Viet Minh Quotes

You will kill ten of us, we will kill one of you, but in the end, you will tire of it first.

If we forgot our resentment, if we forgot revenge, if we acknowledged that we are all puppets in someone else's play, if we had not fought a war against each other, if some of us had not called ourselves nationalists or communists or capitalists or realists, if our bonzes had not incinerated themselves, if the Americans hadn't come to save us from ourselves, if we had not bought what they sold, if the Soviets had never called us comrades, if Mao had not sought to do the same, if the Japanese hadn't taught us the superiority of the yellow race, if the French had never sought to civilize us, if Ho Chi Minh had not been dialectical and Karl Marx not analytical, if the invisible hand of the market did not hold us by the scruffs of our necks, if the British had defeated the rebels of the new world, if the natives had simply said , Hell no, on first seeing the white man, if our emperors and mandarins had not clashed among themselves, if the Chinese had never ruled us for a thousand year, if they had used gunpowder for more than fireworks, if the Buddha had never lived, if the Bible had never been written and Jesus Christ never sacrificed, if you needed no more revisions, and if I saw no more of these visions, please, could you please just let me sleep?

In your schoolbooks, you won't find anything about the Land Reform nor about the internal fighting of the Viet Minh. A part of our country's history has been erased, together with the lives of countless people. We're forbidden to talk about events that relate to past mistakes or the wrongdoing of those in power, for they give themselves the right to rewrite history. But you're old enough to know that history will write itself in people's memories, and as long as those memories live on, we can have faith that we can do better.

IN WRITING THIS BOOK, I returned again and again to what people call my homeland, where my parents were born, as was I. But for the Vietnamese, the homeland is not simply the country of origin. It is the village where one’s father was born and where one’s father was buried. My father’s father died where he was supposed to, as my father will not and as I will not, in the province of his birth, his mausoleum thirty minutes from Ho Chi Minh’s birthplace.

But Che was neither as innocent nor as friendly as she looked. She knew nothing of the global clash of ideas that brought American soldiers to Vietnam, but the war was her life. Her position in it was dead certain. With all the passion of youth, she hated the Saigon regime, the Republic of Vietnam. This enmity was largely an inheritance. Before she was born, her father had fought with the Viet Minh against the French, and when she was a child he had been imprisoned for years by the Saigon regime, which had followed the French. In her mind they were the same, only now the shadow behind the local oppressor was not France, but the United States. Her father, a bricklayer, had been fighting his whole life. For Che, the war had turned even more personal two years earlier, when the ARVN killed her big sister, a leader in the VC underground. She knew the regime’s soldiers as nguy (fake), a word that in Vietnamese suggested a familiar Asian face masking an alien soul.3

Paved alleyway, close on all sides, the old quarter. The men at Bia hoi She just watched her go, sullen, red-eyed. The heat beating down, worse than unusual, night but still unbearable, air thick. Tempers onedge, the aftermath of a Chinese crackdown the week before. A prism grenade thrown into a high-end restaurant popular with the Chinese military; two dead officers, two dead waiters, a dozen were injured. Not the most notable of attacks, except one of the dead officers was a general. So there were raids and arrests and bodies turning up, young men and young women, tortured and aired out and worse. Everyone was an informant, everyone Viet Minh, no one able to talk or trust. She lurch-stepped down the alley. The thirty-six streets they called it.

In most cases, the Chinese advisors cooperated well with the Viet Minh commanders and maintained a close working relationship with the Vietnamese throughout the war. Many of them thought they had built friendships for life.

The Vietnamese troops had experience with traditional guerrilla warfare as well as small-scale operations, but Chinese advisors believed that the Viet Minh should engage in large-scale offensive campaigns and seek decisive battles in order to destroy more French troops.76

But what was this meaning? What had I intuited at last? Namely this: while nothing is more precious than independence and freedom, nothing is also more precious than independence and freedom! These two slogans are almost the same, but not quite. The first inspiring slogan was Ho Chi Minh’s empty suit, which he no longer wore. How could he? He was dead. The second slogan was the tricky one, the joke. It was Uncle Ho’s empty suit turned inside out, a sartorial sensation that only a man of two minds, or a man with no face, dared to wear.

But the Viet-Minh had had about ten months in which to establish their administration, train their forces with Japanese and American weapons (and Japanese and Chinese instructors), and kill or terrorize into submission the genuine Vietnamese nationalists who wanted a Viet-Nam independent from France but equally free of Communist rule. The first round of the war for Indochina already had been lost for the West before it had even begun.

Every time a man has contributed to the victory of the dignity of the spirit, every time a man has said no to an attempt to subjugate his fellows, I have felt solidarity with his act. In no way should I derive my basic purpose from the past of the peoples of color. In no way should I dedicate myself to the revival of an unjustly unrecognized Negro civilization. I will not make myself the man of any past. I do not want to exalt the past at the expense of my present and of my future. It is not because the Indo-Chinese has discovered a culture of his own that he is in revolt. It is because "quite simply" it was, in more than one way, becoming impossible for him to breathe. When one remembers the stories with which, in 1938, old regular sergeants described the land of piastres and rickshaws, of cut-rate boys and women, one understands only too well the rage with which the men of the Viet-Minh go into battle.

Stalin justified his position by saying: “China and Vietnam are sharing the border and related to each other. It’s convenient for China to help [Viet Minh].”39 Mao agreed with Stalin. Mao followed Stalin’s advice and met Ho in Moscow. Ho explained to Mao why the Viet Minh needed international help in their war against the French. Mao made it clear to Ho at their meetings that China would support North Vietnam in order to win the war against the French. Mao also “stressed the importance of reciprocating friendship.

Refusing the money would have aroused suspicion, so I took it. I was tempted to use it for charitable activity, namely the support of beautiful young women hampered by poverty, but I remembered what my father said, rather than what he did, as well as Ho Chi Minh’s adages.

As one of those connected with the Viet Minh, who went from South Vietnam to North Vietnam in 1954, remarked to the regional post of the Viet Minh, Buddhism is pervasive but formless. For that reason it is difficult to crush, It has its organizations that are simple to shatter, but Buddhism itself remains. It is like a drop of mercury: you can strike the mercury and it will disintegrate into many smaller parts, but as soon as you remove your fist, they all run together again.

You need not wait until the universe lines up all the pins. Conditions are never going to be perfect. If you think you have an opportunity for change, take it, and have no regrets. Remember, those who fear death the most are those with regrets.

Whatever China has and Vietnam needs, we will provide,” Mao intoned. The Chinese Communist Party “offers all the military assistance Vietnam needs in its struggle against France.”[67] True to his word, Mao gave Ho everything he requested. During the first nine months of 1950, the Chinese shipped the Viet Minh 14,000 rifles, 1,700 machine guns and recoilless rifles, 60 artillery pieces, 300 bazookas, and a variety of other military equipment.

Mai was thirteen years old in 1954, when fear forced her and the rest of her family to flee the North and begin new lives in Saigon. “Saigon was like a foreign country to us at the time,” she recalled. Some hated us for having abandoned the Viet Minh and clung to the French; others saw us as carpetbaggers who were going to steal their jobs and their rice bowls, or who were going to drive up the price of everything and make life difficult for everyone….Instead of seeing us as compatriots, many people thought of us as aliens: they called themselves “Vietnamese,” while calling us “Northerners.

provided the French with money and weaponry, were hardening into a Cold War frame of mind: they saw the Viet Minh as just another kind of communist and failed to understand the degree to which they were inspired by nationalism and open to friendship with them.

Sát bên bờ của dải đất lở dốc đứng bên này, một đám đông khách đợi đò đứng nhìn sang. Người đi bộ, người dắt xe đạp. Một vài tốp đàn bà đi chợ về đang ngồi kháo chuyện hoặc xổ tóc ra bắt chấy. Nhĩ nhìn mãi đám khách nhưng vẫn không tìm thấy cái mũ cói rộng vành và chiếc sơ mi màu trứng sáo đâu cả. Thì ra thằng con trai của anh chỉ mới đi được đến hàng cây bằng lăng bên kia đường. Thằng bé vẫn cắp cuốn sách bên nách đang sà vào một đám người chơi phá cờ thế trên hè phố. Suốt đời Nhĩ cũng đã từng chơi phá cờ thế trên nhiều hè phố, thật là không dứt ra được. Không khéo rồi thằng con trai anh lại trễ mất chuyến đò trong ngày, Nhĩ nghĩ một cách buồn bã, con người ta trên đường đời thật khó tránh được những cái điều vòng vèo hoặc chùng chình, vả lại nó đã thấy có gì đáng hấp dẫn ở bên kia sông đâu? Họa chăng chỉ có anh đã từng trải, đã từng in gót chân khắp mọi chân trời xa lạ mới nhìn thấy hết sự giàu có lẫn mọi vẻ đẹp của một cái bãi bồi sông Hồng ngay bờ bên kia, cả trong những nét tiêu sơ, và cái điều riêng anh khám phá thấy giống như một niềm mê say pha lẫn với nỗi ân hận đau đớn, lời lẽ không bao giờ giải thích hết.