Word: ho
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Ho was born in 1890 in Nghe An province, in what is today North Viet Nam. According to a local maxim, "a man born in Nghe An province will oppose anything," and both his parents were cast in that rebellious mold. His father lost his post as a magistrate for associating with the anti-French movement; his mother, who died when Ho was ten, was charged with stealing weapons from French barracks for the rebels. At the time, nationalism was beginning to be a potent force in Southeast Asia, spurred by the generally oppressive colonial rule of the French, British...
...first generation of Asian nationalists, of which Ho was a charter member, seized on these borrowed ideas. Ho's emphasis on nationalism made him stand out in the memories of his fellow Communists. Ruth Fischer, a leading German party member who knew Ho in the 1920s, wrote: "It was Ho's nationalism which impressed us European Communists, born and bred in a rather gray kind of abstract internationalism." To classic nationalistic sentiments, Asians added an indigenous ingredient ?barely contained outrage at the fact that the European colonizers almost inevitably humiliated the peoples they sought to rule. "Natives" were...
Imbued with the nationalist ideals of his father, Ho finished his schooling, taught briefly in the South and finally, about 1914, shipped out to Europe. For several years, he held a series of odd jobs, including a spell as a pastry cook under the famed French Chef Escoffier at London's Carlton Hotel. In Paris, Ho worked as a gardener and photo retoucher. In 1917, so one account goes, he worked his way across the Atlantic as a merchant seaman, visiting New York, Boston and perhaps San Francisco. One source says that Ho worked briefly as a waiter...
Over the next decade, Ho the Asian nationalist became Ho the Westernized Asian Communist. He absorbed the teachings of Marx and Lenin during two years of study at Moscow's Toilers of the East University, wrote a host of articles on colonial problems for Communist-front magazines. In 1925, he was assigned by the Comintern to go to Canton as an adviser to Soviet Agent Mikhail Borodin, then an adviser to the Chinese Nationalists...
...Canton, he began preparing for his eventual return to Viet Nam. Nationalism, Ho saw, was the foundation on which an independent Viet Nam could be built. To this end, he began organizing young Vietnamese nationalists exiled in China, slowly building the organization that was to become his apparatus of power. In the process, he proved that he could be utterly cruel...