Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Ho Chi Minh

Two weeks ago, I reread some of the writings of Ho.  You are struck with the dumb American caricature of the man.  While he wrote lousy poetry, he was a smart polemicist and pamphleteer.  His directive to his revolutionary followers were simple but incisive.  What also struck me is that he wrote an early essay  in the 1920s (study, really) of the KKK (it was later published in Moscow as a study of the "Negro question".  The man who was mocked in US media knew his enemy far better than the Americans knew their enemy in Vietnam.