[ndlr] Signalement d’un article de Cao Dac Tuan relançant le débat autour des articles de l’historien engagé Gareth Porter publiés dans les années 1970 : l’un concerne la réforme agraire en RDVN et l’autre le massacre de 1968 à Hue. Sur le blog dissident Dan Lam Bao, Cao Dac Tuan livre son point de vue sur cette bataille de chiffres incarnation de deux désastres humains dans un Viêt-Nam en révolution et en guerre. De quoi nourrir notre réflexion sur les sources historiques, leurs constructions et leurs interprétations.
Abstract: In the 1970s, Gareth Porter, an anti-war American scholar, published two articles on the land reform campaign in North Vietnam in the 1950s and the massacre at Huế in the Tết Offensive 1968, calling these myths. Porter’s articles are full of distortions and devoid of scholarship. Porter committed several logical fallacies in his reasoning and reflected a malicious misrepresentation of facts to suit his political stand.
In the 1970s, Gareth Porter, an anti-war American scholar, has written a number of articles opposing the Vietnam War (Wikipedia 2014a). Porter is one of many anti-war American scholars including Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, and Marilyn Young. One of Porter’s specialties is to hunt down statistical information provided by the anti-communist Vietnamese and Americans, looking for errors or mistakes to make a case for accusing these authors of lying, mis-representation, or exaggeration. While the objective of truth finding is commendable, Porter’s one-sided approach is seriously flawed and renders him a communist propagandist who uses cheap and malicious tricks to attack others.
There are two myths that Porter has raised: the bloodbath in North Vietnam’s land reform campaign (1953 – 1956) and the Huế massacre in 1968 (Wikipedia 2014). As will be presented in the following, the truths about the bloody land reform program and the massacre at Huế have been known for many years. Nevertheless, Porter’s articles still appear as references in many sources, including the Internet, and are exploited to the maximum by the Vietnamese communists in their propaganda.
Lire la suite : Dan Lam Bao, 14/11/2014.
Cao Dac Tuan est arrivé aux États-Unis en 1975 en tant que réfugié. Il a reçu un doctorat en génie électrique et un diplôme en droit. Il a enseigné le génie informatique et de l’informatique dans une université d’État. Il est actuellement avocat spécialisé dans le droit de la propriété intellectuelle. Il vit avec sa famille dans le comté d’Orange (Orange County), en Californie du Sud. Il a publié un recueil de nouvelles sur trame historique intitulé Fire in the rain en 2014.
