Knowledge Session: Who Was Ho Chi Minh?

People of Ho Chi Minh’s cal­ibre don’t come around often. One of the great revolu­tion­ar­ies of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury, he excelled as a lead­er, a teach­er, a journ­al­ist, a strategist, an inter­na­tion­al­ist, a uni­fi­er, a guer­rilla fight­er, a nego­ti­at­or, a cre­at­ive thinker, a poet. He endured dec­ades of exile and then dec­ades of war. He suffered pris­on and tor­ture in China in the early 1940s (by which time he was already in his fifties).

As a guer­rilla lead­er and then as the pres­id­ent of the Demo­crat­ic Repub­lic of Viet­nam under attack from French colo­ni­al­ism, he lived with his com­rades in the most basic pos­sible con­di­tions in the caves of Cao Bang, often hav­ing to for­age for food. And yet, his ded­ic­a­tion to the causes of Viet­namese inde­pend­ence, Viet­namese uni­fic­a­tion, and glob­al social­ism nev­er faltered. With relent­less energy, pro­found intel­li­gence and undy­ing pas­sion, he led his people through every up and down over the course of half a century.

His most not­able achieve­ments include:

» Provid­ing the major inspir­a­tion and stra­tegic vis­ion for the Viet­namese Revolu­tion from the early 1920s up until his death in 1969.
» Con­nect­ing the Viet­namese inde­pend­ence struggle with the glob­al social­ist and anti-imper­i­al­ist move­ment, and thereby provid­ing it with a source of decis­ive support.
» Unit­ing dif­fer­ent polit­ic­al trends and back­grounds into a single, extremely effect­ive fight­ing organisation.
» Pur­pose­fully build­ing and train­ing a close-knit team of ser­i­ous revolu­tion­ar­ies cap­able of provid­ing lead­er­ship to the Viet­namese masses.
» Pro­mot­ing and build­ing max­im­um nation­al unity against imper­i­al­ism, bring­ing the peas­antry, work­ing class, intel­lec­tu­als and pat­ri­ot­ic cap­it­al­ist ele­ments togeth­er in order to struggle against French, Japan­ese and US colonialism.
» Along with the oth­er top lead­ers of the Viet­namese res­ist­ance, con­sist­ently mak­ing a cor­rect ana­lys­is of the pre­vail­ing bal­ance of forces, enabling his­tor­ic vic­tor­ies such as the cap­ture of power in August 1945, the defeat of the French occu­pa­tion in 1954, the build­ing of social­ism in the Demo­crat­ic Repub­lic of Viet­nam (North Viet­nam), and the Tet Offens­ive of 1968, which served as the major turn­ing point in the war with the US.
» Lead­ing the work of inspir­ing, organ­ising and edu­cat­ing the masses of the Viet­namese people for their long struggle against imper­i­al­ism and for socialism.

Read more, vis­it Invent The Future: Fifty years on the front­line: the revolu­tion­ary con­tri­bu­tions of Ho Chi Minh

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Gata Malandra

Edit­or / Research­er at No Bounds

Gata is a music and arts lov­er, stud­ied anthro­po­logy, art man­age­ment and media pro­duc­tion ded­ic­at­ing most of her time to cre­at­ive pro­jects pro­duced by No Bounds.

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