Thanks!
(Also interesting to consider that the French had to ask the US for our permission before they were legally to be allowed to divert their share of the Marshall Plan aid to pay for their further military mis-adventures in those 'uppity' Colonial lands.)
For example... during the WW II period (in which, of course, the French were no longer in control of Vietnam... or of France itself, for that matter, as both areas had been conquered by AXIS nations), Ho Chi Ming rose to some local renown in the temporarily former 'French Indochina' (under Japanese occupation) as a famous resistance leader against the Japanese, and patriotic nationalist.
After the Japanese were run out, he appealed to the US to NOT support the French desire to come back in and lord it over their former Colonial territory, (as if nothing had changed)... and was EXTREMELY DISAPPOINTED when the US didn't live up to it's high-flown rhetoric about 'support for Democracy and national self-determination', and instead backed the claims of the former French Colonial overlords.
(As I pointed out: after WW II France was broke. If the US had not given the French permission for them to divert our Marshall Plan aid to the military reconquest of their lost Colonial lands, there is no way they would have been able to pay for it, and Vietnam would have --- in an undivided state --- been welcomed into the UN.)
Old Ho was always disappointed that the US had reacted the way it did. He thought it showed that we put the interests of 'fellow whites' over those of 'brown skinned orientals'... and did not believe that they deserved the right to rule themselves.
So, he turned the fight that the resistance forces had been waging (fairly successfully...) against the Japanese occupiers into a fight against the French occupiers and then, after beating the French, against the US (after we were suckered into foolishly picking up France's bad hand).
If we had only refused the French permission to divert the Marshall Plan aid that we gave them over to war-making and re-conquest... a whole lot of waste could have been avoided. |
