BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS
Ho Chi Minh: A Life by William J Duiker
The extraordinary life of Ho Chi Minh not only had an immense impact on Vietnamese and US history but world history as well.
America hasn’t won a war since 1945.
Now the struggle is for global economic supremacy, and that is changing at lightning speed.
This book is a great eye-opening look at that ever changing power struggle.
EXCERPTS
To many who met him, Vietnamese and foreigners alike, he was a sweet guy who, despite his prominence as a major world leader, was actually a selfless patriot with a common touch and a lifelong commitment to the cause of bettering the lives of his fellow Vietnamese. Critics, however, pointed to the revolutionary excesses committed in his name and accused him of being a chameleon personality, a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Since the end of the Vietnam War, Ho Chi Minh’s colleagues, some of whom are still in power in Hanoi today, have tirelessly drawn on his memory to sanctify the Communist model of national development. Ho’s goal throughout his long career, they allege, was to bring an end to the global system of capitalist exploitation and create a new revolutionary world characterized by the Utopian vision of Karl Marx. A few dissenting voices, however, have argued that the central message of his career was the determination to soften the iron law of Marxist class struggle by melding it with Confucian ethics and the French revolutionary trinity of liberty, equality, and fraternity. In justification, they point to one of Ho’s slogans, which is seen everywhere on billboards in Vietnam today:
“Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom.”
The country that French warships had attacked was no stranger to war or foreign invasion. Indeed, few peoples in Asia had been compelled to fight longer and harder to retain their identity as a separate and independent state than had the Vietnamese.
In August 1939, Party cadres had frequently encountered problems in explaining why Stalin had chosen to ally his country with Hitler’s Germany, widely viewed as the archenemy of the world revolution. By late June 1941, however, word of the German attack on the USSR reached the border area and undoubtedly facilitated Nguyen Ai Quoc’s effort to coordinate the activities of the ICP with the global struggle against world fascism. As he explained it on one occasion: The fascists have attacked the Soviet Union, the fatherland of the world revolution, but the Soviet peoples will definitely be against the fascists.
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