Hello comrades. I am Brazilian and here in Brazil we have the newspaper Folha de São Paulo, which is a newspaper of the bourgeois order and which supported the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff and collaborated with the Military Dictatorship in my country for lending reporting cars for the agents of the regime to capture members of leftist guerrillas.The newspaper is completing 100 years of existence and is rescuing some striking interviews throughout its history and I was impressed that they interviewed the general who played a significant role in the Vietnamese victory in the Vietnam War in 1995.Observe some details of the interview (which is in Portuguese, but the one that a Google Tadutor does not solve):"Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap went down in history as one of the greatest military geniuses of all time. In 1975 he defeated the USA, the main military power of the century; in 1954, he dealt a death blow to colonialism by defeating the French in celebrated battle of Dien Bien Phu. 'Dang Bich Ha, 60, the wife of Giap's second marriage, opened the door to the room to reveal walls covered with books and paintings, almost all with the figure of Ho Chi Minh, the leader of independence and the communist revolution.Legacies of war also survive in the general's daily life: he gets up daily at 5:30 am to listen to the radio news.At 6 am he still does gymnastics and two hours later he starts working on research, one on Ho Chi Minh's thinking and the other dedicated to the reforms that bring the market economy to Vietnam.The day ends at 3:30 pm, after a two-hour lunch break. Free from research, Giap engages in reading, dominated by military classics, studies by Napoleon or Mao Tse-tung, and also authors like Goethe, Shakespeare and Tolstoy. ""That Saturday, March 18, the general reorganized the agenda to receive a Brazilian journalist. He entered the room at exactly 4:30 pm, with military punctuality. He talked for 78 minutes and emphasized that he preferred to talk about the future.He did not change his tone of voice at any time, he gestured sparingly, denouncing the typical Vietnamese characteristics of discretion and self-control.When the interview was over, the recorder turned off, General Giap reached out for a handshake and said: "I admire your profession, I also had my journalism days when we were doing political unrest in the 1940s."He was referring to his arson articles published in Viet Lap (Built Vietnam). ""What are the countries that want to dominate the new international order?(He hesitates for seven seconds before answering) I speak only in general terms, I mean countries that accumulate economic and military power. A crucial question is whether colonialism is over or not. I can also say that there is a new neo-colonialism.I fought against old colonialism, against neocolonialism and I think we must be vigilant against the emergence of this new neocolonialism, based on economic power and the power of technology. Domination still exists, but in a different way. ""Although there is no war, Vietnam's workers are being exploited. We have started our reform process to renew the country and bring it out of underdevelopment. To do this, we need to industrialize and modernize the country. We have changed our economy so that it adopts market mechanisms. , under state control. The renovation has already brought results, although they are still initial."What is the role of the Communist Party in these changes towards capitalism? (See the interviewer's bias here!)When we started the renovation, I think we found the right way to move forward and we already have positive results, such as economic growth. The country's leaders, the party and the people of Vietnam are looking for the fastest path to development.Before, I had a dream, to see Vietnam reunified and independent. The dream came true. And now I have another dream: that Vietnam will reach developed countries and become a modern country.But I want to add that we want to build a society in which people are prosperous and the country is strong, a civilized and equal society. We change our economy, but we maintain our goals of socialism and social equality. ""Would you say then that the directions that Vietnam has followed in the last 20 years since the end of the war were wrong?I would like to repeat a phrase from Ho Chi Minh: if the country is independent, but people do not enjoy happiness, then independence does not make sense.For the past 20 years, our goal has been to bring happiness to the Vietnamese, but in the early years after the war, we got some decisions right and others wrong. At that time, we were under the influence of some ready models of socialism (that of the USSR). But since 1986 we have embarked on renovation and we are growing; we have already achieved economic growth rates of 8%. '"See that statue (points to a bronze piece over a deactivated fireplace). It is Tran Hung Dao, precursor to our military doctrine. In the 13th century, he led our people in resisting the invasion of the Mongols, who came from China.He used small contingents, small units, to face large armies. He resorted to simple weapons, stimulated courage, intelligence and creativity, to invent mechanisms that would surprise the enemy.At Dien Bien Phu, we didn't lose any tanks or planes, simply because we didn't have them. In the war against the USA, we didn't lose any B-52s, because we didn't have them."A brilliant interview! via /r/communism https://ift.tt/3hUpE66
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