Word: ngo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This situation could not last long without prompting resistance. When the Viet Minh began mobilizing in the early 1940s, land reform was at the top of its agenda. And similarly, when the U.S.-backed Ngo Dinh Diem regime refused in the late 1950s to implement a serious land reform program to redress the century-old grievance, peasants in the south began to resist, forming the National Liberation Front in 1960. Today, the Thieu regime has reversed its faltering steps toward land reform and handed back vast tracts to the former owners, while reforms in the NLF-controlled areas...
Thieu believes that if the war continues, American aid will continue to flow. So Thieu prolongs the war, directing his army and air force to strike at NLF territory and ignoring the calls for reconciliation contained in the cease fire agreement. Ngo Vinh Long '64, who works at Harvard's Vietnamese Studies Project, has estimated that the South Vietnamese Air Force, using warplanes supplied by the United States, has flown about 15,000 bombing and reconaissance missions since the ceasefire. Obviously, such bombing prevents the peasants from going home--and joining...
When the U.S.-sponsored Ngo Dinh Diem regime stepped up its repression in the South in the late 1950's, peasants left their plows and rice paddies and villages and joined the National Liberation Front. In the late 1960's peasants who had never seen a television set or a washing machine, who had never visited a city, successfully resisted the American war machine. They alternately evaded and defeated U.S. ground troops; they shot down American warplanes with rifles and with their bare hands rebuilt bombed-out bridges and roads...
...Ngo Vinh Long '64, a Vietnamese who works with the Vietnamese Studies Project at Harvard's East Asian Research Center, has taken up this neglected area. Before the Revolution is a remarkable and insightful book which draws upon many Vietnamese and French sources and Long's own experience in his homeland to depict the agonizing destruction of rural Vietnam. The book is divided into two parts: in the first, Long painstakingly molds reams of statistics into a moving but never heavy-handed description of the French transformation of rural Vietnam. In Part II, he presents his own translations of articles...
...Ngo Vinh Long has disagreed elsewhere with certain aspects of the Mus-FitzGerald analysis. Traditional Vietnam, he argued in a Ramparts review of FitzGerald's book, was not a stable, ordered moral universe. Vietnamese history is punctuated with peasant upheavals and popular resistance to foreign invasions, including to French landing parties in the 19th century. Resistance diminished somewhat in the middle years of French rule, Long suggested, not because some heavenly mandate rested upon the French, but because their rule so brutally and swiftly transformed Vietnamese society that the peasants were unable to act. Not some mystical power of French...