Word: minh
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...Rubin's main story, a North Vietnamese and an American colonel seek reassurance against overly callous commanding officers from photographs of their countries' faraway presidents. But Rubin's own account undercuts the parallelism--it's hard to imagine anyone saying of Lyndon Johnson, as he says of Ho Chi Minh, that "he had a sweet face... a lovable face." And by Rubin's own account--which therefore takes on, as long as the American-financed war in Vietnam continues, some value for American readers--there are things in Vietnam genuinely worth fighting for and in which one side...
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...
This situation could not last long without prompting resistance. When the Viet Minh began mobilizing in the early 1940s, land reform was at the top of its agenda. And similarly, when the U.S.-backed Ngo Dinh Diem regime refused in the late 1950s to implement a serious land reform program to redress the century-old grievance, peasants in the south began to resist, forming the National Liberation Front in 1960. Today, the Thieu regime has reversed its faltering steps toward land reform and handed back vast tracts to the former owners, while reforms in the NLF-controlled areas...
...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...
...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...