The Colonial and Post-Colonial Worlds of Milton Osborne

In the first volume of his memoirs, the American diplomat and historian George Kennan describes the training he received in the late 1920s and early 1930s as a candidate for the State Department’s Division of Russian and Eastern European Affairs. A posting to the legation at Riga, classes in Russian history at the University at Berlin, private tutoring from Russian emigrés who were not systematic teachers but cultured people who conversed with the young man and had him read aloud for hours from Russian classics—the purpose of the program was not to produce “experts” in “Sovietology” but to provide the candidate with “a background in Russian language and culture not dissimilar to that which would normally have been assumed on the part of a well-educated Russian of the old, pre-revolutionary school”.

I was reminded of this, and other passages in Kennan’s memoirs, while reading Milton Osborne’s Pol Pot Solved the Leprosy Problem, a memoir of Osborne’s engagement over some twenty-five years with what used to be called Indo-China as a diplomat, scholar and consultant for the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees. Memoir, not memoirs; this is not an autobiography, though Osborne could no doubt write an interesting one. Nonetheless, a clear portrait of the character emerges. Urbane, liberal in the traditional sense, broadly as well as deeply learned, Osborne resembles, mutatis mutandis, the figure that Kennan’s superiors imagined in the lost world before the State Department became a modern bureaucracy. And just as Kennan had a knack for recreating lost worlds in evocative prose—a gift that, like the ability to paint a good portrait, implies some sympathy for its subject—so does Osborne, though the Australian seems to be a rather less dyspeptic character than the American, who could be undiplomatic even, as he might have said, for a professional.

The enchanted Kingdom of Cambodia under the glamorous and despotic Prince Norodom Sihanouk is the lost world that looms largest in this tableau mourant. Mourant rather than des morts because a theme of the book is the persistence, often highly problematical, of the past in the present.

Osborne was in the prime of youth at twenty-two when he was posted to the embassy in Phnom Penh in 1959, and although he only stayed en poste in Cambodia a few years before leaving to pursue graduate study in the South-East Asian program at Cornell University, the world that was destroyed in the civil war and by the Khmer Rouge regime that followed Sihanouk’s overthrow in 1970 was in a very real way the world of Osborne’s youth, when if perceptiveness is not yet at its peak, receptiveness is. Many of Osborne’s Cambodian friends had died or disappeared between 1970 and his return to the country in 1981, after the Khmer Rouge regime had, in turn, been overthrown by Vietnamese troops. The Cambodian “auto-cide”, then, which to most outsiders is a matter of statistics, as Stalin might have said, is for Osborne a fully individualised tragedy.

A note of fate, personal as well as political, is introduced into the narrative by the suggestion that the event which was to determine Osborne’s intellectual as well as professional trajectory, his posting to Phnom Penh rather than, say, Paris, where he might have hoped with some reason to be posted given his competence in French, came about in part because he dropped a catch off the bowling of “the last of the mandarins”, Arthur Tange, then head of the department, in a social cricket match. Could it really be true? Tange gave nothing away when Osborne asked him about it years later, but in any case, one is inclined to say the decision was justified.

The road to Paris led, as it often does, through an American university, and Osborne arrived there in 1965 to conduct research into the history of French Indo-China. The atmosphere of the city at that time will be familiar to readers of Patrick Modiano and the later Maigret stories. Osborne’s doctoral dissertation, revised and published as a book, The French Presence in Cochinchina and Cambodia: Rule and Response (1859–1905) (1969, reprinted 1997), was based on an original reading of documents in the colonial section of the Archives Nationales. Indeed, Osborne was the first person to read many of the documents since they were produced, and the book, unusually for something based on a dissertation, is still worth reading today. Characteristically, Osborne notes that he was lucky to arrive in France in 1965 rather than a year later; the colonial section was moved to Aix-en-Provence in 1966.

Osborne’s appreciation of the traces left by France’s self-appointed mission civilisatrice in Asia, which included the education in France of many young Cambodians, Laotians and Vietnamese, including the future Pol Pot and Ho Chi Minh, is morally as well as historically delicate, and attentive to all facets of human experience, from public life to private passions, habits of mind and heart as well as art, architecture and food. One of these traces, and a rather more marked one than most of the others, was ideology in the modern sense. Indeed, the quotation from a Cambodian doctor who survived the Khmer Rouge regime and that provides the book with its title—“Pol Pot’s government solved the leprosy problem; they killed all the lepers”—points to a difficulty that we have hardly come to terms with yet: not only in the East but often in the West, too, “progress” and civilisation have not always gone hand in hand, and the greatest “crimes against humanity” that have ever been committed, by volume at least, were committed in the name of a philosophy or religion of humanity.

Of course, the exact role of ideology, of professed beliefs, in any given event is always a legitimate question. Simon Leys, no apologist for communism, claimed in his commentary on the Cultural Revolution that Mao launched it opportunistically, because he was losing control of the Communist Party, and ideology as such did not play a large role. (In passing, this commentary was produced from outside the country, contemporaneously, and using only “open source” material, making it a triumph of intelligence analysis of the kind the Office of National Assessments, now the Office of National Intelligence, strives to produce, and which Osborne, who is a former Head of the Asia Branch as well as Current Intelligence at ONA, has no doubt provided his country on several occasions.) On the other hand, Stephen Kotkin claims persuasively in his recent biography of Stalin that it is impossible to understand the disastrous decision, taken in the late 1920s, to collectivise agriculture without recognising that Stalin was a sincere Marxist. Putting aside the question of how Mao may have differed from Stalin, and Pol Pot from both of them, one might conceive of the crime as the cause of the ideology, rather than the other way round. This has the advantage of making the prime mover not an abstract idea but a basic and eminently comprehensible human drive: the desire for power, often closely allied—since it is rather easier to express power by destroying than creating—with the desire to destroy.

In the Cambodian case, the deed reflected the desire with a purity perhaps unprecedented in human history. Between 1975 and 1979, Cambodia was the site of the most radical effort ever made to “sever history into parts, so to speak, and to tear open a gulf between a people’s past and future”, as Tocqueville said about the French Revolution. Presented as a progressive and therefore, to many modern minds, essentially noble project, the true nature of the Cambodian experiment took a long time to become clear to many in the outside world. Relying on his knowledge of the region and his sound intuition, Osborne saw it earlier than most, though, with characteristic rigour, in his contemporary writings and remarks on the subject he did not claim to know more than he did.

Some of his academic colleagues did not so distinguish themselves. There is academic politics, and then there is the politics of the academy. Osborne seems largely to have avoided the former; like most of the best academics, he has been in the academy, never of it. But the refusal of some South-East Asian specialists to accept the reality of what was happening in Cambodia even after it become abundantly clear, like the refusal of many Sinologists to accept the realities of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, reflects the fact that, while the academic mind has its virtues, including an appreciation of the non-utilitarian domain of human life that is all too rare in the modern world, realism about the political domain of human life (something that depends to an under-appreciated degree on courage—the courage to acknowledge the unpleasant facts, constantly shifting equations, trade-offs, and choices between imperfect alternatives that politics necessarily involves) tends not be among them.

Osborne’s unusual combination of scholarly bona fides and political and moral realism is also on display in his nuanced account of the Vietnam War, or, to be precise, his account of his experiences in Vietnam before, during and after the American and Australian involvement in a larger conflict that included the French and ran from 1946 to 1975.

Several writers in recent years have sought to complicate the now conventional picture of an unjust war that was always unwinnable. For example, in the ninth, final and synthetic volume of the Official History of Australia’s Involvement in Southeast Asian Conflicts 1948–1975, published in 2012, the general editor of the collection, Peter Edwards, suggests that if Saigon had fallen in 1965 and not 1975, the “dominoes” might well have fallen. Certainly, many South-East Asian leaders of the period thought so, or said so. They used those ten years to strengthen their internal and external defences to ensure they did not become dominoes. Of course, jus ad bellum is not the same thing as jus in bello. Even granting that there was a basically just cause, many of the means adopted in the course of it were not. And the claim that the United States had a vital strategic interest in the maintenance of the South Vietnamese regime, vital enough to warrant the extraordinary cost of the war in blood, treasure and international goodwill, has always been a tough sell.

My impression is that Osborne would not endorse “revisionist” suggestions that the war might have been worth fighting after all, though he offers no summary judgment on it here. What he does offer, and directly contra what has become the conventional view that the Phoenix Program (designed to identify and destroy Vietcong cadres through infiltration, capture, interrogation and assassination) was a genuine if limited success, is a clear picture of the inability of the South Vietnamese government, even with American—and Australian—help, and even at the best of times, when the war was supposedly going “well”, to control the countryside or to command the loyalty of a population that did not necessarily want to be governed by a tyrannical regime based in North Vietnam.

Unlike many Americans, the Australian soldiers, in particular those of the Australian Army Training Team, that Osborne met in the course of his travels were impressive: dedicated, competent and clear-eyed about the limits of military force and the unlikeliness of victory even in the early 1960s. (The first commander of this force, Colonel Ted Serong, was more optimistic, and seems to have become even more optimistic after he left the army to work for the South Vietnamese government and the Americans.) The South Vietnamese, some of whom Osborne came to know well and who were destined to suffer after the victory of the North, made a more complicated impression. So evocative are some of the scenes in Old Saigon that Osborne recounts that one can almost taste the decadence of a highly sophisticated, deeply corrupt regime steeped in both French and ancient Vietnamese ways and poised on the brink of the abyss.

In keeping with the wishes of Arthur Tange and the gods of cricket, Osborne remains engaged with the region of South-East Asia as a consultant, commentator and fellow at the Lowy Institute. This region will, once again, be of particular importance to Australia in the future. A point not always appreciated about the rise of China is that it makes Australia’s relations with nations other than China, and including the US, more, rather than less, important, as well as more delicate to handle. It is the Pacific powers other than China that will play a crucial balancing role as China continues to expand its influence and American power continues to decline.

As Osborne noted in his important essay The Paramount Power: China and the Countries of South-East Asia (2006), China has drastically improved its relations with nations that have traditionally distrusted and feared it, and with good reason. In Cambodia, for instance, Chinese support has more or less replaced American and Japanese aid as the main prop of the increasingly tyrannical regime of Hun Sen, who, of course, was for some time a member of the Khmer Rouge. (Paraphrasing Faulkner, one might say that in South-East Asia, the past is often the future.) And yet interest in non-Chinese Asia in Australia is, by many indicators, at an all-time low. As Michael Wesley lamented in his There Goes the Neighbourhood: Australia and the Rise of Asia (2011), the study of Asian languages has declined even as more Australians have a parent or grandparent who speaks an Asian language at home, and if we are well-travelled and cosmopolitan, we are also ignorant and insular.

In this context, Osborne’s memoir is a timely aide-mémoire, not only for the daughter he says he started to write it for, but also for all of us, as well as a record of a remarkable Australian life.

Jack Sexton, from Sydney, is studying in Chicago.

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Pol Pot Solved the Leprosy Problem: Remembering Colonial and Post-Colonial Worlds 1956–1981
by Milton Osborne
Connor Court, 2018, 280 pages, $39.95
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