the saure fate. Thought control and doctrinal rigidity are common features of Soviet, Cuban, Chinese and Vietnamese cultural life. The results are poor artistic quality and the death of creativity, which in turn leads to the destruction of self-confidence, loss of identity, and deadly silence defiance.
At first glance, Party demands on the creative intelligentsia sound dear and positive: "Writers and artists must cultivate the Marxist-leninist Weltanschaung, the Party's lire and policy ... they must stay in close touch with the working mass, intensively participating in the revolutionary movements of the mass" 53 But its implication are not that simple. Behind the Party appeals for a revolutionary culture, the intelligentsia are in fact exhorted to produce high-quality works of art and thought to adorn the Party and impart toit an aura of intellectual respectability and legitimacy. In this process of legitimation, the role of writers, artists and cultural figures is preponderant for the fundamental reason that they are the modern mythmakers. Only they can give life and blood to abstract theories and political discourses. The irony being that the myth-makers are not free to express themselves while subject to the constant control of Party ideological watchdogs.

In fact, the cultural gendarmes in communist Vietnam have always exacted strict obedience and severely proscribe any unorthodox tendency. Succinctly, as Czeslaw Milosz observed, here censorship and other control mechanisms have a very welldefined goal: "the reduction of artists and scholars to the status of yes-men" M During the aforementioned meeting with Nguyen Van Linh, a very popular playwright frankly denounced this "tutelage of the mind", a totalitarian mechanism of thought control where "only one man is necessary to dear the mind for all, one ultimate head thinking for all heads", reminiscent of Andre Glucksmann's expression; "the Central Committee sieging the head". However, as in the Soviet Union or Poland, mind control and the censorship of cultural expression in Vietnam, is not solely the business of the ideological apparatus. Whenever necessary rude sanctions are applied and police intervention called in .56
The final product of intellectual terror is a "captive mind", a conditioned thin dng system that has internalized censorship and practices it against its own integrity. One Vietnamese writer, among many other colleagues, confessed that fear has become part of their nature. "Fear pervades from the top, from around us and from inside ourselves. Before we exhibit our writing, we have already done the censor's job, cutting away all thorny issues for fear that the product may seem problematic" 57 A more honest as well as talented storyteller did not hesitate to describe the process of "self-debasement" to which many of his creative friends have succumbed 5s

In addition to this humiliating experience, we should mention its debilitating effect upon the intellectual and creative faculties of the Vietnamese artists, writers, and scholars according to an internai logic already studied by Czeslaw Milosz: "What is not expressed does not exist. Therefore if one forbids men to explore the depths of human nature, one destroys in them the urge to make such explorations; and the depths in themselves slowly become unreal" sy So the inescapable fate of the artistic and cultural life in Vietnam can be easily predicted after the downfall of its myth-makers. Answering a corresponding concern of the General Secretary, the Vietnamese cultural elites readily acknowledged "the poor state of our arts and letters, as poor and backward as our country today" 60

Just five years after the communist mastery of the whole country, an identity crisis was attacking the artistic community. "From diverse pressures, certain persons are denying themselves, abolishing the dividing lire between revolution and counterrevolution"61 However, Party directives are powerless against the process of ego disintegration. Before the Third Congress of the Writers' Association in 1983, both top Party authorities and high officiais in the creative domain were well aware of the profound crisis numerous writers were undergoing, the young especially.62
In communist Vietnam, writers, artists and cultural figures play Hie role of myth-makers, Hie modern "Yes-men ".
Oct-Dec 1990	Indochina Report 11