Gunny
Gold Member
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- #61
A number of the older people I met were definitely from the French regime. I remember speaking with one old gentleman, this would have been about 1978/9 and he would have been in his seventies then and he was speaking French with our translator (my schoolboy French failed me beyond a simple greeting). Our translator spoke Vietnamese (the southern version), French and English thankfully (actually her father was a bigwig in the French colonial government). The old gentlemen told me about the French regime and explained the genesis of the resistance, he even referred to the "Viet Minh". Really interesting man to talk to and very well educated to boot.
Ah ... you mean the Viet Minh who were Vietnamese nationalists fighting to throw off centuries of colonial rule? The ones we chose to not support, instead siding with our age-old "ally" France?
IMO, when you remove the superficial ideological struggle and Cold War fearmongering and political allies, seems to me Ho represented American idealism FAR more than Diem did.