Bookstore Ambiguity

It is a sad irony that a book I just purchased - The Banned List, by John Rentoul - was shelved in the bookstore's "Humour" section. A book cataloguing tired words and phrases that at best reveal laziness and at worst incompetence kept according to a fuzzy classification.

Agriculture: Need we worry?

Primitive man has lived twice: once in and for himself, and the second time for us, in our reconstruction. (Gellner, 1988: 23).

To kill a man between panels is to condemn him to a thousand deaths. (McCloud, 1994: 69)

One of humanity’s most important inventions is agriculture. This decisive step freed people from the quest for food and released energy for other pursuits. No civilisation has existed without an agricultural base, whether in the past or today. Truly, agriculture was the first great leap forward by human beings. (MacNeish, 1992 cited in Kiple, K.F., 2007: 61)

Why was Jared Diamond (1987: 66) led to the assertion that ‘the’ so-called ‘Neolithic Revolution,’ which had its beginnings around eleven thousand years ago at the dawn of the Holocene, was the “worst mistake in human history?” It was a bold suggestion to make, and because the consequences of this ‘revolution’ permeate most societies and the world at large to this day it is an important one to confront. In this discussion, this view will take the form of a challenge, and because there are only really two weak links in his pithy claim, first that it was a ‘mistake’ and then – the more tenuous of the two – that it was the ‘worst’ of them, these will support the skeleton of the assault. Perhaps because – unlike today – these early ancestors of ours were not likely to have the option to eat less, Diamond says that the mistake resulted from their choosing to produce more food, rather than to limit their population. While he has good evidence to say that “starvation, warfare, and tyranny” resulted from this choice, it will be a challenge for even a more comprehensive balance sheet to settle whether this was the ‘worst’ of our species mistakes; the staunchest luddite must admit after all the benefits that agriculture has bestowed. Is it possible that agriculture has opened the possibility of solutions to some of the very problems it has also created? (Kiple, K.F., 2007: 3)

To meaningfully discuss agriculture, we should be clear about what exactly a community practicing it does, and more importantly what might be meant by any ‘revolution’ inherent to this kind of living. A suitable definition of an agricultural society could be based on that used by Price and Bar-Yosef (2011: S165): one that lives with a diet predominantly of domestic plants and/or animals. What about adopting this kind of diet was revolutionary? Looking back over thousands of years makes it possible to see any dramatic effects of a process, so is this merely an attribution resulting from anthropological hindsight? Did its pioneers consider it a massive step from prior procuring practices? There are at least two reasons to believe otherwise. One is latent in the earlier definition itself: early practitioners did not rely on it exclusively and still did some hunting and/or gathering; the other reason is that it does not seem a particularly rare development: Cochran and Harpending (2010: 31) point out that humanity has managed it on at least seven independent occasions, and Price and Bar-Yosef’s more recent survey (2011: S163) has inflated that figure to ten separate locations, adding that the origins of domestication – a prerequisite for agriculture, at least – continue with new evidence to be placed earlier in time.

While the times and places of agriculture’s emergence are not a great mystery, there have been several reasons proposed for the shift and consensus has not congealed about any of them, probably due to the variety of circumstances.  Diamond’s thesis does not depend on a particular cause, but he did propose it alongside an assumption that the choice was forced by population pressure. This is dubious in the light of it being fairly recently realised that early experimenting with agriculture occurred in fail-safe environments of relative plenty, and is also weakened by the fact that most evidence of significant population growth post-dates agriculture. This latter tendency does however bolster his central point, given a number of flow-on effects of this growth. The main incontrovertible negative of agriculture has been epidemiological: with growing populations tend to come denser populations, and denser populations foster the spread of infectious pathogens, and promote in particular the spread of zoonoses where this is accompanied by greater contact with animals (some notable examples being HIV and various strains of Influenza). While humans are able to respond to these threats to some extent, consciously (through improved hygiene, vaccinations, antibiotics, bacteriophages, etc.) or unconsciously (mutations affecting susceptibility), we are fundamentally – though not completely – limited in our ability to control their evolution for the better. (Diamond, 1987: 66; Price and Bar-Yosef, 2011: S168; Ewald, 2007)

Some authors make the shady assumption that the population growth of agriculturists is inexorable. While it is true that forager cultures have an innate restraint on their population, “since the plants and animals they depend on cannot be overharvested without immediate harm,” there can be cultural forces keeping the growth of agricultural communities in check. They need not be so draconian as those in China, either. Hans Rosling (2012) highlights the UN Population Division’s forecast that the world’s population will stop growing at ten billion, partly as a consequence of simple – and interrelated – things like increased educational level of women, greater numbers of women integrated in the workforce, and increased ages at first marrage. While it will without doubt be a demanding problem to feed a global population reaching this ceiling, it is misleading to label the issue intractable. (Hemenway, 2006: 3)

When cultural factors are more prominent than biological, it is plausible that future trends could be directed to a greater extent, so while inequalities – economic and gender-based - were greatly exacerbated by the growth in sedentism resulting from agriculture, that these are mutable can be witnessed by the fact of national differences in income inequalities – or the successes of the feminist and suffrage movements in various areas – across the modern world. Still, post-agriculture disparities appear early in the record, for example in the behaviour of the living – evinced through the building of monumental structures, or nutritional deficiencies via skeletal remains – and the treatment of the dead – from differences in grave artifacts alongside remains. (Price and Bar-Yosef, 2011: S167-S169; Diamond, 1987: Kiple, 2007: 62-63)

The core corollary to Diamond’s position – affirming some views that had been expressed through the 20^th century but had become especially salient in the 1960s – is that hunter-gatherer societies were indeed the ‘original affluent society.’ That he justifies this partly by extrapolating backwards from modern hunter-gatherers (who thus never made the switch) is cause for concern, as a hypothetical difference between their culture and an ancestor’s sibling-cultures could itself explain why they did not follow the majority. Kaplan expertly illustrates how evidence has in the past been selectively accommodated to suggest that such people are generally of a disposition “more concerned with games of chance than with chances of game,” and in doing so either quells or demolishes various conclusions. Estimates of foragers’ hours of leisure, for example, are somewhat diminished when one is careful demarcating what constitutes ‘work’ and ‘leisure,’ highlighting how the latter can often be more strenuous than the former. He also manages to tear up the “somewhat rosy picture” of their “well-balanced diet.” Just as other commentators have decried early agriculturists’ protein insufficiency, he points to – for example – the !Kung tribe’s lack of a reliable source of carbohydrates or animal fat. There were no doubt varying degrees of nutritional wealth between different hunter-gatherer groupings, but Kaplan shows us how careful one needs to be in linking approaches to subsistence. (Sahlins, 1972; Kaplan, 2000: 302, 305, 309-310, 312-313)

Cochran and Harpending (2010: ix, 14, 23, 65-66) are of the perspective that we cannot approach a macroscopic understanding of the changes in human society between (or beyond) hunting and gathering and agriculture without taking biological evolution seriously. Previous anthropologists, they propose, were led to the misconception that human evolution had halted because they only attended to easily observed characteristics. There were many forces, however, continuing to shape human living in ways unique to the disparate populations across the globe, and they assert that agriculture was the most important of all of these: that by stimulating population’s growth, we accelerated our own evolution by increasing the frequency of favourable mutations, and highlight the perhaps counter-intuitive importance of such mutations to later generations: that it takes “only twice as long [for an advantageous allele] to spread through a population of 100 million as it does to spread through a population of 100 thousand.” Together these conclusions lend compelling support to the suggestion from the outset of this discussion, that even though agriculture had negative social and biological consequences our species had no chance to foresee, the provenance of these changes would continue to yield us further tools to combat them.

Is it reasonable to talk of the Neolithic ‘Revolution’ as a ‘mistake’ only when considering it in the short term? Does an encompassing view – both temporally and spatially – lead to a conclusion that the transition to agriculture was just “an inevitable step in the evolution of human society?” Given that humans have not even practiced sedentary agriculture for “one-tenth of one per-cent of their time on earth,” it is easy to imagine that unforseen advances still to accrue – in both our knowledge and accomplishments – may provide future chapters for this ongoing debate. (Price and Bar-Yosef, 2011: S168; Kiple, 2007: 3)

List Of References

Cochran, G. and Harpending, H., 2010. The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution. New York: Basic Books.

Diamond, J., 1987. The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race, Discover 52(5): 64-66 [online] Available at: [Accessed 17 September 2012].

Ewald, P., 2007. Paul Ewald asks, Can we domesticate germs? [video online] Available at: [Accessed 24 September 2012]

Gellner, E., 1990. Plough, Sword and Book: The Structure of Human History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hemenway, T., 2006.  Is Sustainable Agriculture an Oxymoron?,  Permaculture Activist [online] Available at: [Accessed 17 September 2012].

Kaplan, D., 2000. “The Darker Side of the ‘Original Affluent Society.’” Journal of Anthropological Research 56(3): 301-324. Available through: JSTOR [Accessed 16 September 2012].

Kiple, K.F., 2007. A Movable Feast: Ten Millennia of Food Globalization. New York: Cambridge University Press.

McCloud, S., 1994. Understanding Comics. New York: HarperPerennial.

Price, T.D. and Bar-Yosef, O., 2011. “The Origins of Agriculture: New Data, New Ideas.” Current Anthropology 52(S4): S163-S174. Available through: JSTOR [Accessed 16 September 2012].

Rosling, H., 2012. Religions and Babies | Video on TED.com. [video online] Available at: [Accessed 24 September 2012].

Sahlins, M.D., 1972. “The Original Affluent Society.” In Stone Age Economics. Available at: [Accessed 22 September 2012].

"Economic Globalisation," too convenient a phrase?

Winston Churchill once remarked that “We shape our buildings, then our buildings shape us.” Historical consequences often seem to become drivers of change in and of themselves. Economic globalisation is a complex instance of this general trend, and this essay will question its significance. Has it indeed become the most significant force for change by the end of the twentieth century?

The grammar of the question is unfortunate, because it is unclear what makes a historical contingency significant: to be so, must it exert more of a ‘push’ (or ‘pull’) than any other we can name would alone? Or must it instead be the root of a chain of causality that matters? In relaying the philosopher Hegel, Francis Fukuyama has supported the thesis that the ‘struggle for recognition’ is the most significant driver of history, simply because all human action would stem from that struggle. Alongside that struggle, a number of circumstances had to accrue before globalisation – let alone economic globalisation – could become so important, and this would happen over thousands of years: populations would grow, trade would develop between rising centres of wealth, this trade would allow minerals from disparate sources to unite and form the basis for advances in technology such as the industrial revolution, which further sped along the growth of rapid communications of information, and a particular form of that information, currency. All being necessary for this massive interdependence of economic units that falls under the moniker ‘globalisation,’ are these factors any less significant? What instead this discussion considers is the idea that economic globalisation is instead a convenient proximate cause, a label that conveniently encapsulates the many prior justifications we could make for the events that occur today.

A vivid – though often hidden – corollary of indulgence in modern technology throughout the more developed nations are the conflicts that this demand only makes more heated. Minerals sourced from the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, are used in the construction of modern consumer goods, and our demand for these goods drives up the prices of these minerals. Rather than being a boon to the Congolese economy, this only enflames the ethnic conflicts there. Though these arose from a nationalistic fervour that erupted with the inundation of Tutsi refugees from the genocide in neighbouring Rwanda, they are spurred on by outside countries’ dependence.

The strong division of labour and sources of minerals that our economy has become dependent on has itself become a sort of butterfly effect. Small changes in far off countries that many have never heard of can have significant consequences for all of us. Rising labour costs in one country (perhaps due to simple changes in legislation promoting better rights) could cause a profit-seeking company to find talent – or just numbers – elsewhere, in turn damaging that country’s economy. This interconnectedness makes any changes inherently more unpredictable and far-reaching, though it would be simplistic to call the economic globalisation evident here significant. It is just a convenient catch-all label for its more basic preludes.

A (very) sketchy look back at the 60s

Their message could be articulated. They had a voice, and they used it well. Yet try dissecting it, try classifying them, and you would quickly be branded a “straight.”[1] In some cases this is not a clear-cut expression of anti-intellectualism, and is instead a concern that trying to do so may just detract from the fluidity of the subculture in responding to the needs of and – perhaps more importantly – whims of its members. That people should just “get in and do it.”[2] Can this simply be construed as cowardly evasion? That if no end-goal is defined then criticising its attainment is impossible? Or is it a more optimistic appeal to the numinous and the unknowable, an admission of uncertainty in the face of establishment orthodoxy?

To evaluate the legacy of the hippies we must somehow lay down measuring posts, at least temporarily.  Where did they succeed and where did they fail? The intervening years since the soixante huitard and their ilk captured the world’s attention, and even recent events, make this an auspicious time to look back at this inimitable subculture. Primary sources are in a unique position to reveal the flowering of the movement, yet have a forced myopia towards assigning weight to specific, salient events, especially those damaging to its image. While the sociologist John Robert Howard tries his best, and Richard Nixon his worst, to critique the upwelling discontent of the sixties, both men reach a limit; the former constrained mainly by the zeitgeist, and the latter – being generous – blinkered by political ambition. It has been astutely observed that counter-culture contains the seeds of a future over-the-counter culture, yet it is doubtful that these would be able to germinate were elements of the subculture not able to shed earlier weaknesses.[3] Much as natural selection leaves standing those organisms that most effectively evolve to fit changing environments, the course of history is most kind to those ideas that meet its dialectical challenges. In that sense, this and other secondary commentaries would be well placed, as opposed to contemporary sources, to assess the movement’s successes. These surveys are complementary, not exclusive, with later sources providing context to those closer to events.

Two of these contemporary publications, The Digger Papers and Abbie Hoffman’s 1968 Lincoln Park address, reveal that both the Diggers and the Yippies wanted essentially the same thing: the absence of outside domination of thought and action. Each group emphasised very different means for moving towards these shared hopes, the Diggers the cooperation of entire communities to sustain ‘Free Cities’ relatively independent of ‘straight’ society, and the Yippies the individual means – through “guerrilla theatre,” while embedded in the ‘system’ – to free oneself from and continue resisting dependence and control, that desperate “holdin’ on to their fuckin’ pig jobs ‘cause of that little fuckin’ paycheck.” As Howard observes, for the Diggers it is in the somewhat codified volunteerism where they unwittingly encode their own downfall. While aspiring that “every brother should have what he needs to do his thing,” the Diggers seem to miss that this volunteerism calls for the implicit Marxian precondition: “From each brother according to his ability.”[4]

With Nixon’s fear-mongering denouncement aimed at civil disobedience in general instead of the hippies in particular, it requires some context to accommodate it in this discussion. That said, it is plausible that groups like the hippies would be ashamed of their successes did they not draw the ire of such figures, as those who have occupied Wall Street recently may feel towards Mitt Romney painting that campaign as “dangerous … class warfare.”[5]  It must also be asked if Nixon was any more responsible than many of those he attacked – or to what extent he should be taken seriously – in his misleadingly quoting Robert Kennedy as saying that the law was a foe to “the Negro,” as opposed to his actually pointing out that many Negroes justifiably considered it antagonistic.[6]

Reflecting on these contemporary documents in the light of years past – and especially recent events – reveals parallel perspectives on social justice to this day.  This in itself highlights a massive success of the hippie movement; more than its music struck a chord then, many of its ideals impassion us still.

Bibliography

Boxer, Sarah B. “Romney: Wall Street Protests ‘Class Warfare’.” National Journal, last modified 5 October 2011, accessed 21 September 2012. http://www.nationaljournal.com/2012-presidential-campaign/romney-wall-street-protests-class-warfare--20111004.

Brown, Charles E. “Shouts of ‘We’ll Kill Whites,’ ‘Burn’ to ‘This is War’ Heard” in JET, ed. John H. Johnson. Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, 2 September 1965: 5-10.

“The Digger Papers” (c.a. 1966), pp. 273-278 in Bloom and Breines, eds. “Takin’ It to the Streeets”: A Sixties Reader, 2^nd edition. Oxford 2003.

Hoffman, Abbie, “Media Freaking,” The Drama Review: TDR 13. Summer 1969: 46, 48-51.

Howard, John Robert. “The Flowering of the Hippie Movement.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 382. March 1969: 44-48.

Nixon, Richard. “If Mob Rule Takes Hold in the U.S.,” originally published in U.S. News and World Report, a news magazine, in 1966. pp. 294-297 in Bloom and Breines.

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[1] John Robert Howard, “The Flowering of the Hippie Movement,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 382 (March 1969): 45.

[2] Abbie Hoffman, “Media Freaking,” The Drama Review: TDR 13 (Summer 1969): 51.

[3] John Robert Howard, “The Flowering of the Hippie Movement,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 382 (March 1969): 46-47.

[4] “The Digger Papers” (ca. 1966), in Bloom and Breines, eds., “Takin’ It to the Streets”: A Sixties Reader, 2^nd edition (Oxford, 2003): 273-277; Abbie Hoffman, “Media Freaking,” The Drama Review: TDR 13 (Summer 1969): 46, 48.

[5] Sarah B. Boxer, “Romney: Wall Street Protests ‘Class Warfare’,” National Journal, last modified 5 October 2011, accessed 21 September 2012, http://www.nationaljournal.com/2012-presidential-campaign/romney-wall-street-protests-class-warfare--20111004.

[6] Charles E. Brown, “Shouts of ‘We’ll Kill Whites,’ ‘Burn’ to ‘This is War’ Heard”, JET, ed. John H. Johnson (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, 2 September 1965): 8.

Nationalism versus Communism in the Vietnam War

One need only look at the names given by various groups to what could more neutrally be referred to as the 'second' Indochina conflict, in order to realise that there have been a diversity of perspectives on what caused and sustained it. Vietnamese objecting to perceived U.S. encroachment have referred to it as – among other names – the “Anti-U.S. War of Resistance for National Salvation,” whereas Americans popularly united (or dissented) under the less rallying banner of the Vietnam War.[1] The name of the conflict also alludes to its legacy from the First Indochina War, and – somewhat more piercingly, even if it seemed to escape the attention of many U.S. policymakers at the time – the fact that the Vietnamese already had much more invested in this long-term struggle than did the Americans when they escalated their presence in the early 1960s.[2]

As fascinating as the logistics involved may be, this discussion will instead view what motivated both sides through the lens of ideology. Did the grounded concerns of national identity versus colonial ambition enjoy greater sway than the struggle between more abstract notions of capital and Marx- and Lenin-inspired peoples' revolution?

A byproduct of historical record-keeping is that the American position has enjoyed much greater scrutiny than the Vietnamese. It seems no less inevitable that abstract ideologies will attract mostly the attention of the elite, which resolves us to a narrower matter: the primacy of the adversaries' small cadres of decision-makers versus their supporting or dissenting populations.

By its end, this essay seeks to establish that separating the nationalist roots of the conflict from the Communism that America hoped to contain is impossible, and – at least partly in consequence of this – that the struggle for national identity and sovereignty grounded the conflict more than did an opposition between capitalism and communism. To do this, it will proceed through a few salient concerns: some of the ways the stage was set for the conflict many years before – for example – the well-known (and now known to have been falsified) incident in the Gulf of Tonkin, the characters and outlooks of some of the different people or groups in a position to influence the course of the war, and – before drawing some general conclusions – how Nationalism was key to the success of the Communist regime in Vietnam.[3]

While it is difficult to say that the war would otherwise not have taken place in the absence of certain events, it would be remiss not to highlight – since one of the professed policies of the U.S. in pursuing the war was to hold back the falling dominoes of communist insurrection – some developments that worked to strengthen the Communist forces in the country. Perhaps supporting him in the manner Lenin allegedly likened to providing the rope that would later hang them, the U.S. sent advisers and supplies (through the CIA-forerunner the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS) to the Communist leader Ho Chi Minh when the Japanese had invaded Vietnam in 1943. Later, in 1954, the Viet Minh victory driving out the French was a great boon in nationalists’ eyes to Ho Chi Minh’s status.[4]

Ho Chi Minh was a veritable enigma, and this is an impression you could plausibly argue he intended to cultivate to allow himself to present a different face to potential financiers. For example, on one occasion when probed by someone who had vaguely heard that the Viet Minh was Communist, he would deflect with the non-answer that “the French called all Annamites Communists.”[5] He inspires mutually nigh-incompatible aperçus from historians: Lind considers him as owing “little to Vietnamese tradition, and almost everything to his foreign models, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao,” whereas Buzzanco concluded that he “had hoped to develop strong ties with America, had never been particularly close to Stalin, and though supported by Mao, held a traditional Vietnamese distrust of China.”[6] After “years of struggling” to understand his character, Tảng was convinced that “the Leninism [Ho Chi Minh] espoused was an accretion that served the cause of Vietnamese nationalism.”[7] Whether Ho Chi Minh’s loyalty to Leninism was genuine or merely a ruse to retain a line of credit from the Comintern is a distinction that history seems to vindicate as not requiring a difference, though – unless you consider him an opportunist – it may have occasionally induced dissonance due to the conflict between nationalism and communism’s inherent internationalism. One occasion he seems to appease the Comintern was after a complaint that establishing a Vietnamese Communist Party promotes “narrow national chauvinism” by renaming it the Indochinese Communist Party.[8]

That the nationalists in the South could cooperate with the Americans at least hints that attitudes towards them were by no means uniform across the country. Prior to the war they had been assured that “the U.S., in sharp contrast to France, recognized the sovereignty of the State of Vietnam as extending all over Vietnam.” It can be surmised from similar statements being made by the American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to the French Prime Minister Pierre Mendès France that this was not mere posturing on the part of the United States. In an attempt to discredit the nationalism of those in the South and to whitewash their own allegiance to communism, the North painted the South as a puppet of their backers, the U.S., who they further proclaimed as having “colonial designs” on the country. In a brilliant riposte to these portrayals, Dommen points out that “if the amount of assistance were taken as the measure of the relationship, [North Vietnam] qualified as a colony in 1954 more fully than [South Vietnam], considering the massive Chinese aid to the [North] during the war, which the [North] kept secret, and the full extent of which only became known after the war from Chinese archival sources.” Together, these appeals from the various stakeholders put in high relief the popular demand for national unity and if not ill will then at least the people’s indifference to communism.[9]

When Tảng states that “the Geneva agreement was like a warning shot, signalling that Vietnamese nationalism had now become hostage to the ideological and geopolitical conflicts of the great powers,” he doesn’t seem to grasp the near-tautology.[10] To assert its identity, a nation must find how it differs from every other; to interact with the others as a unique entity on the world stage it must find its position on that stage. The pre-existing conflict between capitalism and communism made it near inevitable that a country boasting a strong communist bloc would be drawn in to the larger battle (think Cuba, Germany, and Korea). The (admittedly schizophrenic) body politic held itself hostage, a gun from the Chinese in one hand, a gun from the Americans in the other. Ho Chi Minh had appealed to two U.S. presidents – President Wilson in 1919 and President Truman in 1945 – requesting assistance bringing “constitutional government, democratic freedoms, and other reforms to the Vietnamese” in the first case, and in the second called for help in “obtaining independence from the French.” It was this failure of the most powerful nation of the West to respond to his nationalist pleas that Ho himself attributes to his Leninist leanings. Nationalism was at the genesis of Ho’s affiliation with communism. It must be remembered, however, that his and other movements only persist while the masses support them. To attribute more definitively the ideological origins of the conflict, it is necessary to probe wider Vietnamese society. John Kerry, who was then a Lieutenant and is now a Senator, testified after returning from Vietnam that “the conflict between the Vietnamese was ‘an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever, but also we found that the Vietnamese whom we had enthusiastically molded in our image were hard put to take up the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them from. We found most people didn’t even know the difference between communism and democracy.’” Among the intellectuals (who ironically were able to arise as a group largely due to the colonial system), hostility towards capitalism could be understood as a reasonable response to the exploitation of locals by foreign businesses. Rausch argues that, even if nationalism and communism are not compatible ideologies, communism was able to succeed because many in these groups saw as interlinked national liberation and alternatives to capitalism.[11]

This discussion set out to examine the roots of the second conflict in Indochina, and more specifically whether the struggle for national identity and sovereignty was more decisive in sparking and fanning the hostilities than was the divide between capitalism and communism. Drawing from background material spanning a number of decades before the war and some time during it (different starting points can be selected; the falsified attack off the Northern coast of Vietnam is a fair choice of epoch), most attention was paid to the situation and attitudes of Vietnamese, both within the leadership and the masses. This was guided by assuming that the most important stakeholders in the conflict were those in their homeland. From this material, it was concluded that not only among the masses but even among the communist and non-communist leadership in Vietnam, the main driving force in the struggle was the pursuit of national unity.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Tảng Trương, Như, David Chanoff, and Van Toai Doan. A Vietcong Memoir. New York: Random House, 1985.

Secondary Sources

Buzzanco, Robert. Vietnam and the Transformation of American Life. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999.

Crossley, Pamela K., Lynn H. Lees, and John W. Servos, Global Society: The World Since 1900, 3^rd ed. Boston: Wadsworth, 2012.

Dommen, Arthur J. The Indochinese experience of the French and the Americans: Nationalism and Communism in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2001.

Ford, Harold P. “Why CIA Analysts Were So Doubtful About Vietnam,”  Central Intelligence Agency Center for the Study of Intelligence, last updated 27 June 2008, accessed 12 August 2012, https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/97unclass/vietnam.html.

Kimball, Jeffrey P., ed. To Reason Why: The Debate about the Causes of American Involvement in Vietnam. New York, 1990.

Lind, Michael. Vietnam, the necessary war: a reinterpretation of America’s most disastrous military conflict. New York: Free Press, 1999.

Rausch, Joseph A. “The Significance of Nationalism for the Spread of Communism to Vietnam and Cuba.” Master's thesis, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 2011.

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[1] Jeffrey P. Kimball, ed. To Reason Why: The Debate about the Causes of American Involvement in Vietnam (New York, 1990), 3.

[2] Harold P. Ford, “Why CIA Analysts Were So Doubtful About Vietnam,” Central Intelligence Agency Center for the Study of Intelligence, last updated 27 June 2008, accessed 12 August 2012, https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/97unclass/vietnam.html.

[3] Pamela K. Crossley, Lynn H. Lees, and John W. Servos, Global Society: The World Since 1900, 3^rd ed. (Boston: Wadsworth, 2012), 363-364.

[4] Ibid., 310-311; Arthur J. Dommen, The Indochinese experience of the French and the Americans: Nationalism and Communism in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2001), 93-94; Ford, “Why CIA Analysts Were So Doubtful About Vietnam.”

[5] Dommen, 95.

[6] Michael Lind, Vietnam, the necessary war: a reinterpretation of America’s most disastrous military conflict (New York: Free Press, 1999), 2; Robert Buzzanco, Vietnam and the Transformation of American Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 17.

[7] Như Tảng Trương, David Chanoff, and Van Toai Doan, A Vietcong Memoir (New York: Random House, 1985), 71-73

[8] Dommen, 43.

[9] Dommen, 262, 270.

[10] Như Tảng Trương, David Chanoff, and Van Toai Doan, 31.

[11] Joseph A. Rausch, “The Significance of Nationalism for the Spread of Communism to Vietnam and Cuba,” (Master's thesis,  Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 2011), 45-47, 49.