Ho Chi Minh
At the end of the nineteenth century, revolutionary movements began to arise throughout Asia. Asian Nationalists struggled against the oppressive European imperialists who ruled much of the continent. Many of these revolutionary movements were at least nominally Communist. Mao Zedong led Chinese Communists against Japanese forces in World War II and against a rival group of Chinese led by Chiang Kai-Shek in a civil war before assuming control of the entire nation. Pol Pot, who would go on to become one of history’s worst mass murderers, became ‘s dictator by leading the Khmer Rouge rebels, a Communist group. Ho Chi Minh, who led the Viet Minh, became the leader of . Ho, despite his communism, was fiercely nationalistic, refusing to let or the Soviet Union dictate the way his country was run. After being internationally recognized as the leader of , Ho led the country on a path toward his ultimate goal of unification, despite an inevitable clash with the .
When Ho Chi Minh was born, what is now known as was ruled by the French, divided into three of the five states of French Indochina. By the time he entered his teenage years, Ho had already begun working with Vietnamese insurgents. In his early twenties, Ho left aboard a French merchant ship and eventually ended up in Paris. Ho’s nationalism was already prominent, as he began calling himself Nguyen Ai Quoc, which means Nguyen Who Loves His Country. He read widely and began an association with the far left wing of French poitics. At the end of World War I, Ho Chi Minh presented a proposal for stronger Vietnamese participation in government to the Versailles peace conference. Ho had not yet begun to demand independence, but was laughed at. By the next year, Ho was officially a Communist. In the French Communist Party, he found a group more open to his fight to liberate .
Ho worked for years as an agent of the Comintern. He was in Moscow at the time of Vladimir Lenin’s death. Lenin had greatly impressed Ho Chi Minh by successfully leading a revolutionary group of oppressed people. Ho was dispatched by the Soviets to aid Chinese Communists by serving as a translator for Mikhail Borodin. He was back in Moscow at the height of Josef Stalin’s reign of terror. Despite this long association with international Communism, Ho remained first and foremost Vietnamese, and in 1940 he was again within miles of his homeland, training an army to overthrow the French.
In 1941, Ho Chi Minh and his group of freedom fighters, the Viet Minh, finally crossed the border into . Like Mao Zedong in , Ho saw the wisdom in an alliance with peasants, and by 1944 he was the popular leader of his country, despite Japanese and French claims to rule in the area. Vietnamese independence was proclaimed in Hanoi in 1945, but by 1946, Ho Chi Minh again found himself leading a guerilla campaign against French occupying forces. In 1954 the war ended, with Ho accepting rule in only the north of in exchange for a promise of general elections within two years. American fear of a Communist Vietnam caused them to continually postpone these elections until war broke out between Ho’s government and the American-backed South Vietnamese. When he died in 1969, his dream of an independent, unified was in the easily foreseeable future, and in 1975 the Communists controlled the entire country. Although Ho Chi Minh’s vision had been fulfilled, the country was hardly in a comfortable place; his successors followed the oppressive pattern of human rights abuses that plague nearly every Communist country.
Communism, as defined by Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, dictates that Communist revolutions must occur in every country in the world in order for the survival of any Communist country. The Russians interpreted this as a mandate for Russian control of Communism throughout the world. They imposed puppet governments over much of Eastern Europe and in . In most of Asia, however, despite the victorious Communist revolutions, each government remained fiercely nationalistic. The Chinese eventually had a bitter split with , and even made diplomatic overtures to the capitalist .
No Asian leader remained more devoted to his nation than Ho Chi Minh. Despite being backed by both Russia and China in the fight for independence, the First Indochina War against France, and in the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese government he estabished remained autonomous rather than becoming a puppet of either of the great Communist powers of the world. Recognizing the danger posed by Pol Pot and the Chinese-supported Khmer Rouge, they sent troops into to establish a rival government. Mao Zedong’s successor in , Deng Xiaopeng, dispatched an army to to try to force the Vietnamese to leave . Rather than bow to the wishes of their larger neighbor, the Vietnamese repelled the Chinese invasion and kept their army in .
Until the end of his life, Ho Chi Minh firmly believed that “Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom.” He steadfastly resisted French, American, and Chinese attempts to control . Rather than enjoying the trappings of his position as head of a government, Ho lived simply in the house built for a former palace gardener, the living embodiment of the Communism he preached. Like many other Asian leaders, Ho never abandoned nationalism in favor of international Communism. Unlike leaders such as Mao Zedong, however, he never abandoned a lifestyle
