In the October 1981 issue of the American Historical Review, Allen Goodman of Georgetown University recounted asking former Comintern member Bertram Wolfe about Ho Chi Minh, whom he had spent three months with touring the Soviet Union as part of the Comintern in the 1920s.
Goodman quotes Wolfe’s reply: “Ho was the sharpest, most callous communist organizer I ever met. While in public he spoke with fierce pride as a Vietnamese nationalist, in private he readily acknowledged that this was all for show. What mattered most to him was power–gaining it and holding it–and he pledged to manipulate any cause and anyone to these ends.”
That is the real Ho Chi Minh. President Obama’s statement, while meeting with the current Vietnamese dictator, that “Ho Chi Minh was actually inspired by the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and the words of Thomas Jefferson,” could not possibly be more wrong.
Obama is not alone in this. His Secretary of State John Kerry, at the height of his collaboration with the Vietnamese Communists, was documented by an FBI surveillance report as having given a June 1971 talk at a Philadelphia YMCA in which “he stated that HO CHI MINH is the GEORGE WASHINGTON of Vietnam. Ho studied the United States Constitution and wants to install the same provisions into the Government of Vietnam.”
The myth of Ho’s devotion to the ideals of America’s Founders comes largely from a speech he made in Hanoi upon the defeat of the Japanese at the end of World War II. On September 2, 1945, he declared: “‘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 in 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 and to be happy and free….”
That was standard operating procedure for communists. The Communist Party USA, including Obama’s mentor Frank Marshall Davis, would periodically try to portray themselves as the ideological reincarnates of America’s Revolutionaries of 1776.
In China, while Mao’s forces were fighting the US-allied Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese Communist Party’s official newspaper Xinhua published an editorial on July 4, 1947, proclaiming: “Since a young age, we have thought of the U.S. as a lovable country. We believe this is partly due to the fact that the U.S. has never occupied China, nor has it launched any attacks on China. More fundamentally, the Chinese people hold good impressions of the U.S. based on the democratic and open-minded character of its people.” Three years later Mao’s new government would send hundreds of thousands of troops to fight American soldiers in Korea.
In 1953 Fidel Castro, on trial in Cuba for leading an attack on a military base, would read aloud the entire preamble to the Declaration of Independence in defense of his actions. Yet, from the moment he took power a few years later, he would tirelessly work to do the United States harm in any way he could–even bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war.
The narrative was always the same: some unusually well organized rebel force would appear on the scene to wage war against an American-allied government, go on endlessly about how they–despite having been lifelong Communists (secretly in Fidel’s case)–love America and her ideals, then once they gain power suddenly find an excuse to turn on America and blame her for everything. And, true to form, liberals would follow in lock step at every twist and turn of the process.
According to former Army Intelligence Officer Robert Turner, whose job in Vietnam was to deal with defectors and captured Communist documents and Prisoners, the most popular quote among the Vietnamese Communists was from Lenin’s “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920):
[T]he whole history of Bolshevism,both before and after the October Revolution, is full of instances of maneuvering, making agreements, and compromising with other parties, bourgeois parties included! The more powerful enemy can be vanquished only be exerting the utmost effort, and without fail by most thoroughly, carefully, attentively and skillfully using every, even the smallest, “rift” among the enemies, of every antagonism of interest among the bourgeoisie of the various countries and among the various groups or types of bourgeoisie within the various countries, and also by taking advantage of every, even the smallest, opportunity of gaining a mass ally, even though this ally be temporary, vacillating, unstable, unreliable, and conditional.Those who fail to understand this, fail to understand even a particle of Marxism, or of scientific, modern Socialism in general.
Thus, on March 6, 1946, Ho invited the French to return to Vietnam–literally stating “I love France and French soldiers. You are welcome. You are heroes.” Decades later Vietnamese Communist Party First Secretary Le Duan would explain that they were simply following the “shrewd recommendation of Lenin”: “We would at one time reach a temporary compromise…with the French in order to…wipe out the reactionaries [the non-communist Nationalists, whom the Communists helped the French to hunt down]…thus gaining time to consolidate our forces and prepare for a nationwide resistance to French colonialist aggression, which the party knew was inevitable.” (The Vietnamese Revolution: Fundamental Problems, Essential Tasks. 1970.)
The French fell for this trick. Harry Truman, an anti-Communist Democrat (back when there was such a thing), did not.
Ho died in September of 1969. One month later, Jeremiah Denton, then a ranking officer among the POWs who had endured years of torture in North Vietnam’s gulags, was treated to a bizarre series of meetings the ranking Communist prison officials. In these meetings, the Communist officials told him that it was Ho Chi Minh himself who was responsible for the torture. With Ho gone, they promised, the torture would come to an end (and most, but not all of it, did).
Looks like Vietnam’s current dictator forgot to mention to our ignorant president that the guy he is comparing to our founders was the man personally responsible for torturing our brave Military pilots. Next time Obama accuses our nation of torture–and tries to prosecute our CIA agents on such charges–remember that at the same time he feels Ho Chi Minh is worthy of the highest praise.
Image: Kitman TV
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