Ho Chi Minh was a communist with brutality of his reign. Yet Ho Chi Minh still stands distinct from the rest of communist leaders

Everytime I look at our classroom in my previous middle school age, there will always be a photo of an old man, smiling in front of the students. Yes, that person is taught by many people in Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh. The man that sometimes we heard them bestowing the title "Uncle" as a respect.

He is, of course, revered by my mother and my maternal grandmother, although the latter has some criticism on Ho, but her respect does not change. My father's family is different - they despise Ho Chi Minh and consider him a tyrant, a dictator who slaughtered people and dissidents for his communist revolution. This is the most significant issue and a problem of my two traits - an anti-communist in a half and a communist in the other half.

Of course, I'd be happily to side with the anti-communists if this comes to Ho Chi Minh. However, with myself growing up, it is rather strange to realise that hating Ho Chi Minh isn't that simple - he is actually loved, and still being loved, by many people from the other countries. He has a plaque honouring his arrival to Bratislava, modern Slovakia. There is an avenue in Mozambique's capital Maputo writing the name of Ho. In Kolkata, there is a statue of the late North Vietnam leader. In Peru, there is a football club named after him in Ayacucho.

Okay, so now we go to the main detail. Ho Chi Minh was, indeed, of communist breed. So he had to be taken in line with Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Kim Il-sung, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, Nicolae Ceaușescu, Pol Pot, Enver Hoxha or other communist figures. However, for some reasons, Ho Chi Minh was often omitted out of these men - instead he was given a rather unique position that explained the complexity of the historical situations. This uniqueness may drive us to understand why Ho Chi Minh can, or can't, be taken into a similar position to that of these other communist dictators.

Exposure to the world

A great difference, though probably not entirely, between Ho Chi Minh and those fellow communist dictators was their exposure to the others.

Stalin, Mao and Kim, for example, had carried a skewed, distorted viewpoint about outside influence and appeared to be lacking the sense of realising the gravity of the real life. Hence, these dictators tended to enforce brutal, if not saying authoritarian, handling based on land reforms in the name of proletariat revolution. This was also what Pol Pot did with his Cambodian genocide.

Ho was different. Throughout his younger years, he boarded to Europe and North America, even living in the United States' city of Boston. He used the time in Boston to read American literature, admiring Charles Dickens and even conversed with Marcus Garvey, a Black Jamaican activist. Sensing racism and discrimination raging across the United States and Europe against Africans, Ho Chi Minh took a great sympathy to the African Americans. Nonetheless, Ho Chi Minh admired the United States for being triumphant against the British two centuries ago, as well as respecting its institutions with hope to get Vietnam free of French control.

Moreover, Ho Chi Minh used his traveling time to lecture himself English and French (later he learnt Chinese) to the point of acquiring proficiency without needing to attend college. It is impossible to imagine a communist leader like Joseph Stalin would even bother about studying, the Russian despot was even dropped from school. When Ho Chi Minh inspired its African brethren to rise up against European colonial powers, the Russians and Chinese were actually not so honest in helping Africa, but only aimed to exploit the continent for good.

Rationalism

This led to the second point. Because of Ho Chi Minh's greater exposure and his willingness to understand the reality, he did not fall into the false sense of proletariat ideology like that of the rest. While he did come to the Soviet Union and adopted communism for his goals, his message was never about communism - it was about a state that Vietnamese could live in peace.

It was necessary to remember that back in 1946, when Chiang Kai-shek's Republic of China Armed Forces began to march to northern Vietnam following the end of World War II, Ho Chi Minh was quick to remind his Viet Minh partners when talking about China,

You fools! Don't you realize what it means if the Chinese remain? Don't you remember your history? The last time the Chinese came, they stayed a thousand years. The French are foreigners. They are weak. Colonialism is dying. The white man is finished in Asia. But if the Chinese stay now, they will never go. As for me, I prefer to sniff French shit for five years than to eat Chinese shit for the rest of my life.

I did expect several communist leaders have no willingness to allow the bigger communist powerhouses to subjugate, but so far, only Josip Broz Tito appeared to carry that trait similarly to Ho Chi Minh. Moreover, despite Ho Chi Minh aligned North Vietnam with the Soviet Union, he was aware that Stalin and later communist leaders only treated him as a pawn for the Soviet gamble. There was a folk story in the north that I used to hear that back in 1972, when the Americans decided to enable a massive bombing campaign in the north to decimate the communists, the Soviets tacitly approved the American attacks without informing. This had a consequence as the relations between the Soviets and North Vietnamese strained for three years, before North Vietnam conquered the already demoralised South at the disbelief of Moscow and Beijing. While Ho Chi Minh died in 1969, he already didn't like to align North Vietnam with the USSR's politically, and frequently strayed away from Soviet demands.

Acknowledgement

It's definitely questionable at best, but Ho Chi Minh was eager to acknowledge about the wrongdoings more than that of fellow communist dictators. Kim Il-sung, for example, enacted a brutal reform that killed more than thousands before the Korean War and did not even think about accepting that he was wrong. Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin starved and killed millions but neither these dictators ever took responsibilities for it. Some leaders were actually megalomaniac like that of Albania's Hoxha or Romania's Ceaușescu, one built hundreds of war bunkers while one tried to Stalinise the nation. Even before dying, Cambodian communist dictator Pol Pot had also refused to believe he was wrong.

Ho Chi Minh was different. After the bloody land reforms in early 1960s that led to the deaths of thousands, Ho Chi Minh had to publicly apologise for the crimes. Ho Chi Minh also expressed that he could have built a greater relationship with the Christian population, which had been severely antagonised for siding with France, and that he believed persecution of Christians was not needed. These traits alone, though hard to verify 100%, already set Ho aside from the other communists.

The American influence

By comparison, the American influence in the communist leaders of Vietnam was another significant trait, probably more than that of Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslavia.

Every communist dictators considered the United States and its allies a problem. But that was not the thing with the North Vietnamese communist leadership, at least if you exempted the Vietnam War. Living in Boston aside, Ho Chi Minh was fond of America and even welcomed American spies aiding his army. OSS activities in Vietnam was short, but inspirational enough to come through this line - the Americans trained Ho's fledging militia force that would be the foundation of the PAVN (Vietnam's People's Army). That American experience played a key role in helping the PAVN to understand how the eventual ARVN worked.

And probably, thanked for the Americans, Ho Chi Minh became more emboldened with the view that, trusting nobody but itself. Ho Chi Minh's approval for his delegation to negotiate with the United States in 1968, a year before his death, triggered criticism from North Korea and China and shock from the Soviet Union, but was it matter?

Despite disliking the United States for fighting the Vietnam War, Ho Chi Minh still held no hatred, only expressing that there would have tea to serve.

Cult in the name of people

Ho Chi Minh also had his own cult, like many communist dictators. But the cult was only developed after his death. This set a difference from other dictators like Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong or Kim Il-sung, whose cult of personality was born even before they died. As much as it was ingenuine for some, the feeling was genuine for many people when Ho Chi Minh died. Ho Chi Minh never had interest in building a cult for his own. In that sense, he was more in common with Yugoslav dictator Josip Broz Tito, whose cults came in the personal interaction and understanding of public livelihood rather than being glorified like a God-like figure so untouchable, in that meaning, Ho Chi Minh being an ordinary man who raised to the fame and led a nation to liberation.

This cult also came with another reason: symbols. The flag of South Vietnam was designated in 1948 with French supervision (although there had been disputes about the first origin year), while the flag of modern communist Vietnam was from 1940, longer than that of its Chinese and South Vietnamese rivals. It could also help explain why several Vietnamese so eager to criticise the South's flag as a French colonial product. And then, the anthem of South Vietnam was actually from a Northern Vietnamese marching song calling for the end of French imperialism, endorsed by Ho Chi Minh.

A short conclusion

For these reasons above, Ho Chi Minh was made different from so many communist leaders because in a sense, he was not even communist at all. Not even in long term.

As much as his brutality and his persecution on dissidents were worth for us to condemn the once Viet Minh leader, his determination and his willingness, as well as sharing no hatred on America and its once allies, coinciding with his desire for a nationhood, set him away from the rest.

Fareed Zakaria had once stated that, during the early Cold War, the United States lumped all communist states together, making geopolitical mistakes that took them 25 years to realise, not all communist nations were the same. By this point, this was also true for Ho Chi Minh. And this could explain why Ho Chi Minh was set different from his fellow communist dictators.