Makeshift_Swahili posted:

page 167: Ho Chi Minh "abolished onerous taxes and puritanically banned prostitution, opium, gambling, even liquor" lol

ho chi minh was a muslim

Petrol posted:

Press F to contract Fail Aids

this worked, thanks

Makeshift_Swahili posted:

related to this idea of reducing anticolonialism in france to a "sentiment expressed by only a handful of eccentric intellectuals" we can read Ho Chi Minh's appeal to the French Communist Party in 1924 that they should put the question of anti-colonialism at the forefront of their activities:

Thus, it is not an exaggeration to say that so long as the French and British Communist Parties have not brought out a really progressive policy with regard to the colonies, have not come into contact with the colonial peoples, their programme as a whole is and will be ineffective because it goes counter to Leninism. I will explain myself more clearly. In his speech on Lenin and the national question Comrade Stalin said that the reformists and leaders of the Second International dared not align the white people of the colonies with their coloured counterparts. Lenin also refused to recognize this division and pushed aside the obstacle separating the civilized slaves of imperialism from the uncivilized slaves.

According to Lenin, the victory of the revolution in Western Europe depended on its close contact with the liberation movement against imperialism in enslaved colonies and with the national question, both of which form a part of the common problem of the proletarian revolution and dictatorship.

Later, Comrade Stalin spoke of the viewpoint which held that the European proletarians can achieve success without a direct alliance with the liberation movement in the colonies. And he considered this a counter-revolutionary viewpoint. But if we judge from practice to make our theoretical examination, we are entitled to say that our big Parties, excepting the Soviet Communist Party, still hold the above-mentioned viewpoint because they are inactive in this matter.

What have the bourgeois class in the colonialist countries done towards oppressing so many people enslaved by them? They have done everything. Using the means given them by the State administrative machine, they have carried out an intense propaganda. They have crammed the heads of the people of the mother countries with speeches, films, newspapers, exhibitions and every other means, so that they have a colonialist outlook; they have displayed before their eyes pictures of the easy, honourable and rich life which seems to await them in the colonies.

As for our Communist Parties in Great Britain, Holland, Belgium and other countries - what have they done to cope with the colonial invasions perpetrated by the bourgeois. class of their countries? What have they done from the day they accepted Lenin’s political programme to educate the working class of their countries in the spirit of just internationalism, and that of close contact with the working. masses in the colonies? What our Parties have done in this domain is almost worthless. As for me, I was born in a French colony, and am a member of the French Communist Party, and I am very sorry to say that our Communist Party has done hardly anything for the colonies.

It is the task of the communist newspapers to introduce the colonial question to our militants to awaken the working masses in the colonies, win them over to the cause of Communism, but what have our newspapers done? Nothing at all.

http://marxists.org/reference/archive/ho-chi-minh/works/1924/07/08.htm

(whole thing is worth a read)

"All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness" This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America m 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free. The Declaration of the French Revolution made in 1791 on the Rights of Man and the Citizen also states: "All men are born free and with equal rights, and must always remain free and have equal rights." Those are undeniable truths. Nevertheless, for more than eighty years, the French imperialists, abusing the standard of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, have violated our Fatherland and oppressed our fellow-citizens. They have acted contrary to the ideals of humanity and justice. In the field of politics, they have deprived our people of every democratic liberty. They have enforced inhuman laws; they have set up three distinct political regimes in the North, the Center and the South of Vietnam in order to wreck our national unity and prevent our people from being united. They have built more prisons than schools. They have mercilessly slain our patriots- they have drowned our uprisings in rivers of blood. They have fettered public opinion; they have practiced obscurantism against our people. To weaken our race they have forced us to use opium and alcohol. In the fields of economics, they have fleeced us to the backbone, impoverished our people, and devastated our land. They have robbed us of our rice fields, our mines, our forests, and our raw materials. They have monopolised the issuing of bank-notes and the export trade. They have invented numerous unjustifiable taxes and reduced our people, especially our peasantry, to a state of extreme poverty. They have hampered the prospering of our national bourgeoisie; they have mercilessly exploited our workers. In the autumn of 1940, when the Japanese Fascists violated Indochina's territory to establish new bases in their fight against the Allies, the French imperialists went down on their bended knees and handed over our country to them. Thus, from that date, our people were subjected to the double yoke of the French and the Japanese. Their sufferings and miseries increased. The result was that from the end of last year to the beginning of this year, from Quang Tri province to the North of Vietnam, more than two million of our fellow-citizens died from starvation. On March 9, the French troops were disarmed by the Japanese. The French colonialists either fled or surrendered, showing that not only were they incapable of "protecting" us, but that, in the span of five years, they had twice sold our country to the Japanese. On several occasions before March 9, the Vietminh League urged the French to ally themselves with it against the Japanese. Instead of agreeing to this proposal, the French colonialists so intensified their terrorist activities against the Vietminh members that before fleeing they massacred a great number of our political prisoners detained at Yen Bay and Cao Bang. Not withstanding all this, our fellow-citizens have always manifested toward the French a tolerant and humane attitude. Even after the Japanese putsch of March 1945, the Vietminh League helped many Frenchmen to cross the frontier, rescued some of them from Japanese jails, and protected French lives and property. From the autumn of 1940, our country had in fact ceased to be a French colony and had become a Japanese possession. After the Japanese had surrendered to the Allies, our whole people rose to regain our national sovereignty and to found the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The truth is that we have wrested our independence from the Japanese and not from the French. The French have fled, the Japanese have capitulated, Emperor Bao Dai has abdicated. Our people have broken the chains which for nearly a century have fettered them and have won independence for the Fatherland. Our people at the same time have overthrown the monarchic regime that has reigned supreme for dozens of centuries. In its place has been established the present Democratic Republic. For these reasons, we, members of the Provisional Government, representing the whole Vietnamese people, declare that from now on we break off all relations of a colonial character with France; we repeal all the international obligation that France has so far subscribed to on behalf of Vietnam and we abolish all the special rights the French have unlawfully acquired in our Fatherland. The whole Vietnamese people, animated by a common purpose, are determined to fight to the bitter end against any attempt by the French colonialists to reconquer their country. We are convinced that the Allied nations which at Tehran and San Francisco have acknowledged the principles of self-determination and equality of nations, will not refuse to acknowledge the independence of Vietnam. A people who have courageously opposed French domination for more than eighty years, a people who have fought side by side with the Allies against the Fascists during these last years, such a people must be free and independent. For these reasons, we, members of the Provisional Government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, solemnly declare to the world that Vietnam has the right to be a free and independent country and in fact it is so already. The entire Vietnamese people are determined to mobilise all their physical and mental strength, to sacrifice their lives and property in order to safeguard their independence and liberty.

http://marxists.org/reference/archive/ho-chi-minh/works/1945/declaration-independence.htm

The fact that Ho follows up the US declaration of independence with a quote from Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen suggests that this is less a starry-eyed endorsement of those texts and more about pointing out that the ideals of Life, Liberty, Pursuit of Happiness or Liberty, Equality and Fraternity are in contradiction to the reality of imperialism/colonialism.

Elsewhere Karnow quotes Ho talking about the US more realistically (also in 1945): "They are only interested in replacing the French... They want to reorganize our economy in order to control it. They are capitalists to the core. All that counts for them is business" (page 138). The fact that Ho in his writings has said "The world was divided into two camps: one is the revolutionary camp which includes the oppressed colonial peoples and the exploited working class throughout the world. Its vanguard is the Soviet Union" suggests to me that any co-operation with the US were just temporary tactical moves.

In 1940 we have Japanese invasion of Indochina; "they left the French colonial administration intact, directing it from behind the scenes" (page 140), and also France has fallen to the Germans. So in 1941 we have the formation of the Vietminh:

Selected by Ho in the early 1940s to shape the Vietminh organization, Giap mobilized his forces carefully. In northern Vietnam he recruited village chiefs and trained guerrilla bands. He had chosen the region for its proximity to the Chinese border, over which weapons and agents could move easily, and because its terrain of mountain jungles and hidden valleys offered security. He especially cultivated the local tribes, like the Hmong, the Thai, and the Tho, promising them autonomy in an eventually independent Vietnam.

(page 142)

Overnight, French imperial power had crumbled, and the Japanese seemed to be doomed to defeat. Which Vietnamese faction would fill the void?

(page 144)

At this point (March 11, 1945) the puppet emperor Bảo Đại declares independence from the French and Vietnam becomes part of Japan's Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.

But Japan's almost lost the war by now, their hold on any power in Vietnam is weak. Karnow describes their actions which had caused famine and led to widespread unrest:

Ho, wisely estimating that the Japanese were finished, prepared to greet the Allies in the hope that they would recognize him. He hastened to stiffen the Vietminh's authority for that prospect - and, fortuitously, he was helped by a ghastly famine for which the Japanese were almost entirely responsible.

Earlier in the year, as the Allies cut off their sources of raw materials in Southeast Asia, the Japanese had compelled Vietnamese peasants to plant industrial crops like peanuts and jute instead of rice. They also requisitioned rice, storing it for their troops in case of Allied landings. By the summer of 1945, floods aggravated the already serious food shortage as the Red River dikes, neglected by local officials, burst in several spots. In northern Vietnam, poor in the best of circumstances, two millions people out of a population of ten million starved to death

(page 144)

August 15 there's the surrender of Japan. Uprisings spread and the Vietminh launch an insurrection. Vietminh take over administrative positions in both city and country. By August 19 they have taken Hanoi, but southern Vietnam is less stable, with more parties competing for control. Bảo Đại abdicates on August 23rd but is given a position as "supreme adviser". Ho declares independence on September 2nd.

Edited by Chthonic_Goat_666 (Dec. 5, 2015 05:11:40)

COLLUSION BETWEEN THE AGGRESSORS

Let us review Viet Nam’s situation in 1951.

After their defeat in the China-Viet Nam border campaign in October 1950 - the greatest reverse they had ever suffered in the whole history of their colonial wars, which involved for them the loss of five provinces at one time - Cao Bang, Lang Son, Lao Cat, Thai Nguyen and Hoa Binh - the French colonialists began the year 1951 with the despatch of General de Lattre de Tassigny to Viet Nam.

They resorted to total war. Their manoeuvre was to consolidate the Bao Dai puppet government, organise puppet troops and redouble spying activities. They set up no man’s lands of from 5 to 10 kilometres wide around areas under their control and strengthened the Red River delta by a network of 2,300 bunkers. They stepped up mopping-up operations in our rear, applied the policy of annihilation and wholesale destruction of our manpower and potential resources by killing our compatriots, devastating our countryside, burning our ricefields, etc... In a word, they followed the policy of “using Vietnamese to fight Vietnamese and nursing the war by means of warfare”.

It is on orders and with the assistance of their masters, the American interventionists, that the French colonialists performed the above-mentioned deeds.

Among the first Americans now living in Viet Nam (of course in areas under French control) there are a fairly noted spy, Donald Heat, ambassador accredited to the puppet government and a general, head of the U. S. military mission.

In September 1951, de Lattre de Tassigny went to Washington to make his report and beg for aid.

In October, General Collins, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, came to Viet Nam to inspect the French Expeditionary Corps and puppet troops.

In order to show their American masters that U.S. aid is used in a worthwhile manner at present as well as in the future, in November, de Lattre de Tassigny attacked the chief town of Hoa Binh province. The result of this “shooting offensive” which the reactionary press in France and in the world commented on uproariously, was that the Viet Nam People’s Army held the overwhelming majority of enemy troops tightly between two prongs and annihilated them. But this did not prevent de Lattre de Tassigny and his henchmen from hullabalooing that they had carried the day!

At the very beginning of the war, the Americans supplied France with money and armaments. To take an example, 85 percent of weapons, war materials and even canned food captured by our troops were labelled “made in U.S.A.”. This aid had been stepped up all the more rapidly since June 1950 when the U.S.A. began interfering in Korea. American aid to the French invaders consisted in airplanes, boats, trucks, military outfits, napalm bombs, etc.

Meanwhile, the Americans compelled the French colonialists to step up the organisation of four divisions of puppet troops with each party footing half the bill. Of course, this collusion between the French and American aggressors and the puppet clique was fraught with contradictions and contentions.

The French colonialists are now landed in a dilemma: either they receive U.S. aid and be then replaced by their American “allies”, or they receive nothing, and be then defeated by the Vietnamese people. To organise the puppet army by means of pressganging the youth in areas under their control would be tantamount to swallowing a bomb when one is hungry: a day will come when at last the bomb bursts inside. However not to organise the army on this basis would mean instantaneous death for the enemy because even the French strategists have to admit that the French Expeditionary Corps grows thinner and thinner and is on the verge of collapse.

Furthermore, U.S. aid is paid for at a very high price. In the enemy held areas, French capitalism is swept aside by American capitalism. American concerns like the Petroleum Oil Corporation, the Caltex Oil Corporation, the Bethlem Steel Corporation, the Florid Phosphate Corporation and others, monopolise rubber, ores, and other natural resources of our country. U.S. goods swamp the market. The French reactionary press, especially Le Monde is compelled to acknowledge sadly that French capitalism is now giving way to U.S. capitalism.

The U.S. interventionists have nurtured the French aggressors and the Vietnamese puppets, but the Vietnamese people do not let anybody delude and enslave them.

People’s China is our close neighbour. Her brilliant example gives us a great impetus. Not long ago the Chinese people defeated the U.S. imperialists and won an historical victory. The execrated Chiang Kai-shek was swept from the Chinese mainland, though he is more cunning than the placeman Bao Dai. Can the U.S. interventionists, who were drummed out of China and are now suffering heavy defeats in Korea, conquer Viet Nam? Of course, not!

ATROCIOUS CRIMES OF THE U. S. INTERVENTIONISTS

Defeated on the battlefield, the French colonialists retaliated upon unarmed people and committed abominable crimes. Hereunder are a few examples:

As everywhere in the enemy controlled areas, on October 15, 1951 at Ha Dong, the French soldiers raided the youths even in the streets and pressganged them into the puppet army. And there as everywhere, the people protested against such acts. Three young girls stood in a line across the street in front of the trucks packed with the captured youngsters to prevent them from being sent to concentration camps. These courageous acts were worthy of heroine Raymonde Dien’s1 The French colonialists revved the engines and, in a split second, our three young patriots were run over.

In October 1951, the invaders staged a large-scale raid in Thai Binh province. They captured more than 16,000 people - most of whom were old people, women and children - and penned them in a foot-ball field surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by soldiers and dogs.

For four days, the captives were exposed in the sun and rain, ankle-deep in mud. They received no food and no drinking water. Over 300 of them died of exhaustion and disease.

The relatives and friends who brought food to the captives were roughly manhandled, and the food was thrown into the mud and trampled under foot. Mr. Phac, a surgeon of 70, who tried to save the victims’ lives was shot dead on the spot as also were a number of pregnant women.

Incensed by these barbarous acts, the townsfolk staged. a strike and sought ways and means to help the internees. The determination of the population compelled the French colonialists to let the food in, but on order of Colonel Charton of the French Expeditionary Corps, it was declared a donation from the U.S.A.

On October 38, 1951, Le Van Lam, 27, from Ha Coi, a puppet soldier who had been saved from drowning by an old fisherman at Do Son, said after he had come to: “On October 37, the French embarked me as well as one hundred other wounded men on board a steamer, saying they would send us to Saigon for medical attention. In the night, when the ship was in the offing, they threw us one by one into the water. Fortunately, I managed to snatch at a piece of floating wood and swam landward. I was unconscious when I was saved ”.

Hereunder is the confession of Chaubert, a French captain captured at Tu Ky on November 35, 1951, “The French High Command gave us an order to destroy everything in order to transform this region into a desert”, he said. “This order was observed to the letter. Houses were burnt down. Animals and poultry were killed. Havoc was wrought to gardens and plants and trees hewn down. Ricefields and crops were set afire. Many days on end, black smoke covered the sky and there was not a single soul alive, except the French soldiers. The conflagration lasted until November 25, when the Viet Nam People’s Army unexpectedly attacked and annihilated our unit.”

The examples quoted above can be counted by the thousands and are sufficient proof to substantiate the essence of the French colonialists’ and U.S. interventionists’ “civilisation”.

http://marxists.org/reference/archive/ho-chi-minh/works/1952/01/x01.htm

^ the whole thing is worth a read. there's also some good stuff in there about the Vietminh's education efforts.

Anyway, reading Karnow you'd get the impression that USA was supporting France simply to contain communism. Ho's writings dispute this.

Page 482

...These were routine missions, not outrageous atrocities like the Mylai massacre that occurred in March 1968

Mylai wasn't exceptional and there were so many accounts, leaks, rumors about what really was going on but I guess Karnow wasn't curious about that he cares mostly about giving a play-by-play of the president's mood swigns or whatever

quavers posted:

Also

Page 482

...These were routine missions, not outrageous atrocities like the Mylai massacre that occurred in March 1968

Mylai wasn't exceptional and there were so many accounts, leaks, rumors about what really was going on but I guess Karnow wasn't curious about that he cares mostly about giving a play-by-play of the president's mood swigns or whatever

cheers dude, ive been slacking