Ho Chi Minh Quotes

To reap a return in ten years, plant trees. To reap a return in 100, cultivate the people.

It was patriotism, not communism, that inspired me.

You will kill ten of us, we will kill one of you, but in the end, you will tire of it first.

Robert Conquest once suggested that 'a curious little volume might be made of the poems of Stalin, Castro, Mao and Ho Chi Minh, with illustrations by A. Hitler.

You can kill ten of our men for every one we kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and we will win.

I follow only one party: the Vietnamese party

After the rain, good weather. In the wink of an eye, the universe throws off its muddy clothes.

I'm very moved to be here today, ... Our lives are now much better, but Vietnam remains a very poor country. We need to work much harder.

If we forgot our resentment, if we forgot revenge, if we acknowledged that we are all puppets in someone else's play, if we had not fought a war against each other, if some of us had not called ourselves nationalists or communists or capitalists or realists, if our bonzes had not incinerated themselves, if the Americans hadn't come to save us from ourselves, if we had not bought what they sold, if the Soviets had never called us comrades, if Mao had not sought to do the same, if the Japanese hadn't taught us the superiority of the yellow race, if the French had never sought to civilize us, if Ho Chi Minh had not been dialectical and Karl Marx not analytical, if the invisible hand of the market did not hold us by the scruffs of our necks, if the British had defeated the rebels of the new world, if the natives had simply said , Hell no, on first seeing the white man, if our emperors and mandarins had not clashed among themselves, if the Chinese had never ruled us for a thousand year, if they had used gunpowder for more than fireworks, if the Buddha had never lived, if the Bible had never been written and Jesus Christ never sacrificed, if you needed no more revisions, and if I saw no more of these visions, please, could you please just let me sleep?

Mr. Schoenbrun, we have a secret weapon ... don't smile when I tell you this. Our secret weapon is nationalism. To have nationhood, which is a sign of maturity, is greater than any weapons in the world.

The great victory of April 30 represents the triumph of the entire nation, of justice over brutality and of humanity over tyranny.

I’ve never cared for humming verse But what to do inside a jail? I’ll hum some verse to pass long days I’ll hum and wait till freedom comes.

The morning sun shines over the prison wall, And drives away the shadows and miasma of hopelessness. A life-giving breeze blows across the earth. A hundred imprisoned faces smile once more.

It may take three years, it may take five, it may take ten, but that will be the war of Indo-china.

On Ho Chi Minh's desk in Hanoi on the day he died lay a biography of John Brown.

We are convinced that the Allied nations which ... have acknowledged the principles of self-determination and equality of nations, will not refuse to acknowledge the independence of Vietnam.

Ho Chi Minh successfully accomplished his cause to free his country despite the opposition of France and the United States. This achievement required the efforts of a man that was part Lenin, part Gondi, part Confucius, and all Vietnamese.

Freedom for my people, independence for my country, this is all I want, all what I understand.

McNamara’s electronic fence, which the Jasons called an “anti-infiltration barrier,” was constructed along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, at a cost of $1.8 billion, roughly $12 billion in 2015. It had very little effect on the outcome of the Vietnam War and did not help the United States achieve its aim of cutting off enemy supplies.

The Marxist constituency has remained as narrow as the conception behind it. The Communist Manifesto, written by two bright and articulate young men without responsibility even for their own livelihoods—much less for the social consequences of their vision—has had a special appeal for successive generations of the same kinds of people. The offspring of privilege have dominated the leadership of Marxist movements from the days of Marx and Engels through Lenin, Mao, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, and their lesser counterparts around the world and down through history. The sheer reiteration of the "working class" theme in Marxism has drowned out this plain fact.

Getting through the intersection involves tracing paths through the parking system, many braided filaments of direction like the Ho Chi Minh trail.

Perhaps the most that can be said is that HCM had become a prisoner of his own creation, a fly in amber, unable in his state of declining influence to escape the inexorable logic of a system that sacrificed the fate of individuals to the "higher morality" of the master plan.

The U.S. imperialists are expanding their war against national independence and peace in Vietnam. They are committing monstrous atrocities and crimes more odious than the Hitlerite fascists.

I saw no unity of purpose, no consensus on matters of philosophy or history or law. The very facts were shrouded in uncertainty: Was it a civil war? A war of national liberation or simple aggression? Who started it, and when, and why? What really happened to the USS Maddox on that dark night in the Gulf of Tonkin? Was Ho Chi Minh a Communist stooge, or a nationalist savior, or both, or neither? What about the Geneva Accords? What about SEATO and the Cold War? What about dominoes? America was divided on these and a thousand other issues, and the debate had spilled out across the floor of the United States Senate and into the streets, and smart men in pinstripes could not agree on even the most fundamental matters of public policy. The only certainty that summer was moral confusion.

An early gesture was to rename Harrington Road after a hero of the world communist movement, so that at the height of the Vietnam War the address of the United States Consulate was 7 Ho Chi Minh Sarani, Calcutta.

The U.S. imperialists supply armaments to their henchmen to massacre the Indochinese peoples. They dump their goods in Indochina to prevent the development of local handicrafts. Their pornographic culture depraves the youth in areas placed under their control. They follow the policy of buying up, deluding and dividing our people. They strive to turn some bad elements into U.S. agents that they use for the conquest of our country.

The Left’s great fight is with material inequality, not with evil as normally understood. Thus, the Left has always been less interested in fighting tyranny than in fighting inequality. That is why Leftist dictators—from Lenin to Mao to Pol Pot to Ho Chi Minh to Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez—have had so much support from Leftists around the world. Many of these dictators were mass murderers, but to much of the world’s Left it was more important that they opposed material inequality (and America).

We tried to change Vietnam. Instead, Vietnam changed us.

Laos is the most heavily bombed country in the history of the world. From 1964 to 1973, the United States dropped more than two million tons of ordnance on Laos to disrupt the Ho Chi Minh Trail and try to stanch a Communist insurgency—more than was dropped on all of Germany and Japan during World War II. There were 580,000 bombing missions, which averages out to one every eight minutes for nine years. Sometimes, U.S. planes returning to Thailand from missions over Vietnam indiscriminately dropped their remaining bombs on Laos. More than 270 million cluster munitions—“bombies”—were used, and 80 million of them failed to detonate. In the four decades since the end of the war, only 1 percent have been cleared. More than fifty thousand people have been killed or injured in UXO accidents; over the last decade, nearly half of those casualties have been children.

IN WRITING THIS BOOK, I returned again and again to what people call my homeland, where my parents were born, as was I. But for the Vietnamese, the homeland is not simply the country of origin. It is the village where one’s father was born and where one’s father was buried. My father’s father died where he was supposed to, as my father will not and as I will not, in the province of his birth, his mausoleum thirty minutes from Ho Chi Minh’s birthplace.

In June of 1968, a month after graduating from Macalester College, I was drafted to fight a war I hated. I was twenty-one years old. Young, yes, and politically naive, but even so the American war in Vietnam seemed to me wrong. Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons. I saw no unity of purpose, no consensus on matters of philosophy or history or law. The very facts were shrouded in uncertainty: Was it a civil war? A war of national liberation or simple aggression? Who started it, and when, and why? What really happened to the USS Maddox on that dark night in the Gulf of Tonkin? Was Ho Chi Minh a Communist stooge, or a nationalist savior, or both, or neither? What about the Geneva Accords? What about SEATO and the Cold War? What about dominoes? America was divided on these and a thousand other issues, and the debate had spilled out across the floor of the United States Senate and into the streets, and smart men in pinstripes could not agree on even the most fundamental matters of public policy. The only certainty that summer was moral confusion. It was my view then, and still is, that you don’t make war without knowing why. Knowledge, of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can’t fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can’t make them undead.

The whole scene put the unpleasantness of the last few weeks into some perspective, but it also fed a sense of anger at the story I was caught up in back in Washington. The notion that there is no room for complexity: Ho Chi Minh was a Communist, not a nationalist. We could not have dropped the atomic bomb on something other than a large city. There are no Iranian moderates. It was as if simply recognizing complexities and context was tantamount to pulling a thread that could cause some American narrative to unravel. The faces of the people lining these streets told a different story. Surely what made America great to them was not the fact that we’d dropped the bomb; it was the ideal associated with who we were, the fact that we had a president who was willing to acknowledge difficult histories and show respect for different people. Our constant struggle to improve ourselves and our country while seeking guidance from the story of our founding values—that is what makes America great.

Lors d'un des procès politiques des années 70, au Maroc, le greffier lisait l'acte d'accusation lorsqu'il arriva à la phrase suivante : "... ils possédaient des textes de Karl Marx et de Ho Chi Minh", qu'il lut ainsi : "... ils possédaient des textes de Karl Marx et 'ceci est une partie de cela'." Ho Chi Minh peut se lire huwwa chayy'un minh, qui veut dire effectivement "ceci est une partie de cela". Après quelques secondes de flottement, les prisonniers éclatèrent de rire au grand dam de la cour qui ne comprenait pas ce qui se passait...

In southern Laos, in the bamboo jungles along what was once the Ho Chi Minh trail, I visited a village whose weavers had produced cotton blankets with motifs that could not be misidentified: American fighter planes and “Huey” helicopters. It was as though I had found the exact opposite of a World War II cargo cult. This isolated culture living along the former Ho Chi Minh trail—one of the most heavily bombed pieces of real estate in history—had produced talismanic blankets in the hope that those wrapped in them would be protected from the terrible rain of bombs and bullets.

Washington Post, was recorded in the “Special China Series,” documents issued by the State Department in August, 1969, but came to the notice of the public only when reported by Terence Smith in the New York Times. Mao and Chou En-lai, it turns out, approached President Roosevelt in January, 1945, “trying to establish relations with the United States in order to avoid total dependence on the Soviet Union” (italics added). It seems that Ho Chi Minh never received an answer, and information of the Chinese approach was suppressed because, as Professor Allen Whiting has commented, it contradicted “the image of monolithic Communism directed from Moscow.

This place where she worked certainly didn't make it look as if she continued to believe her calling was to change the course of American history. The building's rusted fire escape would just come down, just come loose from its moorings and crash onto the street, if anyone stepped on it - a fire escape whose function was not to save lives in the event of a fire but to uselessly hang there testifying to the immense loneliness inherent to living. For him it was stripped of any other meaning - no meaning could make better use of that building. Yes, alone we are, deeply alone, and always, in store for us, a layer of loneliness even deeper. There is nothing we can do to dispose of that. No, loneliness shouldn't surprise us, as astonishing to experience it as it may be. You can try turning yourself inside out, but all you are then is inside out and lonely instead of inside in and lonely. My stupid, stupid Merry dear, stupider even than your stupid father, not even blowing up buildings helps. It's lonely if there are buildings and it's lonely if there are no buildings. There is no protest to be lodged against loneliness - not all the bombing campaigns in history have made a dent in it. The most lethat of manmade explosives can't touch it. Stand in awe not of Communism, my idiot child, but of ordinary, everyday loneliness. On May Day go out and march with your friends to its greater glory, the superpower of superpowers, the force that overwhelms all. Put your money on it, bet on it, worship it - bow down in submission not to Karl Marx, my stuttering, angry, idiot child, not to Ho Chi-Minh and Mao Tse-tung - bow down to the great god of Loneliness!

Everybody's experience of life is a profound lesson and one which is very useful. In the old days, wise men educated themselves through much study. They still do even now. Besides, every nation grows up by experiencing glory and shame, victory and defeat, and learning through its own experience and the experience of others. If it is incapable of doing so, then it becomes subjective and complacent, sufficient unto itself and isolated from the rest of the world like an orphan who cannot relate to society or its prevailing discipline.

Local authorities keep an eye on proceedings. The Saigon Protestant Church in Ho Chi Minh City, for instance, one of the biggest in the country, has to submit a list of its event schedules, financial records and appointments of Church leaders to government officials for their prior approval.

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In the mid-1950s Winston Churchill advised his American friends to recognize that Ho Chi Minh was unbeatable, accept his victory, and try to make the best of it. This the Dulles brothers could not do—because they were Americans.

Usually, after a disagreement, they suggested i read this or that, often Marx, Lenin, or Engels. I preferred Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Sung, Che, or Fidel, but i ended up having to get into Marx and Lenin just to understand a lot of the speeches and stuff Huey Newton was putting out.

Now the roads just feed into a parking system -- not a lot, not a ramp, but a system -- and lose their identity. Getting through the intersection involves tracing paths through the parking system, many braided filaments of direction like the Ho Chi Minh trail. CSV-5 has better throughput, but Cal.12 has better pavement. That is typical -- Fairlanes roads emphasize getting you there, for Type A drivers, and Cruiseways emphasize the enjoyment of the ride, for Type B drivers.

A team of Soviet biochemists, who called themselves the Mausoleum Laboratory and had carried out the mummifications of Lenin, Stalin, and Ho Chi Minh,

In the absence of an established distribution network, he built his own—a financial ‘Ho Chi MinhTrail’ between Dublin and the four corners of the country to target the people directly. Couriers had to distribute the prospectus, promotional material and receipts for the Loan, and carry subscriptions (cheques, notes, coin, gold) back to Dublin.

North Vietnam had long played patron to Cambodia’s revolutionaries, often under difficult circumstances. In the early 1950s, in conformity with the strong spirit of the Marxist internationalism that still existed then, Mao encouraged Ho Chi Minh and his cohorts to oversee the creation of Communist parties in Southeast Asia, a task that the North Vietnamese undertook with enthusiasm. The North Vietnamese cadres sent to Cambodia in the 1950s were virtually obliged to start from scratch. As late as 1944, only five hundred Khmer students completed primary school each year, and nationwide there were not more than a thousand secondary school students.

Tijdens een van mijn avondwandelingen belandde ik bij toeval in de Rua de Almeida Garrett (een zijstraat van Avenida Ho Chi Minh). Die was genoemd naar João Baptista da Silva Leitão de Almeida Garrett, een negentiende-eeuwse Portugese schrijver en politicus, die in de Verenigde Staten weinig gekend was, en in Angola nog minder. Ik kende hem alleen van een motto in een roman van José Saramago, een uitspraak die reuze toepasselijk was in Luanda: 'Ik vraag de economen en de moralisten of ze ooit wel eens hebben berekend hoeveel individuen veroordeeld moeten worden tot lijden, zwaar werk, demoralisatie, een ellendige jeugd, volstrekte onwetendheid, overweldigende rampspoed en de opperste armoede om één rijke man voort te brengen?

That’ll put us about a hundred miles due east of Ho Chi Minh City in another five hours.” The name always caught Max off guard. Vietnam’s largest city would always be Saigon to him.

In fact, this is not a book about sex or sexual relations; rather, men's and women's participation in HCMC's sex industry involves much more than the purchase of sex.

Since Soviet “mistakes” (including the murder of millions of its own citizens) had ruined its chances for providing a haven for existentialist politics, Sartre was forced to take on the American juggernaut alone. America’s global empire, he warned, was being assembled by means of its control over a global mass communications and technological network and the “world economic system.” “This One World,” as Sartre described it, was actually a nightmare of American cultural and political hegemony, enabling six percent of the earth’s population to dominate the other ninety-four percent.41 He began looking desperately for humanist alternatives. He turned to other Marxist countries, including Tito’s Yugoslavia, Castro’s Cuba, Ho Chi Minh’s North Vietnam (declaring in 1967 that “the Vietnamese are fighting for all men, and the Americans against all men”), and still later Mao’s China.42 He also took up other anti-Western crusades. He led a host of leftist intellectuals in protests against France’s war in Algeria in 1954 to ’56 and embraced the cause of the Marxist FLN rebels—which led to his friendship with Frantz Fanon.

In World War II, I was in Indochina—that’s what Vietnam was called then—and I didn’t just meet Ho Chi Minh, I knew him. We were fighting the Japanese, and so was he. We were allies. Plus he was our hero because his guerrilla fighters rescued American pilots shot down in the jungle by the Japanese. Ho spent so much time with Americans that sometimes his own men only recognized him by the pack of Camels in his shirt pocket. Also, he loved President Roosevelt for pissing off Churchill by saying that colonialism had to end after the war. Ho even knew our Declaration of Independence by heart—it was his model for sending the French colonists home. But after FDR died, everything changed. Truman sold Ho Chi Minh down the river by supporting the French—otherwise France wouldn’t join NATO. But didn’t we also fight a revolution to get rid of the British? Didn’t we fight a civil war to keep our country from being split into north and south? Well, that’s what Ho Chi Minh is doing now—and we’re on the wrong side.

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The storm is a good opportunity for the pine and the cypress to show their strength. —Ho Chi Minh

The first generation of revolutionary nationalists had more difficulty occupying the legal-bureaucratic space of the colonial states than the charismatic space in people’s hearts. The first symbolic leaders of the upheavals that delivered proudly independent and assertive states-- Aung San, Ho Chi Minh, Sihanouk, Sukarno, Phibun Songkhram, Tunku Abdul Rahman—achieved an almost supernatural aura from their identification with racial/national liberation, though some of their henchmen also spilled considerable blood to achieve that result. Their successors invariably imposed more of an iron hand, particularly in what I have called the post-revolutionary countries, to defend a single definition of the fruits of those revolutions.

Travel Bucket List 1. Have a torrid affair with a foreigner. Country: TBD. 2. Stay for a night in Le Grotte della Civita. Matera, Italy. 3. Go scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef. Queensland, Australia. 4. Watch a burlesque show. Paris, France. 5. Toss a coin and make an epic wish at the Trevi Fountain. Rome, Italy. 6. Get a selfie with a guard at Buckingham Palace. London, England. 7. Go horseback riding in the mountains. Banff, Alberta, Canada. 8. Spend a day in the Grand Bazaar. Istanbul, Turkey. 9. Kiss the Blarney Stone. Cork, Ireland. 10. Tour vineyards on a bicycle. Bordeaux, France. 11. Sleep on a beach. Phuket, Thailand. 12. Take a picture of a Laundromat. Country: All. 13. Stare into Medusa’s eyes in the Basilica Cistern. Istanbul, Turkey. 14. Do NOT get eaten by a lion. The Serengeti, Tanzania. 15. Take a train through the Canadian Rockies. British Columbia, Canada. 16. Dress like a Bond Girl and play a round of poker at a casino. Montreal, Quebec, Canada. 17. Make a wish on a floating lantern. Thailand. 18. Cuddle a koala at Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary. Queensland, Australia. 19. Float through the grottos. Capri, Italy. 20. Pose with a stranger in front of the Eiffel Tower. Paris, France. 21. Buy Alex a bracelet. Country: All. 22. Pick sprigs of lavender from a lavender field. Provence, France. 23. Have afternoon tea in the real Downton Abbey. Newberry, England. 24. Spend a day on a nude beach. Athens, Greece. 25. Go to the opera. Prague, Czech Republic. 26. Skinny dip in the Rhine River. Cologne, Germany. 27. Take a selfie with sheep. Cotswolds, England. 28. Take a selfie in the Bone Church. Sedlec, Czech Republic. 29. Have a pint of beer in Dublin’s oldest bar. Dublin, Ireland. 30. Take a picture from the tallest building. Country: All. 31. Climb Mount Fuji. Japan. 32. Listen to an Irish storyteller. Ireland. 33. Hike through the Bohemian Paradise. Czech Republic. 34. Take a selfie with the snow monkeys. Yamanouchi, Japan. 35. Find the penis. Pompeii, Italy. 36. Walk through the war tunnels. Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam. 37. Sail around Ha long Bay on a junk boat. Vietnam. 38. Stay overnight in a trulli. Alberobello, Italy. 39. Take a Tai Chi lesson at Hoan Kiem Lake. Hanoi, Vietnam. 40. Zip line over Eagle Canyon. Thunderbay, Ontario, Canada.

During World War II the top secret “Norden XV” or “Blue Ox” otherwise known the Army Airforce’s “Norden M Series Bombsights,” were used up to and including the Vietnam War by all American military aircraft with bomb carrying capabilities. This bombsight was considered a “Canonical Tachometric Design” meaning that it had the ability to measure the aircraft's direction and ground speed. In time the Norden improved its original design by using a computer that constantly calculated the aircraft’s flight characteristic and external wind forces to determine the bomb's impact point. When the B-17 Flying Fortress was designed, it came equipped with a Sperry A-3 Autopilot that only corrected angular deviations in the aircraft’s straight and level course. In time most bombsights were replaced by video displays on the instrument panel. Dumb or gravity bombs were mostly replaced with in-flight guidance bombs, such as laser-guided bombs or those using a GPS system. The last combat use of the Norden bombsight was by the US Navy during the covert “Operation Igloo White” mission when OP-2E Neptune aircraft dropped electronic sensors to detect enemy activity along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Project CHECO Southeast Asia Report was declassified on May 5, 2013.

In a televised appearance in June, Goldwater made remarks that permitted viewers to infer that he would look favorably on a proposal that had appeared in an Air Force journal calling for the use of low-yield nuclear weapons to defoliate the Ho Chi Minh Trail, thereby exposing the North Vietnamese and their supply convoys to attack.

I have never met an American, be he military, O.S.S., diplomat, or journalist, who did not reach the same belief: that Ho Chi Minh was first and foremost a Vietnamese nationalist.

In October 1949 Acheson, now Secretary of State, talked about Indochina with Nehru, who was extremely pessimistic about the French experiment there (“the Bao Dai alternative,” as it was known). He outlined the failings of the prince and said that the French would never give Bao Dai the freedom necessary to hold the hopes and passions of his people. Acheson told Nehru he was inclined to agree, but that he saw no real alternative. This was an odd answer, since he was in effect saying that we were committed to a dead policy. Nehru, who like other newly independent Asian leaders refused to recognize Bao Dai, told Acheson that Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist, albeit a Communist. Nehru argued that European judgments on the failures of popular fronts were specious in an Asian context, and Acheson replied by talking about France and Italy. But at that early date, Acheson knew the French cause was both wrong and hopeless.

A young Vietnamese man working in a London hotel as a dishwasher watching events in Ireland unfold, as rebels made their bid for freedom in what became the War of Independence following the rising, was moved to remark on the death of Republican hunger striker Terence MacSwiney that ‘a country with a citizen like this will never surrender’.1 His name was Ho Chi Minh, and he would go on to emulate the guerrilla warfare tactics developed in Ireland as he took on the might of the United States’ war machine in the Vietnam War.

Vietnam was originally a matriarchy and, in 111 B.C. China tried to integrate it into the Han Empire, the first resistance leaders were women. A female military commander who managed, for a time, to successfully oppose the Chinese occupation of Vietnam, famously exhorted her troops: 'I'd like to ride storms, kill sharks in the open sea, drive out the aggressors, reconquer the country, undo the ties of serfdom, and never bend my back to be the concubine of whatever man.' Such heroines became iconic symbols of Vietnamese patriotism. The Chinese ruled Vietnam for one thousand five hundred years, imposing Confucian principles of male superiority. This provoked a deep divide between the north of the country, strongly influenced by China, and the south which kept alive the more relaxed culture of feminine sensuality. The nation's struggle for independence, finally won in 1428, was shaped by women's struggles for liberation from (Chinese) patriarchy. The whore was a distinct image of South Vietnam during two decades of the Vietnam War until the communist North's victory in 1975. Saigon — now Ho Chi Minh City — the 'Paris of the East' was dominated by corrupt politicians, army officers and gangsters who enjoyed and profited from prostitution rackets. After Communists seized power, a decade of severe repression followed, then an increasingly flagrant resurrection from prostitution in the late 1980s in reaction to poverty and austerity and austerity under communism.

He said the strategy of the VC was the same as International Christian Leadership’s,” gushed Robinson, “except applied physically and militarily.” Robinson’s vision of Worldwide Spiritual Offensive could not yet accommodate Ho Chi Minh’s tactics, but Sullivan convinced him their enemy was a worthy one. “They spend hours, days, weeks, whatever time is necessary setting up for the LEADERS and then either by ambush, assassination, or other intrigue, they do away with them—not the people, the leaders. He said to kill 32 top level people”—as the Vietcong had done the previous month—“was tantamount to immobilizing thousands.

Refusing the money would have aroused suspicion, so I took it. I was tempted to use it for charitable activity, namely the support of beautiful young women hampered by poverty, but I remembered what my father said, rather than what he did, as well as Ho Chi Minh’s adages.

Ho Chi Minh once put it more bluntly: “You will kill ten of us, and we will kill one of you, but it is you who will tire first.

In the minds of the Vietnamese people in general, Ho Chi Minh was a national hero who had led their struggle against the French. Except for a very small group of intellectuals, no one thought of him as a Communist, or as one who was about to establish a Communist regime in Vietnam.

Để bản thân bị chi phối bởi ấn tượng ban đầu là điều tối kị trong điều tra. Cô có thể đặt giả thuyết, nhưng cô phải nhớ, gia thuyết chưa chắc đã là sự thật. Cô đưa ra giả thuyết và tìm cách chứng minh giả thuyết đó sai, chứ không phải tìm bằng chứng chứng minh nó đúng.

The U.S. directed military-political aims at present are to herd the entire population in the countryside of South Vietnam into concentration camps - fortified villages surrounded with barbed wire entanglements and moats - from which the peasants may leave only in daylight hours under the guns of the U.S - Diemist troops. The main military operations are designed to sweep the peasants up into the so-called 'strategic hamlets', the concentration camp villages. The people of South Vietnam resist this, they refuse to live like slaves. With primitive arms made by themselves and those they can capture from their oppressors they fight back. In order to increase the pressure on them, U.S. planes have of late greatly stepped up their barbaric campaign of destroying rice and other food crops by air-sprayed chemicals and thus starve the peasants into submission.

One of the fascinating things about the human psyche is that people don't begrudge a wealthy person's making money, but they very much resent someone of lesser means making "too much" money.  I had been found guilty of trying to violate one of the most sacred, unwritten rules of the Jungle—the rule that little guys don't have a right to make big money.  Marie Antoinette said, "Let them eat cake," which was kind of cute.  But this New York lender with a Ho Chi Minh personality went one step further and seemed to be saying, "Let loan brokers eat—but not too much.

Every year, visit Singapore, Jakarta, Addis Ababa, Lagos, Mumbai, Ho Chi Minh City, and Silicon Valley. Each is creating the future in very different ways.

While in Europe aspiring Communists were motivated, above all, by the desire to ameliorate social injustices, the East Asian version of Communism had both social and nationalist dimensions. In the 1920s and 1930s, in the era when Kim Il Sung, Mao Zedong, and Ho Chi Minh were young idealists, Communism in East Asia was widely seen as a shortcut to the national revival and modernity, a way not only to solve social problems but also to leapfrog past stages of backwardness and colonial dependency.

Lately, the Army has found new worlds to conquer under the cloak of the Green Berets who operate with the CIA. Even the Air Force welcomes the utilization of the once proud B-52 strategic bomber in a function that is totally degrading—the blind bombardment of Indochina’s forests and wastelands on the assumption that there are worthwhile targets on the Ho Chi Minh trail. The only reason State and Defense can give for what they have permitted themselves to become engaged in is that “the intelligence reports” say the “enemy” is there. No one asks, What is the national objective in Indochina? No one has a national plan for Indochina. We have become counterpunchers without a game plan, and we have become that because we take our cues from raw intelligence data.

Tell me,’ Artemis said, his voice still weak. ‘How do I know you?’ And so Holly began her story: ‘It all started in Ho Chi Minh City one summer. It was sweltering by anyone’s standards. Needless to say, Artemis Fowl would not have been willing to put up with such discomfort if something extremely important had not been at stake. Important to the plan …

The skeptics had been there all along, since before the shooting started. During World War II, Franklin Roosevelt was their champion, and it’s not fanciful to believe that had he lived beyond 1945, FDR would have tried to keep France from forcibly reclaiming control of Indochina, and might well have succeeded, thereby changing the flow of history. But Roosevelt died, and soon thereafter patterns of thought were laid down that would drive U.S. policy for the next twenty years. American leaders in this era always had real choices about which way to go in the anti–Ho Chi Minh struggle, choices evident not only in retrospect but also at the time, yet the policy always moved in the direction of deeper U.S. involvement. Successive administrations could have shifted course, but they never did. Hence the danger in focusing exclusively on contingency: It can blind us to the continuities that permeate the entire American experience in Vietnam. And hence the vital importance, if we are to understand the U.S. war, of reckoning seriously with the earlier era.

The imperial heir in 1954, Bao Dai, was a nationalist who had abdicated after the Japanese occupation ended in 1945, giving his benediction to Ho Chi Minh. This conferred a legitimacy on Ho that proved troublesome when Bao Dai briefly returned to head the French-backed government of South Vietnam. From 1949 until 1955, the faux emperor failed to shake his image as an interloper. Ho had been designated the national leader, and Bao Dai was now seen simply (and correctly) as an agent of the French.

Years before, at his Marine Corps battalion headquarters he got to know two fellow marines who worked in intelligence. Basically, their role was to take three dinks up in a chopper, push two of them out and then write down everything the third dink told them so he could save his miserable Ho Chi Minh brainwashed communist asshole life.

The French Ministry of Colonies and the secret police demanded to know just who this agitator was. Three undercover agents were assigned to report on his every move. He called himself Nguyen Ai Quoc—“Nguyen the Patriot”—but his real name was Nguyen Tat Thanh. During his long, shadowy career he would assume some seventy different identities, finally settling on “Ho the Most Enlightened”—Ho Chi Minh—the name by which he remains best known (and by which he will be known in these pages).

These days, the U.S. constantly bombed the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Up in the mountains near a village called Pleiku, there was fighting. “That’s Long Binh,” one