Word: nguyens
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Though some top U.S. officials in Saigon still describe South Viet Nam as a "free society," South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu in the past year has gathered most of the reins of power into his hands. He so manipulated last August's Senate elections that a pro-Thieu majority was chosen. This gave him control of both the Senate and the National Assembly, and so Thieu had no trouble changing the constitution to eliminate its two-term limit, enabling him to run in October 1975 for a third five-year term. His intimidation of political opponents...
...Peace" obviously referred to the end of fighting, "honor" for an agreement which did not "abandon our allies," the South Vietnamese regime of Nguyen Van Thieu. But in the year since Nixon's announcement, it has become clear that the two words are wholly incompatible with reference to Vietnam...
...National Liberation Front welcomed the return of peace to Vietnam, for it expected that the end of the war would reverse a trend in South Vietnamese society which had strengthened Nguyen Van Thieu's position at its expense. Ten years of brutal warfare in the Vietnamese countryside, heightened savagely by the continual rain of American bombs, had herded the peasants into the disease-ridden shantytowns which ring Vietnamese cities. There Thieu's enormous police force could keep watch over them and insulate them from NLF influence. But with the end of the war, the NLF hoped the peasants could return...
...Nguyen Van Thieu, his army and police, stand directly athwart the path of Vietnamese progress. Thieu has no awesome visions; his only desire is to remain in power and to continue rewarding the small group of landlords and government officials who support him. Thieu cannot survive without the massive amounts of American aid which finance his government and equip his army. But the United States is weary of war, weary of pouring money into the bottomless Vietnamese pit. Thieu must insure that the aid continues despite the stiffening American reluctance...
There is much more to Kieu than escapist melodrama. Written by a renowned Vietnamese classicist named Nguyen Du (1766-1820), the poem in Vietnamese has a wide range of wordplay. The meter is a flowing iambic called luk-bat, full of rhyming and nearly as easy to memorize as a song. Much of this is unavoidably lost in the otherwise excellent English translation by Huynh Sanh Thong, a Vietnamese scholar who has lived in the U.S. all his adult life. Jaded Western readers who may find Kieu's plight unconvincing can still enjoy the poem for its language, especially...