The Superior Civilization

Source: Le Libertaire, September 23, 1921.24

Hồ Chí Minh toàn tập, Tập 1, Chính trị Quốc gia - Sự thật, Hanoi, 2011, pp. 61-62.

Translation: Foreign Languages Press, Paris, 2021.

Our comrade Vigné d’Octon, using the rich documentation from his campaign, teaches the readers of Le Libertaire how, under the pretext of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity and in the name of “French democracy,” the Indochinese nations are being systematically poisoned.

But alongside this collective and official poisoning, which does great honor to the country of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, many murders are being committed by individual civilizers.

Let us make known some of these exploits which have been recorded and verified, either by witnesses or by the authors themselves, who, by a “superior” sadism characteristic of the colonizing heroes, recount them for the sake of boasting.

We extract the following story from the travel journal of a colonial soldier:

While the “Tonkinese” are entertaining themselves, some junks25 are selling fruits and shells on the starboard side. To get to us, the Annamites pulled out their long poles equipped with baskets containing their goods. Our only problem is choosing what to buy. Those who have the luxury of being able to pay, put in the bottom of these baskets the most diverse objects: pipe stems, panty buttons, and cigarette butts. (Maybe that’s how the native people learn about commercial honesty!) Sometimes, just for fun, a boat driver throws a bucket of boiling water on the backs of these unfortunate people. As a result, there are howls of pain, oars moving around in all directions, making the junks crash into each other.

Just below me, an Annamite burned from head to toe, completely mad, tries to jump into the sea. His brother, ignoring all danger, let's go of the oars, grabs him and forcibly lays him on the floor of the sampan. The struggle, lasting not more than two seconds, was hardly over when another bucket of boiling water, thrown with a sure hand, is poured over the misfortunate brother. I see him rolling around in his boat, his flesh torn to shreds, screaming in a way that is not human! And this makes us laugh; it all seems excessively funny to us. We have already gained the colonial spirit!

And further on we read:

At the time when I was there (in Tonkin), we hardly spent a week without seeing a few heads roll.

From these spectacles, I only retained one thing, and that is that we are far crueler and more barbaric than the native pirates themselves. Why bother with such “refinements” for someone who is about to die? Why all these physical tortures, multiple processions of prisoners through the villages?”

Nguyen A Q

 24 Le Libertaire was an anarchist newspaper. Hồ Chí Minh wrote three articles for it, pub-lished in three consecutive issues. Some historians claim that as proof that Hồ Chí Minh was attracted to anarchism in those years, regardless of the fact that he was part of the PCF lead-ership. A declassified letter intercepted by the French intelligence however, shows what Hồ Chí Minh’s opinion on anarchists: in it, he advises his friend to read some of the articles they write, “even if these are written by anarchists,” because they discuss the question of Viêt Nam. 25 A junk is a type of Chinese sailing ship with fully battened sails. The term “junk” was also used in the colonial period to refer to any large to medium-sized ships of the Austronesian cultures in Island Southeast Asia, with or without the junk rig.