Like everyone else I have grown up on horror stories of the Vietnam war, heard the music, seen the movies, and visited the — to use an American phrase — humongous Vietnam veterans war memorial wall in Washington, DC. So I can understand why America wants to colonise Vietnam, economically speaking. I also have a sense of how bitterly the communists in Vietnam hated the evil empire of America that they forcefully expelled from their country — the “imperialist forces” (to use an anachronistic Karat-ism). Jeff Danzinger, a cartoonist and columnist with The New York Times syndicate wrote recently of how “we had dropped more tonnage of bombs in the temples and fields of North Vietnam than had been dropped by all sides in the entire span of World War II”. Yet, after each trip to Vietnam, I cannot help wondering that the communists in Vietnam seem to have no problem in embracing America for what America has to offer, while vilifying it in their version of history. In the war museum here, to quote from Lonely Planet, “the pamphlet handed out at reception pulls no such punches: it’s entitled ‘Some Pictures of US Imperialists Aggressive War Crimes in Vietnam’”.

Come to think of it, the communists everywhere in the world seem to have managed their hybrid model well — they fight America in the history books and museums while wooing America to help improve quality of life and GDP of the present. It is against this backdrop that I find the report in The Indian Express about Prakash Karat’s book both amusing and puzzling. To denounce The

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