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Vietnam and the myth of "the Mandate from Heaven"

Pham Thi Hoia:

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The Vietnam War was a complete victory for the communists. The war was the mother's milk, the school and the testing ground of Vietnamese communism. It provided historical justification for the leadership of the Communist Party, endowing it with the "Mandate of Heaven." To this day, the legitimacy earned 30 years ago is constantly reiterated, reaffirmed, validated and deified. War-era heroes continue to monopolize peacetime authority; war-era military leadership has been reborn as totalitarian control. The party knows that although many things can change, the myth of its "Mandate of Heaven" must remain intact because every other element of its ideology has been betrayed or revealed as bankrupt.

Thirty years after the war, all of our foundational cultural values have lost their validity, and the noblest ideas of communist ideology have become a joke. No space has emerged for basic Western democratic values or for the positive dimensions of modern globalization. Instead, we face corruption, violation of the rule of law, perversion of morality and dignity, the collapse of our medical and educational systems, dizzyingly rapid increases in social inequality, the time bomb of ethnic and religious conflict, a destroyed and polluted environment, the impoverishment of spiritual life, a crisis of belief and of hope. Vietnam's totalitarian system long ago showed that it does not have the authority to solve these problems. It is easy to say that the war wound has begun to heal, but it is not a wound. It is a tumor for which time is not a cure.

The author is a novelist from Vietnam who was born in North Vietnam during the war. The worst thing that ever happened to the Vietnamese was the communist victory. The Americans got to go hame, but the Vietnamese who survived the communist take over have to live with despots and incompetent communist government every day. They can think John Kerry and Jane Fonda for their current circumstances.