McHale concludes racial violence and race issues during the First Indochina War which often seen as marginal, outside the mainstream scholarship: "...,the First Indochina War was a race war. But it was not like World War II, in which Japanese propagandists spoke of a "Yamato race" fighting whites in a bitter global struggle, or Nazis defined Germans as a pure Aryan "race" fighting against racial others. Neither was it a Fanonian war pitting white colonialists against a darker foe. Rather, in the worst of times, Vietnamese sometimes perceived the war as a struggle for their own racial or ethnic survival against enemies, who ranged from French rapists and killers to Moroccan and Senegalese cannibals and on to Khmer Krom decapitators."
