Word: thieu
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...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...
...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 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...
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...
...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...
...evidence of an important nexus? What about Bok's on-and-off commitment to a program of training officers for the state's Army? Or, the development in Harvard labs and offices of napalm and a theory of "forced-draft urbanization"--bombing villagers until they moved to cities where Thieu's cops could beat up the ones they didn't like? Was that enough of a nexus with the government to make Harvard an instrumentality of the state...