HO CHI MINH BIOGRAPHY

Ho Chi Minh, was born May 19, 1890, Kimlien, Annam, Vietnam.

Attended school in Hue. Later, Ho Chi Minh taught at a private school in Phan Thiet.

In 1911 Ho Chi Minh was employed as a cook on a French steamship liner. After World War I, Ho Chi Minh engaged in radical activities, and was part of the founding group of the French Communist party.

Ho Chi Minh was summoned to Moscow where he was given training. Then in 1924, Ho Chi Minh was sent to Canton, China, to organize a revolutionary movement among Vietnamese exiles. In 1930, Ho Chi Minh founded the Indochinese Communist party (ICP).

In June 1931 Ho Chi Minh was arrested in Hong Kong by British police. He was kept in prison until his release in 1933.

He returned to the Soviet Union, where he spent several years recovering from tuberculosis. Ho Chi Minh returned to China in 1938 and worked as an adviser with the Chinese Communist armed forces.

When Japan occupied Vietnam in 1941, Ho Chi Minh helped to found a new Communist-dominated independence movement known as the Vietminh. In 1945, with Japan defeated, the Vietminh took power and proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh became president.

The French were unwilling to give the Vietnamese independence, and in 1946 war broke out. For eight years Vietminh guerrillas fought the French troops, finally defeating them in 1954. However, negotiations at Geneva divided the country.

Conflict resumed in the 1960`s, when the North mounted an insurgency against the U.S. puppet regime in Saigon. Ho Chi Minh died on September 3, 1969, in Hanoi of heart failure. I In his honor, Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City.

Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com:
Ho Chi Minh (1890-1969) fought for half a century to free Vietnam from foreign domination, and the story of his life illuminates the ongoing struggle between colonialism and nationalism that still shapes world history. William J. Duiker, who served in Saigon's U.S. embassy during the Vietnam War, spent 30 years delving into Vietnamese and European archives, as well as interviewing Minh's surviving colleagues, in order to write this definitive biography. The son of a civil servant from a traditionally rebellious province, the future president of North Vietnam was known for more than 20 years as Nguyen That Thanh. It was under this name that he founded the Vietnamese Communist Party, having concluded after reading Lenin's analysis of imperialism that revolutionary Marxism was the most effective tool to achieve Vietnam's independence. He spent 30 years in exile, cementing his communist ties in Moscow and working with Vietnamese rebels from a base in China, before assuming the name Ho Chi Minh in 1942, when the forces unleashed by World War II seemed to be clearing the way for Vietnamese liberation. French intransigence and American anti-communism would delay the emergence of an independent, united Vietnam for another 30 years, but Ho became an icon who inspired the communist North and the Southern Vietcong to keep fighting. Focusing almost exclusively on political events and ideological debates, Duiker depicts Ho as a nationalist first and foremost, but also as a convinced (though pragmatic) Marxist who believed socialism would help his country modernize and correct ancient inequities. This long, very detailed biography is not for the casual reader, but anyone with a serious interest in modern history will relish a dense narrative that fully conveys the complexities of the man and the issues with which he grappled. --Wendy Smith
Read More Here....Ho Chi Minh: A Life

World War Two

Paralumun New Age Village