Ho Chi Minh - an actor?




I have some Vietnamese notes with me from Vietnam.

On each of them the face of Ho Chi Minh looks at me.

Who was Ho?

It's not easy to say.

He changed identity, name and look at lot of times.

But he had just one goal.

He was born Nguyen Sinh Cung, but he was also known as Nguyen Tat Thanh and Nguyen Ai Cuoc.

When he worked as a kitchen helper on a steamer going to France he used the alias Van Ba.

When he left France for Moscow he used a passport with he name Chen Vang, a Chinese name.

It was not until 1940, when he was fifty years old, he started to use the name Ho Chi Minh, which means "he who has been enlightened". I guess it was then he started to grow the long beard.

After he had the chance to be he official leader of Vietnam, he let many Vietnamese enemies be killed., even former friends as Trotsky patriots.

When his Communist party, with Ho as the president, started to be in charge on North Vietnam, about one million people fled to the south.

In 1960 he announced a new President, but by then he had implanted the movement to a free Vietnam.

He was married, but the party still want to see him as hero or saint that lived in celibacy.
Therefore they let his body be shown in a mausoleum that still is visited by the masses.
Ho himself had preferred to be cremated and the ashes to be spread in four different places in Vietnam.

He doesn't seem to want to be regarded as a saint. He for sure new he wasn't one.
Maybe he took his latest name as it suited his purpose, to free Vietnam.
He even sometimes used a western name when he wrote articles in a French newspaper, as it suited him best then.

It seems ha was an adventurer  and actor who used different characters to reach his goal.

It may be that he also used the communist movement as an instrument for the independence.
He joined a group of Vietnamese nationalist in France around 1920 and they tried to  the have the President Wilson on their side, as they pointed to the US "Declaration of independence".
That was not successful, but it have been, Ho hadn't needed the communist help.
When Ho finally declared the independence, He quoted from the US declaration.

When choosing the communist side, he drew Vietnam into the cold war.

Who knows if it was the right decision?

Maybe the independence  in the long run would had come anyway, as it did on other places.

But Ho couldn't wait an therefore took different costumes on in different acts of his drama.
He played the young adventurer, the patriot, the communist, the husband, the enlightened and the saint. But who was he then? Well, if we have no permanent essence he was all of the characters...


                                         Celebration of the independence in front of the mausoleum.

In the last act, just before his death, he wrote;

 "Vietnam will be free, independent and sovereign, the enemy will be defeated, and the Vietnamese people will build a Vietnam 10 times more beautiful. It must be united....Our country will have the outstanding honor of being a little nation that, through heroic struggle, would have defeated two great imperialist powers – the French and the American – and thus would have made a worthy contribution to the national liberation movement... My only wish is that our Party and people, closely united in struggle, build a peaceful, unified, independent, democratic and prosperous Vietnam, and make a valuable contribution to world Revolution."


But nowadays no country can be totally independent. Vietnam needs, for instance, its tourists. And they need to make affairs with other countries.
And one day many Vietnamese tourists may come to Europe, as nowadays many Chinese people are here. 
The days of a homogeneous countries are gone. 
 Ho was influenced by, and traveled to, France, US, Soviet, Thailand, China and so on and talked many languages. 
People of today will do the same and will also do the the same. 

 The climate crises are also binding us together. 

 Some people, like Trump and Putin want to deny this, but in the long run, I guess, they are just short parenthesis. 













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