BOOK: PEDLER: A Word Before Leaving

BOOK: PEDLER: A Word Before Leaving

Postby Oscar » Sun Dec 21, 2014 11:31 am

OVERVIEW: A Word Before Leaving - A Former Diplomat's Weltanschauung by John Pedler

[ http://www.troubador.co.uk/book_info.asp?bookid=3148 ]

Sir Crispin Tickell, GCMG, one of Britain’s outstanding diplomats and one of the word’s leading proponents of ‘climate change’, says of this book: “Here John Pedler takes the broadest of views, ranging from politics and science to religion and beyond, and paints a picture of the world as most of us have yet to see it. As a former diplomat there is almost nowhere he does not know; and as a writer he puts a thousand stories together and makes elegant and convincing sense of them.”

This book is for all those worldwide with an interest in foreign affairs who are increasingly concerned about climate change/over-population, and the spread of religious violence - fearing that the world’s politicians may be taking us in the wrong direction. John Pedler, now 86, joined the British Diplomatic Service in 1951 and has ever since been involved with foreign affairs. This is his weltanschauung (world-view), a new genre, in which he sets out how he has come to see our world and what may lie beyond.

Subjects include: Russia and the EU; our wars: Vietnam, Afghan, and Iraq; sex in politics; ‘political correctness’; advertising; media self-censorship and News International; world religions and Islam: ‘moderate’, Wahabist, and ‘Jihadist’. It’s in the form of answers to his adult children’s questions so it’s an easy, and often gripping, read.

As well as his diplomatic postings in Europe and the Far East, John Pedler was a war correspondent in Vietnam, a businessman in Mao’s China, and the first Director of the Cambodia Trust. He worked for the Bosnian government during the siege of Sarajevo. He was educated at the Browne and Nicholls School, Cambridge, Mass. USA and the London School of Economics (where he took a subsidiary course in Comparative Religion).
Oscar
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Re: BOOK: PEDLER: A Word Before Leaving

Postby Oscar » Sun Dec 21, 2014 11:33 am

The Vietnam War, the Two Lost Chances for Peace, the "Vietnam Syndrome" - Yet Now a Neocon Resurrection

[ http://truth-out.org/news/item/28034-th ... surrection ]

By John Pedler, Truthout | Book Excerpt Saturday, 20 December 2014 11:51

The following is an excerpt from John Pedler's A Word Before Leaving in which he shares what, worldwide, many in diplomacy have come privately to believe. Hence the book is warmly endorsed by Sir Christopher Tickell, GCMG, one of the UK's outstanding diplomats. John Pedler, a former British diplomat, served in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia between the French War and the American war, where he was a war correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph.

After Korea, Stalin's Soviet Union wanted to exploit the situation in Indochina, again avoiding committing its own troops, but using as proxies (like the Koreans before) the Vietnamese rebels struggling against the return of France to its Indochina possessions.

The Chinese had accepted the Japanese surrender in the north of Vietnam and the British General Gracey had taken the Japanese surrender in the south of Vietnam and so controlled that as well as Cambodia and all but two provinces of Laos which had been taken over by the North Vietnamese or their supporters. After World War II, French Indochina therefore became divided similarly to Austria and Korea.

The Paix Manquée - Vietnam's Lost Peace

What happened to Vietnam at the end of World War II was a heart-rending tragedy. Jean Sainteny, the French officer parachuted into Hanoi by France in 1945, found Ho Chi Minh and his colleagues - French speakers and steeped in French culture - ready to accept a self-governing relationship within the French Union (largely as a counter to China - Vietnam's historic enemy). Sainteny successfully negotiated with Ho Chi Minh a self-governing solution for Vietnam within the French Union: the Agreement of 6 March 1946 ("Histoire d'une Paix Manquée," "The History of a Lost Peace" - Jean Sainteny).

But General de Gaulle refused to meet Ho Chi Minh when he went to France to formalise this arrangement. The situation then deteriorated and war broke out after Admiral Thierry d'Argenlieu (ironically, he had been Sainteny's boss) bombarded Haiphong, the port for Hanoi. The Viet Minh (Free Vietnam) withdrew into the countryside. The United States - which had cooperated with Ho Chi Minh during World War II - was by then in "Cold War mode" and abandoned the Viet Minh to favour France. But the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and the Geneva accords that year arranged for the North to be governed by the communists and the South to be "independent."

So the French war with Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh could readily have been avoided a) if it had not been for France's understandable desire to recover its colonies in Indochina after the humiliation of its defeat in 1940, b) if the West had understood that the Vietnamese (who had been pushed out of part of what is now south China by the encroaching Han race) had around a millennia of enmity with successive Chinese dynasties. That made Vietnam a natural partner in countering Chinese expansion in South East Asia, and certainly not a partner in the spread of communism to Australia as the so called "domino theory" had it.

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[ http://truth-out.org/news/item/28034-th ... surrection ]
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