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Shame and Revolution: Vietnam’s potent and storied anticolonialism

Vietnam’s potent and storied anticolonialism is founded upon a unique sense of national shame

This tradition of anti-imperial struggle culminated in the rule of the Vietnamese Communist Party whose official political ideology is ‘Hồ Chí Minh thought’, named after the narrative’s protagonist, the first president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. After gaining independence from a thousand years of Chinese rule in 939, the Vietnamese conquered the Cham and the Khmer people, taking their lands and participating in what we would call genocide as they marched southward in the 15th century to create their settler colonial state. In Black Skin, White Masks(1952), Frantz Fanon defines all colonised peoples as those ‘in whom an inferiority complex has taken root, whose local cultural originality has been committed to the grave.’ But the anticolonialists discussed above were conscious that a thousand years of Chinese domination meant the shame of taking almost everything – philosophy, political systems, literature, language – from China.

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