I agree with the sentiment...but on this particular instance...it’s true. Ho Chi Mihn was a fan of Jefferson and the Constitution...until the French came in and pushed him towards communism.
The guy was a member of the Comintern and a founding member of the French Communist Party in the early 1920s, he may have cynically tried to fool the US....heck, Fidel Castro tried to do the same thing.
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
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.