Ho Chi Minh

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''For the city named after him, see Ho Chi Minh City

He was originally named Nguyễn Sinh Cung, is also known as Nguyễn Tất Thành, Nguyễn Ái Quốc (a name which means "Nguyễn the patriot"), Lý Thụy, Hồ Quang (among others) and is popularly called Bác Hồ (Uncle Hồ) in Vietnam, Hồ Chí Minh means "he who enlightens". He is most famous for being the founder of the Viet-Minh independentist movement in 1941 and establishing communist control in part of Vietnam in the 1960s.

Biography

His father, Nguyễn Sinh Sắc, was a Confucian scholar, and he himself received a strong Confucian upbringing. He also received a modern secondary education at a French-style lycée in Huế, the alma mater of his later disciples, Phạm Văn Ðồng and Võ Nguyên Giáp. Hồ Chí Minh applied for a course at the French "Colonial Administrative School" immediately after he arrived in Marseille. However, his application was rejected. (This document is still preserved at the National Archives of France. Historian Nguyen The Anh has photocopied and published it in his books.)

In 1911, Hồ Chí Minh went to the South to Gia Dinh (Saigon) and joined a ship en route to Marseille, France as a cabin-boy. Hồ Chí Minh’s first time abroad was not easy, he worked hard as a cleaner, waiter, cook's helper, and film developer. Regardless, he was very excited with what he learned from a totally different world each day. He often went to the public library, read newspapers and paid close attention to the current affairs and political issues. He also appreciated the French mundane life, and enjoyed Maurice Chevalier songs, which he knew by heart.

He lived in England in the period 1913 - 1917 where he trained as a pastry chef under the legendary French master, Escoffier, at the Carlton Hotel in the Haymarket, Westminster. There is a commemorative [Blue Plaque] on the building, which is now the New Zealand House. The city's fancy restaurants were beyond his means, but he indulged in one luxury — American cigarettes, preferably Camel or Lucky Strike brands.

Hồ Chí Minh embraced communism while living abroad in France from 1917 - 1923. Following World War I, as Nguyễn Ái Quốc, on behalf of the "Group of Vietnamese Patriots" he petitioned the great powers at the Versailles peace talks for equal rights in French Indochina but was ignored. He asked sitting U.S. President Woodrow Wilson for help to overthrow the French in Vietnam for a nationalist movement and new government, but was ignored. He soon helped to form the French Communist Party and spent much time in Moscow. He later moved to Guangzhou, China, where he founded the Communist Party of Indochina.

Hồ Chí Minh lying in state in his mausoleum that is viewed by millions of supporters and tourists per year.

He was forced to leave China when local authorities cracked down on Communist activities, but he returned in 1930 to found the Indochinese Communist party (ICP). He stayed in Hong Kong as representative of the Communist International. In June 1931 Ho was arrested there by British police and remained in prison until his release in 1933. He then made his way back to the Soviet Union, where he reportedly spent several years recovering from tuberculosis. In 1938 he returned to China and served as an adviser with Chinese Communist armed forces.

He returned to Vietnam in 1941 to lead the Việt Minh independence movement, conducting successful military actions against the Japanese occupation forces and later against the French bid to reoccupy the country (1946-1954). He adopted the name Hồ Chí Minh, a Sino-Vietnamese name with a common surname (Hồ ) and a given name meaning 'enlightened will' (Chí meaning 'will', and Minh meaning 'light') in August 1942 while sojourning in China. He was jailed for many months by Chiang Kai-shek's local authorities. After his release in 1943 he returned to Vietnam. After the August Revolution (1945) organized by Việt Minh, he became Chairman of Provisional Government (Premier of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam), when he forced Emperor Bảo Đại to abdicate, but this government was not recognized internationally. Ho petitioned American President Harry Truman to accept Vietnamese independence, but was rebuffed.

It was on September 2, 1945 that he read the Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Việt Nam. Before this speech, both the new Vietnamese anthem (Tiên Quân Ca) and the American anthem (the Star-Spangled Banner) were played. Before the speech, he had tried unsuccessfully to acquire a copy of the American Declaration of Independence from the OSS. Unable to get one, he quoted it from memory as, "All people are created equal. They are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. Among these are the right to live, the right to be happy, and the right to be free". Note that he knew the difference between 'men' and 'people', and accordingly used the Vietnamese 'người' for people.

During this period, the History Channel reports that a team of American paramedics rescued him from a certain death (due to illness and hunger. Famine struck Vietnam and caused the death of about two million Vietnamese, while wheat was exported to France out of charge.)

He signed an agreement with France which recognized Vietnam as an autonomous state in the Indochinese Federation and the French Union on March 6, 1946. But soon after, the agreement broke down. The purpose of the agreement on the Vietnamese side was to get the Chinese army to withdraw from northern Vietnam. Soon after the Chinese left, fighting broke out with the French. Hồ Chí Minh was almost captured by a group of French soldiers led by Jean-Etienne Valluy at Việt Bắc, but he was able to escape. In 1954, the important Battle of Điện Biên Phủ was fought between the French and Viet Minh.

Hồ Chí Minh became president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) in 1955.

During the period from 1953 to 1956, elements within the government of Hồ Chí Minh conducted the Land Reform Campaign, possibly inspired by the Land Reform of Mao Zedong. During this campaign, so-called "landlords" (who hired peasants working for them) of provinces in the North of Vietnam down to Thanh Hoa province were brought to the so-called People's Courts to be humiliated and, often, executed. The party gave local cadres quotas of landlords to execute and often innocent people were punished. The Landlord campaign also often involved the punishment or execution of anyone seen as not politically loyal to the new government with landlordism being an excuse. Property confiscated from "landlords" was given over to former members of the Viet Minh. While Ho was to later publicly denounce those responsible for the more extreme violence that took place at this time, many of his detractors hold him responsible for the event in question. None of the cadres involved was ever punished for the violence and none of the property taken during the landlord campaign was ever returned.

During his presidency, Hồ Chí Minh was the center of what his detractors see as a large personality cult in North Vietnam. Former capital of South Vietnam, Saigon (Sài Gòn), was renamed Hồ Chí Minh City on 1 May, 1975.

For the West, he remains much of a dual character: To his supporters Hồ Chí Minh is viewed positively as a committed Nationalist who fought for a united Vietnamese state. To his detractors and some critics in the West he was an opportunistic communist who seized power, created an authoritarian government, plunged Vietnam into a war that wrecked the country and established economic policies that left Vietnam poor and backward. They claimed that he mandated the invasion of South Vietnam that resulted in the deaths of over a million of its citizens. Many more, as many as two million, fled South Vietnam after the unification of Vietnam. Many criticize the Việt Cộng, who were subordinate to him, for terrorism in the South, even though his direct knowledge of these exactions is still not clearly known by his biographers.

Hồ Chí Minh mausoleum, Hanoi

Hồ Chí Minh died on the late evening of September 2, 1969, at his home in Hanoi at age 79 from multiple health problems, including diabetes. His embalmed body was put on display in a granite mausoleum modeled after Lenin's Tomb in Moscow. This was consistent with other Communist leaders who have been similarly displayed before and since, including Mao Zedong, Kim Il-Sung, and for a time, Josef Stalin, but the "honor" violated Hồ's last wishes. He wished to be cremated and his ashes buried in urns on three Vietnamese hilltops, each in one of the three main regions of Vietnam (North, Central and South). He wrote, "Not only is cremation good from the point of view of hygiene, but it also saves farmland."

In Vietnam today, he is elevated by the Communist government to an almost cult-like status even though the government has abandoned most of his economic policies. He was invariably referred to as "Uncle Hồ" as decreed by the current regime in Vietnam. Hồ Chí Minh appears on the Vietnamese currency, and his image is featured prominently in many of Vietnam's public spaces.

Quotes

• "Nothing is more precious than independence and liberty."
• "I only follow one party: the Vietnamese party."
• "You can kill ten of our men for every one we kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and we will win." (referring to France and America in their wars in Vietnam)
• "It is better to sacrifice everything than to live in slavery!"
• “The Vietnamese people deeply love independence, freedom and peace. But in the face of United States aggression they have risen up, united as one man."
• "In (Lenin's Theses on the National and Colonial Questions) there were political terms that were difficult to understand. But by reading them again and again finally I was able to grasp the essential part. What emotion, enthusiasm, enlightenment and confidence they communicated to me! I wept for joy. Sitting by myself in my room, I would shout as if I were addressing large crowds: "Dear martyr compatriots! This is what we need, this is our path to liberation!" Since then (the 1920s) I had entire confidence in Lenin, in the Third International!"
• "When the prison doors are opened, the real dragon will fly out."
• "It was patriotism, not communism, that inspired me."
• "Remember the storm is a good opportunity for the pine and the cypress to show their strength and their stability."

Further reading

• Richard Nixon, Reprint edition (November 1, 1987).No More Vietnams. Arbor House Pub Co.
• Bernard B. Fall, ed., 1967. Ho Chi Minh on Revolution and War, Selected Writings 1920-1966. New American Library.
• Francis Fitzgerald. 1972. Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and Americans in Vietnam. Little, Brown and Company.
• William J. Duiker. 2000. Ho Chi Minh: A Life. Theia.
• William J. Duiker. The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam.
• N. Khac Huyen. 1971. Vision Accomplished? The Enigma of Ho Chi Minh. The Macmillan Company.
• Hồ chí Minh toàn tập . NXB chính trị quốc gia
• Hoang Van Chi. From colonialism to communism. New York : Praeger, [1964]

External links

• [Vietnam's Independence and Ho Chi Minh]
• [New York Times Obituary, May 19, 1969]
• [TIME 100: Ho Chi Minh]
• [Ho Chi Minh's biography]
• [Ho Chi Minh Biography] From Spartacus Educational
• [Ho Chi Minh Archive] at Marxists.org.
• [Ho Chi Minh Pictures as slides]
• [Satellite photo of the mausoleum on Google Maps]

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