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:
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.
[…] From American Catholic: […]
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.
As a Vietnam vet, obama’s remarks were offensive.
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.
“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.