Word: minh
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...Viet Nam has long hinged on the fortunes of the restless, landless peasants whose rebellion against an intolerable feudal way of life was one of the original causes of the war. In the 1950s, the Viet Cong cut a wide swath through the Vietnamese countryside by importing Ho Chi Minh's formula of routing the landlords and distributing "land to the tiller." Today, the leading advocate of Ho's thesis is none other than President Nguyen Van Thieu...
...differs in important respects from the religious sects and the nationalist parties, but it also shares many characteristics with them. Up to a point, the evolution of relations between the Viet Cong and the established political system paralleled that of the sects and other parties. Like them, the Viet Minh developed organizational and political consciousness in the 1930s; it then came into conflict with the French and their puppet authorities; after 1954 it in effect withdrew and, like the other sects and parties, went underground during the period when Diem was attempting to centralize authority and eliminate local centers...
...appeal of the revolutionaries depends not on economic deprivation but on political deprivation, that is, on the absence of an effective structure of authority. lives in "hard-core" Viet Cong areas, some of which have been almost continuously under Viet Minh and Viet Cong control since the 1940s. They include the Camau peninsula, much of the Delta coast, the Plain of Reeds, War Zones "C" and "D" north and west of Saigon, and portions of Binh Dinh and Quang Ngai in the central part of the country. In some villages an entire generation has grown up under communist rule...
...most striking feature of these varied patterns of rural political control--contested, communal and Viet Cong--has been their resistance to change. The French, Diem, the post-Diem regimes, the Viet Minh and Viet Cong have all tried, without significant success, to produce permanent changes in them. The huge current pacification program has been another effort to bring about a political revolution in the relations between the Government and the countryside. It may succeed where the others have failed, but as yet there is no conclusive evidence of this. On the other hand, the massive American effort is producing...
Nixon's ban on further infiltration is a disguised demand that Hanoi close down the Ho Chi Minh trail. Since Hanoi's troops and their allies would be fully cut off from their lines of supply, the U.S. supported governments--who would presumably retain their supplies of U.S. military aid--would find themselves at a distinct military advantage...