Word: ngo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When the U.S.-sponsored Ngo Dinh Diem regime stepped up its repression in the South in the late 1950's, peasants left their plows and rice paddies and villages and joined the National Liberation Front. In the late 1960's peasants who had never seen a television set or a washing machine, who had never visited a city, successfully resisted the American war machine. They alternately evaded and defeated U.S. ground troops; they shot down American warplanes with rifles and with their bare hands rebuilt bombed-out bridges and roads...
...Ngo Vinh Long '64, a Vietnamese who works with the Vietnamese Studies Project at Harvard's East Asian Research Center, has taken up this neglected area. Before the Revolution is a remarkable and insightful book which draws upon many Vietnamese and French sources and Long's own experience in his homeland to depict the agonizing destruction of rural Vietnam. The book is divided into two parts: in the first, Long painstakingly molds reams of statistics into a moving but never heavy-handed description of the French transformation of rural Vietnam. In Part II, he presents his own translations of articles...
...Ngo Vinh Long has disagreed elsewhere with certain aspects of the Mus-FitzGerald analysis. Traditional Vietnam, he argued in a Ramparts review of FitzGerald's book, was not a stable, ordered moral universe. Vietnamese history is punctuated with peasant upheavals and popular resistance to foreign invasions, including to French landing parties in the 19th century. Resistance diminished somewhat in the middle years of French rule, Long suggested, not because some heavenly mandate rested upon the French, but because their rule so brutally and swiftly transformed Vietnamese society that the peasants were unable to act. Not some mystical power of French...
...dominance by foreigners. Bao Dai, the first head of state of Vietnam to be recognized by the western powers, was at heart a Frenchman. He spent most of his time at his villa in France, and when in Vietnam he lived in regal European style. Bao Dai, the Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem, and the other would-be westerners who have ruled South Vietnam in succeeding years are barely thought of as Vietnamese. So it is hardly surprising that they would join forces with foreign armies against their own people...
...years after his murder in a bloody military coup, the memory of South Viet Nam's President Ngo Dinh Diem last week stirred a curious nostalgia in Saigon. About 3,000 Diem supporters marched to the city's Victorian cathedral to attend a memorial service, then moved on to a nearby cemetery where Diem lies buried under an inconspicuous concrete slab. Gongs tolled. Drums thumped. Buddhist monks intoned prayers. Two Catholic bands played the national anthem...