Under that definition, then EVERY COUNTRY that was part of a previous empire was a "fiction".
No. Read about Vietnam before the French got there. Or even the first 50 years of the French occupation. You will see why Ho had to live in exile.
All Arab countries.. All African countries.. And if you take it back far enough, you can say the same for every other state...
In a sense, yes. But in another sense, not at all. There are cultural and ethnic groups. The Vietnamese was one such. Sure, if you take it back far enough, you would see that a few hundred years ago, some groups in Vietnam murdered other groups, and their ethnic status was in part determined by blood and might.
But the point to linking to the Geneva Accords was that in 1954, the French, the Vietnamese, and the international community generally agreed that Vietnam was one country (in fact, two countries didn't even occur to anyone at that point), and that elections were to be held by 1956 to determine the government of that country. The elections were cancelled by the US and US Vietnamese allies in the South, who then more or less arbitrarily called themselves a country. Are you suggesting that any group that lives in an area be able to call themselves a country whenever they choose?
It would seem that the Communists did TOO.. After all, what kind of tradional history did Communism have in Vietnamese culture?
You talk about communism like they did in the 50s and 60s--like "it" is one thing. It isn't and wasn't. Chinese communism was like Soviet communism wasn't like Cuban communism wasn't like Vietnamese communism. Ho called himself a communist, but Thomas Jefferson was one of his heroes. He was as naive about the US as the US was about him, though--he actually thought for awhile that the US would back Vietnamese liberation and independence, something he would have welcomed, since China was a traditional Vietnamese enemy. The US wanted a buffer zone in Indochina and didn't even realize that a united Vietnam under Ho actually would have provided it if we had allowed it.
gotta go.... |
