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Leninism in Hanoi. - Review - book review
National Review, Oct 23, 2000 by John Derbyshire
Ho Chi Minh, by William J. Duiker (Hyperion, 720 pp., $35)
One of the great moving forces of the world in the early 20th century was the resentment felt by Asians towards those European powers that had seized their territories. Intelligent young people from these old, proud countries seethed with rage at the effrontery of the white men. The other side of this anger was shame-shame that one's culture had proved too feeble, one's countrymen too supine, to resist the alien onslaught.
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Those young Asians who set out to right the wrong had two things on their minds: to expel the foreigners, and to reform their own societies. Both intentions were summed up in the slogan of the May Fourth movement in Peking, 1919: Da dao lie qiang! Zhen xing Zhong Hua!-"Down with the great powers! Strengthen the nation!" Both were liable to curdle: the first into xenophobia, the second into a cruel contempt for one's own people.
This was the intellectual and political environment in which Ho Chi Minh grew up. Born in 1890 to a family of scholar-gentry in French Indo-China, Ho's actual surname was Nguyen. He went through a great many pseudonyms in his career, settling decisively on "Ho Chi Minh" only in 1940.
For Americans, Ho is principally associated with the war that bears his country's name. From this point of view, William Duiker's biography of Ho must be regarded as deep background. The U.S. Marines do not come ashore at Da Nang until page 543 of his 580-page main narrative. This is properly to scale: By 1965, Ho was pretty much out of things-a revered figurehead, but no longer much of a decision-maker. He died four years later.
Ho was never, in fact, a total dictator like Stalin, Mao, or Castro. He actually declined the post of General Secretary of his party in 1941 and seems, by Duiker's account, to have been wary of assuming too central a position in affairs, perhaps as a result of having witnessed Stalin's terror at first hand. Communism is a horrible, inhuman business, and the sufferings of the Vietnamese people under Ho's party should not be understated; but as Leninist regimes go, the Vietnamese was one of the milder varieties. Central decision-making was always collegial, and senior figures who found themselves on the wrong side of the party line, like the odious Truong Chinh, rarely suffered more than demotion. There were no mass purges in the manner of Stalin, few gangsterish intrigues of the Castro style, and no quasi-religious-leader cults like Mao's.
Ho left his homeland in 1911, returning 30 years later as a seasoned revolutionary. Those years included long sojourns in China and the USSR., shorter ones in France, England, and the U.S. He was already a patriot and an anti-imperialist at the time he went abroad, but his positive ideas were inchoate. The formative event of his life was reading Lenin's "Theses on the National and Colonial Questions" in July 1920. Here he found the strategies that were to guide him to the very end.
Lenin approved of nationalism as a permissible tactic for colonial peoples, and argued-erroneously, of course-that capitalism survived past the date Marx had set for its demise only by exploiting overseas colonies. He thus provided Asian intellectuals with answers to their two great questions. How to get rid of the foreigners? By temporarily cooperating with bourgeois nationalist groups, while preserving one's separate, Communist, identity. How to reform one's own society so that such humiliations could never recur? By proceeding to socialism via class warfare. The second of these prescriptions was, of course, horribly mistaken. Where applied, it let loose a flood of human misery, and resulted at last in corrupt and cynical kleptocracies like the ones that rule China, Vietnam, and North Korea today. This, however, is hindsight; it all seemed perfectly logical in 1920.
It is in his seduction by Lenin's "Theses" that we find the answer to the question most often asked about Ho: Was he more of a nationalist or a Communist? To the very end of his life-for example, in his advice on dealing with the Diem government of South Vietnam in the 1960s-he held firm to Lenin's strategy: First, expel the foreigners and unify the country; then set about building socialism in earnest. Ho was a convinced Leninist; but it was in the "Theses" that he found his license to be a nationalist as well as a socialist. It was nationalism, not socialism, that really engaged his emotions. Hard to blame him; I wouldn't want to be ruled by Frenchmen, either.
Although Ho occasionally expressed himself in Leninist diction (e.g., in 1946: "All those who do not follow the line that I have set out will be smashed"), Duiker's account suggests that Ho resorted to the more severe Leninist methods with an ill conscience. How convincing is this? My own impression after reading this book is closest to the one voiced by James O'Sullivan, the U.S. consul in Hanoi immediately after World War II, who described him as "a very shifty character."
