The Life of a Revolutionary: Ho Chi Minh (born May 19, 1890)

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The Life of a Revolutionary: Ho Chi Minh (born May 19, 1890)

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Socialism & Liberation - May, 2007

http://socialismandliberation.org/mag/index.php?aid=791

The life of a revolutionary

Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese Revolution

By Richard Becker

Among the many outstanding revolutionary figures of the 20th century,

one of the most remarkable was the Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh. In

order to achieve the liberation of his country, the national liberation

movement he led for nearly 40 years had to defeat not one, but two, of

the world�s major imperialist powers�France and the United States�and

withstand five years of Japanese occupation.

Without a revolutionary party and leadership, Vietnam�s victory would

have been unthinkable.

Ho Chi Minh was the founding leader of the Indochinese Communist Party

(later the Vietnam Workers Party). Ho was also a founding member of the

French Communist Party a decade earlier. The position of Lenin and the

Bolshevik Party on supporting the right of oppressed nations to

self-determination was key in winning him over to communism.

In addition to his great achievements, Ho Chi Minh�popularly known as

Uncle Ho�was revered for his simple lifestyle and revolutionary

dedication. As countless witnesses testified over the years, this was

no pretense. Elected president, he refused to live in the palace

inherited from the colonial era, preferring a modest house with a

garden.

Early life

Ho was born on May 19, 1890, in a tiny village in Nghe An province of

central Vietnam. Nghe An was an area renowned for resisting foreign

domination and French colonialism. His father was a Confucian scholar

and civil servant who lost his position in the early 1900s because he

opposed French colonialism and its Vietnamese elite collaborators.

French colonization of Vietnam and the rest of Indochina, including

Laos and Cambodia, had begun in the 1830s. By the 1880s, the takeover

was complete.

French exploitation of Vietnam was ruthless and brutal. Contrary to the

colonizers� claim of �bringing civilization� to a country whose

existence and culture was more than 1,000 years older than their own,

only a very thin layer of the Vietnamese elite shared in the vast

wealth extracted from the land and people.

An indicator of the deteriorating conditions under French rule was a

sharp decline in literacy in Vietnam in the late 19th and early 20th

centuries.

Hundreds of thousands of peasants died or were permanently disabled by

corv�e (slave) labor to build roads, ports and other projects that

opened the country up to French capitalist profiteering. The colonizers

levied crushing taxes on the rice-growing small farmers who constituted

the vast majority of the population.

>From student to world traveler

In 1908, this combination of heavy taxes, forced labor and rising

anti-colonial sentiment led to a series of demonstrations and

rebellions. On May 9, large numbers of peasants converged on the

imperial capital of Hue.

At that time, Ho was known by the name his father had given him at 10

years old, Nguyen Tat Thanh. He had been studying at the National

Academy in Hue. Ho joined the demonstration, offering to serve as an

interpreter for the protestors since he was studying French.

The demonstration ended with French troops opening fire and killing

many. Ho was beaten and the next day, nine days short of his 18th

birthday, was expelled from the academy. From that point on, he was on

the French secret police surveillance list, along with his father and

brother.

In 1911, Ho left Vietnam, signing on as an assistant cook on a French

ocean liner, the first of many jobs aboard ships. His workdays

typically lasted 17 hours and included washing pots and pans, cleaning

floors and shoveling coal.

His travels and experiences during those years would profoundly shape

his views as a communist and internationalist.

Over the next decade, Thanh worked ocean-going ships, in the kitchens

of fancy restaurants in New York, Boston, London and other cities, as a

boiler operator and as a photo retoucher. As a seaman, he traveled to

other French colonies, including Senegal, Madagascar, Algeria, Tunisia

and Morocco.

�The French in France are all good. But the French colonialists are

very cruel and inhumane,� he commented. �To the colonialists, the life

of an Asian or an African is not worth a penny.�

In 1912 to 1913, Ho lived in the United States. He attended Harlem

meetings of the United Negro Improvement Association, the organization

led by Marcus Garvey. He also traveled to the South, where he observed

a Ku Klux Klan lynching. Ho arrived believing that the United States

was not an imperialist country and might help Vietnam win its freedom.

He left disabused of any such notion.

His incisive writings about lynching and the KKK�s racist and

anti-working class role were published in French and Soviet newspapers

in the 1920s.

Organizer and communist in France

>From the United States, Ho relocated to Britain and then to Paris,

becoming active in trade union and socialist politics. In 1919, he

organized an association of Vietnamese living in France. The same year,

he authored a petition to the post-World War I Versailles conference.

The petition called on President Woodrow Wilson and the other

victorious allied powers to extend Wilson�s renowned �14 Points� and

advocacy of the right of self-determination to the colonized peoples of

Southeast Asia. Representatives of other oppressed peoples in Asia and

Africa sought similar redress. All were turned away.

The allied leaders� speeches about �democracy� and �self-determination�

were proved to be nothing more than propaganda. Once the war was over,

the victorious empires, particularly the British and French,

expropriated the colonies of their defeated German, Austrian and

Turkish rivals.

Ho�s petition catapulted him to fame, making him the best-known

Vietnamese in France and the subject of intense police surveillance. He

changed his name and for the next two decades was known as Nguyen Ai

Quoc.

At the age of 30, Ho emerged as a tireless organizer, writer and

advocate of national liberation and socialism. In the aftermath of the

Russian Revolution of 1917, the world socialist movement was splitting

into revolutionary and reformist wings. Ho was involved in the struggle

raging inside the French Socialist Party. The decisive element for him

was reading Lenin�s �Theses on the National and Colonial Questions.�

�There were political terms difficult to understand in this thesis,� he

wrote. �But by dint of reading it again and again, finally I could

grasp the main part of it. What emotion, enthusiasm, clear-sightedness

and confidence it instilled in me? I was overjoyed to tears. Though

sitting alone in my room, I shouted aloud as if addressing large

crowds: �Dear martyrs, compatriots. This is what we need, this is the

path to our liberation.��

Unlike Wilson�s hypocrisy, Lenin not only advocated the destruction of

colonial empires but also insisted that support for the struggles of

the colonized peoples must be a priority of the revolutionary workers

parties inside the imperialist countries.

Ho was a delegate to the founding convention of the French Communist

Party in 1921 and an organizer of the Inter-colonial Union, made up of

revolutionaries from France�s African, Asian and West Indian colonies.

He edited and distributed its publication, �The Pariah,� a unique

source of anti-colonial agitation that was outlawed by French colonial

authorities and had to be smuggled.

Returning to Southeast Asia

In danger of arrest by French secret police who watched him around the

clock, and desiring to begin organizing in his homeland, Ho slipped out

of France in 1923. He left for the center of world revolution, the

newly formed Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In the Soviet Union,

he worked as part of the Communist International.

After nearly two years in Moscow, Ho was sent, at his request in 1924,

to Guanzhou in southern China, then in the midst of revolutionary

upheaval, under the cover of being a reporter for a Soviet newspaper.

His real mission was to begin building a revolutionary party along

Leninist lines in Indochina. The subterfuge was necessary because the

French secret police were on the lookout for Ho.

He started by organizing the Revolutionary Youth League, made up mainly

of young Vietnamese nationalists who had fled to southern China to

escape French repression. Revolutionary unrest was spreading in

Vietnam. The youth league was organized along Leninist organizational

lines, and served as the predecessor to the Indochinese Communist

Party, founded in 1930.

After participating in a series of uprisings against French rule, the

ICP was severely repressed in 1931 and many of its future leaders were

imprisoned. The French got their fellow imperialists, the British, to

arrest Ho in Hong Kong in 1931, where he narrowly escaped execution. In

1933, he escaped, was reported killed and was memorialized by the

Communist International and mourned in Vietnam. He resurfaced in China

five years later, in 1938.

In 1940, France was defeated and occupied by Nazi Germany. The new

Nazi-controlled Vichy government in France took over in Vietnam. The

Vichy French were allowed to continue administering Vietnam by the new

rulers, the Japanese Empire. Vietnam was now under double colonial rule.

The war of independence

The following year, after three decades of exile, Nguyen Ai Quoc

returned to Vietnam together with other leaders of the ICP. They

launched the League for the Independence of Vietnam, also known as Viet

Minh, in 1941, beginning a guerrilla struggle against the French and

Japanese occupiers that would last four years.

Nguyen Ai Quoc adopted a new name: Ho Chi Minh.

In early 1945, after the collapse of the Vichy regime, Japan took over

direct control. The Japanese occupiers continued to export rice from

Vietnam even as severe famine hit the country. Between 1.5 and 2

million of the 10 million Vietnamese died in the famine. The Viet Minh

distributed confiscated food supplies to the hungry. The organization

grew exponentially in size, as did the party. In August 1945, Japan

surrendered to the United States, ending World War II.

On Sept. 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam�s independence to an

assembly of more than 500,000 people. He indicted the French

colonizers: �In the field of politics, they have deprived our people of

every democratic liberty. � They have enforced inhuman laws; they have

set up three distinct political regimes in the North, the Center and

the South � in order to wreck our national unity and prevent our people

from being united. They have built more prisons than schools. They

[have] mercilessly slain our patriots; they drowned our uprisings in

rivers of blood. � They have robbed us of our rice fields, our mines,

our forests and our raw materials.�

Hoping to gain the support�or at least the neutrality�of the United

States, whose pilots the Viet Minh had helped during World War II, Ho�s

speech borrowed language from the U.S. Declaration of Independence.

Washington was unmoved. On the contrary, U.S. troop carrier ships

ferried the French army back to Vietnam. Starting with Truman, the next

six U.S. presidents would all wage war against the Indochinese peoples.

Despite all efforts by Ho and other Vietnamese leaders to negotiate a

settlement, the French re-occupation left the Vietnamese with two

choices: surrender or fight. They chose to fight.

The French believed that the war would be short and that victory was

inevitable. In their colonial arrogance, they severely underestimated

the resolve, resourcefulness and strategic thinking of the Vietnamese

leaders. Every year, the French commanders issued proclamations that

victory was near, that Vietnamese forces were weakening and could not

hold out much longer. By 1954, the United States was paying more than

75 percent of France�s Indochina war budget.

But the same year, the Vietnamese scored a decisive military victory,

killing 7,000 French troops and capturing 11,000 more. The battle of

Dien Bien Phu signaled an end to French colonialism in Indochina, but

not the end of imperialist intervention.

The fight for unification

The 1954 agreement in Geneva, �On the problem of restoring peace in

Indochina,� called for the �temporary� division of Vietnam at the 17th

parallel into two zones.

In the north, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam was established. It

was led by the victorious liberation forces, the communist party,

renamed the Workers Party, and Ho Chi Minh. They immediately began the

process of land reform and socialist construction.

In the south, a government was set up headed by former Japanese and

French puppet emperor Bao Dai and his U.S.-appointed prime minister,

Ngo Dinh Diem. According to the Geneva accords, a countrywide election

was to be held within two years. But Washington did everything possible

to make the �temporary� division of Vietnam permanent and to block the

election.

The reason was no mystery. President Dwight Eisenhower later said: �I

have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in

Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as

of the time of the fighting, a possible 80 per cent of the population

would have voted for the communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader.�

Despite these attempts to keep the nation divided, large swaths of

southern Vietnam were in the hands of Viet Minh forces, which had set

up popular and efficient governments in those areas. The brutal,

corrupt and virulently anti-communist Diem regime soon launched a

campaign to physically destroy the liberation forces and restore

landlord rule in the countryside.

In 1960, the National Liberation Front was established in southern

Vietnam. Its aim was to defeat the neocolonial Diem regime and reunite

the country. Within three years, it was on the brink of victory. Only

the intervention of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops and the most

intense bombing campaign in history delayed the Vietnamese victory. The

U.S. war killed millions of Vietnamese and inflicted massive

destruction on the country. On the U.S. side, 58,000 were killed and

300,000 wounded.

But despite the Pentagon�s reign of death, the Vietnamese were not to

be defeated. On April 30, 1975, the armed forces of the north and of

the National Liberation Front entered Saigon, the southern capital,

ending the war. Shortly thereafter, Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City.

Ho Chi Minh did not live to see that day; he had died on Sept. 2, 1969.

What lived on and ensured that world historic defeat of U.S.

imperialism was the party that Ho had dedicated his life to building.

Ho�s testament, written a few months before his death, expressed his

full confidence that victory was certain. �We, a small nation, will

have earned the unique honor of defeating, through a heroic struggle,

two big imperialisms�France and the United States�and making a worthy

contribution to the national liberation movement.�

Articles may be reprinted with credit to Socialism and Liberation

magazine.

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