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“The politics of a
country can
only be an extension of its idea about human relationships” Trong
số những nhà văn thế giới
“đau đáu nỗi đau” Quê Nhà vs Quê Người, có lẽ Naipaul số 1, khó có
ai hơn được
ông, nếu coi văn chương “thứ thiệt”, là, ở trong cái dạng “đụng chạm”
nhất của
nó, [sự va chạm của các nền văn minh], và, ở trong những “ký”, ra đi
không màng
đâu là quê nhà quê mình. Chúng ta chỉ là những 'displaced persons". Pankaj
Mishra BETWEEN
1929 and 1935, the
English novelist Evelyn Waugh published no less than four books about
his
journeys to Africa, South America and the Cái
vụ DHT bỏ chạy qua Tây “bỗng”
làm Gấu nhớ đến thân phận ‘displaced persons’, và, “bỗng” nhớ đến bài
diễn văn
của Naipaul, Văn minh phổ cập của chúng ta, Our
Universal Civilisation, đọc trước Học Viện Manhattan, Nữu Ước, được
in
trong Nhà văn và Thế giới, như là lời
Bạt. Tin Văn sẽ giới thiệu, lời dẫn, và lời bạt của cuốn sách này. "The
most splendid
writer of English alive today .... Ông ta nhìn vào con mắt khùng của lịch sử, mà đếch thèm nhấp nháy con mắt". Đúng rồi, chúng ta cũng cần một ông nhà văn nhìn vào con mắt khùng của lịch sử hậu 30 Tháng Tư 1975 của chúng ta, mà đếch có nhấp nháy con mắt. Chúng ta đếch cần Hậu Hiện Đại, mà cần mở thật to hai con mắt, nhìn vào con mắt khùng Hậu Chiến Thắng!  Ấn Độ: Một nền văn minh bị thương The
turbulence in Uchronie, theo từ điển Le Nouveau Larousse Illustré 1913: Danh từ giống cái. Không tưởng, utopie, áp dụng vào lịch sử; lịch sử làm lại một cách hợp lý như là nó có thể. Thí dụ: Cái mũi của Cléopatre: Nếu ngắn đi một tí, thì bộ mặt thế giới đã thay đổi. Bằng thủ pháp uchronie, nhà văn thay đổi dòng chảy của lịch sử. Một ông Quang Trung của NHT ra Bắc nhét kít vô miệng sĩ phu Bắc Hà, và thế là lương tâm kẻ sĩ xuất hiện đè bẹp dí Cái Ác Bắc Kít, và thế là cuộc chiến giữa Mít Bắc và Mít Nam đổi khác! Chỉ có những nhà văn mới có thể làm được điều trên đây. Thời điểm thay đổi số mệnh của họ. Với Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, tác giả Nửa kia của Hitler, La Part de l’autre: Phần của kẻ khác, đó là lúc ông cho Hitler thi đậu vô trường Mỹ Nghệ và trở thành họa sĩ. Chúng ta cứ giả dụ, ông Hồ được Tây mũi lõ cho một chức quèn, thư ký thư kiếc gì đó, như ông đã từng làm đơn xin xỏ, thì biết đâu, lịch sử Mít đã khác? Gấu chưa dám đọc Đỉnh Cao Chói Lọi, thành thử không hiểu thời điểm thay đổi số mệnh của Bác, theo DTH, là thời điểm nào? VTH, trả lời diễn đàn X-Cà phe, phán về Bác: Ông Hồ Chí Minh là một người đàn ông, chuyện vợ con của ông tôi không quan tâm. Nhưng trong câu chuyện bi thảm này, những người có lương tri đều lên án ông, ngay cả trong trường hợp ông không trực tiếp ra lệnh giết người phụ nữ bất hạnh, người đã “đầu gối tay ấp”, có con bồng con mang với mình. Ông biết, ông tất nhiên phải biết, nhưng ông đã im lặng, đã quay mặt đi trước tội ác. Người không nhân hậu với người thân của chính mình thì nhân hậu được với ai? Liệu chúng ta có thể lấy thời điểm, “ông Hồ ôm lấy vợ con” này để thay đổi, modifier, dòng chảy lịch sử nước Mít chúng ta? * Ho Chi Minh He married
nationalism to communism and perfected the deadly art of guerrilla
warfare By STANLEY
KARNOW An
emaciated, goateed figure in a threadbare bush jacket and frayed rubber
sandals, Ho Chi Minh cultivated the image of a humble, benign "Uncle
Ho." But he was a seasoned revolutionary and passionate nationalist
obsessed by a single goal: independence for his country. Sharing his
fervor,
his tattered guerrillas vaulted daunting obstacles to crush France's
desperate
attempt to retrieve its empire in Indochina; later, built into a
largely
conventional army, they frustrated the massive U.S. effort to prevent
Ho's
communist followers from controlling Vietnam. For Americans, it was the
longest
war-and the first defeat-in their history, and it drastically changed
the way
they perceived their role in the world. To Western
eyes, it seemed inconceivable that Ho would make the tremendous
sacrifices he
did. But in 1946, as war with the French loomed, he cautioned them,
"You
can kill 10 of my men for every one I kill of yours, yet even at those
odds,
you will lose and I will win." The French, convinced of their
superiority,
ignored his warning and suffered grievously as a result. Senior
American
officers similarly nurtured the illusion that their sophisticated
weapons would
inevitably break enemy morale. But, as Ho's brilliant commander,
General Vo
Nguyen Giap, told me in Hanoi in 1990, his principal concern had been
victory.
When I asked him how long he would have resisted the U.S. onslaught, he
thundered, "Twenty years, maybe 100 years-as long as it took to win,
regardless of cost." The human toll was horrendous. An estimated 3
million
North and South Vietnamese soldiers and civilians died. “France
undervalued… the power [Ho] wielded.
There's no doubt that he aspired… to become the the Gandhi of
Indochina. JEAN
SAINTENY, De Gaulles’s special emissary to Vietnam, 1953 * 1890 in
Hoang Tru in rural Vietnam 1911 Sails
to France to study and work 1941 Forms
the Vietnam Independence League, or Viet Minh 1954 Defeats
the French at Dien Bien Phu. Vietnam is divided, and Ho
becomes first President of North Vietnam 1959 Begins
armed revolt against South Vietnam 1967 Tells
L.B.J .. "We will never negotiate" 1969 Dies of
a heart attack in Hanoi * The youngest
of three children, Ho was born Nguyen Sinh Cung in 1890 in a village in
central
Vietnam. The area was indirectly ruled by the French through ~ puppet
emperor.
Its impoverished peasants, traditional dissidents, opposed France's
presence;
and Ho's father, a functionary at the imperial court, manifested his
sympathy
for them by quitting his position and becoming an itinerant teacher.
Inheriting
his father's rebellious bent, Ho participated in a series of tax
revolts,
acquiring a reputation as a troublemaker. But he was familiar with the
lofty
French principles of liberté, égalité, fraternité and yearned to see
them in
practice in France. In 1911 he sailed for Marseilles as a galley boy
aboard a
passenger liner. His record of dissent had already earned him a file in
the
French police dossiers. It was scarcely flattering: "Appearance awkward
... mouth half-open." In Paris, Ho
worked as a photo retoucher. The city's fancy restaurants were beyond
his
means, but he indulged in one luxury American cigarettes, preferably
Camels or
Lucky Strikes. Occasionally he would drop into a music hall to listen
to
Maurice Chevalier, whose charming songs he would never forget. In 1919,
Woodrow Wilson arrived in France to sign the treaty ending World War I,
and Ho,
supposing that the President's doctrine of self-determination applied
to Asia,
donned a cutaway coat and tried to present Wilson with a lengthy list
of French
abuses in Vietnam. Rebuffed, Ho joined the newly created French
Communist
Party. "It was patriotism, not communism, that inspired me," he later
explained. Soon Ho was
roaming the earth as a covert agent for Moscow. Disguised as a Chinese
journalist or a Buddhist monk, he would surface in Canton, Rangoon or
Calcutta
- then vanish to nurse his tuberculosis and other chronic diseases. As
befit a
professional conspirator, he employed a baffling assortment of aliases.
Again
and again, he was reported dead, only to pop up in a new place. In 1929
he
assembled a few militants in Hong Kong and formed the Indochinese
Communist
Party. He portrayed himself as a celibate, a pose calculated to
epitomize his
moral fiber, but he had at least two wives or perhaps concubines. One
was a
Chinese woman; the other was Giap's sister-in-law, who was guillotined
by the
French. In 1940,
Japan's legions swept into Indochina and French officials in Vietnam,
loyal to
the pro German Vichy administration in France, collaborated with them.
Nationalists in the region greeted the Japanese as liberators, but to
Ho they
were no better than the French. Slipping across the Chinese frontier
into
Vietnam-his first return home in three decades she urged his disciples
to fight
both the Japanese and the French. There, in a remote camp, he founded
the Viet
Minh, an acronym for the Vietnam Independence League, from which he
derived his
nom de guerre, Ho Chi Minh roughly "Bringer of Light." What he
brought was a spirit of rebellion-against first the French and later
the
Americans. As Ho's war escalated in the mid-1960s, it became clear to
Lyndon
Johnson that Vietnam would imperil his presidency. In 1965, Johnson
tried a
diplomatic approach. Accustomed to dispensing patronage to recalcitrant
Congressmen, he was confident that the tactic would work. "Old Ho can't
turn me down," L.B.J. said. But Ho did. Any settlement, he realized,
would
mean accepting a permanent partition and forfeiting his dream to unify
Vietnam
under his flag. There was no
flexibility in Ho's beliefs, no bending of his will. Even as the war
increasingly destroyed the country, he remained committed to Vietnam's
independence. And millions of Vietnamese fought and died to attain the
same
goal. Ho died on
Sept. 2, 1969, at the age of 79, some six years before his battalions
surged
into Saigon. spiring to bask in the reflected glory of his posthumous
triumph,
his heirs put his embalmed body on display in a hideous granite
mausoleum
copied from Lenin's tomb in Moscow. They violated his final wishes. In
his will
he specified that his ashes be buried in urns on three hilltops in
Vietnam,
saying, "Not only is cremation good from the point of view of hygiene,
but
it also saves farmland." • Stanley
Kamow, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for In Our Image: America's
Empire in
the Philippines, is the author of Vietnam: A History Time April 13 1998, Special Issue Leaders and Revolutionaries of the 20th century
Người bạn của
nhân dân: BIOGRAPHIE A friend of
the people VLADIMIR
TISMANEANU J. Arch
Getty and Oleg V. Naumov YEZHOV The rise of
Stalin's "Iron Fist" 283pp. Yale
University Press. £25 (US $35). 978 0 300 09205 9 In a century
stained with the blood of millions, Nikolai Yezhov, Stalin's People's
Commissar
for Internal Affairs from 1936 to 1939, was definitely one of the worst
mass
murderers. He served his master unswervingly and presided, in cold
blood, over
the Great Terror. J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, authors of The Road
to
Terror (1999), here offer provocative and illuminating analysis of the
way
Yezhov rose to become the second most influential man in the Soviet
Union. This
study adds significantly to the previous Yezhov biography by Marc
Jansen and
Nikita Petrov, Stalin's Loyal Executioner: People's Commissar Nikolai
Yezhov
(2002), which focused on his role as the main architect of terror. Certainly,
the intensity of the terror, its the amplitude and recklessness were
directly
linked to Yezhov's paranoid mentality. Nonetheless, for most of his
career he
was a dull, unobtrusive, disciplined party apparatchik. Strikingly
short in
stature, unflinchingly dedicated to the Bolshevik cause, Yezhov did not
reveal,
early on, any sadistic proclivities. On the contrary, he appeared to be
relatively balanced in dealing with his comrades' real or imaginary
sins. As Getty and
Naumov show, this relatively unimportant apparatchik made it to the top
by
clever use of the bureaucratic machinery. An industrial worker from
Petrograd,
he had joined the party a few months before the October Revolution, so
he could
claim, like other Stalinist magnates, Old Guard credentials. After
working in the provinces and Central Asia, Yezhov went to Moscow,
studied the
basics of Leninism, and was recruited by the chief of the party's
cadres
department Ivan Moskvin as an instructor in that crucially important
sector.
Under Moskvin's protection, he cultivated relations with Vyacheslav
Molotov and
Lazar Kaganovich. It appears that he did not establish personal
connections
with Stalin until the late 1920s or early 30s. Yet Stalin was certainly
aware -
of the young functionary's impeccable credentials as an organizer.
Yezhov
symbolized the ascent of the provincial cadres in the Soviet hierarchy.
He owed
everything to Stalin and his camarilla and knew how to exploit the
increasingly
fierce struggle for power in the dictator's inner circle. The murder
of Sergei Kirov by a disgruntled militant in December 1934 was a
godsend for
Yezhov. He accompanied Stalin to Leningrad and conducted the
investigation of
those suspected of having organized the assassination of the Leningrad
party
leader (and Stalin's presumed rival). In the meantime, Yezhov had
become the head
of the Party Control Commission, a decisive instrument used to
discipline and
supervise the apparatus. Moreover, he was a Central Committee Secretary and head of the party's
Organizational Bureau. Altogether, he had amassed more power in his
hands than
any other of Stalin's associates (except perhaps Molotov). Getty and
Naumov see Yezhov as instrumental in playing on Stalin's anxieties,
fears and
phobias. He appeared convinced that the "enemy" was conspiring
everywhere, that the "Fatherland of socialism" was in mortal danger
and that terror was morally justified. His mindset was typically
Bolshevik: the
world was divided into friends and foes, and the latter needed to be
weeded out
mercilessly. In his correspondence with Stalin, Yezhov used precisely
the same
terms about the "enemies of the people" as in his public utterances.
In this respect, there was no real difference between the Stalinists
and the
Nazis: they meant what they said, and ideology was not just a
smokescreen. As
the authors put it: "The Stalinists said the same thing to each other
behind closed doors that to they said to the public: in this regard
their
'hidden transcripts' differed little from their public ones .... Small
political deviations were portrayed, and sincerely understood, as
attacks by
enemy forces". Still, one wonders whether Stalin himself ever
considered
someone like Nikolai Bukharin a genuine enemy of the people, or whether
he
accepted Yezhov's convenient scenario in order to eliminate a major
figure in
the Leninist tradition. A consummate
schemer, the austere, self-effacing Yezhov managed to slander and
replace
Genrikh Yagoda as head of the secret police. He pursued his career
fully
convinced that the party and society as a whole needed to be
continuously
purged. There are no indications of personal viciousness. Like many
Nazi
criminals, Yezhov appeared calm, quiet, approachable, even
dispassionate. By the end
of 1938, Stalin had got what he wanted from the Great Terror, and had
no use
for the hysterically unpredictable Yezhov. The time of frantic
mobilization had
passed and Yezhov had become an embarrassment. In 1939, Lavrenty Beria
replaced
him as head of the NKVD and a few months later Yezhov was arrested. He
was
executed in 1940 under surreal charges of moral decay and treason. When
my
parents arrived in the USSR in late 1940 (they had both fought with the
International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War), they asked a veteran
Comintern executive what had happened to Yezhov. The old man whispered:
"He was liquidated because he had come to suspect even Stalin of
treason". TLS 12 Tháng
Hai 2009
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