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Jewish World Review April 11, 2001 / 18 Nissan, 5761

Chris Matthews

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'This is not your country'


http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- HANOI -- The big lesson from a week's visit to Vietnam is that the past remains potent. Just as African Americans cannot forget the legacy of slavery or the Jewish people the horror of the Holocaust, Asian nations retain a bitter memory of colonialism.

This capital, located just across the Tonkin Gulf, maintains a regular vigil to the same anti-colonial legacy as that ignited by the U.S. spy plane incident off China's Hainan Island.

I refer to the old French prison in Hanoi that once housed the patriotic heroes of Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh.

Here you see the torture chambers, the iron shackles and the guillotine that would be transported province to province - all remnants of a colonial government willing to do what was necessary to maintain its grip on Indochina.

A one-room exhibit, which could be easily overlooked, notes the presence within these same walls of the notorious Hanoi Hilton where U.S. fliers were forced to endure years of torture and ill-treatment. What the Vietnamese learned from the French, they practiced on men like John McCain.

What grabs the visitor is not the cover-up of the bad treatment endured by the Americans but the celebration, a half-century later, of the punishment perpetrated by the French colonialists.

The people of Vietnam do not want to forget, either, the price the West made them pay for their independence.

We in the West make no such effort, of course. We recall the era of European colonialism with nostalgia. Those fortunate enough to travel through Asia or Africa see the old hotels and sense the charm and elegance of the colonial lifestyle. Over a poolside drink at the quaint old Metropol here, we see nothing and think even less of the brutal politics that supported these French, British and Dutch empires.

Yet beneath the seductive surface of all the old colonial worlds was the willingness of the colonial power to enforce its rule, to torture and execute the colonized.

This is what we Americans need to keep in our minds in every dispute with the formerly colonized. Nationalism, the key to overthrowing Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe, is the key to understanding why Asians retain their prickly sensitivity to the West. They want to trade with us, want our tourist dollars, are willing to drive us around on their three-wheel bicycles. What they demand in return is recognition of their sovereignty.

When it comes to China or Vietnam or any other country that once felt the humiliation of colonialism, we must remember the scolding a North Vietnamese army officer once gave a complaining U.S. prisoner:

"This is not your country."

We don't have to like that sentiment, but as we work our way through situations like Hainan Island, we darn well have to know it.



JWR contributor Chris Matthews is the author of Hardball. and hosts a CNBC show of the same name. Send your comments to him by clicking here.

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