Australian Left Review

Article Title

Vietnam: A View of Human Nature

Authors

Tom Hayden

Abstract

Most visitors to North Vietnam return deeply impressed with the society they have seen. The Vietnamese revolutionaries seem epic in their achievements, legendary already in their moral stature. “Our struggle has a sacred significance in the revolutionary world”, an official Hanoi spokesman said in winter 1973. They invoke an optimistic philosophy about human possibilities which many Westerners would label impossibly romantic.