The Wages of "Settlers" is Srebrenica, Part II: Indochina

Just as Tito's Yugoslavia put a lid on the ethnic tensions within the Balkans, French colonialism did the same in another region equally divided by mountains and rivers: Indochina. The Mekong River flows through the Laotian capital of Vientiane and the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, and its delta encompasses the former capital of what was South Vietnam, Saigon, now known as Ho Chi Minh City. The Red River flows through Hanoi, capital of a united Vietnam. The Irrawady River flows through Yangon, the capital of modern Myanmar until 2006. The Mae Nam Nan flows through Bangkok, capital of Thailand.

All of these rivers save the Mae Nam Nan arise out of Himalayan glaciers; the Mae Nam Nan flows from mountains in the north of Thailand itself. Together with China's Yangtse River, the Mekong and Irrawady flow in a succession of high Himalayan canyons only about 100 kilometers apart from each other on the Chinese side of the Sino-Myanma border.

The rivers, jungles, and mountains dissect this land and make travel more difficult than even the many ranges of the Balkans. This has had immense political repercussions.

First off, the land is called "Indochina" because neither India nor China were definitively able to add it to their cultural sphere. Vietnam was initially called "Nam Viet," but changed its very name in deference to a Chinese emperor who asked them to. Myanmar was a part of the British Raj, and at that time was called Burma. In between these two, where one civilization or the other predominated but didn't fully control things, cultures developed from various waves of evangelization of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, and a little bit of Christianity during the French colonial period.

Perhaps the best way to demonstrate the utter power of the mountains of Indochina in determining its history is to focus merely on the number of languages spoken in the region.

The first source of the linguistic diversity of Indochina is the Austroasiatic-speaking peoples: the Cambodians and the Vietnamese. There are 166 other Austroasiatic languages, and they appear to be descendants of the original language of the inhabitants of Indochina. Pockets of Austroasiatic speakers can be found in the hills of Myanmar, the hills of Thailand, mountain valleys of mainland Malaysia, and scattered remnants in Bengal, Assam, and the Nicobar Islands of India. One tiny branch, Pakanic, holds fast in southern China.

Second is the Malayo-Polynesians, a subgroup of the Austronesian languages that originated in Taiwan and spread across the world from Madagascar to Rapa Nui (Easter Island). The Malayo-Polynesian subgroup includes the Chams who ruled the Champa kingdoms. These were conquered and assimilated into the Vietnamese nation during the "nam tiến," the "southern march" that began a thousand years ago and wrapped up shortly before the colonial era. The Cham also moved into Cambodia, and live on the mountainous border with Vietnam and in places along the Mekong. Though it's one of the less prevalent linguistic groups in the region, the fate of the Champa states will be of great relevance to us later on.

Third is the Tai language family, with 62 languages spoken in it. The most numerous of these are Thai and Laotian. Shan is spoken in Myanmar, in the mountainous north of the country. The Zhuong subfamily of roughly a dozen languages or dialects is spoken in the mountains of southern China and northernmost Vietnam.

The last three important languages belong to much larger families mostly spoken in China. Myanma, also known as Burmese, belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family of languages, to which of course standard Chinese and Tibetan belong.

Hmong belongs to the Hmong-Mien languages scattered across the mountainous parts of southern China, Vietnam, and Laos, with tiny pockets stretching as far southwest as Thailand as well. Western Hmong is the main language of these, and Hmong speakers played a key if reactionary role in the revolutionary wars that established communist Laos. The Western Hmong speakers also dwell in the mountains of northwestern Vietnam. Iu Mien is a closely-related language co-distributed in pockets near its cousin Western Hmong.

Tally it all up, and there's roughly 234 languages spoken in or near the Indochinese peninsula. And why shouldn't there be? This is among the most defensible terrain in the world. American imperialism rolled up here, dropped more bombs on part of it than they dropped on all of Nazi Germany, and still noped off in abject defeat anyway. If napalm and Agent Orange couldn't bring cultural unity to the region, how could the locals hope to have better luck through conquest? And this is just the number of languages, not the number of individual pockets of language speakers. All it would take to set up another one is for a small fleet of fishing boats to sail up or down the Mekong (or any other river), find a defensible bend in the river or a hard-to-reach mountain valley, and set up shop until the end of time. The local governments have occasionally tried to genocide the hill peoples, and the hill peoples are still there anyway, able to raid their neighbors right back.

World War I was so bitter and deadly largely because it was a war of unvanquishable static defense until the invention of the tank. Even if half a million men went over the top all at once, the likeliest result would simply be half a million men mowed down by machine guns. Well, Indochina is a place where World War I is built right into the geography, no machine guns or trenches necessary. Because total victory is nigh impossible for anyone, the bourgeoisie of each nation find the rewards of stoking ethnic conflict far greater than the risks of it.

That isn't to say total victory is impossible in the region; it was done to the Champa states by Vietnam during the nam tiến. Though the interior of Indochina is rugged jungle-swaddled mountains divided by rivers, the narrow strip of coast is relatively flat by comparison. This has made invasion easier: by the Champa in the first place sailing from Indonesia, by the Chinese whose breakaway province of Lâm Ấp is considered to be the first proper Champa state, and eventually by the Vietnamese themselves in their southern march.

The Champa states were as militarized as their neighbors; history records a vast Champa fleet rivalled by none. But unlike their neighbors, their military prowess lay in the sea, not on land. They could and did project military and cultural influence across the sea. The closest language to Cham is Acehnese, spoken in the former Sultanate of Aceh in modern Indonesia, where alliances were maintained through marriage between the royal houses. Dynastic intermarriage was also practiced with the Majapahit rulers of Indonesia. The Cham Princess Daravati, a Muslimah, converted the Majapahit royal house to Islam, and is therefore a major figure of Indonesian history to this day, and her tomb still stands in the former imperial capital of Trowulan.

Naval prowess can get a state only so far in Indochina. The essence of the thing is littoral operations. A state that can send fleets up the Mekong or Red rivers, or raid the coasts, can maintain their position in Indochina. This is what kept the Chams, and the French for that matter, in the region. What dispelled them both was gunpowder-armed Vietnamese armies. In the Cham case, they were late adopters of gunpowder technology in the region it was invented, and by the time they caught up technologically, they were already tributaries of Vietnam. In the French case, they had already been bled white by World War II and the Nazi occupation, and the French colonial empire was barely holding together even with American aid.

But it's more than that. Geography isn't destiny, of course, but it opens certain institutional development paths more easily than others. If you're a naval power, it's only a hop, skip and jump away from that to become a seafaring mercantile power too. If you're a mercantile power, you're going to have liberal bourgeoisie that will generally only get richer over time. They will slowly displace the nazbol bourgeoisie in the military and peasantry in your state's ruling coalition. This will increase your state's cultural power as the liberal bourgeoisie patronize art, but weaken your military and reduce the loyalty of the peasantry to the state. It happened in Athens, it happened in Carthage, it happened in Venice, it happened in Britain, it happened in French Indochina, and it happened to the Chams.

We see evidence for this liberal bourgeoisie in the history of the Champa states. For starters, the plural is necessary because they never unified internally, while their Vietnamese and Khmer opponents did. Archaeologically, different cities are predominant in different eras. This led some archaeologists to speculate that a central royal capital kept changing locations, but it's more likely that it was just different mercantile states gaining prominence at different times, similar to the ancient Phoenicians. Disunited states are easier to conquer by a unified enemy, even if that conquest is slow and piecemeal like the nam tiến was.

Additionally, the Champa states produced a lot of art and culture. The Vietnamese have preserved much of it, adopting it as part of their own cultural heritage in much the same way as American children are taught about Native American nations as a part of their own history. The Chams were more culturally developed than the Vietnamese, but the Vietnamese were more militarily developed. This is why there was never a northward advance of Cham, but also why Cham culture survived the Vietnamese takeover and flourishes to this day, both inside Vietnam and in neighboring Cambodia.

There are several things to note about this nam tiến, more to do with the character of the Vietnamese state, and its relations with its neighbors, and the analyses this history would prompt in the region.

First off, in godforsaken Sakaist terms, Vietnam is a settler-colonial state. Literally every nation on Earth is if you peer hard enough, of course. But Vietnam is, front and center. It exists in its modern form because earlier inhabitants were conquered and their territory annexed and integrated into the whole of the country proper, and people from the core of the conquering country moved in and made new lives in the ashes of what came before. When the Champa states fell, some Chams fled to Cambodia. Their lands, the lands of the war dead, and plots of formerly-vacant wilderness were all taken by incoming ethnically Vietnamese peasants who were settled there by the central government to discourage rebellion in the new territories, and serve as ready-made militias with an inherent loyalty to the central government if such rebellion did occur.

Just because the cop J. Sakai describes this process, and calls it "settler-colonialism," doesn't mean it doesn't exist in the real world. I described it in Class Analysis and Revolution and called it nazbollery, after the nazbol political position between communism and fascism on my triangle compass class analysis thingie (that'd be the technical term).

There is a Cham independence movement in the latter day, and consistent Sakaists would support it. So would American imperialists; Cham independence is just so much trolling of an actually existing socialist state.

But are Chams actually oppressed? Clearly, the behavior of the Vietnamese belies that notion. Cham culture, which was prolific due to the bourgeois influence in their states historically, survives to this day and makes up part of the cultural fabric of modern-day Vietnam. The Chams are celebrated as an integral part of the modern Vietnamese people.

And what would be the result of Cham independence? Not only would there be another South Vietnam with extra steps, but ethnic tensions that are cooled now would flare up. People who are now comradely Vietnamese citizens united by a common history would hate each other because of that same common history instead. Nobody but a Cham bourgeoisie and American imperialism would be served by Cham independence. A Cham state could only ever hope to defend itself against the rest of Vietnam by selling its soul to American imperialism, relying as in time past on invaders from across the ocean. It is utopian and reactionary, and this is why Cham independence is a boutique movement among a select few, and will likely never enjoy majority support among the Chams themselves.

There is another ethnic group's bourgeoisie that is very, very suspicious of the Vietnamese for the same reason that the Cham bourgeoisie are: the Khmer, or Cambodians. Parts of modern-day southern Vietnam were wrested from the Khmer Empire in the era just before French colonialism. We will learn all about Khmer Sakaism, and their efforts at implementing "Land Back," next.

On to Part III!