Word: nlf
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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...
...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 of the south continue unhindered. There is little doubt that the vast majority of peasants in southern Vietnam would prefer the NLF program were they permitted to leave the crowded cities and return home...
...NLF does not view land reform as merely a material benefit, although in a country where people have starved to death because they had no land, the material aspect should not be discounted. But land reform for the NLF is more than a material concept--it is a construction of a new set of social relationships. The Front never entered villages simply to redistribute land by fiat. Instead, the NLF organized village discussions, usually lengthy, at which even the humblest peasant would air his or her views concerning the reforms. When a certain consensus was reached, the reforms would...
...NLF intends to use this popular participation in local affairs as a sturdy foundation on which to build a humane, socialist society in the South and eventually reunify with the North. Then, a united Vietnam can begin the long march toward industrialization. Vietnam's socialist principles, forged into a profound sincerity by the white heat of several decades of total war, are not likely to be left by the wayside. No society in the world has ever managed this combination of meaningful socialism with industrial progress. The people of America, although they cannot participate in this process, must respect...
Thieu believes that if the war continues, American aid will continue to flow. So Thieu prolongs the war, directing his army and air force to strike at NLF territory and ignoring the calls for reconciliation contained in the cease fire agreement. Ngo Vinh Long '64, who works at Harvard's Vietnamese Studies Project, has estimated that the South Vietnamese Air Force, using warplanes supplied by the United States, has flown about 15,000 bombing and reconaissance missions since the ceasefire. Obviously, such bombing prevents the peasants from going home--and joining the NLF...