From: calvin@dinkum.wpd.sgi.com (Calvin H. Vu)
Subject: Re: Vietnam National Day
Organization:  Silicon Graphics, Inc.  Mountain View, CA
Date: Wed, 15 Apr 1992 06:12:17 GMT

In <1992Apr14.171717.16168@news.media.mit.edu> Vu Ngo <VU@GODZILLA.SCH.Symbolics.COM> writes:

|     Date: Mon, 13 Apr 1992 16:30 EDT
|     From: giao@informix.com (Giao Tien Vu)
| 
|     Can we call the government of Tra^`n Tro.ng Kim a legitimate government?
|     The catch was that the government was promoted by the Japanese as the
|     nationalist alternative to the French government.  The truth was that
|     the Japanese used this government to further their control of Indochina.
|     This government fell because its association with the Japanese whose cruel
|     wartime policies caused about 2 million deaths in Vietnam in 1945.  There
|     was no way that it could stay in power.
| 
| Anh Giao, would you expand on the Japanese cruel wartime policies for my own
| interest.  I once met a old gentleman who possessed a tremendous hatred to 
| the Japanese, to the seemingly silly extent of not allowing his son-in-law
| to park the Japanese-made car in front of his house.  He said he didn't
| hate as much the Chinese or the French Legionaires "Le^ Du+o+ng" (presuming
| during the domination periods) as deeply the Japanese of their inhumane
| wartime cruelty.  He would hold his contempt for the Japanese till the day
| he dies.

	This is a dark spot in our history which I also like to know.
    Noone could deny that millions of people died in the North due to 
    starvation.  However, the cause of that differed depending on what 
    you read.   From one source, the death was caused by the Japanese 
    policies of destroying rice fields and turning them into cotton fields 
    to satisfy the demand for military clothes.  From another source,
    it was caused by a bad crop in the North added by American bombing of
    the Xuyen Viet railroad which carried rice from the South [in order
    to cut off food supply to the Japanese].

	I tend to believe the second source a little bit more than the
    first since it's hard to believe that anybody would be so stupid
    as to destroy the most important of all military supplies: food.
    That also wouldn't explain why the starvation only occured in the
    North and not at all in the South.
    As for the American bombing causing the starvation, it is more
    believable since the North has never been known for having 
    consistent good rice crops and the South has always helped it out
    im time of need.  I'm not saying that the intention of the Americans
    was to let the Vietnamese starve, but in 1945, we were just some
    faceless little people on the ground, caught in the battle field
    of two giants and neither the Japanese nor the American would put
    our welfare before their strategy for a victory, that's all.

	Anyway, I just had a chat with my older brothers a few days ago
    about the A^'t Da^.u (1945) starvation.  They told me that they saw
    a lot of people die that year.   Every morning, when they opened the
    door they would prayed that the door would open since, if it got stuck, 
    it was invariably because there was a dead body in front of it.
    There were ox carts making its round every now and then to collect
    dead bodies for burial.  Some people who was picked up tried to
    plead with their last breadth: "Please help me ... I'm still alive..."
    ["La`m o+n giu'p to^i... To^i va^~n co`n so^'ng ma`..."].  But the
    corpse collector who has grown callous by seeing too many people 
    die just replied irritatingly: "If you don't die now you will
    die later anyway" ["Ba^y gio+` kho^ng che^'t thi` mai mo^'t cu~ng che^'t
    ma`"].  All those starving and starved people were stacked up on
    the ox carts and carried to a big hole in the ground where they were
    dumped on top of each others and sprayed with "vo^i bo^.t" to prevent
    the plague.   

	Undoubtedly, the old gentleman you mentioned who hated the 
    Japanese lived in the North at that time.  I would understand his 
    hatred for the Japanese since he could see with his own eyes that
    the Japanese army was going around collecting rice to keep themselves
    well-fed while leaving millions of people dying.  But what he couldn't
    see was the bigger picture why there was such a severe shortage of 
    rice in the North at that time and why there was no help from the 
    fertile South.   Anyway, if you talked to that old gentleman, you
    can try to get some stories from him and share them with us.  He
    must have seen a lot of terrible things which caused him to hate
    the Japanese until now, after 47 years.

	It would be nice to know the cause(s) of this starvation, not 
    because I would like to blame one country or the other for it, but 
    it's always good to know the truth.  If we want to blame somebody,
    first we have to blame ourselves for allowing ourselves to be the
    little flies and so, got caught in a battle of the two buffaloes
    ["Tra^u bo` hu'c nhau ruo^`i muo^~i che^'t"].  What have we learned
    from that lesson ?   Did we learn to make ourselves stronger ?
    It seems to me that many people are blaming our current poverty 
    problem on picking the wrong buffalo and think that we would be better
    off being a fly on the other buffalo !!!   It seems that too many
    people forget that the country consists of three elements: its
    people, its land, and its government.  We might have a bad government
    but the land and the people are still there.  Instead of strengthening
    the good things we have left: our land and our people and let the
    bad government disintegrate according to the law of natural selection
    [lua^.t dda`o tha?i], too many people are thinking that the only way 
    to destroy the bad government is to destroy its people by keeping them 
    in poverty.  What will we have left after everything we have is 
    destroyed  ? (as I'm sure that some parts of our land with precious 
    resources will be invaded after we weakened ourselves to the point of 
    being defenceless)

	I have serious misgivings regarding "patriotic" people who can't
    think about the people and the land but just concentrate on the
    government.  It seems to me they are either too power-hungry or too
    near-sighted.  They don't seem to see that it will take us another
    30 years to catch up with other countries.  By that time, the Communist
    government will be long gone without a bullet being fired.  Instead
    they want to wait and make the country poorer until the Communist
    government is replaced.  But by that time, we will be so far behind
    that it will take us another 50 years to catch up if we can catch up
    at all since we will be the poorest country in the world by then.

	It's not that I'm advocating helping VN whole-heartedly right now
    since I myself think that it's impossible to get anything done
    under the corrupted Communist system which is plagued with the
    most stupid and illiterate officials imaginable.  If you have better
    things to do it is not wise to go back and fight with the government
    officials to teach them basic cerebration.  However, thing
    will change gradually and we should leave the option of helping
    ourselves open until we can do it.   Thinking too much about our
    hatred for the government while forgetting our love for the people
    and the land won't do us a lot of good in the long run.

    Anyway, I talked too much already.  Ciao.

- calvin
--
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Calvin H. Vu			   | "We are each of us angels with only one
Silicon Graphics Computer Systems  | wing.  And we can only fly embracing
calvin@sgi.com   (415) 962-3679	   | each other."
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