In which I complete my journey through Laotian history…
(Written mostly at Kop Chai Deu restaurant, Vientiane on March 6th, 2007)
The Lao National Museum is, to put it succinctly, an odd place where communism is worshipped and Laos overflowed with prosperity once the foreign oppressors were vanquished. Skipping over a vast and (to me) completely uninteresting exhibit on the historical interactions between Laos and the Netherlands, I poked through the museum’s core, a series of dry and dusty rooms chronicling Laos’ endless conquests by, and wars of liberation against, pretty much everyone.
Local leftist luminaries (again I applaud alliteration) like Kaysorn Phomsivane, the founder of the revolutionary Pathet Lao, stood in sculpted and painted form alongside better-known international symbols like Ho Chi Minh, Gorbachev, Marx and Lenin. The main hall runs through a gamut of international occupations of Laos, from ancient Burmese and Khmer overlords, to the Japanese, the French, and eventually the Americans who attempted to hobble the Laotian communists through their Hmong tribal proxies. The room is speckled with paintings of villages forced to toil for the occupiers, and sun-faded black-and-white photos of cruelly injured civilians and victorious Lao revolutionaries. Interspersed throughout are glass display cases full of American M-16s, empty artillery shells and CIA field binoculars, among many other paraphernalia of war.
The 1962-75 proxy war that raged between the CIA and the North Vietnamese along Laos’ eastern border with Vietnam is known as “The Secret War” for good reason. It was one of the most underreported news stories of the 20th century, and yet it was staggering in scale. It’s vastly more complex than I’m able to relate – I have only the dimmest understanding of the war. The North Vietnamese essentially occupied half of Laos to gain vital strategic territory for the fight in Vietnam; the Americans responded by bombing the living shit out of the entire country. Sorry for the crassness. I wish I had a more polite way to describe it, but I don’t – over the nine or so years of the Secret War, the US ran nearly 300,000 bombing missions to support a thousand CIA agents and the 75,000 Hmong insurgents they were training. Those sorties dropped more tons of explosive on Laos (about 3 million tons, if memory serves) than were dropped on Japan or Germany during World War II – the unexploded remnants of which continue to mutilate Lao civilians by the hundreds every year. Yet the US government at the time refused to acknowledge that the war was even underway, while the CIA bomber pilots flew in civilian clothes lest they be captured.
Eventually, despite all this, the North Vietnamese crushed the US-supported Hmong rebels and their CIA “advisors”, driving the few Americans out and brutalizing the surviving Hmong. Why the history lesson? Because as little of this information was on display in the Lao museum as there is in the typical American history book. According to the government-approved histories I saw at the museum, the heroic Lao forces fought back against the cruel American imperialists, and through pluck and brilliance and ideological superiority, singlehandedly drove them out. I couldn’t find one mention of the fact that it was North Vietnam that invaded Laos first, nor that the NVA carried the major burden in evicting the Americans again; come to think of it, the entire country of Vietnam went unmentioned, along with the fact that Vietnam colonized Laos after the war and that Laos remains a Vietnamese political vassal to this day.
The government-approved storyline, one of triumphant communism vanquishing oppressors and unshackling the poor, apparently left no room for military occupation by Laos’ ideological brethren in Vietnam. Come to think of it, according to the museum, Laos’ history more or less ended entirely in 1975 when the last of the Americans were driven out and a workers’ paradise was presumably established. There was no mention of the grinding poverty that continues to enslave most Lao, nor of the periodic peasant uprisings in response to government oppression. There was certainly no talk of the sporadic and ongoing Hmong insurgency and the vicious ethnic persecution the government has launched to quell it.
There was a small room full of ascending bar charts which, though untranslated, clearly meant to indicate ever-expanding prosperity and a handful of photos of shining breweries and pharmaceutical plants. But the numbers don’t lie – Lao’s communist revolution was embarrassingly brief and unsuccessful even by the miserable standards of real-world Marxism. It gained traction in 1970, was renounced in all but name by 1990, and left the people as poor as when they started. Laos’ literacy rate (58%) remains a disgrace, rural poverty is some of the most oppressive you’ll see outside central Africa, and the Communist Party still clings furiously to power. Life in Laos, for the vast majority, remains nasty, brutish and short – not to mention illiterate and oppressed.
Needless to say, my one glimpse of official Laotian ideology left me perplexed and a touch pissed off. The Lao government has been very explicit that it has absolutely *no* interest in fostering multi-party elections, permitting political criticism, or loosening the tight reins on the press. Fortunately, some other things are changing here, and not a minute too soon. Economic growth has begun to take off and life is haltingly starting to improve for ordinary Laotians. It’ll be interesting to see how economic growth affects one-party rule – like a micro-China, perhaps.
In the meantime, at least all those vicious oppressors left Laos with some great food. I’m going out for pasta now – I’ll write more when I hit Vang Vieng tomorrow and start doing some outdoorsy stuff.
(Written mostly at Kop Chai Deu restaurant, Vientiane on March 6th, 2007)
The Lao National Museum is, to put it succinctly, an odd place where communism is worshipped and Laos overflowed with prosperity once the foreign oppressors were vanquished. Skipping over a vast and (to me) completely uninteresting exhibit on the historical interactions between Laos and the Netherlands, I poked through the museum’s core, a series of dry and dusty rooms chronicling Laos’ endless conquests by, and wars of liberation against, pretty much everyone.
Local leftist luminaries (again I applaud alliteration) like Kaysorn Phomsivane, the founder of the revolutionary Pathet Lao, stood in sculpted and painted form alongside better-known international symbols like Ho Chi Minh, Gorbachev, Marx and Lenin. The main hall runs through a gamut of international occupations of Laos, from ancient Burmese and Khmer overlords, to the Japanese, the French, and eventually the Americans who attempted to hobble the Laotian communists through their Hmong tribal proxies. The room is speckled with paintings of villages forced to toil for the occupiers, and sun-faded black-and-white photos of cruelly injured civilians and victorious Lao revolutionaries. Interspersed throughout are glass display cases full of American M-16s, empty artillery shells and CIA field binoculars, among many other paraphernalia of war.
The 1962-75 proxy war that raged between the CIA and the North Vietnamese along Laos’ eastern border with Vietnam is known as “The Secret War” for good reason. It was one of the most underreported news stories of the 20th century, and yet it was staggering in scale. It’s vastly more complex than I’m able to relate – I have only the dimmest understanding of the war. The North Vietnamese essentially occupied half of Laos to gain vital strategic territory for the fight in Vietnam; the Americans responded by bombing the living shit out of the entire country. Sorry for the crassness. I wish I had a more polite way to describe it, but I don’t – over the nine or so years of the Secret War, the US ran nearly 300,000 bombing missions to support a thousand CIA agents and the 75,000 Hmong insurgents they were training. Those sorties dropped more tons of explosive on Laos (about 3 million tons, if memory serves) than were dropped on Japan or Germany during World War II – the unexploded remnants of which continue to mutilate Lao civilians by the hundreds every year. Yet the US government at the time refused to acknowledge that the war was even underway, while the CIA bomber pilots flew in civilian clothes lest they be captured.
Eventually, despite all this, the North Vietnamese crushed the US-supported Hmong rebels and their CIA “advisors”, driving the few Americans out and brutalizing the surviving Hmong. Why the history lesson? Because as little of this information was on display in the Lao museum as there is in the typical American history book. According to the government-approved histories I saw at the museum, the heroic Lao forces fought back against the cruel American imperialists, and through pluck and brilliance and ideological superiority, singlehandedly drove them out. I couldn’t find one mention of the fact that it was North Vietnam that invaded Laos first, nor that the NVA carried the major burden in evicting the Americans again; come to think of it, the entire country of Vietnam went unmentioned, along with the fact that Vietnam colonized Laos after the war and that Laos remains a Vietnamese political vassal to this day.
The government-approved storyline, one of triumphant communism vanquishing oppressors and unshackling the poor, apparently left no room for military occupation by Laos’ ideological brethren in Vietnam. Come to think of it, according to the museum, Laos’ history more or less ended entirely in 1975 when the last of the Americans were driven out and a workers’ paradise was presumably established. There was no mention of the grinding poverty that continues to enslave most Lao, nor of the periodic peasant uprisings in response to government oppression. There was certainly no talk of the sporadic and ongoing Hmong insurgency and the vicious ethnic persecution the government has launched to quell it.
There was a small room full of ascending bar charts which, though untranslated, clearly meant to indicate ever-expanding prosperity and a handful of photos of shining breweries and pharmaceutical plants. But the numbers don’t lie – Lao’s communist revolution was embarrassingly brief and unsuccessful even by the miserable standards of real-world Marxism. It gained traction in 1970, was renounced in all but name by 1990, and left the people as poor as when they started. Laos’ literacy rate (58%) remains a disgrace, rural poverty is some of the most oppressive you’ll see outside central Africa, and the Communist Party still clings furiously to power. Life in Laos, for the vast majority, remains nasty, brutish and short – not to mention illiterate and oppressed.
Needless to say, my one glimpse of official Laotian ideology left me perplexed and a touch pissed off. The Lao government has been very explicit that it has absolutely *no* interest in fostering multi-party elections, permitting political criticism, or loosening the tight reins on the press. Fortunately, some other things are changing here, and not a minute too soon. Economic growth has begun to take off and life is haltingly starting to improve for ordinary Laotians. It’ll be interesting to see how economic growth affects one-party rule – like a micro-China, perhaps.
In the meantime, at least all those vicious oppressors left Laos with some great food. I’m going out for pasta now – I’ll write more when I hit Vang Vieng tomorrow and start doing some outdoorsy stuff.
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