Word: minh
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...Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom," one of Ho's favorite slogans, is stenciled on hundreds of roadside monuments, while colorful posters exhorting one and all to remember the North Vietnamese army's heroic sacrifices adorn shopwindows. In Saigon, now officially known as Ho Chi Minh City, the airport is fringed by old bomb craters and littered with the hulks of U.S. transport planes. In Hanoi, the capital, the memories of war are cherished in details large and small. At the War Museum, a once stately mansion located near the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum, visitors gaze...
...most decorated units in the French army: the Foreign Legion's Deuxième REP (Second Foreign Parachute Regiment), whose history goes back to 1948, when, as the Second Foreign Parachute Battalion, it was sent to Cambodia to maintain internal security. In 1954, as Viet Minh guerrillas tightened their siege of the French base at Dien Bien Phu, 700 members of the battalion were dropped into the camp at night as last-minute reinforcements. Although the French were eventually defeated, the legionnaires fought heroically...
...benevolent. That idea, and it was widely shared, has been obliterated in the wake of the Communist victory, obliterated by the sinking junks of boat people, obliterated by the stories of "reeducation camps," obliterated with the recognition that at least some of the men who surrounded Ho Chi Minh are unreconstructed Stalinists. But what about the conclusion that Podhoretz draws from the scenario? Vietnam, he says, was an "act of imprudent idealism whose moral soundness has been, overwhelmingly vindicated by the hideous consequences of our defeat." Given the boat people, he says, the American effort to save the South from...
...first place, as he admits quite freely, we robbed a people of the right to self-determination by preventing elections in the 1950s. "The main reason for opposing these elections was that they would in all probability have resulted in a victory for Ho Chi Minh," not through deceit but because "possibly 80 percent of the population would have voted" for him. (The problem, says Podhoretz, is that though he would have been democratically chosen he would not have ruled democratically. It is an interesting argument, that people should not be permitted in free and open balloting to support...
Where the left was wrong was in their estimation of the North Vietnamese. As Podhoretz currently points out, the steady stream of folk singers and Nation writers flowing into Hanoi really thought it was a benevolent government. They were wrong in thinking that Ho Chi Minh stood for justice, peace and poetry. But they were not wrong in thinking those goals worth pursuing...