To fully understand the complexity of ideological commitments in Vietnam between 1945 and 1975, it is useful to return to the 1930s, when the attraction of the Vietnamese nationalists for the Fascist European regimes led a number of them to publicly celebrate the figure of Adolf Hitler. Within the context of the Popular Front in France and a certain political openness in Indochina, the intellectual and organizational turmoil of the nationalist parties gave substance to a doctrine nourished by Western models but that nevertheless remained uniquely Vietnamese. This article addresses the question of the “fascist temptation” of the prewar nationalist Đại Việt parties, which is rarely addressed by historiography.

This article elucidates the role of personalism in Ngô Đình Diệm’s relations with his principal anticommunist allies in Asia by considering the First Republic’s involvement in the Asian Peoples’ Anti-Communist League and Moral Re-Armament. These organizations provided crucial transnational platforms through which Ngô Đình Diệm secured support for his personalist vision. Shared beliefs about the spiritual and moral threat of communist materialism, and the spiritual revolution it demanded in response, undergirded Ngô Đình Diệm’s anticommunist alliances in Asia. The First Republic’s deep involvement in these regional organizations, which operated free from US influence, challenges prevailing conceptions of its engagement with Cold War Asia.

This article re-examines Vietnamese diasporic anticommunism in the context of twentieth-century Vietnamese history. It offers an overview of the Vietnamese anticommunist tradition from colonialism to the end of the Vietnam War, and interprets the effects of national loss and incarceration on South Vietnamese anticommunists. These experiences contributed to an essentialization of anticommunism among the prisoners, who eventually provided a critical mass for anticommunist activism in the United States since the early 1990s.