How Do You View Ho Chi Minh? A Committed Communist Or A Nationalistic Patriot?

Throughout reading multiple different sources, it was very difficult to fully assess Ho Chi Minh’s role in the Geneva Accords negotiation. The Geneva Accords allowed for a national election to determine the destiny of Vietnam in 1956. This was an election that Ho was heavily favored to win because he had a large following, and northern Vietnam was more densely populated than southern Vietnam. South Vietnam recognized this and refused to allow the election to happen, so Ho Chi Minh created the National Liberation Front for southern Vietnam. This began the second war in an attempt to unify Vietnam once again (Kirkpatrick). To his people Ho Chi Minh was known as “Uncle Ho”. He remained as a strong symbol for Vietnam’s unification (History.com Staff). While in the midst of a second war, the Vietcong, know as Guerrillas, were conducting strong revolt against the U.S. aided regime in South Vietnam. Later, Ho Chi Minh conceded his position as the party’s secretary-general; however, he remained chief of state. Since this point on, the majority of his undertakings were behind-the-scenes. Ho still continued to have an immense amount of influence in the government. His old followers dominated this. He focused on becoming more and more of a symbol to the people of Vietnam. His public personality is best symbolized by his popularly known name; Uncle Ho. Uncle Ho symbolized the idea of unification in a divided Vietnamese nation (Ho Chi

Two very different leaders, one liked by many and one despised by many, are Ho Chi Minh and Adolf Hitler. Hitler’s hatred of communists completely opposes Ho Chi Minh’s ideas. However, both Minh and Hitler wanted liberation and independence for their countries to be able to function independently. They both spent their lives attempting to gain their wishes of attaining the government they viewed as best for the countries. Minh’s goal was to get Vietnamese independence from the French and to blend Communism with Nationalism. When Minh was forced to leave China because the nationalists wanted to get rid of left wing radicals, he decided to go to Russia, joined the Comintern, but continued travelling back and forth. He became the leader of the Vietnamese communist party and started a revolution with the end goal of the independence of Indochina. Like Hitler, he was placed in prison for his wishes that went against the governmental ideas that he hoped would result in freedom. After his time in prison, he founded the Viet Minh in order to finally gain independence for Vietnam. The Japanese gave up Northern Vietnam, and Ho Chi Minh established himself as president of the Democratic state of Vietnam. Hitler also established himself as a leader and decided to take matters into his own hands. Ho Chi Minh and the Vietcong were then able to defeat the anti communist French controlled South Vietnam in the battle Dien Bien Phu. Minh fought for the freedom of others, did not let his power get to his head, and was able to get the people what they wanted, and was not fighting on behalf of himself, rather for others.

The leader of this communist introduction and development in Vietnam was Ho Chi Minh. Ho Chi Minh, born Nguyen Tat Thanh, grew up with a passion for freeing his country of the French. Ho Chi Minh worked hard on his French when his tutor told him, “If you want to defeat the French, you must understand them. To understand the French you must study the French language.” Ho Chi Minh’s patriotism developed mainly from his Chinese-language instructor, Hoang Thong, who was anti- French himself. Thong believed that losing one’s family was worse than losing one’s country. Ho Chi Minh’s first involvement against political action came on May 9, 1908 when he joined a peasant uprising as a translator. Attempting to translate in the front of the crowd, he was beaten and forced to hide at his friend’s house at night to prevent being arrested. In the following years, Ho Chi Minh yearned to go overseas; he said to journalist Anna Louise Strong, “The people of Vietnam, including my own father, often wondered who would help them to remove them the yoke of French control…I saw that I must go abroad to see for myself. After I had found out how they lived, I

2...Ho Chi Minh was a vietnamese communist who main goal was to to gain independence: French colonization the United Sovereign and communist Vietnam wanted otherwise. he had led the North Vietnamese in an

Ho was determined to achieve independence for the region. The French wanted to regain power and took badly to Ho's proclaiming the former Indochina as 'The Democratic Republic of Vietnam' in September, as the British had persuaded the allies to return power to the French in October (Palmer, 1984). At this time bi-polarity was not yet fully entrenched and Ho appealed to the U.S. in his September speech to the masses, drawing on The American Declaration of Independence (ibid.). America influenced the celebrations and professed its friendship to the new state.

Vietnamese people wanted freedom and communist Ho Chi Minh wanted freedom for Vietnam therefore people supported him. But they all know that Vietnam belong to the French. Ho fought with French his army was in the north and he tried to get US to help him but US didn’t because he was communist and were afraid that communism would spread throughout South

Since the late 1800s, Vietnam has struggled with maintaining independence. Vietnam was under the French control but the Vietnamese wanted to break free of the harsh rules put in place by the French, so Ho Chi Minh created the Indochinese Communist Party in 1940. After the Japanese conquered Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh created the Vietminh in order to gain independence from all foreign rule. Although the Vietnamese defeated the Japanese in 1945, the French had no thoughts of pulling out of Vietnam. By the end of 1945 the French had already reentered into Vietnam and conquered the southern cities.

For centuries the Vietnamese people resisted being controlled by their powerful Chinese neighbors. They struggled to unify their country as an independent state. Ultimately they freed themselves from China 's claim for control of political authority and achieved national unity only to fall victim to French imperialism (Anderson 1). French ruled Vietnam and neighboring kingdoms as colonies from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century. Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia during World War II influenced the Vietminh war against the French in 1945. September 2nd, 1945, Ho Chi Minh declares independence from French rule shortly after Japans surrender from World War II (www.history.com). France 's rule over its colony was incredibly brutal and exploitative (Anderson 6). French colonialism deprived the Vietnamese of their political independence, and it impoverished many of the Vietnamese people (Anderson 7). Many villagers lost their lands and became low-paid plantation

In the year 1917, Ho Chi Minh moved to Paris during World War I to become involved in leftist anti-colonial activism. There, he received the name Nguyen Ai Quoc, which translates to “Nguyen the Patriot”. He finally became a founding member of the newly created French Communist Party in 1920.

Born on August 20, 1952, three years before the Vietnam War, my uncle and his family were forced to migrate from North Vietnam to South Vietnam. As an intelligent boy with an ambitious dream, Anthony had not known of the land of freedom until tragedy struck. After World War II and until 1955, France worked hard to reign over Vietnam. Unfortunately, with a poorly organized army and little determination among the troops,

Vietnam is a southeastern Asian country that has been occupied by the French since the early 19th Century. During War War II Japanese forces invaded Vietnam. In order for the native Vietnamese to fight off both the French Colonial Administration and the invading Japanese, political leader Ho Chi Minh inspired by Soviet Communism, established the League of Independence of Vietnam. After Japan’s defeat in World War II in 1945, the Japanese withdrew their forces from Vietnam. The French educated Emperor Bao Dai was now back in control of Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh saw this as an opportunity to finally gain control and almost immediately took control of the northern city of Hanoi. Ho Chin Minh declared himself as president. In hopes to regain control of Hanoi, France backed Emperor Bao and created the state of Vietnam in 1949. Although both sides wanted the same goal of uniting Vietnam, their government views were drastically different. Ho and his followers wanted the nation to be modeled after other communist countries. While Bao and his followers wanted their country to be in close ties with democratic countries in the west. These causes led to a civil war for the sole control of Vietnam.

Vietnam has a very rich history that often goes unnoticed and unaccounted for, this is most likely due to the war being such a big landmark in the history of Vietnam. Before the war many events transpired that would eventually lead up to the war. In the late 19th century Vietnam was considered to be a French colony. The French built their own standing infrastructure, they began to build railways and roads and bridges. All of this building meant heavy taxation on the Vietnamese. This was all good and progressive for vietnam however “Naturally the Vietnamese wanted independence.” (http://www.localhistories.org/viethist.html) From there Ho Chi Minh founded a revolution and within 20 years Vietnam came under Ho Chi Minh rule.

This investigation will answer the question, “How significant was Ho Chi Minh’s role in the Vietnam War?” This investigation is important because it describes how a leader can affect the outcome of a war. This investigation will focus on the years 1955 to 1975 and analyze Ho Chi Minh’s leadership of the Viet Minh independence movement and role as an inspirational symbol to the Vietnamese people.

After the war, Ho Chi Minh, the communist leader of the League for the Independence of Vietnam, declared Vietnam’s independence from French colonial rule. In his independence speech, Ho Chi Minh used the U.S. Declaration of Independence as a template and stated, “All men are created equal. The Creator has given us certain inviolable rights: the right to life, the right to be free, and to right to achieve happiness” (Turse 7). Ho Chi Minh’s attempts to gain U.S. support for his cause were unsuccessful. As part of its broader foreign policy to contain communism, the U.S. supported the French in its attempt to reconquer Vietnam during the First Indochina War. The war ended with the Geneva Peace Accord of 1954, which divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel. Vietnam would be temporarily partitioned between the communist government of Ho Chi Minh in the North and the anti-communist government of Ngo Dinh Diem in the South (Turse 8). As part of the peace agreement, elections were to be held in 1956 to reunify the country; however, fearing that the communist-led government would win, the U.S. threw its support behind the increasingly corrupt and repressive South Vietnamese

Ho Chi Minh Ho Chi Minh was a Communist, who had announced Vietnam independent. He was a Marxist and believed in “national Communism ". Throughout the war with the French, Ho Chi Minh took refuge in northern Vietnam and settled there with his followers. He founded the Indochina Communist Party and the Viet Minh. North Vietnam was a deprived area and was cut off from the agricultural profit of South Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh was forced to ask assistance from main Communist allies, the Soviet Union and China. Both aided North Vietnam before and during the war. (Dong Si Nguyen, Duong xuyen Truong son: hoi uc.  Hanoi: Nha Xuat Ban Quan Doi Nhan Dan, 1999). Ho Chi Minh declared the independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. This had been a tremendously significant event in world history perhaps the most important event since the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. It marked the first occasion in human history in which a radical national movement under Communist leadership had succeeded in overthrowing the influence of a colonial state and establishing and maintaining its own new, independent form of social and political system. However, Ho’s type of communism was markedly different than that of Marxist ideology that had been the metaphorical icon of the October Revolution. alike to Jose Antonio’s fascist movement, the hierarchical communist party (later renamed the Vietminh) conformed intimately to the ideas of the person at its head, but unlike Antonio’s movement, did not