Word: minh
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Once the peasants started streaming back to their villages, the NLF could begin to implement the policy which had brought it, and its predecessors, the Viet Minh, widespread popular support--radical land reform. In traditional Vietnam, land had been distributed relatively evenly, and the tax rate was low and applied fairly. But when the French invaded in the middle of the 19th century, they expropriated vast tracts of lands, creating a tiny new class of French and Vietnamese landlords, and they hiked the tax rates and added new taxes. The majority of Vietnamese peasants were plunged into a frightful life...
...entirely appropriate, both for Viet Nam and the U.S., that The Tale of Kieu, a long epic poem that has captivated the Vietnamese for more than 150 years, should now be published in English. Ho Chi Minh incorporated many lines from Kieu into his own poetry. Students in South Vietnamese high schools study it today just as English-speaking students study Shakespeare. In remote villages, mothers recite it to their children as moral instruction and entertainment. If Americans are to understand the Vietnamese and their war -even at this late date-The Tale of Kieu is a good place...
NEWS IS MADE by kings, prime ministers and diplomats, history by an entire people. In Vietnam, history has been made by peasants. It is they who started to resist the French in the 1930's, joined the Viet Minh in the early 1940's and fought on to partial victory in 1954. Peasants dragged heavy artillery over jungle trails to the mountains overlooking the French garrision in the valley of Dienbienphu...
Fifty years later the Vietnamese had raised an army, declared themselves independent, defeated the French and thrown them out of Vietnam for good. The Viet Minh was a peasant army and North Vietnam was and is in many ways a government of peasants. What had happened to the Vietnamese under the French? What features of French rule had turned peasants into soldiers, rice farmers into social revolutionaries...
...Fire in the Lake, the best-known book about Vietnam, Frances FitzGerald 62 argued that the Vietnamese peasants had a particular cast of mind, a conception of the world, which conditioned their response to certain events in the 1940's and caused them to join the Viet Minh resistance. Her analysis--which drew upon the work of Paul Mus, an eminent French scholar of Vietnam--explained that in traditional Vietnam the peasant believed that his father, ancestors and emperor exercised great mystical powers over events. After the French consolidated their control over the country, they replaced the emperor...