So do you think his murdering countless thousands of his political enemies was attributable to Ho's undying admiration for American Ideals? One can immediately see the attraction that Obama has to him.
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
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