Word: ho
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Another American, former Marine Lieutenant Charles Fenn (now a novelist writing in Ireland), had helped Ho set up the intelligence operation and occasionally corresponded with him. In one letter, previously unpublished, Ho wrote to Fenn: "The war is won. But we small and subject countries have no share, or very very small share, in the victory of freedom and democracy. Probably if we want to get a sufficient share, we have still to fight." He was right, of course. Ho and his Viet Minh colleagues approached the French as the Pacific war was ending and asked for a measure...
...republic was baptized in blood. Initially, Ho and French civilian leaders in Hanoi sought to work out a compromise. Their efforts were undermined by colonialists in Paris, and for the next nine years the revolution ground on. In the spring of 1954, after a series of disasters on the battlefield and war exhaustion back home, the French were forced to leave Viet Nam. But Ho failed to secure at the conference table what his troops had won in combat. Under severe pressure from the Soviet Union, he was forced to accept control of only half of Viet...
...Ho's spoils seemed paltry at best. The French had concentrated their agricultural production in the South; crops in the North were insufficient to feed its population. Industry, indeed, had been established in the North?but the plant was minuscule: a cement factory, a brewery, a few railway-repair shops and an assortment of small machine and textile producers. Ho's major asset was coal, and its continuing abundance has provided North Viet Nam with badly needed foreign exchange. Clearly, intensive efforts were needed in the agricultural sector. Ho's first major program, accordingly, was agrarian reform, and his first...
...clever gambit, characteristic of Ho, and it worked for a time. But in 1956, when the government tried to force every farmer into a collective, a peasant revolt erupted in his native Nghe An province. Though the policy was almost certainly Ho's, Truong Chinh was made the scapegoat. He lost his post as party leader. Giap denounced him for having "executed too many people" and having "resorted to terror." The agrarian purge was not the only instance of the regime's bloody-mindedness. Immediately after independence was declared in 1945, Ho's officials, bent on eliminating all real...
...Ho re-embarked upon collectivization, this time calling the units "cooperatives." Today 93% of North Vietnamese peasants are enrolled in them. Productivity has not been helped. Last year North Viet Nam was forced to import 750,000 tons of wheat from Russia to make up for rice shortages...