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Diem operates under a democratic constitution, and holds elections; they are always carefully controlled. When one outspoken critic ran for the National Assembly and won, he was denied his seat on the ground that he had made "false promises" in his election campaign. Bitterly, Ngo Dinh Diem's critics label his system "Diemocracy" — democracy in form but not substance. Diem merely shrugs. The U.S., concerned with his rigid inflexibility atop an insecure nation, also presses for a change in policy. But Diem is a stubborn man, and the U.S. is wary of the charge of "interference in internal affairs."
Gauze Trousers. Curled like a shrimp around the Indo-Chinese Peninsula, South Viet Nam is washed by 900 miles of the South China Sea. Behind the sandy dunes of the north are tiers of flat plains leading back to the highlands where 300,000 Moi hut dwellers search the thick forests for white elephants as good-luck charms. In the south are the hard-working Annamese peasants, squatting under conical hats of palm leaves in the brimming Mekong Delta marshes to plant the rice that is South Viet Nam's chief source of sustenance and a major export. The delta's deep black soil is some of the world's richest, could produce still more food if developed with roads, modern farming techniques. It is this great food potential that makes Ho Chi Minh and his hungry North Vietnamese press southward toward the sea.
Near the southern coast is the port city of Saigon, with its teeming, clamorous, shop-filled alleyways, its broad, treelined, Frenchified boulevards overflowing with beautiful fragile girls, like exotic moths in their flowing skirts split at the waist over trousers of silken gauze. Saigon's wealthy exporters deal in rice, and in the rubber, tea, cinnamon and copra that pour onto the docks from plantations in the nearby countryside.
Viet Nam (land of the south) has long been a magnet for conquerors. First came the Chinese, who drove south in the 2nd century B.C. to grab control for a thousand years, labeling the area Annam (pacified south), exacting tributes of pearls, precious stones, elephant tusks and valuable woods for the Emperor. Cleverly, the Annamese took the best China had to offer—the Chinese classics, the ethics of Confucius, and Mahayana Buddhism. But they fought fiercely and persistently to regain their independence.
At one stage, women led some of their most spectacular revolts. In A.D. 40, Trung Trac, whose husband had been beheaded by the Chinese governor, gathered an army of 80,000 Vietnamese to storm the governor's fort and set up her own kingdom, which lasted for two years. One of Trung Trac's army commanders was a stanch female who went into the fray nine months pregnant, gave birth on the battlefield, then rose to lead her troops in a futile last assault against the avenging Chinese. When the Chinese withdrew in 939, the Annamese turned conquerors in their turn. For nearly a thousand years, the Annamese armies terrorized neighboring Cambodia and Laos. (Laos' King Savang Vatthana still considers the attack on his country as not Communist but rather a renewed threat from the warlike Annamese.)