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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JF Quinnelly who wrote (12096)	8/24/1998 3:28:00 AM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

Wouldn't know about grad students, never been one. I did do a stint teaching English in a Vietnamese/Cambodian refugee camp, though, and heard many things. The French had their own little Gulags, conveniently forgotten by history, in the '30s. The guillotine was quite active in those days - I'd have to check the figure, but I recall 3000 heads in 5 years, with several hundred thousand imprisoned "pour encourager les autres". The pro-independence movement had no weapons at that stage, except strikes and rallies. Giap's wife and son died in a French jail; his sister-in-law and father-in-law were guillotined. How do you think he felt about the benefits of French civilization? The French, who had the largest armed force of any European power in Asia, let the Japanese in without firing a shot. The north's rice crop in '44 was collected by French and Japanese profiteers, and sent north to China, where it was sold for gold at a huge profit. Several hundred thousand starved. I don't dispute what the Vietnamese communists were by 1975. I think the process by which they became that is much more complicated than you're admitting. I don't think they sprang from the womb wearing little red horns and tails. When evolution is obstructed, revolution takes its place. It is a much uglier thing than evolution, but the blame has to be shared between the revolutionaries and those who created the revolution by obstructing evolution. Oppression begets oppression, violence begets violence. If you had been born Vietnamese, how would you have felt about cringing, scraping, and stepping off into the street every time a Frenchman passed? How choosy would you have been about your allies in your quest to be rid of the oppressor? How would you feel about the people who gave billions of dollars worth of weapons to those who were trying to maintain their hold on your country? As I said, the Patti book is totally devoid of ideological content. It is, however, an extremely detailed eyewitness account of events that have been almost entirely forgotten since. No matter what your ideological perspective, it's an essential read if the period interests you. I'm not trying to justify. I'm trying to understand. Steve