Word: viets
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...such a one, life was not easy. Leaders of Cochin China's neighbor, obstreperous, independent Viet Nam (new state formed of Annam and Tonkin), urged Thinh's countrymen to throw off Western control, called Thinh a quisling and threatened him with torture. Gentle Dr. Thinh was revolted by stories of extremists disemboweling pregnant women and burying Europeans alive...
Even before the monsoon had started, Thinh got a shock when his French friends seemed to turn their backs on him. They had dealt directly with Viet Nam without Cochin China representation, causing Dr. Thinh's Government to lose face...
Before he would join France's projected Indo-Chinese Federation, Ho demanded: 1) Viet Nam's right to manage its own foreign affairs without interference by the Federation; 2) annexation of Cochin-China, an adjoining province (almost one-third the size of Viet Nam), which wants to be a separate member of the Federation. The French, who had agreed to all other Viet Nam demands, said no. Ho walked out of the conference, and while his guerrillas continued to kill French soldiers almost daily, holed up in his flower-littered suite at Paris' swank Royal Monceau Hotel...
...facts were few, but exotic. At Fountainebleau, Ho appeared as a saintly-looking little man who liked to present roses to lady reporters. He had started his underground political career 35 years ago at 19, when his radical father was imprisoned by an unsympathetic Viet Nam emperor. He ran off to sea, went to France at the end of World War I and under the alias of Nguyen-Ai-Quoc ( One Who Loves His Country"), became a Socialist, and later a Communist. Then he went to Moscow, where, under the alias of Song Man-tcho ("Mr. Song of Boundless Generosity...
From Hong Kong, in 1930, Ho tried to organize a Viet Nam revolt, but failed, and hid under several new aliases while the affair blew over. During World War II, he turned up in Viet Nam as Ho Chin Minh ("Mr. Ho the Bright Spirit"), turned out the Japanese puppet ruler and organized an anti-French rebellion. Once in power, he decided that Communism could wait. Says Ho: "Almost 2,000 years ago, Jesus Christ said we should love our enemies. We are still far from that ideal. I do not know when Marx's ideal will be achieved...