“I want to light a stick of incense to farewell my commander,” said war veteran Chu Van Hoan, one of thousands of mourners of all ages, many in tears, who queued for hours to pay their last respects at an altar inside the Hanoi home of General Vo Nguyen Giap who died on the evening of October 4. ‘Brother Van has left us’, lamented another old soldier using Giap’s wartime alias, in an online posting typical of the flood of sorrowful tributes that swept Vietnamese internet sites following news of his death.

There will be two days of national mourning for Giap who died in a military hospital in Hanoi a month after his 102^nd birthday. He will be buried in his native village in the central province of Quang Binh. His long-awaited death – he had been hospitalised since 2009 – marks the passing of the founding generation of Vietnamese communist leaders and confidants of Ho Chi Minh.

Celebrated at home and abroad as a master military strategist, Giap played a key role in formulating a body of military thought centered on the use of a weaker force to defeat a stronger one through a combination of guerilla and regular warfare. He formed the Vietnam People’s Army in 1944 with just 34 recruits and even fewer modern weapons. Within two years he commanded tens of thousands of poorly equipped yet determined fighters ready to resist France’s attempt to reclaim its Indochina empire. Victorious after the eight-year war against the French, Giap remained at the centre of the subsequent 16-year campaign to expel the Americans and reunify the country.

[pullquote]Hugely outclassed in conventional weaponry, and not a professional soldier (he never attended a military academy) Giap, personally, represented among many other things, the superiority of correct political analysis in any conflict, and the role played by a courageous, determined population who understood what was at stake.[/pullquote]

Giap’s gained his reputation as a great military leader despite his civilian background. A teacher and journalist, he seems not to have shouldered a weapon until well into his thirties. However victory in Vietnam would require more than feats of arms, Giap and his comrades believed. They were convinced the military outcome would rest on a political and social struggle to transform a feudal economy and society: that empowering the peasantry and overcoming illiteracy must go hand in hand with fighting the French.

Giap was born on August 25, 1911 in a small village in central Vietnam, a dirt-poor region that produced many of the early communist leaders. His parents may have chosen the name Giap, meaning armour, as a talisman; disease had taken their first three children in infancy. Giap’s upbringing was relatively comfortable thanks to his family’s small land holding. His mother was illiterate but his teacher-father introduced him to the Confucian classics and encouraged him to study.

Giap’s early life was a snapshot of the anti-colonial ferment that swept Vietnam from the 1930s.  Fluent in French he read Marx, Lenin and a nationalist tract by one Nguyen Ai Quoc, a pseudonym of Ho Chi Minh. The writings of Clausewitz and Napoleon on war also provided inspiration.

Giap was expelled from school for organising a student strike but still managed to gain a degree at the University of Hanoi. He briefly achieved his ambition to become a teacher – an esteemed profession in the Confucian social structure – but writing for radical publications earned him 13 months in jail and ended that career. Though his surname ‘Vo’ translates as ‘martial’ Giap later adopted the nom de guerre of ‘Van’ (literature) reflecting a yearning for his missed civilian vocation.

When Giap got out of prison he married a fellow communist, Nguyen Thi Quang Thai. Only a few months later, on the eve of World War 2 the party leadership ordered him to southern China to link up with the exiled Ho Chi Minh.  Giap and Quang Thai never saw one another again. She was arrested by French secret police and died under torture in Hanoi’s Hoa Lo prison (later nicknamed the Hanoi Hilton by US POWs). Their daughter survived and became a leading doctor. The French also executed Giap’s sister-in-law and killed his grandfather by dragging him behind a car.

Giap spent the war years building a resistance base in the mountains and caves of North Vietnam – the launch pad for a nationwide armed revolt.  He went on to mastermind the epic 1954 siege and destruction of the French garrison in the valley of Dien Bien Phu. Giap’s peasant army dragged heavy artillery over mountains to surprise and trap French troops.  It took 12,000 prisoners, toppled France’s empire in Indochina and inspired anti-colonial movements around the world.

With an independent state in North Vietnam the revolution now had a secure base for the struggle to reunite the country after a century of foreign control and territorial division. President Ho Chi Minh appointed Giap as Defence Minister – a post he held for a quarter century – and chose him as the public face of the party’s 1956 apology for the “excesses” of land reform – including mass executions of landlords and other “class enemies” – though others were directly responsible for the campaign.

Giap’s public appearances in the wake of a backlash over land reform was seen as a move by Ho Chi Minh to direct the spotlight on his protégé preparatory to making him party general secretary, in place of the disgraced Truong Chinh. However the top post eventually passed to a third figure, Le Duan (who may have owed his life to Giap’s wife Quang Thai. Fluent in French, she is said to have interceded with prison authorities and saved Duan from imminent execution).

As Defence Minister Giap was nominally in charge of the 1968 Tet offensive, another battle of global significance. The extent of his control over that campaign remains in dispute, however.  Tet ‘68 seems to have been a project of the party’s southern leadership and it is doubtful whether Giap fully supported it. After fierce internal debate it was adopted by Hanoi but main force troops from the north were withheld from most of the fighting.

The spectacular simultaneous attack on more than 100 cities and towns throughout South Vietnam failed in narrow military terms – most captured territory was soon abandoned – but succeeded in its aim of turning US public opinion against the war in an election year. Television covering of marines battling guerillas in the grounds of the American embassy in Saigon exposed the spurious claims of US commanders that they were winning the war and broke the US will to fight.

Giap initiated and oversaw construction and operation of the “Ho Chi Minh Trail” which proved crucial to the struggle for the south. This 3000km network of roads, tracks, fuel pipelines, depots and hospitals was cut through jungle and over mountains. It survived as an unbroken link between northern bases and southern battlefields, via Laos and Cambodia, despite 15 years of incessant bombing.

Official Vietnamese accounts of the war traditionally downplay the roles of individuals – Ho Chi Minh’s excepted. This is in keeping with the party’s customary emphasis on group responsibility (portraits of living leaders are exceedingly rare). While Giap was being lauded as a military genius in the West, the party leadership sought to minimise his contribution to the liberation of the south.  This went beyond the need to reinforce a collective ethos.

Having lost his patron with the death of Ho Chi Minh in 1969, Giap fell victim to an internal struggle over power and ideology.  Despite his many talents other leaders had superior “class credentials”. Giap had read politics at a French-run university while most of his elite comrades were getting their political education through long stints in French prisons. That this could count against a man who endured years of hardship in the cause while the enemy put to death his closest relatives, speaks volumes about the ferocity of the struggle all were engaged in.

Soon after the liberation of the south, army commander Van Tien Dung, Giap’s deputy at Dien Bien Phu, was given main credit for the 1975 offensive which expelled the Americans. Dung replaced Giap as Defence Minister in 1980 and Giap lost his Political Bureau position soon after, leaving him with the junior job of deputy premier responsible for science and, for a time, family planning. Some low-level party cadres in Hanoi, where I then lived, could not disguise their disappointment and embarrassment at Giap’s humiliation.

Giap apparently argued against a prolonged Vietnamese military presence in Cambodia following Vietnam’s overthrow of the Chinese-backed Khmer Rouge in January 1979. He is believed to have proposed an early withdrawal rather than the 10-year occupation which sapped the already-weakened Vietnamese economy.

In his final years Giap lent his stature as a national hero untainted by scandal to the emerging environmental movement. In 2007 a Hanoi newspaper published the general’s open letter urging the leadership to preserve the old National Assembly building (they went ahead and demolished it). In 2009 Giap called on party leaders to reverse their approval of a proposed bauxite mine in Vietnam’s central highlands. The Political Bureau had sanctioned the project without consulting the increasingly assertive National Assembly.  Giap’s letter objected to the Chinese-invested project on environmental and social grounds and reflected broad public opposition to the scheme.

It is most unlikely he was exploited as an unwitting figurehead for these causes. Foreign dignatories who called at Giap’s colonial villa in Hoang Dieu Street – near his former command post and underground bunker  in the old citadel of Hanoi – found the then 97-year-old physically frail but still mentally sharp. Drawing on his credentials as an early champion of the environment, Giap’s letter reminded the party leadership he had overseen a study into bauxite mining in the central highlands in the early 1980s. Experts including Soviet scientists had advised Giap against it because of the “risk of serious ecological damage.”

Despite his criticism of the authorities recent official publications have acknowledged Giap’s position in the pantheon of the revolution, calling him one of history’s great generals. He was a key figure in 2005 ceremonies to celebrate the 30^th anniversary of the liberation of Saigon, his 100^th birthday saw the publication of several books hailing his contributions and a state-funded biopic is in production. Soon Vietnamese streets and parks will carry his name, joining those of other dead commanders who resisted a series of invaders stretching back to antiquity.

Chris Ray is a Sydney-based Asia analyst and journalist. He worked for the Vietnam News Agency in Hanoi from 1976–78.

Sean Hannity: Be sure to wear nose clips when approaching this tower of excrement.

I remember reading the New York Times review of Bill Ayers’ first book Fugitive Days while sitting on a curb in Greenwich Village on September 11, 2001. The haze from the demolished towers hung on the air as thick as the fear felt by almost every person in the city that day.  After reading the review, I thought to myself about how the book’s release could not have come at a worse time.  The destruction of the Twin Towers and the media hullabaloo around that destruction was already overriding any shred of common sense.  It would be a long while before any rational discussion of the Weather Underground would take place in the United States.  For some segments of US society, there would never be a rational discussion.

Bill Ayers writes about that first book and the reaction to it in his newest release, Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident.  He discusses why he wrote Fugitive Days, the interaction with the media in the wake of its publication and the attacks of September 11, 2001, and much, much more.   It is the much, much more that is the real story in this book.  Ayers writes about raising children and he writes about teaching them.  He also writes about helping friends in prison and responding to public campaigns attacking himself and his family.  The narrative Ayers provides is honest, personal, political and occasionally funny.  The best example of the latter is the story he tells about him and his wife Bernardine Dohrn having dinner with a group that included right-wing bloggers Andrew Breinbart and Carlson Tucker.  The dinner was the result of a fundraiser for a humanities council Ayers and Dohrn were part of.  The dinner guests had bid the highest for the opportunity to get inside the Ayers/Dohrn home.  Despite whatever they were anticipating, it seems everyone had a great time, enjoyed the food, drink and even the conversation.  Ayers’ retelling is bound to evoke a few chuckles from almost every reader, if only for the absurdity of the spectacle.

During Obama’s first presidential campaign Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground Organization (WUO) became a campaign issue.  In Public Enemy, Ayers writes about receiving death threats thanks in large part to (what he calls) the caricature of him being broadcast by the mainstream media, especially from the studio of FOXNews host Sean Hannity.  Reading his narrative about those months, and as another indication of how implacable this element of the media can be, I was reminded of my own interaction with Hannity’s staff when they called me in October 2008 asking if I would like to appear on his show to discuss the WUO.  I responded by telling the staffer on the phone that I disagreed with pretty much everything Hannity said and found him to be a disagreeable human being.  After a quick consultation with Hannity, the staffer called me back and rescinded my invitation by saying that they would find a more agreeable guest.

Public Enemy is mostly a collection of anecdotes from Bill Ayers recent life.  He does begin the book with a chapter about his last years underground and he touches on the reasons he and Bernardine decided to surface in 1980. He also writes about the circumstances he and Bernardine faced after the 1981 Black Liberation Army/May 19^thCommunist Organization Brinks holdup in Nyack, NY went wrong and resulted in the deaths of lawmen and robbers.  Two former WUO members were involved in the action and both were charged with several crimes, including murder. As part of a fishing expedition by the authorities, Bernardine was called before a grand jury, refused to testify and ended up behind bars.  Ayers writes tellingly about the stress and emotional changes the entire episode put him and his family through.  Politics are part of the story in these pages, but the primary impetus is on family and friendship. Indeed, the truest hero in the book is the family’s New York child care provider, BJ.

In no way apologetic, the book is a well-written consideration of an engaged life lived in a contentious time.  In his anecdotes and discussion, Ayers portrays a political world where too much (if not everything, to borrow a line from Bob Dylan) is broken.  When one lives in such a world, the best we can do is to try and make it work for as many as possible.  Just as importantly, one must try and live a life that one will not be ashamed of when the reckoning day comes.  To be sure, there are those whom Ayers discusses in his book that think Bill Ayers very existence is a major blemish on the human race.  However, to his credit, the book doesn’t spend time lambasting his critics, although it does poke a little fun in their direction.  Public Enemy is not an attempt by Ayers to reconstruct his public persona.  He makes it clear that he has no control over how people perceive him and, even if he did, he probably wouldn’t change much.  The title itself seems slightly tongue in cheek, but pointedly so.  Here, says Ayers, is your public enemy.  Take it however you want.

Ron Jacobs is the author of the just released novel All the Sinners, Saints. He is also the author of  The Way the Wind Blew: a History of the Weather Underground and Short Order Frame Up and The Co-Conspirator’s Tale. Jacobs’ essay on Big Bill Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch’s collection on music, art and sex, Serpents in the Garden.  His third novel All the Sinners Saints is a companion to the previous two and is due out in April 2013.  He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press.  He can be reached at: ronj1955@gmail.com.

Louvain, Belgium.

Once upon a time, in the early 1970′s, many people, including myself, thought that all the “struggles” of that period were linked: the Cultural Revolution in China, the guerillas in Latin America, the Prague Spring and the East European “dissidents”, May 68, the civil rights movement, the opposition to the Vietnam war, and the nominally socialist anti-colonial movements in Africa and Asia. We also thought that the “fascist” regimes in Spain, Portugal and Greece, by analogy with WWII, could only be overthrown through armed struggle, very likely protracted.

None of these assumptions were correct. The Cultural Revolution had nothing to do with the anti-authoritarian movements in the West, the Eastern European dissidents were, in general, pro-capitalist and pro-imperialist, and often fanatically so, the Latin American guerrillas were a pipe dream (except in Central America) and the national liberation movements were just that: they (quite rightly) aimed at national liberation and called themselves socialist or communist only because of the support offered to them by the Soviet Union or China. The southern European “fascist” regimes transformed themselves without offering a serious resistance, let alone an armed struggle. Many other authoritarian regimes followed suit: in Eastern Europe, in Latin America, in Indonesia, Africa and now in part of the Arab world. Some collapsed from inside, other crumbled after a few demonstrations.

I was reminded of these youthful illusions when I read a petition “in solidarity with the millions of Syrians who have been struggling for dignity and freedom since March 2011”, whose list of signatories includes a veritable who’s who of the Western Left. The petition claims that “The revolution in Syria is a fundamental part of the North African revolutions, yet it is also an extension of the Zapatista revolt in Mexico, the landless movement in Brazil, the European and North American revolts against neoliberal exploitation, and an echo of Iranian, Russian and Chinese movements for freedom.”

The signatories of course demand the immediate departure from power of Bashar al-Assad, which is supposed to be the only “hope for a free, unified, and independent Syria”. They also characterize Russia, China and Iran as standing “in support of the slaughter of people”, although they are “allegedly friends of the Arabs”; they acknowledge that “the U.S. and its Gulf allies have intervened in support of the revolutionaries”, but blame them for “having done so with a clear cynical self-interest” and trying to “crush and subvert the uprising”. It is not clear how this squares with the next line of the text, which claims that “regional and world powers have left the Syrian people alone”.

The upshot of the petition consists in grandiose claims of “solidarity” from “intellectuals, academics, activists, artists, concerned citizens and social movements”, “with the Syrian people to emphasize the revolutionary dimension of their struggle and to prevent the geopolitical battles and proxy wars taking place in their country.” Nothing less!

This petition is worth analyzing in detail, because it nicely summarizes everything that is wrong in today’s mainstream leftist thinking and it both illustrates and explains why there is no Left left in the West. The same sort of thinking dominated the Western Left’s thinking during the Kosovo and the Libyan wars, and to some extent during the wars in Afghanistan (“solidarity with Afghan women”) and Iraq (“they will be better off without Saddam”).

First of all, the presentation of the facts about Syria is very doubtful. I am no expert on Syria, but if the people are so united against the regime, how come that it has resisted for so long? There have been relatively few defections in the army or in the diplomatic and political personnel. Given that the majority of Syrians are Sunnis and that the regime is constantly depicted as relying on the support of the “Alawi sect”, something must be wanting in that narrative about Syria.

Next, like it or not, the actions of “Russia, China and Iran” in Syria have been in accordance with international law, unlike those of the “U.S. and its Gulf allies”. From the viewpoint of international law, the current government of Syria is legitimate and responding to its request for help is perfectly legal, while arming rebels is not. Of course, the leftists who sign the petition would probably object to that aspect of international law, because it favors governments over insurgents. But just imagine the chaos that would be created if every Great Power was arming the rebels of its choice all over the world. One could deplore the selling of arms to “dictatorships”, but the U.S. is hardly in a position to lecture the world on that topic.

Moreover, it is “Russia and China” who have, by their vote at the UN prevented another U.S. intervention, like the one in Libya, which the Western Left, opposed very lukewarmly, if at all. In fact, given that U.S. used the U.N. Resolution on Libya to carry out a regime change that the resolution did not authorize, isn’t it natural that Russia and China feel that they were taken for a ride in Libya and say: “never again!”?

The petition sees the events in Syria as an “extension of the Zapatista revolt in Mexico, the landless movement in Brazil, the European and North American revolts against neoliberal exploitation, and an echo of Iranian, Russian and Chinese movements for freedom.”, but they are careful not to link them to the anti-imperialist governments in Latin America, since the latter stand squarely against foreign interventions and for the respect of national sovereignty.

Finally, what should make anybody think that the “immediate” departure of Bashar al-Assad would lead to a “free, unified and independent Syria”? Aren’t the examples of Iraq and Libya enough to cast some doubts on such optimistic pronouncements?

That brings us to a second problem with the petition, which is its tendency towards revolutionary romanticism. The present-day Western Left is the first to denounce the “Stalinist” regimes of the past, including those of Mao, Kim Il Sung or Pol Pot. But do they forget that Lenin fought against tsarism, Stalin against Hitler, Mao against the Kuomintang, Kim Il Sung against the Japanese and that the last two ones, as well as Pol Pot, fought against the U.S.? If history should have thought us anything, it is that struggling against oppression does not necessarily turn you into a saint. And given that so many violent revolutions of the past have turned sour, what reason is there to believe that the “revolution” in Syria, increasingly taken over by religious fanatics, will emerge as a shining example of freedom and democracy?

There have been repeated offers of negotiations by “Russia, China and Iran”, as well as from the “Assad regime” with the opposition as well as with its sponsors (the “U.S. and its Gulf allies”). Shouldn’t one give peace and diplomacy a chance? The “Syrian regime” has modified its constitution; why be so certain that this cannot lead a “democratic future”, while a violent revolution can? Shouldn’t one give reform a chance?

However, the main defect of this petition, as well as with similar appeals from the humanitarian  interventionist Left in the past, is: to whom are they talking? The rebels in Syria want as many sophisticated weapons as possible- no signatory of the petition can deliver them, and it is hard to see how the “global civil society, not ineffective and manipulative governments” can do it. Those rebels want Western governments to provide them with such weapons-they couldn’t care less what the Western Left thinks. And those Western government hardly know that the wishful thinking Left even exists. And if they did, why would they listen to people with no serious popular support, and so no means of pressuring governments? The best proof of that is given by the cause to which so many signatories have devoted a good part of their lives: Palestine. Which Western government pays any attention to the demands of the “Palestine solidarity movement”?

Just because the petition has no effect in Syria does not mean that it has no effect tout court. It weakens and confuses what is left of antiwar sentiments, by stressing that “our” priority must be empty gestures of solidarity with a rebellion that is already militarily supported by the West. Once this mindset is acquired, it becomes psychologically difficult to oppose U.S. intervention in the internal affairs of Syria, since intervention is precisely what the revolutionaries that we must “support” want (apparently, they have not noticed, unlike the petitioners, that the West wants to “crush and subvert the uprising”). Of course, defenders of the petition will say that they don’t “support” the more violent extremists in Syria, but who exactly are they supporting then, and how? Moreover, the false impression that the “world powers have left the Syrian people alone” (while, in fact, there is a constant flood of arms and jihadists into Syria) comes partly from the fact that the U.S. is not foolish enough to risk a World War, given that Russia seems to mean what it says in this affair. The thought that we might be on the brink of a World War never seems to occur to the petitioners.

Defenders of the petition will probably say that “we” must denounce both U.S. imperialism and the oppressive regimes against which the “people” revolt. But that only shows the depth of their delusions: why claim doing two things at once, when one is not capable of doing either, even partly?

If such petitions are worse than doing nothing, what should the Left do? First of all, mind its own business, which means struggling at home. This is a lot harder than expressing a meaningless solidarity with people in faraway lands. And struggling for what? Peace through demilitarization of the West, a non-interventionist policy, and putting diplomacy, not military threats, at the center of international relations. Incidentally, a non-interventionist policy is advocated by the libertarians and by the paleoconservative Right. This fact, plus invocation of pre-World War II history (the Spanish civil war, the Munich agreements), is constantly used by the Left to give anti-interventionism a bad name. But this is silly: Hitler is not really being constantly resurrected, and there are no serious military threats faced by the West.  In the present situation, it is a perfectly legitimate concern of American citizens to cut back the costs of Empire.

In fact, it would be perfectly possible to set up a broad Left-Right coalition of people opposed to militarism and interventionism. Of course, within that coalition, people might still disagree on Gay marriage but, important as this issue may be, it should perhaps not prevent us from working together on issues that might also seem important to some people, such as World peace, the defense of the U.N. and of international law, and the dismantling of the U.S. empire of bases. Besides, it is not unlikely that a majority of the American public could be gained to such positions if sustained and well organized campaigns were set up to persuade them.

But of course, the spirit of the petition goes exactly in the opposite direction, towards more U.S. involvement and interventions. Many signatories certainly think of themselves as anti-imperialists and pro-peace, and some of them have had an important role in opposing previous U.S. wars. But they do not seem to have noticed that the tactics of imperialism have changed since the days of the national liberation movements. Now, that decolonization is complete (with the exception of Palestine), the U.S. is attacking governments, not revolutionary movements, that are considered to be too independent. And, in order to do that, they use a variety of means that are similar in their tactics to the revolutionary or progressive movements of the past: armed struggle, civil disobedience, government funded “N”GO’s, colored revolutions, etc.

The latest example of these tactics is the attempt by Western governments to use the LGBT community as ideological storm troopers against Russia and the Winter Olympics, in a transparent effort to deflect public attention from the embarrassing fact that, in the Snowden affair, it is Russia and not the U.S. that is on the side of freedom. It is to be feared that the humanitarian interventionist Left will jump on the bandwagon of this new crusade. Yet, as Gilad Atzmon has pointed out, with his usual slightly provocative style, it is unlikely that this will do any good to the LGBT community in Russia, since this sort of support allows their opponents to brand them as bearers of foreign influence. It is not a good idea for any minority, anywhere in the world, to be seen as agents of a foreign power, and least of all, of a government so hated for its arrogance and its interventionism as the present U.S. administration. And incidentally, the people who call for boycott of the Winter games in Russia had no objection to holding the Olympic games in London, which implies that, in their eyes, taking anti-gay measures is a serious crime, whereas wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are mere peccadillos.

People who succumb to the illusions of revolutionary romanticism or who side with the apparent underdog, regardless of the underdog’s agenda, are being taken in by the tactics of present-day imperialism. But those who aspire to a more peaceful and more just world order, and who think that a precondition of this order is the weakening of U.S. imperialism, easily see through this camouflage. These two different world views divide both the Left and the Right: liberal interventionists and neoconservatives on one side, libertarians, paleoconservatives and traditional leftists on the other, and it may call for new and heterodox alliances.

JEAN BRICMONT teaches physics at the University of Louvain in Belgium. He is author of Humanitarian Imperialism.  He can be reached at Jean.Bricmont@uclouvain.be