More on Vietnam and Face

“The day before the coup the French were the respected masters of the country; the day after it they were uninvited guests with the worst of reputations.” – Paul Mus fleeing Hanoi in 1945, as quoted in Frances Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake.

This is the effect of losing face. The French had lost Vietnam to the Japanese, and had not returned until after the war was won. Bah! Frauds!

The Bao Dai and Ngo Dinh Diem governments that followed never acquired any face to begin with, because they did not win office by vote or force of arms or the inspirational power of their ideas or their clever organization—in other words, by proving themselves more capable than anyone else. It was handed to them by the French. As Fitzgerald notes, at the village level, they were the same government as under the French—that is, the average Vietnamese dealt with all the same guys as before. In 1959 one third of active civil servants were still holdovers from the French regime. This is most significant: when the regime loses face, all members of the regime lose face. Confucian honour requires all officials to resign when a dynasty falls, and not to serve with a successor dynasty. For an official to continue in office is a further loss of face.

Generally the capital is even moved. Yet Saigon’s ministries remained in the same buildings, with the same people sitting behind the same desks.

This was obviously not going to work. Both Bao Dai and Ngo Dinh Diem must have known it. It was of course the right thing to do from the Western perspective, capitalizing on the supposed continuity with the previous government, appearing as its “legal successor”; but everything worked just the other way in a Confucian society. Bao Dai or Ngo Dinh Diem could do nothing. They had no organization or personal following. They could not have pulled off firing everyone; they had no one to replace them with. In the meantime, they would have alienated their French or American masters, and being supported by the foreigners was the sole source of their power.

Bao Dai had some claim to the imperial line. Accordingly, he voluntarily abdicated. He knew he could not hope to rule; but being associated with the project would lose face, and he had some face to lose. Having no reputation to begin with, Diem was prepared to put on a show for the foreigners, but his own understanding that it was never going to work doubtless inspired the overwhelming corruption that marked his and the later military regimes. Knowing it was all a sham and must end, the thing to do was to squirrel away as much as possible for yourself and your family in foreign bank accounts before the Potemkin Village collapsed.

And so on for every other official down the line.

Accordingly, the US attempt to establish a strong anti-communist government in the South was doomed. Each general who took the reins in turn knew he had no legitimacy other than as a US protégé, and his only object was to acquire as much loot as possible before this became apparent.

Was there any was out for the Americans? It looks as if there was one. There were three non-communist organizations that might have been capable of taking power and holding it in the Confucian system—that is, three organizations that held some social respect and organizational structure: the Buddhist orders, the Catholic Church, and the Cao Dai. Unfortunately, all were invisible to the Americans, because all were religious organizations.

The Buddhists actually made a bid for power, and probably could have won a popular election, had the US allowed it. Better yet, a coalition of the three religions might have been arranged; this would actually have fit very well with Vietnamese traditions, and when the Buddhists rose against Diem they had explicit Catholic support. And, as religious organizations, they all had every reason to be opposed to Communism.

Sadly, just as with the Shiites in Iraq today, the Americans would not allow it.

They may have feared Communism. But they feared religion even more.