[Vnbiz] Building the Vietnamese Intelligentsia--Intellectuals and Entrepreneurs [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

[Tran Dinh Hoanh]

Dear brother Quang Anh & CACC,

Good ESP.  I was thinking you might ask about giai cap and tang lop, and
here we go, open the computer and you are there :-)

In the old days we only heard about giai cap--dau tranh giai cap  (class
struggle)--giai cap tu ban (capitalist), giai cap tu san (bourgeoisie), giai
cap dia chu (landowners), giai cap ban co nong (can nong & co nong), giai
cap cong nhan (workers).  You realized that I have named these giai cap in
the order of Marxist-Leninist badness -- capitalist on the top list of
badness, bourgeoisie and landowners next in badness, proletariat (ban co
nong and cong nhan) on the bottom as the good guy.

So where was giai cap tri thuc (intelligentsia) in the Marxist-Leninist
view?   Well, they hover somewhere in the middle.  (Looks like life has
never changed for the intellectuals.  We intellectuals always hover
somewhere in the middle, anywhere in the world, then and now :-)  According
to Lenin, the Communist revolution needed brainpower, so the proletariat had
to produce its own intellectuals and also had to win the intelligentsia over
to its side.  Thus the intelligentsia was recruited to turn away from its old
master -- the capitalist -- to serve the new master, the proletariat. So
intellectuals were not really the enemy of the revolution; they were made a
part of the revolution.  Only the intellectuals who either refuse to follow
the revolution or followed but dared to tell the truth (like Nhan Van Giai
Pham in Phong Trao Tram Hoa Dua No) would be terminated.

The real problem is that in the Communist revolution intellectuals were no
longer intellectuals.  After awhile, they merely babble
Marxist-Leninist nonsense like everyone else, and happily prosecuted their
own colleagues who refused to babble along.  They simply lost their
brainpower.  Of course.  The brain is like the arms and legs.  If you don't
use your arms for a year, your arms are gone.  The brain death of the
intelligentsia was the result of the revolution.

Today, the bloody prosecution is no longer there, things are much more
gentle, but the jails and handcuffs are still there, and the general pattern
of treatment to make sure the intellectuals cannot think freely, cannot talk
freely and cannot write freely is still there.  This is really sad affair of
the nation and, right now, as I type this, my heart hurts.  My heart hurts!
Do you hear me?
OK, brother Quang Anh, my observation is that because of the bloody business
involving the term "giai cap," in the recent years (I think starting with
doi moi) the Vietnamese have switched to a new term "tang lop."  Translated
into English both giai cap and tang lop mean "class."  Today we see often in
writing tang lop tri truc, tang lop cong nhan, but once in a while someone
still use the term giai cap.  For the same reason of being conscious about
history, I never use the term giai cap, except when I talk about history.
I use tang lop when writing in Vietnamese.

Have a great day!

Hoanh



On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 3:24 AM, <QuangAnh.Nguyen at dfat.gov.au> wrote:

> [ Vietnam Business Forum ]
>
>
>
> Dear anh Hoanh
>
> Thanks a lot for your discussion.
>
> I translated the word "class" from the original Vietnamese term of that
> research: tầng lớp. Is that a little bit different from the word: "giai
> cấp"?
>
> Regards
>
>
-- 
Tran Dinh Hoanh, Esq., LLB, JD
Washington DC
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