Dear Freedom Fighter,
Please accept this report of the June 30, 2007 meeting of Saigon for Saigon at the San Jose City Hall in California. San Jose is the 10th largest city in the USA and has the largest Vietnamese population in one city outside of Vietnam.
The community was happy to see slides of their homeland, particularly the beautiful old city of Saigon.
My photo is of the people listening to Father Nguyen Huu Le making his presentation. You can see in the middle, bottom row, one of the San Jose community organizers, General Bui Dinh Dam. He gave a short presentation about the reasons that Vietnamese people detest Ho Chi Minh. General Dam passed a paper of his speech in the English language as well as making his own talk in Vietnamese. It was much appreciated by the vice-Mayor of San Jose, Dave Cortese, who gave his own welcome speech to the group. Mr. Cortese spoke of the identity of the people with name "Saigon" and its meaning and related it to the identity of people with the name of city "San Jose" (the Catholic Saint Joseph).
You can also see in the photograph Mr. Tran Quoc Bao, the other major representative of the Saigon for Saigon organization. He spoke of the group's making an educational film about Ho Chi Minh that would tell the truth.
One of the community speakers asked me to bring in some educational material about Ho Chi Minh that was made by Nguyen Chi Thien at a previous meeting at the Martin Luther King Library about the 10th grade World History textbook. His handwritten message on the page, in Vietnamese, is on the attached page. Here is the back text:
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To the San Jose Vietnamese American community:
It is very dispiriting for the people who came to the United States as refugees and immigrants to read history textbooks which do not accurately describe the conditions in Vietnam at the time of the World War II, the August Revolution, and the Vietnam War (1954-1975). The textbooks always disparage the character and people of South Vietnam and their elected government. This is the majority population who came as refugees to the USA from 1975 to the present.
The following corrections (and the underlining on the previous page) are made by the poet Nguyen Chi Thien about the World History textbook in San Jose high schools:
1. Ho Chi Minh joined the Communist Party when he lived in Paris in 1920, not the 1930s. He was not sentenced to death nor did he flee a death sentence. He was in Russia and China until 1941.
2. The "popular program of land distribution" of Ho Chi Minh is incorrect. The Communists' August Revolution of 1945 resulted in a Land Reform law in 1953-1956 that "through the process of denunciation" resulted in death by starvation in prison camps as well as by the executions on public denunciations grounds. At least nearly 200,000 people in North Vietnam died during Land Reform of 1954-1955 according to Communist statistics.
3. The statement in the textbook that "some of the Vietcong [in South Vietnam] were trained soldiers from North Vietnam" should state: "most were trained soldiers from North Vietnam." They were infiltrated during the migration of 1954-1955 and "if supporting Communism previous to that" ordered to stay rather than migrate to North Vietnam according to the terms of the Geneva Accord. The Vietcong were not organized in opposition to corruption, they were organized to continue the war to impose Communism on the whole of Vietnam with the monetary and military support of the Soviet Union and Communist China.
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What you can do! Write to the California edition program consultants of Modern World History, Patterns of Interaction. Their names and schools are on the last pages of the textbook. These are the people who have said this is a good book for California students. They have the power of influence over the publishers to change the book if enough concerned citizens and parents call this misinformation to their attention. Send them this flyer with a letter of support. It will take community organization to do this, but it can be done in a democracy. You will notice that many consultants are at San Jose high schools. You can find them, meet with them, and tell them your history.
The name of the textbook is Modern World History, Patterns of Interaction, California edition. The publisher is McDougal Littell. (Authors are Roger B. Beck et al.)
In San Jose, the representative of the textbook at Silver Creek High School is Brian Irvine. At Del Mar High School the teacher representative is Claudia Udd. Bill Smiley is at Leigh High School; Ellen Oicles is at Piedmont Hills High school. Dr. Bill Hanna, the Director or the History-Social Science Project at San Jose State University, is another Program Consultant for this biased and untruthful textbook.
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Community activists at the June 30 meeting also passed a petition among the audience objecting to the proposed name "Vietnam Business District" for a planned development. The petition, addressed to Councilwoman Madison Nguyen, recommends the name be "Saigon Business District."
Jean Libby, editor
Viet-Am Review
