rrizzo@bbncca.ARPA (Ron Rizzo) (03/11/86)
The current issue of the New York Review of Books (3/27/86) has a long
article on Honduras, "The Country of Nada," pages 11-17, by Edward
Sheehan, whose 4 short Boston Globe articles on Central America I
recently posted.
For Indochina War-era netters & others, there is some eye-opening
reading on the war & what followed it in Vietnam:
Truong Nhu Tang (with Doan Van Toai & David Chanoff), A VIETCONG
MEMOIR. (Simon & Schuster?, early 1980s?, pb $9.95)
Tang was a Vietcong leader throughout the war, and later a high
official in the Communist regime of united Vietnam, finally
making a harrowing escape as one of the boat people.
Doan Van Toai & David Chanoff, THE VIETNAMESE GULAG (forthcoming
in March from Simon & Schuster).
The current issue of Commentary (March 1986) contains an excerpt
from the book, "Vietnam: How We Deceived Ourselves," pages 40-43.
Another name to look out for (I don't know if he's written anything)
is Nguyen Cong Hoan, "the Buddhist opposition Assemblyman under Thieu,"
who escaped Vietnam in 1977 and was among the first people to bring the
bad news about united Vietnam to the outside world.
Postwar Vietnam is a cruel joke, being
--- bankrupt: the economy manages to stagger on only through
massive infusions of Soviet aid;
--- corrupt: Communists from the ascetic north have ransacked
the affluent south, living high off the hog, & have despo-
tically monopolized political power, despite longstanding
promises made to the Vietcong & nationalists to share power;
--- racist: boat people are overwhelmingly ethnic Chinese; the
Vietnamese invasion & occupation of Cambodia still threatens
that battered nation & its culture with extinction; Noam
Chomsky for one believes the invasion has resulted in far
more Cambodian deaths than the massacres of the Khmer Rouge;
policy towards "montagnard" groups has been brutal;
--- militaristic: immediately following victory, the regime threw
the war-weary country into a series of what can only be called
military adventures (Cambodia, Chinese border wars), given
their endless, over-ambitious & imperialist character (& the
country's exhaustion), whatever their original justifications;
--- very repressive: a giant concentration camp network exists
("reeducation camps") which antiwar diehards have been at
pains to deny, minimize or ignore; the camps probably hold
hundreds of thousands of inmates, & possess the character-
istic features of a Communist gulag.
Regards,
Ron Rizzo