Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995 Read Online Free PDF

as a future state distinct from the present; individuals find nirvana by transcending the present and detaching themselves from earthly cares. In the north, Mahayana Buddhism from China was progressive. It is in acts of love and charity directed to the problems of the moment, in which devotees put off their own salvation until others achieve it, that salvation is to be found. Mahayana Buddhism reinforced the communal spirit that social and economic conditions fostered in the north. When the time came to resist the French and the Japanese, that spirit supplied the conditions for political organization.
     
    It started in Nghe An. The Great Depression depressed rice prices, eroding peasant income and creating an epidemic of economic misery and political discontent. Widespread tax revolts erupted spontaneously throughout central Vietnam, and more sporadic eruptions took place in the Mekong Delta. But in Nghe An, radicals organized peasants into Red Soviets—local councils demanding an end to rents, seeking massive tax cuts, and in conformity with communism, striving for land redistribution.
     
    On September 12, 1930, more than 6,000 Nghe An peasants marched on Vinh, the provincial capital. Although the march began as a peaceful demonstration, the French called in an air strike, killing more than 174 people. Later in the day, when relatives drifted in to claim the bodies, aircraft killed another fifteen people. A French journalist called the second attack “an awkward error which had a bad effect.” Bad effect, indeed! The repression of the Nghe An Revolt was a seminal event, proof that France would stop at nothing to keep the empire. For the French, the revolt was sobering testimony to the power of Vietnamese peasants if anyone organized them. For the mandarins, the revolt signaled their downfall if communists ever took over. The “Vietnamese reactionary class,” as Ho described them, would lose everything.
     
    But the collapse of the Nghe An Revolt taught Ho Chi Minh and his followers another lesson. Nobody would overthrow the French empire without first creating a broad-based political organization reaching all the way down to the peasant masses. As far back as 1924, Ho had said that in “all the French colonies.. . conditions have combined to further an uprising of the peasants. Here and there they have rebelled, but their rebellions have been drowned in blood. If the peasants remain pacific today it is because they lack organization and a leader.” Revolution depended on the support of millions of peasants. Success in Vietnam would be more a political than a military question.
     
    September 1945—Ho Chi Minh, right, poses with Vo Nguyen Giap, minister of the Interior in Ho Chi Minh’s provisional government. Giap led the Vietminh and North Vietnamese military through the fall of Saigon. (Courtesy, AP/Wide World Photos.)
     
     
    After the suppression of the Nghe An Revolt, the French went after all revolutionary nationalists. Pham Van Dong was arrested in 1930 and sent to the dreaded “tiger cages” at Con Son Island, where he spent the next eight years. Nguyen Luong Bang held out for a year, but he was put in a French prison in 1931. Tho spent years in hiding and in French jails during the 1930s. Vo Nguyen Giap went into exile in 1939, but the French arrested his wife and baby. Both died in prison in 1941, giving Vo Nguyen Giap a vendetta to accompany his nationalism. The French tried Ho in absentia, convicted him of treason, and sentenced him to death. Under pressure from the French, British authorities imprisoned him in Hong Kong. Rumors quickly spread that he had died there, a story both the French and the Soviet Union believed.
     
    But late in 1932 some British contacts smuggled Ho Chi Minh out of Hong Kong and drove him to Shanghai, where he met with Soviet officials who helped him get to Moscow in 1933. Five years later, Ho Chi Minh returned to China, and the next year he met Vo Nguyen Giap for the first