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Ho Chi Minh (1890-1969) - originally Nguyen Sinh Cung; pseudomyms: Van Ba, Nguyen Tat Thanh, Nguyen Ai Quoc, Linh, Ly Thuy, Wang, Duong, Nguyen Lai, Nam Son, Tau Chin |
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Vietnamese statesman, Communist leader, and Confucian humanist, who led the country's struggle for independence in the 1940s and was a major figure in the war between North and South Vietnam in the 1960s. Ho Chi Minh devoted his life to the revolution and cause of communism. Like Mao Zedong, he emphasized the revolutionary potential of the peasantry, but unlike the Chinese leader, Ho was know for his Gandhian modesty and aestheticism in his private life. Among Ho's most famous literary works is his Prison Diary.
Ho Chi Minh was born on Nguyen Sinh Cung in the village of
Kimlien, Annam – later he was given the name Nguyen Tat Thanh, "he who
will succeed." Ho came from a poor scholar-gentry family. His father,
Nguyen Sinh Sac, was a teacher and civil servant, who was dismissed
from his office for refusing to serve at court. Hoang Thi Loan, Ho's
mother, died when Ho was eleven. Ho was an exceptional student with quick wit and talent for writing. After attending schools in Vinh and
Quoc Hoc College in Hué, Ho left his studies and taught at a private
school in Phan Thiet, a fishing village in South Annam. Ho's wandering
years began in 1911, when he decided to leave French Indo-China
(Vietnam). At the same time he took the pseudonym nickname Ba. He traveled to Saigon and found employment on a French
passenger liner Amiral Latouche-Tréville as a kitchen help. He
then worked in London (1915-17) and Paris (1917-23) in odd jobs, among
others as a pastry cook at the Carlton Hotel in London. He also spent
some time in the United States. By chance, Hemingway and Ho lived in Paris's 5th Arrondissement only three blocks apart, but there is no record that they ever met. For a brief time Ho used the pseudonym Nguyen Ai Phap (Nguyen Who Hates the French). Among his acquaintances was the anti-war novelist Henri Barbusse and the Japanese Komatsu Kiyoshi, the future translator of André Gide and André Malraux. From 1918 to 1923 Ho belonged to an Indochinese group called the Annamite Patriots, which aimed at liberating Vietnam from the French. In the debates of the quarrelsome group, Ho had the loudest voice.Ho also visited galleries with his friends, learned about avant-garde arts, studied in libraries, and read Shakespeare and Dickens and Dostoevsky. Ho's pamphlet, La Race Noire, which was published in
Moscow in 1924, was partly based on his experiences during his trips in
1914-1916. It is believed, that he lived in Harlem for a while, and visited Boston, and East and Gulf Coast ports. The
American actress Mae West told in an interview by Gavin Young at her home in Hollywood, that she met "Ho...
Ho... Ho something" at the Carlton. "There was this waiter, cook, I
don't know what he was. I know he has the slinkiest eyes, though. We meet
in the corridor. We-well..." (Vietnam Past and Present: The North by Andrew Forbes and David Henley, Cognoscenti Books, 2012) In his years at sea, Ho read such writers as Shakespeare,
Tolstoy, Marx, and Zola. He greeted with enthusiasm the Russian
Revolution and after World War I he joined the French Socialist Party.
Lenin's Theses on the National and Colonial Questions impressed
him deeply and in 1920 he participated in the Committee of the Third
International. He also was one of the founders of the French Communist
Party and published writings on colonial issues in the Marxist
periodical Le Paria (The Outcast), and contributed articles to
the newspaper L'Humanité. Like Lenin, he believed that
nationalism was a trap that lured colonized peopled away from class
struggle. "If you do not condemn colonialism, if you do not side with
the colonial people, what kind of revolution are you waging?" Ho Chi
Minh asked. ('The Path Which Led Me to Leninism' (1960), in Selected Works of Ho Chi Minh: Volume IV, Foreign Language Publishing House, 1962, p. 450) By August 1922 the French government ordered the French secret police to follow Ho's movements. As a response he said an open letter to Albert-Pierre Sarraut, minister for the colonies: "If Your Excellency insists on knowing what we do every day nothing is easier: we shall publish every morning a bulletin of our movements, and Your Excellency will have but the trouble of reading. Besides our timetable is quite simple and almost unchanging." (Ho by David Halberstam, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007, p. 30) The French used as a key to Ho's identity his scarred left ear. Ho journeyed in 1923 to the U.S.S.R. to study Marxism
and
revolutionary techniques. In Moscow Ho became a member of the
Comintern's Southeast Asia Bureau. He never met Lenin, who died on 21
January 1924. Following the death of the leader of the young Soviet
state, Ho published in Pravda an article titled 'Lenin and the Peoples
of the East,' in which he argued that the Asian peoples see in Lenin
"the personification of universal brotherhood. [...] They feel
veneration for him which is akin to filial piety." (Ho Chi Minh: The Missing Years, 1919-1941 by Sophie Quinn-Judge, 2003, p. 55)
Like thousands of other mourners, Ho attended Lenin's funeral on Red
Square in the freezing cold. His hands retained frostbite scars for
several weeks. (Ho Chi Minh: A Biography by Pierre Brocheux, 2007, p. 24) Upon leaving Moscow in 1924, Ho settled as an agent of the
Comintern to Canton, China, where he helped to organize the
revolutionary forces and lectured on politics and ideology. These
lectures were published in a book form under the title The
Revolutionary Path (1927). According to some sources, Ho allegedly
married Tang Tuyet Minh in China in 1926 under the name Nguyen Ai Quoc
(Nguyen the Patriot). When Chiang Kai-shek turned on his Communist allies, Ho fled back to Moscow by the way of Gobi. In the late 1920 Ho's political activities took him to Europe, and in 1928 he spent some time in Siam (Thailand) disguised as a Buddhist monk. In 1930 he was again in China and established in Hong Kong the Communist Party of Vietnam. He was arrested in 1931 by the British police, and after he was released in 1933, he escaped back to the Soviet Union in the disguise of a Chinese merchant. The French had already sentenced him to death in absentia in 1930. Before returning to Vietnam, Ho worked with Chinese communists. At the age of fifty, he crossed the Vietnam-China border, but his stay in his native country did not last long. During the early 1940s Ho adopted the pseudonym Ho Chi Minh – meaning roughly "he who enlightens." He was arrested in China in 1942 and jailed for over a year. From this period dates his Prison Diary, which consists of politically and ideologically orthodox poems. "Physically I'm suffering / But my spirit will ne'er flinch," he said in one of the poems. (Ibid., p. 111) In prison Ho lost his teeth and his hair turned grayer. When the Japanese 'occupation' ended in 1945, the Viet Minh independence movement took over Hanoi. Ho proclaimed the birth of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the declaration of independence, which was partly based on his recollections of the American Declaration of Independence. It started with the words, "All men are created equal; they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." In 1946 he was appointed President. During the following years Ho led the anti-French resistance – the Viet Minh was dominant in the countryside, and the French controlled the large cities, hoping to regain control of the whole colony. To secure its political hegenomy, the Viet Minh did not hesitate to kill any adversaries they deemed dangerous. Among them was Ta Thu Thau, the leader of the Trotskyist Struggle Group, who was assassinated in September 1945. "All those who do not follow the line that I have set out will be smashed," Ho said. (Ho Chi Minh by William J. Duiker, 2001, p. 396) The war dragged on for eight years. Its turning point of come in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu,
where the stronghold built by the French troops was crushed – a triumph
of guerilla strategy and patience. "It is a glorious victory of our
people, and also of the oppressed people in the world," Ho later stated.
The French Government signed an armistice, and subsequent negotiations
divided Vietnam along the 17th parallel. In Hanoi President Ho Chi Minh
refused to settle in the governor general's residence, and for some
time he lived in the electrician's cottage and then in a modest house
on stilts. The title he preferred in his old age was Uncle Ho. Usually
Ho Chi Minh dressed in high-necked white garment, called a cu-nao, and
wore open-toed rubber sandals. He was a chain-smoker, especially he
loved American-made Salems. The author Graham Greene interviewed him for the Sunday Times.
"He liked the dictator enormously, and was especially taken with a
phrase applied to Ho Chi Minh by a political rival – 'the man as pure
as Lucifer'." (Graham Greene: The Man Within by Michael Shelden, Heinemann, 1994, p. 383) The interview appeared in the Sunday Times on May 8, 1955. The North adopted the socialist system, and following Maoist policies a brutal land reform was carried out. Although Ho was opposed to the worst excesses, an estimated 50,000 people died and about 50,000-100,000 were imprisoned. (The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression by Stéphane Courtois, et al., Harvard University Press, 1999) Freedom of speech was restricted. From 1959 arms and guerrillas moved down the Ho Chi Minh Trail into the south. Eventually The Trail comprised twelve thousand miles of roads and paths. The United States, supporting Ngo Dinh Diem and the Saigon regime in the South, was gradually drawn into the war against the People's Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF), of which the Americans used the term Viet Cong, an abbreviation of Viet-nam Cong-san (or Vietnamese Communists). Hanoi was repeatedly bombed by American planes. In the 1960s, the conflict created a world wide protest movement and the rhythmic chant "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh" became an essential part of the peace marches. "Tell me gentlemen, is the Statue of Liberty standing on her head?" Ho Chi Minh asked in 1967 from his American visitors. ('Ho Chi Minh' by Sophie Quinn-Judge, in Mental Maps in the Early Cold War Era, 1945-68, edited by Steven Casey and Jonathan Wright, Palgrave, 2011, p. 196) Ho
resigned from his position as the party's secretary-general
in 1959. Due to his poor health, his role as
the symbol of Vietnamese communism was largely ceremonial. The active
conduct of the war was
done by the collective leadership he had established. In 1967 President
Lyndon B. Johnson wrote a letter to Ho, in
the hope that the conflict in Vietnam can be brought to an end. Ho
answered: "The Vietnamese people will never give way to force, it will
never accept conversation under the clear threat of bombs. Our cause is
absolutely just. It is desirable that the Government of the United
States act in conformity to reason." (The Vietnam War: The Essential Reference Guide, edited by James H. Willbanks, 2013, ABC-CLIO, p. 246) Ho
Chi Minh died of heart failure on September 3, 1969, in
Hanoi. In his testament Ho wrote: "All my life, I have served the
Homeland, the revolution and the people with all my heart and strength.
If I should now depart from this world, I would have nothing to regret,
except not being able to serve longer and more. When I am gone, a grand
funeral should be avoided in order not to waste the people's time and
money." The war ended in 1975, Vietnam's reunification was officially
proclaimed next year, and Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City. The
victory of the Communist regime led to a mass exodus, hundreds of
thousands of boat people fled misery and repression. The first real
sign of liberalization came in 1986, when the new secretary general of
the Vietnamese Communist Party freed a large number of political
prisoners and closed concentration camps of the northern region. President Ho Chi Minh's massive Mausoleum in Hanoi, where his embalmed corpse rests, was completed in 1975. The embalming was done by the Soviet Dr Sergei Debrov; it took a full year to complete the process. Mao's body was embalmed without Soviet help. When the Soviet Union collapsed, old Comintern files in Moscow were opened, but thus far historians have not found much inflammable material on Ho. William J. Duiker claims in his biography on Ho Chi Minh, that Ho married twice, and in Hanoi he fathered a child. For further reading: Ho Chi Minh in Hong Kong: Anti-colonial Networks, Extradition and the Rule of Law by Geoffrey C. Gunn (2021); Ho Chi Minh's Heritage in Vietnam and Abroad, chief editors: Evgeny Kobelev, Pham Quoc Thanh (2020); Hemingway and Ho Chi Minh in Paris: The Art of Resistance by David Crowe (2020); Ho Chi Minh by Peter Neville (2019); 'Vietnamin Ho-setä tappoi tuhansia,' Troels Ussig & Jannik Petersen, Historia 13 (2018); Ho Chi Minh's blueprint for revolution: in the Words of Vietnamese Strategists and Operatives by Virginia Morris with Clive A. Hills (2018); Ho Chi Minh: A Biography by Pierre Brocheux (2007); Ho Chi Minh: The Missing Years, 1919-1941 by Sophie Quinn-Judge (2003); Rhetoric of Revolt: Ho Chi Minh's Discourse for Revolution by Peter Anthony Decaro (2002); Ho Chi Minh by William J. Duiker (2001); Ho Chi Minh by Reinhold Neumann-Hoditz (1989); Ho by David Halberstam (1986); Ho Chi Minh by Dana Ohlmeyer Lloyd (1986); Ho Chi Minh by Charles Fenn (1973); Ho Chi Minh: Legend of Hanoi by Jules Archer (1971); Vision Accomplished? The Enigma of Ho Chi Minh by N. Khac Huyen (1971); Ho Chi Minh: A Political Biography by Jean Lacouture (1968) Selected works:
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