Ho Chi Minh

1. Ho Chi Minh By Michael Becton Period ”8”

2. Why the individual is considered an leader. • Ho chi mihn was the founder of the Indochinese communist party. Ho Chi Minh Was Noted for Success in Blending Nationalism and Communism. Ho chi lead the longest and most costly 20th century war against communist, his death might have lengthened the war.

3. Who are the followers of this individual? • Ho chi was supported by an Vietnamese liberation front called “Viet Cong”, also called the “Viet Mihn” during the battle against the French. • and the leader of North Vietnam from 1945 to 1969. Regardless of who looked up to him or not they had to being that he was the leader of North Vietnam at the time.

4. What characteristics separate this leader from others? • Although the most visible symbol of America's chief enemy in the Vietnam War, Ho Chi Minh was still a difficult figure to hate. A frail and benign-looking old man in peasant garb or Mao jacket, the leader of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam seemed perfectly described as 'Uncle Ho,' an epithet bestowed upon him by friend and enemy alike. Indeed, he often seemed more symbol than substance–a mere face on a poster, an intangible foe unreachable by modern means of warfare, an almost mythical personification of the Communist enemy.

5. How long was this person in leadership capacity? Why? • Ho chi mihn was in power from 1890-1969 • In 1940, a tidal wave swept over Southeast Asia. The Japanese pouring down from China, their offensive timed to Germany's conquest of France, crushed the French administration in Vietnam. They pushed on, driving the British from Malaya, the Dutch from Indonesia, the United States from the Philippines. An Asian nation had destroyed European colonialism. In early 1941, disguised as a Chinese journalist, he went by foot and sampan into southern China, then slipped across the border back into Vietnam –his first return in thirty years.

6. Positive traits of the individual that made them attractive to others. • Ho Chi Minh Was a good leader because At the Party Congress at Tours on Christmas Day, 1920, Ho Chi Minh sided with the Communist wing of the party since the Communists advocated immediate independence for all colonial areas. Vietnamese did not have to be Communist to join the fight against the French, and the ranks of the Viet Minh swelled with patriotic volunteers. He had certainly led his native Communist Party through almost 40 years of success, creating a state where none had existed before and devising a Communist government to run it. As a young Communist functionary, he avoided Stalin's great purges of the 1920s and 30s.

7. Negative traits of the individual that made them attractive to others. • Most people agree that dictatorship is in itself a bad thing, so that merely being a dictator is bad. Dictators impose their will on a country by force, rather than by seeking the consent of the population by running for election. Other than that, Ho Chi Minh insisted upon going to war with the southern half of Vietnam, and while North Vietnam did eventually succeed in conquering the south, it did so only at the cost of a very long, very destructive war in which a great many Vietnamese died. A kinder leader would have worked toward national reunification in a non-violent way.

8. Where does this person come from (background)? • Ho Chi Minh, real name Nguyen Tat Thanh (1890-1969), Vietnamese Communist leader and the principal force behind the Vietnamese struggle against French colonial rule. Ho was born on May 19, 1890, in the village of Kimlien, Annam (central Vietnam), the son of an official who had resigned in protest against French domination of his country. Ho attended school in Hue and then briefly taught at a private school in PhanThiet. In 1911 he was employed as a cook on a French steamship liner and thereafter worked in London and Paris. After World War I, using the pseudonym Nguyen Ai Quoc (Nguyen the Patriot), Ho engaged in radical activities and was in the founding group of the French Communist party. He was summoned to Moscow for training and, in late 1924, he was sent to Canton, China, where he organized a revolutionary movement among Vietnamese exiles. He was forced to leave China when local authorities cracked down on Communist activities, but he returned in 1930 to found the Indochinese Communist party (ICP). He stayed in Hong Kong as representative of the Communist International. In June 1931 Ho was arrested there by British police and remained in prison until his release in 1933. He then made his way back to the Soviet Union, where he reportedly spent several years recovering from tuberculosis. In 1938 he returned to China and served as an adviser with Chinese Communist armed forces.

9. How does this persons background affect ho chi’s leadership position • Ho chi was a wise old man so it may have been thought or assumed that he was a wise ma or that he was capable of taking on leadership,

10. What caused ho to fall form power? • Ho Chi Minh did not live to see the end of the war. On September 2, 1969, Ho chi mihn leader of North Vietnam died in Hanoi of heart failure. He did not get to see his prediction about American war fatigue play out. Such was his influence on North Vietnam, however, that when the southern capital at Saigon fell in April of 1975, many of the North Vietnamese soldiers carried posters of Ho Chi Minh into the city. Saigon officially was renamed Ho Chi Minh City in 1976.

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12. Sources • http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/ho-chi-minh/biography.htm • http://www.lonelyplanet.com/vietnam/ho-chi-minh-city • http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/ho-chi-minh/