On October 26, 1967, John McCain's plane was shot down over Truc Bach lake in Hanoi. He ejected, and was captured in the middle of the lake after almost drowning. He was taken to Hoa Lo prison in downtown Hanoi, where he would live under well-documented brutal conditions for about five and a half years until his release in 1973.
The prison, christened sarcastically "The Hanoi Hilton" by its American captives during the war, has mostly been demolished and built over. The gatehouse to the prison still stands and has been turned into a museum for public view. I visited while I was in Hanoi, and was pretty blown away by what I found there.
Visually speaking, the museum isn't all too impressive. Since much of the original prison no longer exists, much of what you can actually see inside the museum are rather absurd-looking dioramas of prisoners in recreated cells. Perhaps the most jarring visual exhibit is a real-life guillotine, used by the French during their colonial rule of Vietnam, when the prison was used for Vietnamese political dissidents. But in general, you didn't really get a feel for the prison, or how it was when it was operational. This is understandable, since the prison itself no longer exists.
The museum's real power stems from its narrative, which is simultaneously fascinating and patently ridiculous. The first half of the museum deals with the prison's original use: by the French, on Vietnamese people. There is no shortage of condmenation of the French treatment of the Vietnamese during the colonial period. And much of this condemnation appears to be warranted -- if the museum is to be believed (and despite what comes next, I think this part probably should be), the conditions in the prison were brutal. Prisoners were kept shackled, by their feet, in square, stone cells, many of which were on an incline. They were therefore forced into the most uncomfortable of positions, which they had to endure for hours if not days on end. Of course, those were the lucky ones -- many were beaten, tortured, or killed (hence the guillotine). There are dioramas throughout this initial exhibit, many of them more absurd-looking than actually effective, that depict the conditions for the Vietnamese prisoners during French colonial rule.
There is nothing to suggest (and quite a lot of evidence proving otherwise) that such treatment did not carry over to the Vietnamese treatment of American POWs during the Vietnam War. And yet, that's exactly what the museum argues in the second half of the walkthrough: that American POWs were not only treated in line with the provisions of the Geneva Convention, but were offered quite comfortable lifestyles indeed. The museum's treatment of the prison during the Vietnam War is comical -- the dioramas disappear, and in their place are trinkets like cigarettes and playing cards, blatantly on display to suggest that what American POWs experienced at Hoa Lo was nothing more than controlled leisure. There is a video on display, obviously coerced, with prisoners sporting bandages, bloody faces, and black eyes, similing together as they prepare a Christmas feast in prison. One sign goes so far as to argue that the quality of life for American POWs at Hoa Lo was, by every measure, better than that of Vietnamese living in Hanoi. You would think, from the narrative at the museum, that the nickname Hanoi Hilton was not sarcastic at all.
Perhaps none of this is surprising. Vietnam is still a palpably communist country, considerably more so than China is, and propaganda is one of the government's most effective weapons. But the Hoa Lo exhibition is stark evidence, almost satirically so, that museums inherently have politics. Every curating decision is made with an agenda. I would just like to assume that for most museums, at least one prong of that agenda is objectivity. Even museums like Yad Vashem in Jerusalem or the Newseum in Washington, which deal with topics so wrought with politics and emotion, do so with the promise that facts reign supreme over all. Perhaps I'm spoiled by the terrific museums I went to as a child, but I really do think a museum ought to be this way. Not so at Hoa Lo.
No comments:
Post a Comment