, that’s all. We haven’t finished.

PART 4 

Where we went wrong

B: Are there people in Nicaragua, strong, articulate public figures, in opposition, saying we gotta change this? Or are people giving up because they are exhausted and well, just allow [Ortega] to do what he is doing?

L: No we’re not exhausted, we’re tired and uncomfortable with this, but we’re not exhausted. I’m part of this citizen’s movement called Movimento por Nicaragua. It’s a movement [whose] role is to restore democracy, liberty, freedom in Nicaragua, and then on that basis, create a more developed country with social justice. That’s what we want and we don’t want to be a political party. But in 2008, which were the municipal elections, and then 2011 which were the presidential elections, these political parties that were supposed to defend the vote of the people, didn’t do it. So all of a sudden here we were in the streets calling it, “un robo a la luz del día” [a theft in the light of day], the 2011 elections.  Everybody knows, here in Nicaragua, you can ask anybody what happened in 2011.

At this point, he stops to speak to the waitress in Spanish, asking her opinion on the aforementioned elections.

B: Translation?

L: Everybody in Nicaragua knows it was fraud. She says that [Ortega] gives the order to commit fraud, and it happens because it is a dictatorship. He orders his magistrados to do this or that, and they do that.

B: Magistrados? Magistrates? Judges?

L: Judges, yes.

B: It’s perplexing to me, because I read the books; Stephen Kinzer, Blood of Brothers, all the history. As an American, I read all the history of what the United States has done in Nicaragua and, the Sandinistas, their language is a little Marxist for my taste, that’s fine, it’s motivating and they overthrow Somoza—

Revered Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario, Managua Airport.

L: Up to July 19, the struggle was a just cause. What happened after that, then you can debate.

B: It seems surprising to me, because I’m naive, but it seems stupid to me. It seems like you have an opportunity after all of this horror for so many years to have the United States supporting, providing aid. [It’s the] end of Somoza, end of the National Guard—you might even do something like Costa Rica; no army. You have the Chamorros, and business people, and the Catholic Church. It’s an opportunity, a moment in time of tremendous opportunity.

L: Everybody was supporting this revolution. The whole world. Because we gave up our lives, and then the world, people, recognized that.

B: And didn’t people, I’m speculating, have some sympathy that [there was the] Spanish conquest, a fucking mass slaughter of indigenous people; military dictatorship supported by European colonial powers and the United States; and now [there’s] a chance to move forward. A little bit of guilt, a little bit of inspiration, and a great moment in history.

L: We moved backwards because coming from a right-wing dictatorship, we came into a left-wing dictatorship in the 1980s, with tremendous repression. And now, I have to be honest. Maybe they thought that was the best thing they could do. They were wrong. Some of these people in government in the 1980s thought that this was the best way to do it, but we only have to review a bit what was happening with Cuba, with the Soviet Union to understand that it was not——

B: It sounds like, by that time, they were too much in the pocket of——

L: Ideology.

B: That’s right, ideologically and organizationally too committed, too controlled, too influenced. Because your brothers and sisters are being killed, you’re being given weapons by the Soviet bloc, support by Cuba, you’re living in Cuba for a while, so it’s pretty hard to say you know——

L: But lately, because everything was helping a lot by lending [to] us, [to] the country, to be at [the same] pace. Venezuela sent some arms and weapons, too. Panama helped with money, so Cuba was not the only support.

B: Especially in the later years.

L: There were [other] democratic governments.

Hope for the future

L: The situation now is that we have this government that has lost, as of today, probably more than 2 billion dollars in aid, 2 thousand million dollars, from the United States, Canada, [and the] European Union. And then from individual countries [including] Germany, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland. They used to help this effort for rebuilding roads, or for schools, or for the health system. So they have retired all this aid because of these two electoral frauds; the municipal elections in 2008 and the presidential election in 2011. They were supported by Venezuela, this regime, at the tune of about 500 million dollars a year.

B: Was that in oil subsidies or in direct support?

L: We have a bill of about 10 million barrels of oil a year, times one hundred dollars is 1 billion dollars. Out of that bill, the Nicaraguan government sends in to Venezuela 50% of the bill and the other 50% stays here. Then they have some discretionary power of how to spend it. Some of that money, to be honest, is being used for subsidizing transportation in Managua. You only pay…about 10 cents of a dollar for any ride, which is too cheap for the cost of it. And they also have a bonus for public employees. If they make under 200 dollars a month, then they give them a subsidy of 80 dollars or so a month. So all of that amounts to a lot of money, but not to 500 million dollars a year.

So the problem right now is that we have elections coming, and we have the same electoral power magistrados, that have been re-elected by the dictatorship to keep the status quo. Because if you let them go away, fire them, everybody will say, “How come we are firing people that are supposed to be doing their jobs right?” It would be like assuming they are at fault, accepting they are at fault.

So in a sense with these new elections that are coming up in 2016, we need to have an electoral process that is clean and that respects each Nicaraguan vote. We need to have for that, observados electorales internacionales and nacionales. Because international review may bring in one thousand [or] two thousand…but you have to add to that some 20 thousand national observers. Then you have a good team to protect the vote of the people. So what the Sandinistas did in 1990, was to learn that they should never allow international observation here. They have never allowed it again

B: So was Somoza right? That if he’s thrown out there’s going to be a communist dictatorship? [laughs] It’s a silly question.

L: You want me to accept that shit that Somoza was right? Well, in a sense he was right because the revolution was betrayed. He is right because the revolution was betrayed, but he was not right because…

B: I only ask that, not to be sarcastic or disrespectful, but in my research I’m looking at Guatemala, Arbenz overthrow, 1954 and then the civil war and Reagan supporting Rios Montt and all of the things the United States has done worldwide. There’s this claim that there’s an international communist conspiracy, and the Soviet bloc, and——

Famed guerrilla Eden Pastora, who electrified Nicaraguans by tearing off his hood after taking over the National Assembly as Comandante Cero (“Commander Zero”). He became disillusioned with the Sandinista government and took up arms against it.

L: Unfortunately we lost that moment in 1979, when we could have had a different kind of relationship with the United States, even though they did what they did with supporting the Somoza regime, because we already were in power—the revolution was in power. So it could have been a different type of dialogue with the United States, and all of that was lost because of this obsession with the Soviet regime and the Cuban socialist regime.

B: The irony to me, is that they overthrow Arbenz, and he wasn’t communist at all, he had some communist advisers, but here’s a situation where they turned out to actually want to create a left-wing dictatorship, which was the paranoid prediction of the Reagan administration and of Somoza.

L: No, it’s not that Carter or the U.S. government was willing to allow a left-wing dictatorship here. They thought that a different kind of a revolution was going to take place in Nicaragua, and that we would be unaligned, and that we would be democratic.

B: But the Sandinistas were not going to allow that.

L: This radical group of people [made] the decision to forget about the 1978 proposal and go back to the 1968 one. And that was a terrible, terrible mistake, and as I said, it was a historical opportunity to have a new kind of relationship with the United States. and I think that even the United States would have learned if that process had gone through. It’s a waste.

B: In effect, you are almost screwing other countries in the future who wanted to say, “We want to do things our own way” and the United States would say, “No, we saw already how that worked out.”

L: Like what happened in El Salvador.

B: That’s right.

L: What we need in Nicaragua, and we’re going to fight for it, is to have these free elections in 2016. We want the will of the people to be respected, each vote to be respected. For that we know we have to struggle, we have to be in the streets demanding observacion electoral, a year before the election.

B: Well I’ll come down to be an observer [laughs]. Tell me Benjamin, how would you like to be known?

L: A Nicaraguan citizen that wants to see a democratic and free Nicaragua, and that has lived through dictatorship, back with the Somoza regime and then with the Sandinista regime. We had a 6-year period where we started getting things back into place with this Violeta Chamorro government. I worked with the Violeta Chamorro government because in 1989, I came and started supporting the campaign, and then in 1990 Violeta won the government, so I came to work with the Ministerio de la Paciencia with Antonio Lacayo. We saw what a country could do.

B: So that period was successful

L: Successful. A tremendously successful period in Nicaragua. Reconciliation. We were not a government that would go after the Sandinistas trying to find them or imprison them. We were more open than that. I think it worked out because the country started to recuperate from all of the terrible things that happened during both wars. The first war against the Somoza dictatorship, and then the other war against the Sandinista dictatorship. But, the point now is that we have lost millions of dollars in aid, and millions of dollars in confidence from investors. That’s why you see all this country with no development compared to Costa Rica or Panama. There is no confidence in people here to invest where his own government cut off aid.

B: It’s a sad story, but there may be an opportunity in 2016 to change it.

L: For change with pacific means, nonviolent means. But if you want to recuperate democracy and freedom, we have to fight for it, nonviolent forms of struggle. We feel that it’s basic, we recuperate the electoral process as a means for the people to decide on which proposal they want to take. Because when you have these proposals made to the people and then you manipulate the votes [on] that night, then [the results make no sense] to the people.

—————-

Special thanks to new editorial intern Anaka Allen for transcribing my three hour encounter with Ben Lugo in Granada, Nicaragua, and for offering these additional resources for more information on the subject. Photos will be added after approval by Ben.

For a quick rundown of the history of Nicaragua and its relationship with the United States, check out the “History of Nicaragua” page on Wikipedia. For more in depth information, check out Stephen Kinzer’s Blood Brothers and Pierre LaRamee and Erica Polakoff’s Undermining of the Sandinista Revolution (1999).

For a short but sweet timeline of Nicaragua history check out: http://web.stanford.edu/group/arts/nicaragua/discovery_eng/timeline/

Another timeline more focused on the Iran-Contra Affair:

https://www.brown.edu/Research/Understanding_the_Iran_Contra_Affair/timeline-nicaragua.php

For more information on the relationship of the contras and Iran:

https://www.brown.edu/Research/Understaning_the_Iran_Contra_Affair/iran-contra-affairs.php

Background on Sandinistas: https://www.brown.edu/Research/Understanding_the_Iran_Contra_Affair/n-sandinistas.php

For a not entirely objective review of the Reagan administration’s foreign policy, mostly in regards to the Miskito Indians, check out:

http://www.envio.org.ni/articulo/3245

For a slightly ragey and more critical view of the Sandinista revolution (and liberal America) read:

http://www.davekopel.com/Misc/Nicaragua.htm