Friday, March 29, AD 2024 3:07am

Ho Chi Minh, Obama and History

That President Obama praised dead Communist dictator Ho Chi Minh will come as a surprise only to Americans who haven’t been paying attention, which, alas, is a large segment of the population.  For the benefit of those people, historian Ronald Radosh in The Wall Street Journal gives some background to Ho:

 

During World War II, Vietnam—a French colony—was taken over by Japan, and toward the end of the conflict, with Japan in retreat, a power vacuum developed. Ho Chi Minh, leading the Viet Minh communist guerrilla group, saw a chance to seize power before the French could restore colonial rule. He needed allies and knew that the American president, Franklin Roosevelt, had a reputation for being anti-French and anti-colonial. Thus began Ho’s courtship of the U.S. by citing the Declaration of Independence and appealing to the American ideal of liberty.

His aim, according to Ho’s biographer, William Duiker, was to “induce the United States to support the legitimacy of his government, rather than a return of the French.”

In reality, Ho was a “disciplined Communist, who had “proved time and again his profound loyalty to Communism,” according to the ex-communist German revolutionary Ruth Fischer, writing in Foreign Affairs in 1954. She had known him in Moscow in the 1920s when he was receiving his training.

Ho didn’t get the U.S. support he sought, but he still succeeded in his national takeover, proclaiming himself president of a provisional government in what he called the Vietnam Democratic Republic. In October 1945, just how democratic the republic would be became clear: Ho ordered the slaughter of his political opponents, including 50,000 of the then-powerful Trotskyist communists. During a trip to Paris in late 1945, Ho told the French Socialist leader Daniel Guerin, “All those who do not follow the line which I have laid down will be broken.”

In his own writings during the war, Ho Chi Minh stressed that the revolutionaries had to have a “tactical, flexible attitude towards the national bourgeoisie,” but as for the Trotskyists, “there can be no compromise, no concession.”

Ho’s posturing as a Jefferson-inspired lover of independence failed to dupe the U.S. in the 1940s. Let’s be generous and assume that antiwar protesters in the 1960s and early 1970s didn’t know any better when they bought into his fiction. Let’s give President Obama the same benefit of the doubt. But let’s also retire the idea that Ho Chi Minh had the slightest interest in the Declaration of Independence except as a tool he once deployed hoping to achieve his communist goals.

Go here to read the rest.  Ho Chi Minh was a fairly typical Communist ruler in that he had absolutely no compunction about ordering mass executions to eliminate anyone who would stand against his regime.  That Obama repeats the old bromides of the “anti-war”, actually pro-Communist, left of the Sixties that attempted to paint Ho as some sort of Jeffersonian Democrat either betrays immense ignorance or something far, far worse.

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Saturday, July 27, AD 2013 8:53am

[…] From American Catholic: […]

Art Deco
Art Deco
Saturday, July 27, AD 2013 9:52am

Unless my memory is playing nasty tricks with me, if you find the 1st edition of Gloria Steinem’s Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions you will find therein the sentence fragment “Ho Chih Minh was the George Washington of Asia”, an attitude she says she picked up on a fellowship in India during the years running from 1956 to 1958. The phrase is not present in the second edition, published in 1995. (The first hit the presses in 1984).

Keep in mind, Gloria Steinem was a personal friend of John Kenneth Galbraith from about 1962 forward (he blurbed an early collection of writings) and certainly congenial with George McGovern and Allard Loewenstein. An agreeable opinion of her was not universal in those circles (Abraham Ribicoff did not want her around), but she was well-connected and not a rebel or an outcast. She was too old for hippie subcultures ca. 1966 (and, in any case, had to earn a living) and not a member of an explicitly and constitutionally pro-Communist organization of the sort that David Dellinger and Tom Hayden ran; she was active in electoral politics, but with Loewenstein’s nexus.

Jerry
Jerry
Saturday, July 27, AD 2013 1:30pm

As a Vietnam vet, obama’s remarks were offensive.

L
L
Sunday, July 28, AD 2013 6:00am

This president also said we have “57 states”. Whatever—these remarks were insensitive and demeaning to so many Vietnam vets and to so many Americans. But he doesn’t have a clue because he does not know anything about history.

Paul W Primavera
Sunday, July 28, AD 2013 1:37pm

“That Obama repeats the old bromides of the ‘anti-war’, actually pro-Communist, left of the Sixties that attempted to paint Ho as some sort of Jeffersonian Democrat either betrays immense ignorance or something far, far worse.”

Something far, far worse.

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