Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995 Read Online Free PDF Page A

French-speaking Vietnamese Catholics who enriched themselves at the expense of poor peasants. Ho Chi Minh was a devout communist because in communism he saw the resolution of both evils. Communism fit the hand of Nghe Annese radicalism like a glove.
     
    Ho Chi Minh’s conversion to communism transformed his life. He was a founding member of the French Communist party, and in 1921 he established the Intercolonial Union, a communist-front group to work against imperialism. He spent 1923 and 1924 in Moscow. Late in 1924 the Soviet leadership asked him to go to Canton as an adviser to the Soviet envoy. There Ho discovered a large Vietnamese expatriate community coalescing around Phan Boi Chau, the old family friend. But the joy of the reunion was short-lived. Ho Chi Minh talked at length about revolution, but Phan Boi Chau’s commitment stopped at talk. Perhaps he was just too old—the fire had dimmed. Ho also found him conservative, willing to get rid of the French but not the Vietnamese elite in a genuine revolution.
     
    Young Vietnamese nationalists in Canton gravitated to Ho Chi Minh’s leadership. One of them was Pham Van Dong. Born in Quang Nam Province of central Vietnam in 1906 to a mandarin family, Dong had studied at the French lycée in Hue. His father was exiled to the French colony of Reunion in 1915 for fomenting rebellion among the Vietnamese troops recruited to fight in World War I. As a student, Pham Van Dong became intensely anti-French, and he moved to Canton to escape the secret police. He was captivated by Ho Chi Minh’s “shining simplicity.” Nguyen Luong Bang, another young nationalist born in Hai Hung Province in 1904, met Ho in Canton and saw him “healthylooking, extremely bright-eyed... with an engagingly gentle way of speaking.” With Pham Van Dong, Nguyen Luong Bang, and several other young Vietnamese, Ho Chi Minh founded the Revolutionary Youth League of Vietnam in 1925. It was the first purely Marxist organization among the Indochinese.
     
    French secret agents and Chinese police went after the rebels, and Ho Chi Minh urged his associates to return to Vietnam and organize anti-French communist cells. He went to Moscow in 1927, attended conferences in Europe later in the year, and in 1928 lived in Bangkok as a Buddhist monk organizing the Vietnamese emigrant community. In Moscow, he temporarily ran afoul of Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, who worried that Ho’s sense of nationalism ran deeper than his commitment to communism. Stalin always suspected nationalists because their devotion to country or ethnic group often transcended their devotion to the class struggle. In Moscow, Ho was too much of a nationalist and not enough of a communist to suit Stalin.
     
    Ho traveled to Hong Kong in 1929 and met Le Duc Tho, another Vietnamese nationalist. Tho, who was born in Nam Ha Province in 1910 to a mandarin family, had become an anti-French nationalist while attending school. With Le Duc Tho, Pham Van Dong, Nguyen Luong Bang, and several other Vietnamese in Hong Kong, Ho Chi Minh established the Indochinese Communist party in June 1929. Its leaders wanted to “overthrow French imperialism, feudalism and the reactionary Vietnamese capitalist class.” Another young Vietnamese nationalist soon joined them. Vo Nguyen Giap, born in Quang Binh Province in 1912, came from a well-to-do family. He earned a law degree at Hanoi University. By the time he was a teenager, Giap hated the French. Although he had never met Ho Chi Minh, Giap was familiar with his revolutionary nationalism and joined the Indochinese Communist party.
     
    In northern Vietnam, not the south, the revolution began. There the population was denser, the rice yields lower, the landholdings smaller. All this evoked a more intense sense of community than prevailed in the south. Religions contributed to the differences. Buddhism came to Vietnam from two different sources. To the south, from India came Theravada Buddhism, viewing salvation