People are essentially arrested because they are Christians but the phenomenon is in decline. Actually people who are Protestant Christians are arrested for doing or saying things that would not get other folks arrested, or at least not so soon. Protestants are a fairly new phenomenon in Viet Nam and Protestantism is considered a foreign thing, a Western thing. Catholics have been a substantial element of the population for several centuries and Catholicism is "Vietnamese." Actually, following Reunification the VCs
(that's what the locals call government people and government fans) attempted to ban religion altogether. The Buddhists, at least in the South, pretty much just stopped- went home and drank tea. The country was sliding rapidly toward the cliff when the VCs decided well okay, Buddhism is a Cultural Vietnamese institution. Right then the border war with China was on and the VCs discovered that they were Vietnamese, not undifferentiated Communists. It took a few years longer to determine that Catholicism is also Culturally Vietnamese but the Catholics were becoming the business class pretty rapidly because they were not permitted to work for the government or in any of the government enterprises, so they got into trading and services and making stuff to sell. The economy was more and more depending on them. The major social disabilities finally came off in the last year.Protestant conversion has happened much too recently and much too fast and the VCs do not understand it and simply don't have any idea how to deal with it. To the VCs it is some sort of foreign invasion. Moreover it has happened mainly among the mountain people- the minorities. The VCs, and to some extent, the Kinh (the ethnic Viets) see it much the same way that our own establishment viewed the Ghost Dance phenomenon that swept the Great Plains Indians in the late 1880s. In our case that led to Wounded Knee and lots of other untoward action. We got over it finally, but not without some egregious killing and imprisonments. The analogy is apt, in part because the folks we call Montagnards are to Viet Nam very much what the plains Indians were to America ca. 1885-1920. There are even reservations from which the Moi and the Hmong depart from time to go hunting or just because it is the season to go somewhere else. The VCs will get over it and US pressure is a great factor in the speed with which they get do over it. Viet Nam desires to be protected by America and desires to NOT be the Chinese Riviera. Viet Nam is thus much more responsive to American pressure than, say, China. The real holdup is that the VCs, while wanting to make all the changes necessary are trying to do it in such a way as to also keep their jobs. Ultimately they will fail to keep their jobs.
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ThanhPhero:
Your brilliant sharing of CLARITY in Post No. 486,
...as our U.S. 7th Cavalry Commanding Officer Lt. Col. HAL G. MOORE kept telling his men while completely surrounded by 1,000's of North Vietnamese Communist Army Regulars in that Valley of Death known as the IA DRANG Valley of November 1965,
.."Is just OUTSTANDING"..!!!
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