On Hồ Chí Minh
Uncle Ho,
Remember, the storm is a good opportunity for the pine and the cypress to show their strength and their stability.
It is well known that the black race is the most oppressed and most exploited of the human family. It is well known that the spread of capitalism and the discovery of the New World had as an immediate result the rebirth of slavery which was, for centuries, a scourge for the Negroes and a bitter disgrace for mankind. What everyone does not perhaps know, is that after sixty-five years of so-called emancipation, American Negroes still endure atrocious moral and material sufferings, of which the most cruel and horrible is the custom of lynching.
Hồ Chí Minh
First covered in On Asia, I'll eventually add more info about Uncle Ho. In short: He led the Việt Minh independence movement and he was a key figure in the People's Army of Vietnam and the Việt Cộng during the Vietnam War. Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City in his honor.
For now, I'll link some works (in a logical order) and post some of my own notes for quick takeaways:
The Path Which Led Me To Leninism (1960)
- Post WW1 in Paris, at French Socialist Party
- given Lenin’s “Thesis on the national and colonial questions”
There were political terms difficult to understand in this thesis. But by dint of reading it again and again, finally I could grasp the main part of it. What emotion, enthusiasm, clear-sightedness and confidence it instilled into me! I was overjoyed to tears. Though sitting alone in my room, I shouted out aloud as if addressing large crowds: 'Dear martyrs compatriots! This is what we need, this is the path to our liberation!' My only argument was: 'If you do not condemn colonialism, if you do not side with the colonial people, what kind of revolution are you waging?' There is a legend, in our country as well as in China, on the miraculous 'Book of the Wise'. When facing great difficulties, one opens it and finds a way out. Leninism is not only a miraculous 'book of the wise', a compass for us Vietnamese revolutionaries and people: it is also the radiant sun illuminating our path to final victory, to socialism and communism.
index tags: Communists, Asia, Vietnam, Reading List, Reading Notes, Hồ Chí Minh, Hồ, Minh, The Path Which Led Me To Leninism
category tags: Famous Communists