HO CHI MINH
Liberation fighter & Vietnam’s leader
Following are excerpts from a talk by Naomi Cohen on
May 19, at a Workers World Party meeting to commemorate the
110th anniversary of the birth of Ho Chi Minh and the 75th
anniversary of the birth of Malcolm X.
Ho Chi Minh was born on May 19, 1890, in a
village in central Vietnam. Anyone who ever saw his picture
knows he was slight in stature. But Ho Chi Minh was a
towering figure in the history of the national liberation
movements of the 20th century. His leadership of the struggle
against colonialism in Indochina inspired and gave confidence
to millions of oppressed peoples in all the colonial
countries of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin
America.
From the time he was a teenager, Ho--born Nguyen Tat
Thanh--was involved in anti-colonial activities against the
French colonial regime. Details about his early years are
sketchy, but it is known that in 1911 he went to sea as a
kitchen worker on a French ocean liner and thus got to see
the condition of the working classes and oppressed peoples
all over the world.
He identified with the struggles of all colonized peoples
and wrote about their plight in detail. Ho spent some time in
the United States and saw in the Jim Crow segregation system,
as well as in the racist terror of the Ku Klux Klan, close
duplications of the status of the Vietnamese under French
rule that he knew firsthand. In fact, he wrote a number of
essays on the KKK and the lynching of Black people in the
U.S., exposing the hypocrisy of the so-called democratic
system.
In an essay entitled "Lynching, a Little-Known Aspect of
American Civilization," written in 1924, Ho wrote:
"It is well known that the Black race is the most
oppressed and most exploited of the human family. It is well
known that the spread of capitalism and the discovery of the
New World had as an immediate result the rebirth of slavery,
which was, for centuries, a scourge for the Negroes and a
bitter disgrace for humanity. What everyone does not perhaps
know, is that after 65 years of so-called emancipation,
American Negroes still endure atrocious moral and material
sufferings, of which the most cruel and horrible is the
custom of lynching."
Joined European
socialist movement
During World War I, Ho Chi Minh worked in London as a
kitchen helper and also shoveled snow to eke out a meager
existence, all the while participating in the European
socialist movement of the time and keeping in touch with
developments in Indochina. Toward the end of 1917, he moved
to France where there was a large Vietnamese exile community.
In November of that year, the Bolshevik Revolution triumphed
in Russia and there were fierce working class struggles in
many of the imperialist powers in Europe.
Ho joined the French Socialist Party and participated in
the political debates of the time over the road to socialism.
But his burning interest remained how to liberate the
colonial peoples from their imperialist masters and how the
working-class organizations of Europe would participate and
assist in those struggles. After all, the war was
fundamentally an inter-imperialist struggle about which of
the European and North American powers would hold sway over
the colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
Ho's earliest public document, drafted under the name
Nguyen Ai Quoc, was an appeal to the Versailles Conference of
1919, where the imperialist powers were meeting to re-divide
the spoils of the war. While U.S. President Woodrow Wilson
was posing as the champion of self-determination for the
colonial people, behind closed doors the U.S., France, and
Britain were actually negotiating over who would get which
colonies. Wilson refused an audience to the audacious
Vietnamese man who dared write up a program for the
self-determination of the Indochinese people and show up at
Versailles. France remained the colonial power in Indochina,
which consisted of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
During this same post-war period, Ho Chi Minh immersed
himself in the debates in the European socialist movement
over which international grouping would give leadership to
the struggle. In an article Ho wrote in 1960 about this
period, he described how he became a Leninist and identified
with the Third International.
"Heated debates were then taking place in the branches of
the Socialist Party about the question of whether the
Socialist Party should remain in the Second International,
should a Second-and-a-half International be founded, or
should the Socialist Party join Lenin's Third International?
I attended the meetings regularly, twice or thrice a week,
and attentively listened to the discussions. First I could
not understand thoroughly. Why were the discussions so
heated? . . .
"What I wanted most to know--and this precisely was not
debated in the meetings--was: Which International sides with
the people of colonial countries?
"I raised this question--the most important in my
opinion--in a meeting. Some comrades answered: It is the
Third, not the Second, International. And a comrade gave me
Lenin's 'Theses on the National and Colonial Questions,'
published by l'Humanité, to read.
"There were political terms difficult to understand in
this thesis. 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
into me! I was overjoyed to tears. Though sitting alone in my
room, I shouted aloud as if addressing large crowds: 'Dead
martyrs, compatriots! This is what we need, this is the path
to our liberation!' . . .
"At first, patriotism, not yet communism, led me to have
confidence in Lenin, in the Third International. Step by
step, along the struggle, by studying Marxism-Leninism
parallel with participation in practical activities, I
gradually came upon the fact that only Socialism and
Communism can liberate the oppressed nations and the working
people throughout the world from slavery."
Until his death in 1969, Ho Chi Minh was to be the guiding
light for the liberation struggle in Indochina. Under his
leadership, the combined forces of the Indochinese people
defeated first the French and then the U.S. imperialists over
a period of some 40 years.
Defeated
French and U.S. imperialists
In September of 1945, Ho Chi Minh was installed as
president of the Provisional Government in Hanoi, having
driven out both the Japanese and French occupation forces
from Vietnam. But, like in Korea, where the revolutionary
forces under Kim Il Sung also liberated their country from
Japanese occupation, the imperialists were bent on the
re-occupation and division of the country. In Vietnam, the
French were the main occupation force, but the U.S. played a
key role in supporting French colonialism there.
It took another nine years for the Vietnam People's Army
to oust the French in the historic battle at Dien Bien Phu in
1954. Then the combined forces of the North and the National
Liberation Front in the South fought for another 20 years,
finally defeating the U.S. in 1975 and driving it from its
last bastions in Saigon--now Ho Chi Minh City.
Famous for utilizing a type of guerrilla warfare known as
People's War, Ho Chi Minh and General Vo Nyugen Giap, who was
commander-in-chief of the Vietnam People's Army, led the
decisive battle against the French forces in 1954. It is
extremely interesting today to understand how this was
accomplished. Here is a brief description of how they
prepared for the battle, from "An Outline History of the Viet
Nam Workers' Party," published in Hanoi, 1976:
"Our artillery and infantry units, with only rudimentary
equipment, built hundreds of kilometers of roads through
forests and mountains to the battlefield, dug hundreds of
kilometers of communication trenches under intense enemy
fire, and hauled heavy guns up hill and down dale to the
battlefield.
"Putting into effect the slogan 'all for the front, all
for victory,' 200,000 volunteer carriers provided more than 3
million work days to serve the Dien Bien Phu front. Tens of
thousands of members of shock youth brigades together with
engineer units valiantly opened new roads and defused enemy
delayed-action bombs on communication lines. Tens of
thousands of pack bicycles, buffalo carts, ox carts, horse
carts and boats were used for the transport of rice,
foodstuffs and ammunition to the front . . .
"After 55 days and nights of continuous fighting, on May
7, 1954, our army completely destroyed the Dien Bien Phu
fortified entrenched camp, annihilating or capturing 16,000
enemy troops. The entire French command led by De Castries
surrendered after hoisting a white flag."
The experience of Dien Bien Phu was built upon and used in
the long struggle against U.S. aggression, where the mass of
the people were mobilized, North and South, often right under
the enemy's noses. This is what was done in the Tet Offensive
in South Vietnam in 1968, which was really a nationwide armed
insurrection carried out by hundreds of thousands of people,
not just trained soldiers.
In fact, it turned out that the U.S. ambassador's
chauffeur was a National Liberation Front fighter who, at the
time of the Tet Offensive, was able to open the gates to the
U.S. Embassy compound and let in other guerrilla fighters.
They took the compound long enough to fly the NLF flag from
the embassy roof in Saigon.
The example of the struggle in Vietnam gave optimism to
people around the world. They saw that if an oppressed
people, armed at first with only bamboo spears or bows and
arrows, could bring the French and then the mighty U.S.
colossus to their knees, then there was hope that they, too,
could challenge the imperialist beast.
The rallying cry of liberation movements from Latin
America to Africa was, "Two, three, many Vietnams." In the
U.S. as well, fighters for Black liberation like Malcolm X
and the youth of the Black Panther Party and Young Lords
Party were listening and learning from the example set by
Vietnam and its president, Ho Chi Minh.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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