Yeah, but John Kerry told him and he was there. More importantly he probably spoke with individuals who personally knew Ho. Heck, Kerry would probably tell us he knew Ho, who was only a year or so dead, if he thought it was worth votes.
Posted on 07/25/2013 5:09:39 PM PDT by SJackson
Ho Chi Minh was a Communist terrorist. President Truong Tan Sang, whom Obama is trying to win over, is a leading Communist.
“We both reaffirmed the efforts that have been made to deal with war legacy issues. We very much appreciate Vietnam’s continued cooperation as we try to recover our Missing in Action and those that were lost during the course of the war. And I reaffirmed the United States’ commitment to work with Vietnam around some of the environmental and health issues that have continued, decades later, because of the war,” Obama said.
How nice.
“Finally, we agreed that one of the great sources of strength between our two countries is the Vietnamese American population that is here but obviously has continued strong ties to Vietnam,” Obama said.
Much of America’s Vietnamese population came here as refugees. It’s like claiming that the Cuban community bonds us to Castro.
“At the conclusion of the meeting, President Sang shared with me a copy of a letter sent by Ho Chi Minh to Harry Truman. And we discussed the fact that Ho Chi Minh was actually inspired by the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and the words of Thomas Jefferson. Ho Chi Minh talks about his interest in cooperation with the United States. And President Sang indicated that even if it’s 67 years later, it’s good that we’re still making progress,” Obama said.
The message to Truman came in 1946. By then Ho Chi Mihn had long been a dedicated Communist and Soviet agent. At the time the letter was sent, Ho Chi Mihn was murdering his political opponents while trying to wheedle Truman into helping him out.
The Vietnamese Declaration of Independence was indeed partly a cheap copy of the American Declaration of Independence in that it borrowed the format to issue a list of grievances against the French.
And the resemblance ends there. There was no commitment to internal freedom. Its sole real purpose was to kick out the French.
But good news. Obama will go to Vietnam according to President Sang.
“Last but not least, I also, on behalf of our government and our state, to extend to President Obama our invitation to visit Vietnam. And President Obama has accepted our invitation and will try his best to pay a visit to Vietnam during his term.”
Maybe he can chant the left’s favorite, “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh is going to win” chant while he’s there.
I wonder if Jefferson would have approved of this:
In North Vietnam during the 1950s, political opposition groups were suppressed; those publicly opposing the government were imprisoned in hard labor camps. Many middle-class, intellectual Northerners had been lured into speaking out against Ho’s communist regime, and most of those who did were later imprisoned in gulags or executed; this became known as the Nhan Van-Giai Pham Affair. Some prisoners died of exhaustion, starvation, illness (often having received no medical attention), or assault by prison guards. Political scientist R.J. Rummel suggests a figure of 24,000 camp deaths during Ho’s rule of North Vietnam between 1945 and 1956.[54]
The government launched “rent reduction” and “land reform” programs, which, according to Steven Rosefielde, were “aimed at exterminating class enemies.”[55] Declassified Politburo documents confirm that 1 in 1,000 North Vietnamese (i.e., about 14,000 people) were the minimum quota targeted for execution during the earlier “rent reduction” campaign; the number killed during the multiple stages of the considerably more radical “land reform” was probably many times greater.[56] Lam Thanh Liem, a major authority on land issues in Vietnam, conducted multiple interviews in which communist cadres gave estimates for land reform executions ranging from 120,000 to 200,000. Such figures match the “nearly 150,000 houses and huts which were allocated to new occupants”.[57] A number of sources have suggested that about 30% of the “landlords” executed were actually communist party members.[57][58][59][60][61] Landlords were arbitrarily classified as 5.68% of the population, but the majority were subject to less severe punishment than execution. Official records from the time suggest that 172,008 “landlords” were executed during the “land reform”, of whom 123,266 (71.66%) were later found to be wrongly classified.[62] Victims were reportedly shot, beheaded, and beaten to death; “some were tied up, thrown into open graves and covered with stones until they were crushed to death”.[63] The full death toll was even greater because victims’ families starved to death under the “policy of isolation.”[64] As communist defector Le Xuan Giao explained: “There was nothing worse than the starvation of the children in a family whose parents were under the control of a land reform team. They isolated the house, and the people who lived there would starve. The children were all innocent. There was nothing worse than that. They wanted to see the whole family dead.”[65] Hoang Van Chi wrote that as many as 500,000 North Vietnamese may have died as a result of the policies of Ho’s government.[66] 6,000 peasants were massacred in response to a revolt against unbearable taxes.[63]
I don’t think so. I think it was simply propaganda
Yeah, but John Kerry told him and he was there. More importantly he probably spoke with individuals who personally knew Ho. Heck, Kerry would probably tell us he knew Ho, who was only a year or so dead, if he thought it was worth votes.
And far away from the point of contact, he met the enemy in Paris.
C’mon folks, it’s a simple mistake for Obama to make. He thinks Marx and Engels wrote the constitution.
“That no more legitimized Ho, than the fact that Hitler also had legitimate gripes about the Treaty of Versailles.”
Of course Hitler had egitimate gripes about Versailles; today no historian even pretends that it was a just peace. The fact that two of our WWI allies (Japan & Italy) formed 2/3 of the Axis says all that needs to be said about Versailles.
Nguyễn Sinh Cung, aka Ho Chi Minh, in 1921, a year after he played a role as one of the founders of the French Communist Party. His worldview was well established by the time Truman was in office.
“Self-determination” meant to Ho that the Communists would takeover by “any means necessary”.
He betrayed Vietnamese nationalist Phan Boi Chao to the French Secret Police for money which was used to fund the Communist Party of Vietnam (later to become the uber Communist Party of Indochina: See Robert Turner’s massive tome on the “History of the Communist Party of Indochina”, Hoover Institution, about 1972 or 1974).
Later on, Ho decimated the Communist (Trotskyite) and non-communist members of the Lien Viet political coalition that was formed in 1944-45, and which were included in the “Coalition government” of 1945-46/47. Ho used Togliatti’s “Salami tactics” to destroy them one group at a time (Cao Dao, Dai Viet, Trotskyites under Thao Tu Tang (something like that); Kuomingtang VNDD, etc).
Ho was always a socialist/marxist, since at least 1916 during his stay in France. He gave up all pretenses of being a nationalist in 1925 but his propaganda machine, aided and abetted by both French Communists and American Communists and liberal dupes, gave him this “George Washington of Vietnam” personna which has only recently been dented to any significant degree.
The Russian/Soviet constitution read like a copy of the US Constitution but about 30 million lives later, even a blind fool could see that it was just a piece of paper with no good faith and practice behind it.
The same for Ho’s writings and constitution. He helped kill at least 2-3 million So. and North Vietnamese citizens, Laotians, and made possible the genocide of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia (another 1.7-2 million people, including some that I knew).
Like Che Guevara, he was the posterboy for “self-determination” in the eyes of the evil Left, but to his victims, he was just a Hitler, Himmler and Eichmann with a Hammer & Sickle on his arm.
SOmetimes the truth hurts but since our Left is immoral, amoral, and just plain evil, they don’t suffer the derision and approbation that they deserve. They get elected to Congress and teach in our colleges and high schools.
Who says that the good guys always win?
Ho was particularly mesmerized by lynchings (and we can thank Mark Twain for that because most of those cited by Ho in a biography were indeed fictional). But what “inspired” him was the FRENCH Revolution which inspired all communist revolutions. Only insofar as the French Revolution was inspired by the American precursor was Ho inspired by the American Revolution or the U. S. Constitution. Worse still, the communists were even more inspired by the various reigns of terror that followed revolution.
Frankly, I see little difference between the inspirations and behaviors of Ho and O. The only reason we’re safer than the poor Vietnamese (and Hungarians, and Polish, and French, etc., is our itsy-bitsy Second Amendment.
The OSS had some dealings with the Viet Minh as the British took over from the Japanese. By Dien Bien Phu, the north Vietnamese were communists. The ‘Domino theory’ ‘strategic containment’ and the Cold War wars by proxy.
But at the ‘end of the day’ circa 1963, if they were such big fans of ours—why were they shooting at us? Barry wouldn’t hesitate: “Because we were neo-colonialists!”
Jefferson. Yeah right. More like Marx/Lenin. 0 remains an idiot and dupe.
He also spent Christmas in Cambodia, an adventure that is seared in his memory.
Believe me I’m the last person to defend Minh or the communists; I was simply trying to clarify what Obama was referring to (regardless of how it is spun).
A Communist propaganda line that resurfaces periodically in various forms. Another variant on this theme is that Castro became a Communist and was driven into the arms of the Soviet Union because of the hostility of America. The truth is both he and Ho were long time Communists, long before leading their respective revolutions.
Did you know that millions of waste water facilities have huge numbers of little obama’s floating around in their systems?
I was more addressing Obama's statement, which referenced a 1946 letter, at which time clearly Ho's political views were fixed, that your post relative to 1919, with which I've no disagreement.
Someone earlier in the thread referenced Ho's cooperation with the OSS during the war, and it's my understanding that post WWII Ho made overatures to the US for support for independence. Which fell on deaf ears, since it meant opposing France. And it wouldn't have mattered, by that time he was a communist revolutionary who had established views regarding governance. Like Castro, he would have been happy to have our support. For awhile. Reminds me of a few Arab states, but I'll leave that for another thread.
Understood. Obama was steeped in marxist thought from very early on and never got away from it (Frank Marshall Davis, Bill Ayers, Quentin Young (father of Obamacare and CPUSA member, Alice Palmer (pro-communist black activist), Timuel Black, another marxist, the Socialist Scholars Conferences at college, Marxist Harvard law professors and black reparationist professor, Valerie Jarrett and her family’s ties to the CPUSA, David Axelrod (mentored by Soviet asset and CPUSA member David S. Canter and pro-communist activist since 1948, Don Rose), Van Jones, Anita Dunn, etc.
And the list could go on for miles and miles.
At least your comments gave us a chance to teach a little real history about Ho Chi Minh, the Mao Tse Tung and Joseph Stalin of Vietnam.
We all can learn from each other because some of the best commentators and most knowledgeable people on history post here.
Now, about Obama and Mao, Castro, Hugo Chavez and Van Jones.
In the immediate aftermath of WWII, America did in fact have Ho’s balls in our pocket.
He DID come here. He DID quote the Constitution, he DID want us to free his country from the French colonialists.
McGeorge Bundy and that other fu%% who’s name I can’t remember just at the moment, (I’ll remember it at 2am) didn’t want the French to be “humiliated.”
OH, WAIT, JOHN FOSTER DULLES (DOLLARS)!!
LEND EFFIN LEASE DONTCHA KNOW!
To the uninformed, we had “HO’S BALLS IN OUR POCKETS!!” All we had to do was let the Viet Minh accept the Japanese surrender, and we would have OWNED all of VIETNAM!
Oh, JeezLoise, the French would have been pi$$ed, but what did they bring to the table at that time anyway?
Side Bar: When the Michelin rubber plantations were caught in the middle of the bLender, the US had to PAY 10,000 US for every tree that was INJURED! And the GD French made sure we PAID.
Bottom line is this: the whole damn war could have been avoided, and commie pigs could have been subdued, had we JUST BOUGHT HO OUT!
Yes he was a commie. On the other hand, he was a closet capitalist, just like a whole lot of other Asians.
Man, did we miss an opportunity or WHAT?
We could have had the VN trading partner of today, back in 1946, without losing 55K Americans.
How tragic.
/rant>
PPS: The French loved John Foster Dollars so much, they believed him when he said the US gov. would NOT let them be overrun at Dien Ben Phu.
What a bunch of sh!!.
Buncha dumb frogs.
I think Eisenhower went and played golf, told his aides he really didn’t want to hear about Dien Ben Phu.
And John McCain was inspired by Ho Chi Mihn.
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