|
The man who would become famous under the synonyme Ho Chi Minh, the most famous one among more than fifty aliases, was born in Annam on 19 May 1880. His real name is Nguyen That Thanh and at this time nobody knew, that this person would become America\'s chief antagonist in the Vietnam War from 1965 until 1975. Little is known about his mother except she was a concubine. His father, Nguyen Sinh Sac, was of peasant origins. However, due to a study of Confucian study he had risen to the lower ranks of the mandarins and to a place at the court. . Later he gave up his post and became an itinerant village school teacher. Still, Ho was more fortunate than most other Vietnamese people, because he was enabled to pursue a formal education at school until the age of seventeen, when he quit after a quarrel with his teacher. After a very short time as an ordinary teacher he signed on as a stoker and a cook\'s helper on a French vessel at the port of Saigon. When the subscribed this job he already used an alias. When he sailed away from Vietnam in 1911, he would not see his homeland again for thirty years.
As an apprentice he travelled to India, Africa, Europe and finally to the United States of America. Obviously he developed a favour for America and so he settled down in Brooklyn, New York. During this sojourn he ventured into black Harlem, where he observed the American attitudes on race and class. He was also deeply impressed by the great optimism among the immigrants, and his ambivalent attitude towards this country may date from this time.
In the summer of 1914 this man returned back to Europe. He found a new job as an assistant pastry chef in a London hotel. During this period the mastered several languages like English, French, German and Chinese. He also started writing manifests about Vietnamese independence from the French empire. After the First World War he moved from the British island to Paris, where he established a small photographer\'s shop as a means of making a living. There he adopted a new alias called Nguyen Ai Quoc, something like Nguyen the patriot. Beside his job as a shop keeper he spent his spare time reading, joining debating societies and even writing the Bamboo Dragon, a play concerning the suppression of his folk by the French colonialists and the collaboration with the Vietnamese monarchs. In spring 1919 he made a first attempt to become politically famous when he delivered an independence plan to US president Woodrow Wilson at the Versailles Peace Conference. This petition asked for reforms in Vietnam, that included a constitutional government, democratic freedoms and the end of exploitation of the people in this country. Although nobody took this amendment serious, the name Nguyen Ai Quoc became widely known from Paris to Saigon. Due to the failure of his petition Ho Chi Minh developed an interest into other political directions. So he joined the French socialist party in 1920. The members had other problems to discuss than the plans of independence in Vietnam, for example the rights of the working class in their own country. Nevertheless some socialists were impressed by the communist revolution in Russia and so the founded the Communist Party of France. Ho saw his chance to rise in this environment and he joined in 1921. He enjoyed a profound education and learned much about Karl Marx and his theories of industrial capitalism as contained in The Communist Manifesto (1848), his many volume study Capital or all his other publications.
None of Marx\'s writings was really important for Ho Chi Minh or the bad situation in his own country. However, he was excited by several scripts released by Lenin. One, that is called Thesis on the National an Colonial Question (written in 1915 in Switzerland), was very helpful for him. This text is simply a modified version of Marx\'s analysis with his own theories. In addition, he supported the thoughts of revolution in the suppressed countries, which were affected by the European colonialism, and was against the powers, who just wanted to exploit these colonies to improve the capitalism. These scripts finally combined Ho\'s ideology. A link between his own experiences and the idea of Leninism to fight colonialism and to establish a rebellion of the native people. He was still keen on writing articles for the socialist newspapers of France. In 1923 he was summoned to Moscow where he was trained and drilled. He had a comrade ship to Lenin as well. Now he was a real communist and ready to leave for China. One of the preparation for the fight for independence of Vietnam was the gathering of Chinese students to found the Revolutionary Youth Leagu, a precursor of the Communist Party of Vietnam. After the eruption of a civil war he fled China and settled down in Hong Kong, where he was imprisoned because of several offendings against the British empire and the founding of enemy organisations. During the rest of the 1930s, Ho was a wanderer. The Chinese communists under the control of Mao Tse Tung were forced to carry out the \"Long March\" in the middle of the decade to the hinterland. So Ho Chi Minh lost support near the Vietnamese borders. In 1941 he returned back to the country of origin after a travel around the world of more than thirty years. That same year, at the age of 51, he fought against the French colonial rule and the occupation by Japan and as they prepared to surrender in August 1945, Ho Chi Minh led the August Revolution, which took control of much of the country. After a declaration of independence of Vietnam the French tyrants came back. The communists had to flee Hanoi and raised armed resistance in the North. Ho spent eight years conducting a guerrilla war until the Viet Minh´s victory in 1954. From this time he lead North Vietnam until his death in September 1969. Without any doubt he was the father of his country, but he never had any children or wives.
|
