ABSTRACT
Vietnam has a history of disorder and division and a record of persistent national identity that few other countries can match. Throughout the Vietnam War one of its most baffling features has been and still is the attitude of the North Vietnamese towards negotiations. When, a few years later, Ho Chi Minh realised that unification of North and South Vietnam on his terms was as far away as ever, he reactivated the movement in the South where in fact operations on a small scale had never completely stopped. Unlike most of the rest of the world, Communists are adepts at psychological warfare. In the centuries that followed there were periods of division into two main parts, with the northern portion pushing south and the southern expanding into a Cambodia from whom it seized Saigon and the Mekong Delta in 1701.
