Religion Part of New Society

Religion is not vilified in the DRV. Buddism was the predominant faith in pre-colonial times and the French established a significant enclave of Catholics, many of whom took to the South when the French were defeated, preferring to live under American tutelage.

The icons in an art museum I visited still attracted people who regarded them as good luck charms. At a pagoda we visited, this same attitude was prevalent. The meanings of the various symbols were explained to me and I was encouraged to take photographs of the interior.

Though the pagoda and grounds were well cared for, and I was informed that such foreign dignitaries as Prince Norodom Sihanouk frequently visited and stayed, there was a total lack of the sort of reverence expressed in churches or board meetings in our society. The pagodas mostly appeared to serve not as pipes for the opiates of the masses, but rather as the places where, in former times the privileged offspring of the Vietnamese wealthy elite could receive an education to help them preserve their position in society.

That evening it was a visit to the circus. In Hanoi there is a permanent circus tent and every night an audience fills it to capacity to see the things that happen in circuses every where; jugglers, acrobats, liontamers and, of course, clowns. How different these people really are, tears rolling down their faces at the antics of the clowns, to the picture of the rampaging inhuman fanatics created by the twisted paranoia of the American generals.

On the following day I had the first of my meetings with the Viet Nam National Union of Students. The student movement in Viet Nam had always been an important element in the opposition to the French colonialists and the American imperialists, right from the first days of protest marches in Saigon and Hue against both these forces in 1950. The students movement in those days also realised that success lay in incorporation with the political leadership and the other sectors of the Vietnamese population who were exploited by the colonialist power.