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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dayuhan who wrote (12153)	8/26/1998 1:43:00 PM
From: JF Quinnelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

I don't know how the fact that Ho took Patti around with him "discredits" Patti. It's simply what happened. Ho was using Patti to give the people of Hanoi the impression that America supported him. At the time, the 55 year old Ho had been an active communist organizer for longer than Colonel Patti had been alive, yet Patti believed that Ho was ready to abandon his commitment to all that. The least surprising outcome is that Ho remained dedicated to Communist ideology and governed like his mentors in the USSR. After assuming power, Ho imprisoned some 100,000 people in "re-education camps". He rounded up 50,000 "landlords" and didn't just strip them of their property, he murdered them; much as Stalin liquidated the kulaks in Russia. In 1950, Ho began a war against the Catholics of North Vietnam, despite the fact that they were doing nothing to oppose Ho's regime. None of this should have been surprising to anyone familiar with the ideology of Marxism-Leninism, with which Ho repeatedly identified himself. American anti-war protestors who traveled to Hanoi during the Vietnam War often remarked on the posters of Stalin that still decorated government buildings there, 10 years after Stalin's death, after even the Soviets had discredited him for his brutality. Frances FitzGerald, an apologist for Ho, writes in Fire in the Lake: "Upon his return to Vietnam in the 1940s, Ho Chi Minh set up his headquarters in a cave above a swiftly rushing river. He renamed the mountain Marx, and the river Lenin...Through Marxism-Leninism he provided the Vietnamese with a new way to perceive their society and the means to knit it up into the skein of history. He showed them the way back to many of the traditional values and a way forward to the optimism of the West - to the belief in change as progress and the power of the small people. Through Marxism-Leninism he indicated the road to economic development, to a greater social mobility and a greater interaction between the masses of the people and their government."