Page:Pentagon-Papers-Part I.djvu/110

Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011

TOP SECRET – Sensitive

(8) The Great Religion of the Third Amnesty (Dai Dao Tam Ky Pho Do), a Cao-Daist sect led by Tran Quang Vinh, the principal subordinate of the Cao-Daist Pope, Pham Cong Tac. The Cao-Daists had been furnished arms by the Japanese and were used as an auxiliary police force throughout Cochinchina.²⁰

Whatever short term advantages these groups gained vis-a-vis the Vichy French, however, collaboration with the Japanese had the longer run effect of discrediting a significant number of Vietnamese nationalists, putting their movements at particular disadvantage in postwar competition with the Viet Minh, which preserved its aura of unwavering faith to resistance against all foreign domination.

(c) Trotskyists

In Cochinchina radical communists survived, and as the war progressed, gained a following concentrated in Saigon. In 1944 the "October" Group announced the forming of the International Communist League, and in March, 1945, issued a manifesto condemning the "Stalinists" of the ICP who supported the Allies, and the "feudalist" collaborators with the Japanese:

"The future defeat of Japanese imperialism will set the Indochinese people on the road to national liberation. The bourgeoisie and feudalists who cravenly serve the Japanese rulers today, will serve equally the Allied imperialist states. The petty-bourgeois nationalists, by their aimless policy, will also be incapable of leading the people towards revolutionary victory. On the working class, which struggles independently under the flag of the Fourth International, will be able to accomplish the advance guard tasks of the revolution.

"The Stalinists of the Third International have already abandoned the working class to group themselves miserably with the 'democratic' imperialisms. They have betrayed the peasants and no longer speak of the agrarian question. If today they march with foreign capitalists, in the future, they will help the class of national exploiters to destroy the revolutionary people in the hours to come."²¹

The Trotskyite "Struggle" Group also re-emerged in May, 1945, to resume its rivalry with the "October" faction, but both parties advocated world revolution, a worker–peasant government, arming of the people and general expropriation of land and industry. Their principal significance was to debilitate the ICP in Cochinchina, and to impair the effectiveness of the Viet Minh there.

(4) Viet Minh Qperations in Vietnam

The ICP, at the heart of the Viet Minh, communicated to the League the lessons it had painfully learned in the uprisings