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Pastimes : THE SLIGHTLY MODERATED BOXING RING
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To: Neocon who wrote (9919)4/20/2002 10:14:30 PM
From: Dayuhan  Read Replies (2) of 21057
 
we practically forced the British and French to divest themselves of their empires

What parts of what empires were divested at out insistence?

only supported the French in Vietnam because the Viet Minh were Communists

This is what we failed to understand. We looked at the French war in Indochina as a conflict between Communism (bad) and non-Communism (good). To the Vietnamese eye it was a Vietnamese army (good) fighting a foreign invader (bad). This is a very natural phenomenon, of course. When your country is occupied by an invader the niceties of the political spectrum don't mean much. Whoever can defeat the invader becomes the good guy.

It is hard to explain the effect these things have on a post-colonial nation. Ho Chi Minh was not a communist to the Vietnamese (most of whom didn't know what a communist was). He was the man who had raised a Vietnamese army - the first in living memory - and led it to victory against a detested occupier. This has nothing to do with political affiliation. It's a question of face regained, of dignity restored. It's a question of wiping out those years of public face-slappings, continuous insult and humiliation.

What we could never understand was that Communist or not, Ho Chi Minh earned a mandate, earned the right to lead, by successfully resisting the French. We wrote ourselves out of the equation by supporting the French; we could only recruit people like Diem, political opportunists with no popular following.
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