Vietnam's independence leader was a hero to his countrymen, a wise uncle to
friends and a monster to enemies
Born May 19, 1890 in Nghe An province
1930 Founds the Communist Party of Vietnam
1941 Starts Viet Minh independence movement
1954 Viet Minh defeat French at Dien Bien Phu; country divided after Geneva
Accords, with Ho as President of the North
1956 War with South begins; U.S. sends troops in 1965 to fight Viet Cong
insurgents
1969 Dies Sept. 2 in Hanoi, six years before North wins the war.
Ho Chi Minh was a friend of my father's. They lived side-by-side in the jungle
during the resistance struggle. Over the years, they exchanged poems. I recall
vividly the poem Ho dedicated to my father in 1948:
The mountain birds sing at my windows
The spring flowers flutter down on my inkwell
The panting horses bring news of victories
And my thoughts go to you with this poem
Isn't it touching that Ho should write this in the jungle in the midst of the
resistance? And when my father died in April 1955, it was Ho who came to
console my family. He arranged the funeral and granted my father's wish that he
be buried not in the official cemetery, as befitting a former president of the
National Assembly, but in our village. That's the way Uncle Ho was.
Communist propaganda elevates Ho to the status of sage, national hero, saint.
He has become the Strategist, the Theoretician, the Thinker, the Statesman, the
Man of Culture, the Diplomat, the Poet, the Philosopher. All these names are
accompanied with adjectives like "legendary" and "unparalleled." He has become
Ho the Luminary, Ho the Visionary. Peasants in the South build shrines to him.
In the North old women bow before his altar, asking miracles for their
suffering children.
Others--boat people, anti-communist fanatics, those who suffered in the
re-education camps--see him in a negative light. They label him the enemy of
the nation, the traitor who sold out Vietnam, the source of all misery.
What is the truth? It is difficult to know because Ho's life is shrouded in
shadows and ambiguities. Even the date of his birth has been obscured by the
authorities, who believe this uncertainty will somehow add to his mystique..
The official date is May 19, 1890, but archives in Paris and Moscow show six
different dates from 1890 to 1904.
Similarly, Ho's official biography says that he left Saigon in 1911 on a French
boat in order to rescue the revolutionary cause, which had stalled. But recent
scholarship indicates that his motivations may have been quite different. We
now discover that Ho's father, a mandarin in Binh Dinh province, had been
cashiered by the French after beating a peasant to death while drunk. Shamed,
he fled to the South to eke out a miserable living practicing traditional
medicine. Ho was so shocked by this that he left school early to petition, in
vain, to have his father reinstated. Ultimately Ho went abroad, where he worked
as a cook, a street cleaner, a photographer. And only in Europe, in 1918, did
he begin his political education, when he was welcomed into French socialist
circles.
There is more ambiguity--more shadows and fog--in the official biographies
regarding the period from 1934 to 1938. Recently opened archives in Moscow show
that Ho was subjected to Stalinist discipline there. He was required to undergo
re-education for failing to display the proper class spirit and identify with
the international proletariat.
Ho himself aided in the creation of his myth. A booklet written in 1948 under
the name of Tran Dan Tien describes President Ho as a modest man of the people
who was nonetheless the father of the nation and a hero greater than Le Loi and
other luminaries of Vietnamese history. When in 1990 I pointed out that Tran
Dan Tien was a pseudonym used by Ho and thus Ho was praising himself, I was
called a traitor and berated for attempting to tarnish the image of Uncle Ho.
Perhaps the most serious charge facing Ho is that he was responsible for
starting a brutal and fratricidal war. The truth is that he did all he could to
avoid war. The responsibility for the war falls to the French and to Charles de
Gaulle, who wanted to re-establish the French Empire after World War II. Even
the French communists rallied to support this policy. And what about the
Americans? Truman abandoned Roosevelt's anti-colonial policy and supported
French imperial aspirations. And who undermined the 1954 Geneva Accords and
prevented the general elections in 1956? U.S. officials, who also ignored
letters from Ho pleading for support.
The policies of the Western democracies pushed Ho and his people into the open
arms of the Soviet Union and China. He took their tanks, ships, airplanes and
missiles, but he refused to allow foreign combat troops on Vietnamese soil. And
he declined Russian and Chinese advice on how to conduct the war. The Russians
did not want him to fight for the liberation of South Vietnam because they
feared an escalation of the war with the U.S. might lead to international
catastrophe. And the Chinese favored a long, patient guerrilla war. But Ho and
his crowd decided to follow their independent course on the war and thus bear
some responsibility for it.
Ho made other mistakes. It was he who wholeheartedly adopted a Stalinist
political and economic model for Vietnam. Thus, there was the development of
heavy industry, hasty collectivization, the elimination of the bourgeoisie, the
starting of concentration camps and the mistreatment of intellectuals. All
those policies led to disaster. Ho later took responsibility for them.
Had Ho lived to see the fall of Saigon and the liberation of the South, would
things have worked out differently? Would the re-education camps have been
avoided? Or the exodus of the boat people? Or the occupation of Cambodia and
the war with China? Would Vietnam have suffered economic isolation during the
1980s? I think Ho would have avoided these disasters. He always cautioned
people not to lose their heads after a victory. Had there been proper
leadership, victory could have been managed more smoothly and the country more
readily accepted into the international community.
In Hanoi these days the leadership is using Ho's name to justify its policies,
as if he were still alive. What would Ho have thought of doi moi, Hanoi's
half-baked economic reform plan? Would he have seen it as a forced marriage
between socialism without soul and capitalism without backbone? Perhaps. The
government should not use Uncle Ho, cold in his tomb, as a defense against the
opposition forming around such people as the mathematician Phan Dinh Dieu or
the physicist Nguyen Thanh Giang..
In times like these I have a great desire to approach Ho--our luminous Uncle
Ho--to ask him to clarify his famous slogan: "Nothing is more precious than
independence and freedom." Does this mean the collective freedom of the kind
being fostered by the regime's intellectuals at the Marx-Lenin Institute in
Hanoi and not individual and civic freedoms? If so, the heroic people of
Vietnam are two centuries behind the times. Poor Vietnam! Poor old Uncle Ho!
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Cambodia Discussion (CAMDISC) - www.cambodia.org" group.
This is an unmoderated forum. Please refrain from using foul language.
Thank you for your understanding. Peace among us and in Cambodia.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected]
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/camdisc
Learn more - http://www.cambodia.org
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
