Vietnam’s avuncular dictator
Peter Cochrane; 4/6/08; Australian Literary Review; Ho Chi Minh: A Biography; Pierre Brocheux; Translated by Claire Duiker; Cambridge University Press, 288pp, $59.95 (HB)
Ho Chi Minh, first president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, was revered in his homeland as Uncle Ho, an endearment Western radicals picked up in the 1960s and turned into the chant: “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, dare to struggle, dare to win.” I marched down streets in Melbourne, many years ago, chanting it myself. And I knew very little about him.
The Australian, No Internet Text
Clearly we were evoking a symbol, not a man, but what did that symbol mean and why did it appeal to so many?
Ho was the rebellious son of a minor official in the colonial government of French Indochina, which included what is now Vietnam. In 1911, aged 21, he made his way to Paris, where he underwent an apprenticeship in proletarian labour, working in one low-paid job after another and using his spare time for study and politics. He could not get through Das Kapital — Vietnamese revolutionaries were never much steeped in Marx — but in Lenin’s Theses on the National and Colonial Questions (1920) Ho found the manifesto he needed.
Lenin stressed the failure of Woodrow Wilson’s 14 points, specifically the one affirming a people’s right to self-determination. It was as-if Lenin was affirming Ho’s personal experience, for Ho had gone to Versailles in 1919, in a borrowed dinner suit, to present the US president with a petition and a list of demands on behalf of the Vietnamese people. Not surprisingly, on the perimeter of a great throng of dignitaries, he was met with some incomprehension and turned away. He now believed, rightly, that the big powers were redesigning the map of the world to suit themselves. The experience only confirmed what he knew from his years in Paris: that talk of liberte counted for little against the rate of return on colonial investments and assumptions of white or European supremacy.
It is in this context that we should weigh up Ho’s attachment to Moscow, in order to understand-him, as it were, from the inside.
The great powers had just spent four years laying waste to one another, and for what? Certainly not for the good of oppressed and brutalised humanity in the Asian colonies. Against this, what might be said (or thought) of the new Soviet Union?
The revolution seemed a beacon, bright and alluring, beyond the pointless carnage of the Western Front. Lenin declared that the colonial and national question was a component part of Bolshevik revolutionary strategy and that the revolutionary path would lead to global liberation. Radical scholars such as Ho could believe it. Russian universalism began with the freeing of the serfs in 1861.
Surely 1917 was stage two, the liberation of the proletariat? Next on the agenda, the oppressed peoples of the colonies, “the native peoples” who were treated everywhere, even in Paris, with contempt.
The sequence here has a certain persuasive logic: the Vietnamese revolutionaries knew they had to find a focal point in the international order, an anchorage for a small nation, outside of Western imperialism.
Moscow it had to be, the “third Rome”. Marxism was the mantra that linked them to that ideal and Leninism was the road map. Certainly Ho was convinced. By 1929 he was working for the Comintern, an undercover man, briefly in Hong Kong to lay the foundations for a communist party in Indochina. The legend was on his way.
Pierre Brocheux’s concise biography covers the two main phases of Ho’s life. First, his perilous undercover work around Europe and Asia between 1911 and 1941, studying, agitating, living on the razor’s edge, shifting in and out of focus, fashioning a quite enchanting persona and slipping from one identity to another like some elusive figure in a John le Carre novel. Another biographer reckoned that Ho used 147 aliases.
And this is only half the story, for then there is Ho’s return to Vietnam and his role as a leading figure in the national liberation struggle until his death in 1969. Throughout these phases of ‘an extraordinary life, Brocheux pursues Ho’s political thought and character and is able to convey some sense of the mystique that eventually made Uncle Ho the venerated one, the embodiment of national aspirations in the long and horrifically costly struggles against the French and the Americans.
For me the mystique around Ho is the most interesting question of all, and if it is possible to distil this mystique into a simple gist then here it is: in a nationalist movement driven to violent resistance, organised on the strictest clandestine lines and requiring rigid conformity, Ho remained an irrepressible, many-sided, ascetic, heroic and charismatic individual.
He seems never to have changed in any fundamental way but only to have developed the unusual qualities of intellect and personality that were evident from his earliest years as a radical and, as it happened, a founding member of the French Communist Party.
Ho’s life, as Brocheux sets it out, is a useful corrective to commentators who think the label Stalinist is the end of the matter, no further explanation required. This sort of labelling is an evasion of inquiry and an ignorance of being-in-context that casts the communist world as a monolith in which no one survived in the upper echelons unless they joined the forces of evil.
What were the qualities that set Ho apart?
Try, for starters, a lack of dogmatism, a refusal to wipe the cultural slate clean and a desire to bridge the gap between past and present. As Ho’s letters, journal articles and books from the 1920s attest, he discerned affinities between his Asian philosophical background and the new ideas he encountered in Paris.
He saw similarities between Confucian thought and European liberal and socialist thought, notably that “men are brothers across the four oceans” and that social order might be guaranteed by an equitable division of land. It was Confucius, Ho insisted, who advocated internationalism and preached the equality of wealth. It was Confucian, he argued, to put the interests of the people first, the nation second “and those of the king are of no consequence”.
While Lenin informed the practical side of the revolution, Ho’s model for human relationships was the ancient Chinese sage, the idea of the philosopher and political theorist deeply pained by the agony of his countrymen.
Ho cultivated the ideal of an altruist or noble soul, of saint and revolutionary. As Brocheux explains, he was neither the strategist bent over a geological survey map (though he did seem to have a profound sense for timing), nor was he the general moving his forces about like a chessmaster.
He was more the scholar-philosopher:
He led the war of resistance by drawing on his philosophy of human relations, by preferring face-to-face encounters, direct dialogue, correspondence in verse (indeed, he wrote a history of his country in verse), and by reciting proverbs rather than presenting arguments based on the rules of (the) Marxist dialectic.
Necessity landed Ho and his cause (national independence) in the Leninist mould, but at the interpersonal level he broke the mould. He much preferred to counsel than to dictate, to sway than to flay.
A Confucian upbringing and observations of human behaviour in two worlds (Europe and Asia), led Ho to the hard-headed realisation that mouthing revolutionary principles did not make men virtuous. His natural inclination to find common ground among all classes adversely affected by foreign domination was repeatedly raised by comrades at home and abroad as his “rightist tendencies”. No less a monster than Stalin tried to pin him down in this regard.
When they met in Moscow in 1950, Stalin pointed to two chairs and said to Ho: “This chair represents the peasantry and that one the landlords. Where do you sit?” Ho replied that he could sit on both chairs at once.
Despite frail health throughout his life, he preferred to walk (vast distances), followed a frugal diet and, saint-like, believed that suffering teaches maturity. He would persistently urge his compatriots to combat individualism, greed, waste and bureaucracy, reminding them of that most un-Marxist dictum: “The enemy is within our own hearts.” He shared a common cause with Mao Zedong and yet there was something of Mahatma Gandhi in him. He was as much the international revolutionary as Che Guevara and yet, in his heart, he was more like Nelson Mandela.
Ho cultivated the role of humble exemplar, of guide and guru to the nation. His political appeal, in this respect, has powerful spiritual overtones.
Brocheux provides a much restated “fact’ that seems to fit nicely. We are told that the name his subject finally chose for himself — Ho Chi Minh — means “well of light”.
In the West, at least, this has become part of the legend; almost any English source will give you some version of this supposedly inspirational meaning. Thus, according to Ho’s Wikipedia entry, the name is Vietnamese and it means “enlightened will”.
I was alerted to this misconception while researching this piece. I received advice from an eminent Vietnamese scholar in Australia and an expert at Hanoi University.
The first advised that the name meant nothing. The second confirmed this, providing another aetiology altogether: Chi Minh was the name of a governor in a southern Chinese province. For someone working undercover, this name might offer protection, facilitating movement across borders.
Similarly, Ho has no known historical or symbolic meaning. It’s just a name. On the other hand, no one working undercover is going to adopt a tag like “well of light”.
The most comprehensive biography of Ho, William J. Duiker’s Ho Chi Minh: A Life (2000) gets it right: the name Ho Chi Minh was a pseudonym adopted from Chinese. So how could such a misconception flourish? Certainly “well of light” can be forcibly extracted from the Vietnamese by means of poor translation but that only restates the error.
I suspect the answer is simple enough: “well of light” comes out of a desire to impose romantic meaning. It tallies with the legend. The life, the man himself, seems to fit so nicely with some sort of profound meaning associated with leadership and inspiration.
What strikes the reader again and again is evidence of a man who seemed not only open to compromise, ready to grasp any possibility for a peaceful way forward to national independence
for Vietnam, but also someone all too ready to find that possibility in the character of his enemy. “No one is better qualified than the French to hear cries for liberty,” he observed.
When he announced the creation of an independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1945, he echoed the sentiments of the US Declaration of Independence: “All men are born equal: the creator has given us inviolable rights, life, liberty, and happiness.”
The folly of the French and the Americans in this period was as self-evident as the truths Ho paraphrased.
It is significant that while Stalin hated Ho, Nikita Khrushchev was captivated by his charm, writing in his memoirs: “I have met many people in the course of my political career, but none has made such a particular impression on me. Believers often talk of the apostles. Well, through his way of living and his influence over his peers, Ho Chi Minh was exactly comparable to these ‘holy apostles’. An apostle of the revolution. Nobody could resist him, so strong was his conviction that communism was the best thing for his people and for all people.”
Graham Greene also succumbed, with one careful qualification: “I was reminded of a Mister Chips, wise, kind, just (if one could accept the school rules as just), prepared to inflict sharp punishment without undue remorse.”
Somehow the image of the frail, selfless (saintly) scholar-philosopher at the head of a just war of resistance against colonial oppression was, by the ’60s, irresistible to radicals in Europe, the US and Australia. But Uncle Ho had, by that time, been a focal point of inspiration in his own land for a quarter of a century or more.
Explaining his appeal to his own people, his unrivalled prestige, is more challenging and on this Brocheux’s account is a little disappointing.
What is missing is an ethnographic chapter on the significance of the emperor in Vietnamese history, on that centre of obligation that was loyalty to the emperor and the consequences for national focus when the French gutted imperial authority at the turn of the 19th century.
The Vietnamese have (or had) a saying: “The emperor is in the country like the father is in the family.” But when the emperor was no longer in the country, there was a vacuum to be filled.
Replacing the “father in the family” was a new notion of the people as the basis for political legitimacy. Modern Vietnamese terms for the nation all include a reference to the people. In this context, “Uncle” suggests something humbler, gentler and more egalitarian than the stricter notion of father or king as embodied in the emperor.
Through the resistance movement loyalty to the people became loyalty to the country and Uncle Ho the embodiment of the people, the epitome of revolutionary qualities.
Simplicity and saintliness combined with implacable determination to be free of the invader. One of the emperor’s main duties, after all, was to defend the nation. The old hierarchy of obligations was replaced, perhaps, by the new, in which love of the emperor was transferred to love of Uncle Ho, a new kind of spiritual helmsman.
After Ho’s death in 1969 the iconography acquired all the trappings that have become familiar as the 20th-century cult of personality: the statues, the gigantic public images, the embalmed body on display, the hagiography of the life, the rites and teachings that celebrate his memory, and so on.
Perhaps the greatest irony is that at precisely the time Uncle Ho was becoming a Marxist icon among Western radicals (in the ’60s), he was being sidelined in his own party for those rightist tendencies (his temporising patriotism) that hardliners insisted was a personal and political defect.
Le Duan, secretary-general of the party in 1960, told a close associate: “I am better than Uncle Ho. He opens his mouth and follows the code of Confucian morality, speaking of human dignity, loyalty, good conduct, wisdom and faithfulness. But what is all that? Outdated moralism. As for me, I support the collective power of the workers.”
And so, while the hardliners marginalised the increasingly frail old Uncle Ho, his whispy Confucius beard getting thinner and thinner, they still made hay with his mystique.
Ho had requested his ashes be put into urns and placed at the four cardinal points of the country. The party had his body embalmed and laid out in an oppressive mausoleum for respectful pilgrims and curious tourists to peer at.
Brocheux draws his richly informed yet succinct biography to a close with an account of Ho’s afterlife, how he has been used by the state since his death.