Ho Chi Minh

10 Key excerpts on "Ho Chi Minh"

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  Rethinking the Vietnam War

  • John Dumbrell(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  It involves not merely according space to Vietnamese people in accounts of their war, but also recognizing the importance of independent Vietnamese agency. The Hanoi leadership is thus seen as having an independent role in moulding the development of the Cold War, in ways which affected policy outcomes in Beijing, Moscow, and Washington. Contemporary Vietnamese scholarship also engages with wider debates about the peasantry: notably with the need to see the rural Vietnamese population – North and South – more as makers of history, less as inert and passive reactors to outside pressures (Kerkvliet 2005; Race 2010; Montesano 2011). Ho Chi Minh and the Rise of Vietnamese Nationalism Otherwise known as Nguyen Tat Thanh, Nguyen Sinh Cung and Nguyen Ai Quoc (‘Nguyen the Patriot’), Ho Chi Minh was born in Annam in (or around) 1890, about seven years after the achievement of comprehensive French imperial control of Vietnam. Ho was born into a nationalist family; his father had rejected the bureaucratic mandarin tradition in favour of anti-imperialism. Ho Chi Minh devel-oped a consistent adherence to nationalism, retaining always a strong element of Confucian dutiful patriotism, but also nurturing a degree of contempt for the passivity of the mandarin elite (Quinn-Judge 2003: 42). After a brief period of study in Saigon, Ho left his country in 1912, embarking upon what was sometimes a literal voyage – he worked for a time as a steward on transatlantic liners; more often a metaphorical voyage of nationalist intellectual development. At various times, he lived in the United States, Britain, and France. Particularly after moving to Paris in 1917, Ho emerged as a leader of exiled Vietnamese nationalism; in 1920, he became a founder-member of the French Communist Party. Ho lobbied the leaders of the victorious powers in the First World War, as they met at Versailles in 1919, to advance the cause of Vietnamese self-determination. He unsuccessfully petitioned

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  Vietnam and the Cold War 1945-1954

  French Imperial Decline and Defeat at Dien Bien Phu

  • John Pike(Author)
  • 2024(Publication Date)
  • Pen and Sword Military

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER III Statesmen Ho Chi Minh B orn in around 1890 in a small town near Hue, Nguyễn Ái Quốc became known to history as Ho Chi Minh, probably the most enigmatic and quixotic figure in communist revolutionary history. His life transcended the entire era of modern Vietnam in the twentieth century, but it represented much more besides. Famously to become ‘Uncle Ho’, Ho was indeed an avuncular figure. A convinced nationalist, ideas inherited from his father, he became an itinerant worker and ship’s galley boy, sailing around the world from about 1911 to 1917. With five different birthdates and over 200 pseudonyms, plus the dubious burnishing of his biography for ‘revolutionary purposes’, the history of his life is quite vague and somewhat mysterious. Even the leading biographer of his early years, Sophie Quinn-Judge, finds it difficult to pin down many hard facts. 1 The fact that he was a Comintern undercover agent or a wanted revolutionary on the run for much of his life only accentuates the elusive nature of the man’s life. Secrecy was seared into his DNA from the moment he took the ship to the USSR in 1923. Apart from being a galley boy and cooking assistant on ships, he claimed to have been variously employed as a baker in New York, a chef at the Parker House in Boston and a manager for General Motors. He also lived in Brooklyn. Moving to London, he is famously believed to have worked as a pastry chef for the renowned Escoffier at the Savoy Hotel. In Paris he was able to use his knowledge to recommend the best croissant shop to croissant-lover Deng Xiao Ping, a fellow revolutionary exile. But again, no proof. A picture of him in 1912 has him wearing a bowler hat, heavy overcoat and scarf. His right hand holds a cigarette. He was a chain-smoker throughout his life and was often photographed with a cigarette in his hand. In 1917 Ho moved to France and engaged in a life of writing and political activism for nationalist causes.

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  Makers of Modern Asia

  • Ramachandra Guha(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Belknap Press

    (Publisher)

  66 Yet because he never had the chance to serve as a peacetime leader, he was deprived of the opportunity to prove his sincerity or provide a model of “open nationalism” for the new century. That he also had faith in the promise of Marxism to create an egalitarian, just society cannot be doubted. But his desire to unify all Vietnamese patriots into one movement was far stronger than his attachment to Communist dogma; he preferred peaceful political transformation to revolutionary violence, in strong contrast to Mao Zedong’s outlook.

  Since 1992 Ho Chi Minh has been promoted to become Vietnam’s leading ideologue, the originator of the latest national ideology: “Ho Chi Minh Thought.” While Marxism-Leninism is no longer the guiding ideology of Vietnamese economic life, the VCP, like the Chinese Communist Party, still clings to its identity as a Marxist organization. But at the same time, “Ho Chi Minh Thought” has become a key element in the party’s efforts to justify its dominant role. Since the collapse of the Socialist Bloc, Ho’s every action and utterance have been scrutinized in order to establish the fundamentals of this new ideology, in spite of the fact that Ho himself never presumed to be an ideologist. Party experts write booklets on Ho’s attitude to every aspect of life—from women and children to literature and military strategy. Unfortunately, this approach leads to an amorphous body of ideas, as it does not discriminate between scripted political speeches and Ho’s interventions at closed meetings. The Vietnamese Communist Party’s claims to legitimacy continue to rely on their Ho Chi Minh lineage. In future the party leadership may realize that in order to restore Ho’s relevance for a new generation, they will have to open up a more honest examination of his political career and the battles that he waged.

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  The Two Vietnams

  A Political And Military Analysis

  • Bernard Fall(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Rise of Ho Chi Minh

  IT is indicative of the depth of the gap in Western knowledge of Vietnamese affairs that such a major personality of the Communist world as Ho Chi Minh has not thus far been subjected to any solid biographical research.1 Unlike many other Communist leaders today, Ho still seems to delight in cultivating an air of mystery about himself even on such prosaic details as his exact birth date. A perusal of a dozen Communist sources on his background will produce at least ten different birth names and as many as six or seven birth dates, and even less is known about his immediate family and those other little details about a man's life that are meaningless per se but so important in fleshing out the personage. In the case of his South Vietnamese rival, Ngo Dinh Diem's large family of brothers and other relatives became a major factor of the political equation. But Ho Chi Minh is presented by his propagandists more or less as if his life had begun in 1920, when he officially became a Communist, and as if he had never had any personal life since. And his non-Communist biographers until now simply lacked the minimal amount of firsthand information to be able to draw some valid conclusions.

  Both northern and southern apologists for their respective leaders note, however, one essential trait their chiefs share: They are both personally lonely. Both are bachelors and both are thus presented as "fathers" of their country, but since the "father image in Viet-Nam is too much wrapped up in the old mandarinal tradition—which Ngo accepts but Ho rejects—the latter is presented to his public as "uncle" instead, i.e., as a man who still commands respect but not with the forbidding sternness of a father. This difference in "image" is clearly reflected in their propaganda photographs: Ngo appears either in full traditional mandarin's dress or in the snow-white Western business suit of the French colonial tradition; Ho is shown either in the "Mao Tse-tung suit" of his party or in the dark peasant cu-nao

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  Down with Colonialism!

  • Ho Chi Minh(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Verso

    (Publisher)

  INTRODUCTION

  Ho Chi Minh: THECOMMUNIST AS NATIONALIST

  Walden Bello

  Ho Chi Minh was a legend in his time, and like all legends, he manifested a variety of personae to people who worked with him, met him, or studied him. To the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, Ho was a living ‘saint of communism’:

  I have met many people in the course of my political career, but none has made such a particular impression on me. Believers often talk of the Apostles. Well, through his way of living and his influence over his peers, Ho Chi Minh was exactly comparable to these ‘holy apostles’. An apostle of the Revolution. I will never forget that gleam of purity and sincerity in his eyes. His sincerity was that of an incorruptible communist and his purity that of a man totally devoted to his cause, in his principles and in his actions.1

  In contrast, for Sophie Quinn-Judge – author of the best study of Ho’s activities from 1919 to 1941 – although Ho was motivated ‘by sincere patriotism and a deep resentment of French imperialism’,

  he was not some sort of communist holy man. He lived with women at various times, made compromises and infiltrated other nationalist parties. He was not always straightforward – in many situations he would have regarded it foolhardy to be honest about his political beliefs. The depth of his attachment to communism is difficult to gauge – the one thing one can say is that he had little interest in dogma. The path he followed was often chosen from a range of options narrowed by events outside his control.2

  Ruth Fischer, a contemporary and colleague in the Communist International, offers yet another view, more nuanced than those of Khrushchev and Quinn-Judge:

  Amid these seasoned revolutionaries and rigid intellectuals, he struck a delightful note of goodness and simplicity. He seemed to stand for mere common decency – though he was cleverer than he let on – and it was his well earned good name which saved him from being caught up in internal conflicts. Also, he was temperamentally far more inclined strongly toward action than toward doctrinal debates. He was always an empiricist within the movement. But none of this detracted from his colleagues’ regard for him, and his prestige was considerable.3

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  The Communist Road To Power In Vietnam

  Second Edition

  • William J Duiker(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2 The Rise of the Revolutionary Movement (1900–1930)

  Ho Chi Minh once remarked that, for him, the road to communism went through nationalism. Put in concrete terms, the most significant event in Ho Chi Minh's intellectual life took place in 1920 when, as a young patriot living in Paris, he obtained a copy of Lenin's famous "Theses on the National and Colonial Questions," presented at the Second Congress of the Comintern in Moscow. At that moment, by his own account Ho became a Leninist, primarily because Lenin's elucidation of Communist strategy in colonial areas seemed to provide the best means of liberating Vietnam from French colonialism.1

  The incident is of more than symbolic importance, for in Vietnam, the roots of the Communist movement are deeply intertwined with those of the anticolonial movement. And while Vietnamese communism and nationalism have frequently appeared to go their separate ways, the Communist movement throughout most of its existence has been able to project itself before the mass of the population as a legitimate force representing Vietnamese national aspirations. This symbiotic relationship between nationalism and communism in Vietnam is in no small measure responsible for the triumph of the forces of revolution over the Saigon regime in the spring of 1975.

  Vietnamese Nationalism

  It is therefore appropriate to begin this study with a brief examination of the dynamics of Vietnamese nationalism. When Marxist doctrine first appeared in Vietnam shortly after World War I, Vietnamese nationalism was in a state of transition.2

  The Vietnamese traditionally had a strong sense of national identity, a consequence of two thousand years of struggle to protect their indepen

  dence from China, their powerful neighbor to the north. Early resistance to the French conquest, led by patriotic elements from among the traditional Confucianist ruling elite, had been irrevocably broken in the mid-1880s when the guerrilla bands led by the rebel leader Phan Dinh Phung Were defeated in the hills of Central Vietnam. As for the imperial court at Hué, it had by then become a mere instrument of French rule, an effete relic of past glories. Vietnamese territory was divided at the whim of Paris. Cochin China, in the South, became a French colony. Tonkin, the old heartland of Vietnamese civilization surrounding the Red River valley, was legally a protectorate, but in practice French authority was virtually total. Only in Annam, comprising the coastal provinces in the center, was the court permitted to retain the tattered remnants of its former authority.

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  Mental Maps in the Early Cold War Era, 1945-68

  • S. Casey, J. Wright, S. Casey, J. Wright(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  After 1947 it becomes difficult to say who we are dealing with when we speak of the communist Vietnamese leadership. Increasingly, from the end of 1946 on, Ho’s views and decisions would be contested by the party’s general secretary, Truong Chinh, and his allies. When Ho finally became a major figure on the world stage at the close of the Second World War, the West had a short window of time to observe him in action, before he slipped back into the Maquis and returned to armed struggle. He delivered his American-inspired Declara- tion of Independence on 2 September 1945, with the OSS in attendance, but within a month had to watch his tenuous US support slip away. The French return to Indochina, first in the British-occupied South, meant that once again Ho had to exert his full charm and powers of persua- sion to avoid a direct French assault on his shrinking area of control. The November decision to dissolve the Indochinese Communist Party appears to have been his own initiative, taken to reassure the occupying nationalist Chinese forces, but possibly also to enable him to get a firmer grip on the situation. Scattered violence and reprisals in September and October against landlords and collaborators of the French and Japanese threatened national unity, and there is no evidence that these acts were carried out under Ho’s orders. His reach or control of underground net- works still did not extend much beyond his inner circle within the Viet Minh Central Committee. ‘To halt the excesses and to build unity among the people: these were the two objectives that Ho Chi Minh and his team worked on’, Philippe Devillers claims. 26 Ho tried to persuade the future president of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, to join the Viet Minh-led resistance at this time, without success. He personally intervened to have Diem released from the Hanoi prison, where he was being held in 1945.

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  Ho Chi Minh in Hong Kong

  • Geoffrey C. Gunn(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  2 Early Life in France and Move Back to Asia Ho Chi Minh’s early life and the circumstances surrounding his family should not be ignored, especially as he remained sentimentally and intellectually attached to his homeland during the Hong Kong years, particularly when it came to understanding local conditions. 1 Taking French archival sources as a guide, this chapter first spells out Ho Chi Minh’s formative years in his native Annam prior to launching his first career as a merchant mariner. It then turns to his arrival in France at the end of World War I and his political activism. Finally it describes his move to Moscow and induction into Communist International actions through special training and his participation in key congresses and conferences, which would prepare him for action once arriving back in Asia. Ho Chi Minh’s Early Years A native of rustic Nghe An, a coastal province in the French Protectorate of Annam with its royal court in Hue, we could say that the life of the young Ho Chi Minh and his family exemplified the transitional age from the mandarinate to modernity. First going by the name Nguyen Sinh Cung, in line with tradition at around the age of ten he adopted a new name, Nguyen Tat Thanh. Born in Lang Sen village in Kim Lien in the sub-prefecture of Nam Dan astride the Ca River, this was some 13 kilometers west of Vinh, a minor port and industrial town astride the north–south Trans-Indochina railroad. The scene was one of flat ricelands, with floods, droughts and famine part of a cycle in coastal Annam. The region had long produced rebels against both mandarin and colonial authority.

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  The First Vietnam War

  Colonial Conflict and Cold War Crisis

  • Mark Atwood Lawrence, Fredrik Logevall, Mark Atwood Lawrence, Fredrik Logevall(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  Ho Chi Minh, who had been persuaded to accept a compromise during a meeting with Chinese foreign minis-ter Zhou Enlai in early July, attempted to calm fevered spirits by de-172 William J. Duiker claring at a party meeting held a few weeks later that “some comrades” were ignoring the fact that the Americans were behind the French. It was time, he said, for the Vietnamese people to bind up their wounds and begin building a new society in North Vietnam in preparation for reunification in the future. 33 By the end of the war, then, the Viet Minh had replaced the Maoist three-stage scenario with a more nuanced approach that made greater use of political forms of struggle. They had learned that for small coun-tries like Vietnam, an impregnable base area was less important than a reliable sanctuary beyond the frontier and that broad support from al-lies was essential when facing a powerful enemy whose base was outside the country. Finally, they had faced the painful reality that objective cir-cumstances sometimes demanded that final victory be postponed in-definitely. In the end, Viet Minh strategy had become an amalgam of the ideas of Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh with a dash of Lenin thrown in. Lenin had laid the political groundwork with his concept of a four-class alliance, while Maoism weighed in with the strategy of people’s war. Ho Chi Minh adjusted Leninism in order to broaden the base of the move-ment and then contributed his own views on the importance of politi-cal struggle and diplomacy in promoting the revolutionary cause. What had been created then was not so much a new model of revolu-tionary war as a patchwork of ideas designed to meet the particular circumstances of the Vietnamese revolution. As an exercise in pragma-tism, it was vintage Ho Chi Minh. 34 Clearly, there was no classical Vietnamese model that could be adopted wholesale by revolutionary groups elsewhere in the world.

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  The Origins of the Vietnam War

  • A. Short(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  7 And yet, on the matter of whether the colonial or the metropolitan revolution had priority, the statement was equivocal. On the one hand it was essential to try to make the peasant movement more revolutionary in character by uniting the peasants and all the exploited, wherever possible, into Soviets; on the other, the obligation to render the most active assistance to revolutionary-liberation movements rested in the first instance with the workers of the country on which the backward nation was colonially and financially dependent. Making concessions to Lenin's Indian and ‘Asia-First’ opponent, M N Roy, the Commission had, throughout the theses, replaced ‘bourgeois-democratic’ by ‘revolutionary’ and the result was, as one may see in the sixth thesis, that the revolutionary-liberation movement in backward countries or among backward nationalities was invited to determine what forms this alliance should take. Specific targets were to include landlords, large-scale landholders, the reactionary and mediaeval influence of the clergy and Christian missions, and all manifestations or survivals of feudalism.

  Ho Chi Minh

  Even though, by 1920, the world revolution was notably behind schedule the prospect for revolutionaries, national or communist, of alliance with Soviet power in the struggle against world imperialism was dazzling. And for the self-styled Vietnamese patriot, reading these theses in Paris in the French Communist paper l'Humanité , it amounted, in his own account, to a religious conversion. It also approximated, in time, to the formation of the French Communist Party, of which Ho Chi Minh was a founder member, and one may, conveniently and conventionally, present him as a communist from 1920 onwards. The nationalist goes back much earlier, even though, as one of his biographers says, ‘Everything that touches on his life until 1941 is fragmentary, approximate and controversial.8 Born, apparently, in 1890 in Nghe An province of central Vietnam, Ho's father was at least an acquaintance if not friend of the veteran nationalist Phan Boi Chau. His uncle, sister, and brother can all be described as nationalists and although Ho seems to have been attracted at one point to the China of the 1911 Revolution, he chose instead to make his way to France where, having led an intellectually enriched but materially impoverished existence in Paris, he achieved some fame, or notoriety, among his fellow expatriates by attempting to present a list of Vietnamese grievances to Woodrow Wilson and the European statesmen who had gathered in 1919 at Versailles. When he made what may be argued were his next intellectually significant appearances, in 1923 at the Peasant International and in 1924 at the Fifth Congress of the Communist International, he had moved on from the French Communist Party and was now accepted in Russia as a revolutionary of considerable promise. But the matter of priorities had still to be settled and Ho threw his weight unmistakably behind the primacy of colonial revolution. He told the delegates: ‘All of you know that at present the poison and vital capacity of the imperialist viper are concentrated in the colonies rather than in the metropolitan countries.’ And yet, he said, hearing the speeches of comrades from France and Britain he had the impression that they all wanted to kill the serpent by beating its tail.9

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