Appendix, Part 5 : Abbreviations
Abbreviations CP Communist Party TR Trotskyist VF Vietnamese radical who had spent time in France AIP member of Annamite Independence Party (1927–1929) TN member of Thanh Nien (1925–1930) ICP member of Indochinese Communist Party/Communist Party of Vietnam (1930-) LO member of one or more Left Opposition groups (ca. 1928–1934) LL member of La Lutte group (1933–1946) LIC member of League of Internationalist Communists (1935–1939, 1945–1946) WM member of Workers’ Militia (1945–1946) UOI member of Union Ouvrière Internationale (Fran... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Appendix, Part 4 : Note on Names
Note on Names Vietnamese accents are omitted throughout this book. As in many other East Asian cultures, Vietnamese family names precede personal names. When consulting other sources, note that there are different ways of anglicizing Vietnamese place names. Yen Bai, for example, can also be found as Yen Bay, Yen bai, Yen bay, Yen-bai, Yen-bay, Yenbai and Yenbay. Note also that names of organizations are translated in a variety of ways. Thanh Nien Cach Mang Dong Chi Hoi, for example, can be found as Revolutionary Youth League, League of Young Revolutionary Comrades, Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth Association, Association of Revolutionary Vietnamese Youth, etc. In a few cases we have indicated common alternative versions to the ones used in this book, but it is often best to use the original Vietnamese names when searching the Web or consulting book indexes. In order to help sort out the sometimes confusingly similar names of persons, groups and... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Appendix, Part 3 : Bibliography
Bibliography Works by Ngo Van (published in Paris unless otherwise indicated) Vu an Moscou, Nha xuat ban Chang trao luu (Saigon: Chong Trao Luu [Countercurrent Publications], 1937). Pamphlet denouncing the Moscow Trials. Divination, magie et politique dans la Chine ancienne [Divination, Magic and Politics in Ancient China]. Presses Universitaires de France, 1976; reprinted by You-Feng, 2002. Viêt-nam 1920–1945: révolution et contre-révolution sous la domination coloniale [Vietnam 1920–1945: Revolution and Counterrevolution Under Colonial Domination]. L’Insomniaque, 1995; reprinted by Nautilus, 2000. Translated into Vietnamese as Viet nam 1920–1945, cach mang va phan cach mang thoi do ho thuc dan (Chuong Re/L’Insomniaque, 2000). Avec Maximilien... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Appendix, Part 2 : Chronology
Chronology It is no exaggeration to say that a colonial war began the moment French troops landed in Indochina in 1859 and never stopped. Once established, the colonial regime engaged in an ongoing battle against the peasant and worker masses, who remained in latent or open revolt until the French and then the Americans were finally driven out more than a century later. The following chronology (mostly drawn from Ngo Van’s Vietnam 1920–1945 and from the British edition of an earlier text by Ngo Van, Revolutionaries They Could Not Break) mentions only a few of the more significant events in order to help orient the reader. 1615. Jesuit missionaries first set foot in Indochina. In order to facilitate the introduction of Christianity they create quoc ngu, a Romanized transcription of Vietnamese, to replace chu nom, the traditional Vietnamese writing system which used Chinese-style ideograms and w... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Appendix, Part 1 : Note on Stalinism and Trotskyism
Appendix Note on Stalinism and Trotskyism For those who are not familiar with the international political background of Ngo Van’s story, it may be helpful to make a few remarks about Stalinism and Trotskyism and to outline some of the twists and turns of the Third International under Stalin’s control. The Russian Revolution of 1917 consisted of two relatively distinct stages. The “February revolution” was a series of largely spontaneous popular struggles beginning in February and continuing over the next several months; the “October revolution” was essentially a coup d’état carried out by the Bolshevik Party under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky. The Bolsheviks had a reputation as radical revolutionaries, due in part to their having been one of the few leftist groups to oppose World War I; but once in power they repressed grassroots radical tendencies and morphed into a new ruling class. Although... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

From One Prison to Another
Chapter 5: From One Prison to Another On May 19, 1937, Marcel Gitton, of the Colonial Section of the French Communist Party, wrote to the Stalinist members of the La Lutte group: “According to the directives we have received concerning you, we consider it impossible to continue the collaboration between the Party and the Trotskyists. We have received a letter from a comrade about the situation in Indochina and the collaboration with the Trotskyists. We are going to transmit this letter to Moscow, along with our personal judgment.” This secret message was delivered to La Lutte by a French sailor. But amusingly enough, he mispronounced the name of the person it was addressed to — the Stalinist Tao — and it fell into th... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

And My Friends
Chapter 9: And My Friends? Friends are like clouds, Life scatters us But only death can separate us. What happened to my friends, my closest comrades? Underground struggle created a strong bond between us, but the clandestine nature of this struggle meant that we often remained unaware of significant aspects of each other’s lives. Despite this, I want to do my best to record what I can of these obscure figures. I’m sorry there are so many gaps in my account. VAN VAN KY, the typographer who stole the type that made our underground printshop possible, was the youngest defendant at our trial [the August 1936 trial of members of the League of Internationalist Communists]. As he lay dying of tuberculosis, he sadly confided to a frien... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Reflections on the Vietnam War
Reflections on the Vietnam War Since the Tet Offensive, propaganda has been churning out deceit with ever greater intensity. While the killing game goes on 10,000 kilometers away, newspapers and television the world over revel in sensationalistic images of an intolerable carnage to which the public is becoming increasingly habituated. This two-way brainwashing helps people to die, or to watch the dying, if their sensitivity has not already been completely dulled by the relentlessly deepening quagmire. Young Americans go off to defend the “Free World” of the dollar and of military bases in the Pacific, and end up rotting under Russian or Chinese rocket fire in the ricefields and hillsides of Vietnam. Young Vietnamese in one camp ... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Childhood
Chapter 2: Childhood Great-Lady departs, a pair of deadly serpents accompany Her. Great-Lady returns, a pair of black dragons escort Her. I think my prison companions felt the same as I did: prison life, however intense, seems to suspend time, encouraging inmates to look back at their past, at their childhood and the “apprenticeship” that marked the course of their life. I came into the world one night in 1912, toward the end of the Year of the Rat. The village custom was to allow a lapse of time before registering a birth, so that if the infant was carried off by evil spirits the parents would be spared having to revisit the registrar to declare the death of their newborn. So I was officially born in April 1913. Whenever a woma... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

In the Land of Héloïse
II. In the Land of Héloïse Chapter 10: Worker in the Promised Land I had left my country in the spring of 1948. The heartrending pain of a loving mother silently enduring the permanent departure of her prodigal son! ... The tears of a 12-year-old girl holding her little brother in her arms! The old tree drifting down the river can never return to its native land — this image flitted around in my head as the Messageries Maritimes freighter raised anchor in the Saigon harbor in that sad late afternoon. It took more than four weeks to lug us from Saigon to Marseilles. I traveled fourth class, in the hold with a dozen young men hoping to study in France. We slept in bunks. At one end of the hold were coffins bearing the remain... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)