Ngo Dinh Nhu - Strategic Hamlet Program

Strategic Hamlet Program

See also: Strategic Hamlet Program

In 1962, Nhu began work on the ambitious Strategic Hamlet Program, an attempt to build fortified villages that would provide security for rural Vietnamese. The objective was to lock the Vietcong out so that they could not operate among the villagers. Colonel Phạm Ngọc Thảo supervised these efforts, and when told that the peasants resented being forcibly removed from their ancestral lands and put into forts they were compelled to build, he advised Nhu it was imperative to build as many hamlets as fast as possible. The Ngôs were unaware Thảo, ostensibly a Catholic, was in fact a communist double agent acting to turn the rural populace against Saigon. Thảo helped to ruin Nhu's scheme by having strategic hamlets built in communist strongholds. This increased the number of communist sympathisers who were placed inside the hamlets and given identification cards. As a result, the Vietcong were able to more effectively penetrate the villages to access supplies and personnel.

Read more about this topic:  Ngo Dinh Nhu

Famous quotes containing the words strategic, hamlet and/or program:

    “The practice of S/M is the creation of pleasure.... And that’s why S/M is really a subculture. It’s a process of invention. S/M is the use of a strategic relationship as a source of pleasure.”
    —Michel Foucault (1926–1984)

    “Shakespeare carries us to such a lofty strain of intelligent activity, as to suggest a wealth which beggars his own; and we then feel that the splendid works which he has created, and which in other hours we extol as a sort of self-existent poetry, take no stronger hold of real nature than the shadow of a passing traveller on the rock. The inspiration which uttered itself in Hamlet and Lear could utter things as good from day to day, for ever.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    “Beluthahatchee is a country where all unpleasant doings and sayings are forgotten, a land of forgiveness and forgetfulness. When a woman accusingly reminds her man of something in the past, he replies, ‘I thought that was in Beluthahatchee.’ Or a person may say to another, to dismiss some matter, “Oh, that’s in Beluthahatchee.’”
    —For the State of Florida, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)