Description

For the Vietnamese communist leadership, the showdown between the French and the Vietnamese at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 is a glorious victory, part of the “inevitable” march towards full victory in 1975. It is certainly a party of this state’s nationalist legitimacy. This talk breaks with this myth of war to provide what is missing in this heroic account of war – the unprecedented, violent assault on the Vietnamese body. Goscha argues that Viet Minh bodies were particularly vulnerable to the technological destruction of modern war as decolonization and the Cold War combined in northern Vietnam in an explosive yet uneven mix. Lastly, he tries to suggest in this talk why some soldiers refused to go over the top at Dien Bien Phu, hypothesizing that they were not opposed to the war’s aims but disagreed with the Party asking them to die senselessly.

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Christopher Goscha is Professor of History at the Université de Québec à Montréal (UQAM). He is a specialist of Southeast Asian studies, History, and International relations. His many books include a Historical Dictionary of the Indochina War (2010), Connecting Histories: Decolonization and the Cold War in Southeast Asia (2008), l’Echec de la Paix: L’Indochine entre les deux accords de Genève (2008), l’Espace d’un regard: Paul Mus et l’Asie (2006), Le Viet-Nam depuis 1945 (2004), Contesting Visions of the Lao Past (2004), La Guerre du Vietnam et l’Europe (2003), Vietnam or Indochina? Contesting Concepts of Space in Vietnamese Nationalism (1995).