War and the Ivory Tower: Algeria and Vietnam

 by Nathan Alexander  

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In his recent book, David L. Schalk proposes to examine the role French and American intellectuals played during the Algerian and Vietnam wars, paying scant attention to the details of their engagement or the consequences of their writing.

War and the Ivory Tower: Algeria and Vietnam
by David L. Schalk
Afterward by Benjamin Stora and George C. Herring
University of Nebraska Press, 2005
Ppbk., 258 pgs.
ISBN: 0803293437
This review was based upon the 1991 Oxford University Press edition.

As the war in Iraq continues, parallels between American involvement in the Middle East and Vietnam continue.  And while the Bush administration has repeatedly denied similarities exist, one that is undeniable is that an overwhelming number of academics, or at least those published in major media outlets, oppose further American military activity. For this reason, David Schalk’s War and the Ivory Tower: Algeria and Vietnam, published at the time of the first Gulf War in 1991, gives insight into academic discourse and its relation to an ongoing military conflict.

Schalk prefaces his book by suggesting that the role of the intellectual in modern society is declining. Intellectuals, he argues, citing the omnipresent French philosophe and TV personality Bernard-Henry Levi, are in danger of extinction. They are losing their raison d’etre because they have retreated into the “Ivory Tower” and are no longer engaged in pressing social and political concerns. Schalk proposes to examine how this was not always the case by looking at the role French and American intellectuals played during the Algerian and Vietnam wars.

Schalk believes that during their countries’ respective wars, French and American intellectuals follow a parallel trajectory of increasing “engagement.” By this Schalk seems to mean intellectuals were increasingly willing to defy public authority in expressing opposition to their countries’ respective wars. Schalk is careful to argue that most intellectuals did not become what he calls “embrigadement,” or completely subordinate to a particular political position. They remain “above the fray,” so to speak, and presumably this has something to do with maintaining their status as intellectuals. The Ivory Tower, apparently, is quite literally something that gives the intellectual a better “view” of the world, than those fighting it out in the streets. 

Schalk divides the period of his intellectuals’ engagement into three phases. First, intellectuals in both wars were willing to publicly debate national policy, using “logical persuasion,” in attempting to bring about an end to the war. Second, intellectuals chose to argue against war according to ethical principles, rejecting American and French involvement in Vietnam and Algeria as morally unacceptable. Finally, intellectuals entered into a third phase towards the end of the respective conflicts which was marked by a limited civil disobedience.

I found Schalk’s book to be unconvincing because in its treatment of intellectuals, it conceptually reinserts them into precisely that Ivory Tower that he insists they should so hastily exit. Schalk’s intellectuals are scholarly heroes — and he rewards them with the appropriate written hyperbole: their scribbling is “brilliant.” It possesses “force and clarity” and can be “devastating.” Their efforts are “extraordinary” and “imaginative” and even “staggering.” In fact, the only thing that really can be held against these intellectuals is that their words cannot (as far as we know) physically leap off their pages, grab bricks, and charge into the streets. Perhaps with a little more Starbucks coffee . . .

Schalk pays scant attention to the details of his intellectuals’ “engagement,” assuming that anyone who is “against war” is somehow “engaged” against the political establishment. However, many of the intellectuals Schalk admires were not only wrong in their assessments of the war, but their efforts often proved disastrous to those on whose behalf they were allegedly (albeit verbally) fighting. Regarding Vietnam, much of the “engaged writing” on the war has not only proven wrong (or egregiously short sighted), but served to mythologize the war itself. To former North Vietnamese communist Bui Diem, for example,¹ American abandonment of South Vietnam after the 1973 Paris peace treaty was incomprehensible.  America, in Diem’s view, failed to take political advantage of the hard earned victories of late 1968 and 1969, refused to acknowledge the clear military gains of 1970-1972, and simply went home. In Diem’s opinion, America could have brokered a political settlement of some sort, preserving some degree of autonomy for the South Vietnamese.

American abandonment of South Vietnam cannot be explained by its presidential political decision makers. The efforts the United States made to defend South Vietnam from 1959-1973 make no sense in lieu of the radical elimination of aid and air support to the Republic of Vietnam following the Paris peace treaty. Instead, one must look to the American culture which legitimated this political incoherence. It is in the writing of “engaged” intellectuals that one finds the best explanation.

Perhaps the most important group of engaged intellectuals were the “Tet Historians,” a group of war journalists who came to oppose the war following the 1968 Tet Offensive.  In the work of David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan and Francis Fitzgerald, one finds the sorts of arguments which justify US abandonment of South Vietnam.  In Francis Fitzgerald’s Fire in the Lake, the Vietnam war was unwinnable because America opposed “Confucian Marxists” who had been resisting invaders for centuries. In David Halberstam’s Best and the Brightest, American “hubris” blinded the US from realizing that its efforts were hopeless. And in the work of Neil Sheehan and others, the South Vietnamese army and government were hopelessly corrupt and unwilling to fight. What all these writers had in common was the belief that quasi-mythical forces prevented the US from bringing democracy to South Vietnam. Hence their books do not attempt to demonstrate how the war effort might have succeeded (or even practical reasons why it failed). Instead, all rely on unprovable theses which, if one chooses to believe them, damn the entire enterprise from the start (one might say eternity).

However, this is not to say that their writing was ineffectual. After the 1968 Tet Offensive, American intellectuals who opposed the war supplied a war-weary country with a rhetoric which enabled “abandonment with honor.” It was a shift in the cultural representation of the war which enabled the so-called “Decent Interval” and not the other way around.  Following the negative media coverage of the Tet uprising, America was hardly in a mood to examine closely the Tet historians’ arguments (to this date, there has never been a serious study of the South Vietnamese army, despite its “unwillingness to fight” being a central tenet of the Tet school). Americans preferred to believe that the war had been unwinnable from the outset — a mythical understanding of the war but one that united both political left and right in an heroic, if defeated, dignity.

Schalk’s ideal of intellectuals committed to social justice is an appealing one, and in the other half of his book he examines the cases of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus and the Algerian war. While it is not always easy to determine what Schalk thinks of either, as best as I can tell Camus fails to live up to the role of the intellectual because he qualifies his opposition to the French war in Algeria by insisting that while, “I believe in justice, . . . I will defend my mother above justice.” (Je crois à  la justice, mais je défendrai ma mère avant la justice.) Camus, born in Algeria, believed it to be his native home and while opposing French colonization, envisioned a future for himself and fellow French Algerians after the conflict was resolved. Consequently, he would not unequivocally justify the violence of the Algerian revolutionaries. For this reason, Schalk entitles his section on Camus, “Colonizer of Goodwill.”

Sartre, on the other hand, earns Schalk’s praise for his monolithic condemnation of France’s role in Algeria — and any compromise which might have attempted to see the conflict in more nuanced terms. Sartre’s engagement, according to Schalk, reached its peak when he signed the Manifesto of 121, a document calling for civil disobedience to protest the war. While Camus saw the French involvement in Algeria as complex and tried to speak for its future as one which might include (albeit as citizens) Frenchmen and women such as his mother, Schalk seems to admire Sartre, whose simplistic and militant opinions exonerate him, in Schalk’s eyes, from the taint of colonialism.

As was the case with Vietnam, Schalk again examines his intellectuals outside of any historical context, applying the simplistic “for or against war” as a sort of litmus test to determine the intellectual’s commitment to politics. Hence he ignores Sartre’s history of embarrassing political allegiances² and is content, like Sartre no doubt was, to see Algeria’s tortured history following independence as something to be blamed on French colonialism — and ignored.

What is missing from Schalk’s book from the outset is a theory of the intellectual’s relationship to power. For Schalk, intellectuals are a species of prophet. They are divine creatures who exist outside of time and space, yet periodically enter into the world of mortals to save them from ignorance and savagery. It never occurs to Schalk to question the intention of intellectuals, let alone examine the consequences of their writing. Intellectuals cannot be “embrigadement” quite simply because they are creatures of the
Ivory Tower.

A less sacrosanct view of intellectuals would acknowledge that they are mortals like the rest of us, hold particular viewpoints and should be held accountable to power, much in the same way as everyone else. What distinguishes intellectuals from the rest of us, however, is that intellectuals have access to the written word in ways rarely available to the average citizen. This does not mean that intellectuals are somehow exempt from the sway of power. It means merely that they have the capacity to represent it. And as representatives of power, they should be subject to critique in the same way one would criticize the government and other forces which embody power.

Looking back on the Vietnam war, intellectuals succeeded in providing a mythology that enabled the US to extricate itself from an unpopular conflict. When we look beyond the fierce theatrics of partisans (safe in the United States), we see that intellectuals were so successful that both political left and right were able to take advantage of their constructions. Richard Nixon’s policy of "Vietnamization," a process doomed from the outset to failure,³ united left and right as an antidote to American “hubris.” It justified  US withdrawal and recast the war in ethnic terms, transforming the struggle against communism into one of ethnic self-determination. Ethically, we were obligated to support democracy — especially a democracy under attack by communism. And we were capable of doing so. The Vietnam War imagined as an ethnic affair radically changed our stakes in Southeast Asia. After all, we weren’t Vietnamese. 

Seen from historical perspective, Schalk’s “crisis of intellectuals” can only take place if one takes seriously the notion that intellectuals somehow exist independently of society in the first place. While social groups have traditionally represented themselves — generally in pious and sectarian terms — the idea that intellectuals are needed to provide this service presupposes that the mass of humanity takes intellectuals as seriously as they take themselves. In fact, it is the social group which engenders the “committed intellectual,” and only the illusion of the “Ivory Tower” could make one think otherwise. So long as there is social division, there will be “committed intellectuals” who peddle representation in exchange for proximity to power.

Schalk’s ideal of a politically and ethically committed intellectual is nonetheless an attractive one. However, his concept of the Ivory Tower prevents him from distinguishing between intellectuals who are committed to human rights — which are also individual rights — and those who are opportunistic. While Camus’ defense of his mother was hardly a solution to the difficulties of Algerian colonialism, Sartre’s monolithic attitude towards the political situation in Algeria offered little ethical insight to a debate which had long since degenerated into a war between groups which rationalized murder in the name of justice.

Today, much like in 1969, America finds itself embroiled in a complex war in a foreign country, defending a people who are different from themselves, for a cause which, in the absence of further attacks on America itself, seems increasingly opaque.  Americans, in short, are looking for a way out — and unsurprisingly, “committed intellectuals” have been hard at work spinning myths which will justify precisely that. The notion that the entire imbroglio is simply “George Bush’s fault” is perhaps the most egregious — but in a time when America is divided along partisan lines, perhaps the most effective. As Bush’s approval among Republicans also drops, a growing American consensus might come to agree with the following syllogism: George Bush is wrong; therefore should Iraq collapse, like South Vietnam, it’s not our fault. The two propositions are unrelated. It would take a popular myth — one put forward forcefully in moral and even mildly illegal terms, to believe otherwise.

War and the Ivory Tower: Algeria and Vietnam is available on Amazon.com.

Endnotes

1. Tin Bui, From Enemy to Friend: A North Vietnamese Perspective on the War (Naval Institute Press, 2002).

2. See Ronald Aronson’s biography of Sartre, Philosophy in the World (Verso, 1980).

3. See James Willbanks’ Abandoning Vietnam: How America Left and South Vietnam Lost its War (Kansas, 2004).

Book Reviews, Vietnam War

Read more articles by Nathan Alexander