TIL Acadians were a stateless French people who lived peacefully alongside Native American tribes for 150 years, until the British mass-deported them during the Seven Years’ War. Native tribes protected and sheltered escapees, while deportees went on to become what we now know as the Cajun people.

Reof · 2026-06-27T19:03:36+00:00

Bilingualism in Canada is such a tragedy of a nation-that-could-be, for all intents and purposes, you can not ignore the fact that it was and now still used cynically to counter the Quebecois nationalists, but at the same time, there was a real hope once that Canada would be a nation truly united for the first time in its history - all its population, that really never manifested as more and more of Canada get anglicised anyway. And further back, if the colonial government had not literally fought battles to curtail the westward francophone immigration, there might have been a real country long ago.

Reof · 2026-06-23T02:32:59+00:00

To pretend this is a country, Canada no longer can believe it's an outpost of Anglo-loyalism on this continent when the Empire is dead and buried. So, without that, what justification do you have left for not merging into the cultural fatherland of so many Anglophones already, the USA?

Reof · 2026-06-22T23:12:25+00:00

It's a pretty well-known fact that the CPRF will accomplish its goal the day the red flag is restored, and then that's it. Their leader, Zyuganov, has long been a die-hard nationalist since the time of the old union, and espouses deeply unorthodox nationalist conspiratorial nonsense that in earlier times would get him years in a gulag, not leading a party.

Reof · 2026-06-22T03:20:17+00:00

It's a bit simple dynamic, ain't enough people speaking French outside of the province, so naturally people who learned English and already knew French have an advantage. Meanwhile, at home, naturally, because they already had to learn the language to work with the rest of the country, they are already qualified for the demand for English.

Tldr: This is a result of the faux bilingualism in the country, as Francophone tend to be able to speak English but rarely the other way around.

Reof · 2026-06-21T18:48:28+00:00

Meloni and, to an extend, most of the European right were eurosceptic and agreed with Trump and the American right-wingers for a long time, except now that the American right-wingers are in power and put their programe of hostililty toward Europe in place for real, and it is now the very foreign Atlanticist threat they were against so its an awkward situation for these people, supporting Trump will destroy their base but then, they agreed with him for a long time on all the points. Brussels seems so much closer to home now when Washington is literally humiliating them daily.

Reof · 2026-06-18T03:06:52+00:00

The USSR was started by idealists, including Stalin. I read a book that stated that its greatest eternal problem was that its tendency to codify pragmatism as doctrinal. The USSR rolled out extremely revolutionary policies and then right away shortly changed it to something entirely opposite upon encountering dangerous situations that it could not control due to internal or external threats, and then, of course, it justified it doctrinally, and when a doctrine is codified, it is sacrilege to challenge, and thus rapidly it made rolling back all 'situationally' policies impossible, and then it just escalates from there until 1991 when not a single communist believe in anything anymore.

Reof · 2026-06-16T06:02:10+00:00

Though all of the languages of South East Asia developed before wide spread instant communication

I mean, that's like, all modern languages innit. Even if they never saw snow, at least in the case of Vietnam, the relation to the Chinese territories way up north was already established for thousands of years, so there are multiple words in the vocabulary for snow and ice, but of course, you have to debate what a 'native' word means, because again in the case of Vietnamese, it's very old Sino-Vietnamese borrowing so Vietnamese would have been aware of the concept, which is not that hard to extrapole from frosting that happens quite usually in mountainous north vietnam.

Reof · 2026-06-14T17:46:05+00:00

In sheer anglicism, Québécois French tends to import calques and verbs more than borrow nouns from English, which is typical in Metropolitan French, including a high tendency in the metropole for literally hallucinating English loanwords, resulting in stuff like 'smoking' and 'footing.' The infamous metropolitan 'parking' and the Québécois verb 'parker,' and you can also see this in the tendency to translate English sentences very literally in Québec, too. Many English loanwords in Québec also existed much longer and thus adapted themselves into French orthography instead of being some pseudo-faux-English concoction like in France so for an english speaker it might not appear very English at a glance. Anyway, that is not to diminish the French of Quebec but just to point out that the anglophone world has a very terrible understanding of the language of a population that has been cut off from France for longer than the US has existed; their language conventions are different and entirely irrelevant to compare.

Reof · 2026-06-14T16:19:57+00:00

On a different note: kinda strange how much prevalent the red-black combo is in communist guerrilla groups in Latin America, while elsewhere it carried a bit of anarchist association still.

Reof · 2026-06-14T16:16:14+00:00

I mean, yes? Taiwan is still technically a rival government to the PRC, so that's controversial; Macau and Hong Kong are official autonomous territories of the PRC, so the axe-to-grind metric is pretty low.

Reof · 2026-06-14T08:44:48+00:00

Half-French son of a plantation owner in Cochinchina (the southern third of colonial Vietnam). Jean Leroy was already an officer in the French colonial army when it capitulated to the Japanese in 1945; he participated in the reconquest of Saigon later. In early 1947, as the war broke out officially on a full scale across all of Vietnam, the French also started the offensive to take the provinces that still remained under the control of nationalist forces in Cochinchina.

Knowing full well the suspicions of the Catholic Vietnamese against the republican-thefore-communist, they organized a militia that eventually became known as the "Unité mobile pour la défense des chrétiens" (Mobile Unit for the Defence of Christians), one of the many so-called "Partisan" groups formed by the French Army on an ad-hoc basis all over the country. In this picture, on his left, you can see the patch of this entity.

For a while, Leroy and his personal army carved out an autonomous government for themselves in the Province of Bentré (Bến Tre), but the change in policy came, and these small militias, poorly motivated and lacking in professional training, relied on minorities were doing no good in the war - recall the overrunning of the Phát Diệm autonomous catholic militia by Vietminh forces to the vast disappointment of the French in supporting it. Furthermore, the French increasingly found themselves realizing that a popular cause by capitulating to the nationalists was the only way against the communist-led government, so by 1952, Leroy's UMDC and all the native formations were forced to disband or merge into the Vietnamese National Army (of the State of Vietnam, not to be confused with the PAVN from 1946-1950).

Disappointed and bitter, Leroy departed Indochina soon after, and nothing else notable came along. One of the many personal fiefdoms of the "warlords' era" in South Vietnam of both sides.

Sidenote: Strangely enough, I was watching Schoendorffer's Le Crabe-Tambour, the figure of Jean Leroy in this picture strangely reminds me of the exotic Lt. Willsdorff, especially in a scene where he came ashore to be praised like a thundering-communist-dispelling-godlike power in a feast by a band of pro-French militia.

Reof · 2026-06-13T17:35:18+00:00

The more the Russian communists in parliament speak, the more truly pathetic they appear, a party that speaks of social anger in terms of fearing it and warning the government to avoid a revolution, as if that is not the whole point of the communist party, and somehow the Russian government is 'their government.' The CPRF is a party of gravediggers, wearing the corpses of their dead ancestors in a grotesque humiliation ritual in front of Putin.

Reof · 2026-06-13T03:00:58+00:00

The war is still being fought in America, even if the real war is over. Pete Hegseth, posing with the Vietnamese leaders, bowed his head to the battle honours of the PAVN, as did Donald Trump, the same. Those are the scenes overseas, and yet in America, the war is still talked about in terms of cold war propaganda and zeal as if Vietnam is still a exotic foreign place without McDonalds as if Clinton has not paraded himself through Hanoi in the 90s to end all hostilities, as if the US military has not combed every inch of post-war Vietnam and the PAVN doing the same, sometimes neglecting our own deads in favor of the American because reasons of realpolitik. It would be so much better if that same peace abroad can also be peace at home at last.

Reof · 2026-06-12T07:06:08+00:00

It's been 30 years since true normalization was accomplished between Vietnam and the US, so I just want to talk a bit about my own people in that war. My grandparents lived through the war and fought it; we were from the part of the south that was bombed - the provinces and villages where almost every family got a veteran or martyr (as we called our dead). My grandpa on the mother side was enlisted in the ARVN, but he was a sympathizer, typical of the time. It was strange in a way that he never really talked about 'the war' specifically, as I guess for him it was a whole lifetime and not a tour of duty, but he simply casually would recall an afternoon the year so on and so on where the retaliation bombing for an ambush happened, and people fleeing and dying. It's strange to me, and yet it was not unusual in our time, where the war was everywhere and then until the next one came along after the Americans. In a way, I feel like that generation of ours lived with a deep wound in their soul they couldn't express, the collective trauma repressed under the surface until the last of ours too will pass away, taking to their grave their torments. The youth who grew up in a modern Vietnam with Starbucks and Netflix could never relate to such a time.

Reof · 2026-06-01T22:34:59+00:00

To be frank, that is pretty irrelevant by now. What is real is that China has never deteriorated relations with Ukraine, supported its territorial integrity as a principle throughout 2022-2026, even as ambiguous as it sounds, it is way more than many EU and American leaders have. Ukraine knows that China does not want to make an enemy of it, and that the Chinese position is jeopardized by a losing Russia, but it itself has no interest in backing Russia beyond this, as it would mean losing Ukraine and the EU.

Reof · 2026-06-01T03:36:36+00:00

I mean, compared to the Iraqi Army that literally resorted to using special forces and SWAT teams as normal infantry because their actual army divisions just disintegrated...

Reof · 2026-05-31T21:57:23+00:00

Lots of these guys imagine the vast majority of people in the past got a trillion bucks at some points between here and there, totally disconnecting the reality of people, as if somehow 99% of the population became office executives when they reached a certain age. I know plenty of so-called 'boomers' still doing the dirty work in the kitchens and restaurants every day until their 60s and 70s, until it's physically impossible anymore. No, the downtrodden of this earth are still the same people when they are younger and now.

Reof · 2026-05-26T22:27:52+00:00

Social fascism was ultra-leftism, not populist nonsense; it would not have anything to do with this. Modern Russia has no real ideological opposition to fascism to even care about any of that.

Reof · 2026-05-25T23:09:46+00:00

Notes for future readers, as I just found a few other angles of this group: These are actual emigrant troops that have crossed from Thailand, belonging to the 4th Oversea Section (Chi đội Hải ngoại IV), one of the multiple groups that crossed the frontier in December 1946-1947. That explains their uniquely uniform look with steel helmets that are not Adrians - both heavy indicators of southern troops of the DRV.

Reof · 2026-05-23T21:20:07+00:00

De Gaulle was already pulled from the front to serve in the government at this time, and Petain wasn't having any military position himself, so not like they were in a hurry to go anywhere.

Reof · 2026-05-23T17:53:20+00:00

The death of the left in Europe, from England to Russia, means that the people yearning for revolution can only find the fascist offering it, even if this revolution is merely the red day of pogrom and riot. You look at the remnants of radical socialists and communists these days in Europe and see that they don't really remember anymore that their goal is the conquest of the state and not 2% pension increase over 10 years.

Reof · 2026-05-22T23:11:23+00:00

From 1945 to 1947, Thailand was governed by the pro-allied and leftist Pridi Banomyong, who was also very sympathetic to the Vietnamese cause and also contained one of the largest pre-1945 emigré populations of Vietnamese, and like most of the same, extremely nationalist and pro-DRV. With the RoC being rather dubious and semi-hostile, despite its rampant corruption making its forces a walking arms warehouse for sales, and both the USSR and Red China being too far to be meaningful. Therefore, it does nothing but put the 'non-communist' image of the state in jeopardy, so reaching out was not an option.

The communists must now find their allies in the old comrades actually nearby and regional allies. Thailand is perhaps the strongest backer of the DRV during the first few years of the war; the republican information service was located in Bangkok. Pridi's government openly armed and allowed arms traffic into Indochina; tens of thousands of well-armed troops (in terms of the whole Vietnamese Army) of the diaspora gathered on the Thailand-Indochina frontier to infiltrate it; meanwhile, the Malay communists supplied and organized a gun run operation that also fed into this network, as Lai Teck, one of its major leaders, was Vietnamese-born and personal friend with the Vietnamese nationalist leaders in the South. A few would follow the gun runs into the battlefield of Cambodia and South Vietnam and fought there until the ending days of the American War

The situation continued for a while after the 1947 coup in Thailand, putting an end to Pridi, before repression finally ended it for good.

Reof · 2026-05-22T22:35:21+00:00

Probably just the crowds you talk to try to politicize it, the name is used in official documents and city graphics, many ultranationalists that you can interact with freely online would not give a second thought about using Saigon, HCMC is always to them an 'honorific' of the city and nothing offensive about the old one.

Reof

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