Don't confuse Ho Chi Minh with Pol Pot

[Stop_the_War]

Ho Chi Minh = HERO
Pol Pot = MURDEROUS DICTATOR

Big difference between them. Also Ho Chi Minh was from Vietnam and Pol Pot was from Cambodia. I remember one poster on the other thread talking about "ho chi minh was a dictator" blah blah blah and all this other nonsense. I think that person was just confused.

[DenverDem]

1. "HO, HO, Ho Chi Minh!"

I chanted that a few hundred times trying to stop the amerikkkan war of invasion of the 60's.

[JanMichael]

2. There's always a great deal of confusion on those types of threads.

Xenophobia, ethnocentrism and imperialism, are traits that even DUers can have.

Oh well, I suppose that's to be expected in this day and age.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

3. Not only that but it was"evil commie" Vietnam that STOPPED Pol Pot! (nt)

[Padraig18]

4. Both = totalitarian Communist thugs. eom

[iamjoy]

5. How Is Ho Chi Minh A Hero?

explain, please.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

6. It's a longer and more complex story than black-and-white thinking

will permit.

Ho Chi Minh lived in the U.S. early in his life and was inspired by the Declaration of Indpendence and all that good stuff. However, when he asked Woodrow Wilson for help in obtaining self-determination for Vietnam, he was rebuffed.

That's when he turned to Communism.

He fought both the Japanese and the French, and in 1956, the U.S. prevented nationwide elections from occurring in Vietnam, because it was clear that Ho Chi Minh was going to win.

Was he a dictator? Sure, in many ways, but he didn't start out that way, and he was able to inspire tremendous loyalty among people who lived in appalling conditions for over twenty years to achieve the goal of independence from Western control. It is significant that people who lived IN South Vietnam (the Viet Cong guerillas) under pro-Western governments fought for him, only partly supported by troops from the North and that only after the U.S. had escalated its military involvement.

Vietnam did not HAVE TO turn out the way it did. If only Woodrow Wilson had been perceptive enough to realize the advantages of freeing colonized people everywhere, not just in the former empires of Russia and Austria-Hungary.