We first passed by the Presidential Palace, built by the French colonialists a century earlier. It is claimed in my guidebook that Ho Chi Minh refused to live and work in the palace as long as his nation was at war.
It was also in his character to live a less pretentious life-style.
Instead, when Ho Chi Minh slept and worked in Hanoi officially as president starting in 1954, he slept either the guards' quarters in another less fancy structure on the same old palace grounds or slept in a simple two story stilt wooden house across the pond on the grounds of the former French governor general's palace for Northern Vietnamese territories.
Next, my tour group proceeded to pass by the Dien Huu Pagoda and then went into the Ho Chi Minh Museum. In the 1980s I had visited similar sort of museums glorifying national communist revolution in both Moscow and East Berlin. Currently, Ho Chi Minh's Museum's narration still praises communist victory in much the same language. On the other hand, as a whole Minh's museum was much humbler and visually more entertaining than either of those two I had witnessed in Europe prior to the end of the Cold War.
The focus in the oldest sections of the museum were on happiness (pursuit of?), freedom and a hoped for peace. More effort is made to explain the victories over the French than to explain the war with America. (Ho Chi Minh died in 1969, so he never saw the reunification of the country in 1975.)
One of the oldest displays notes that on September 2, 1945 the first document created by the communist-led coalition, which had just kicked out the Japanese occupiers, was based almost wholly on America's Declaration of Independence of 1776.
It appeared that many of the most trite communist phrasings have been taken out of display in the museum in recent decades. One of the remaining phrases on the first floor displays a quotation from Uncle Ho that seems to be pointing a finger at the current age of Communist leaders and national bureaucrats in both Vietnam and China:
"The revolutionaries must be ones of virtue. Without virtue, they cannot lead the people no matter how skilled or talented they are."
Almost any English speaking Vietnamese I met concurred that over the past three-plus decades, the corruption and cronyism in Communist governance has left the whole country not only underdeveloped but disillusioned (and lacking hope).
Hanoi has obviously developed negative aspects in recent decades but I observed positive changes, too. Negatives include the lack of planning for mass transportation in a country that moved from bicycles to cars and motorbikes too quickly.
Positive changes include much more tolerant attitudes towards ethnic groups-allowing Vietnams minority families, for example, to bear more than two children per household (which is the rule in Vietnam for the highly urbanized Viet peoples in the country).
Upstairs at the Ho Chi Minh Museum is an attempt to link Ho Chi Minh to the various artistic and mass cultural developments of the early- to mid-20th Century. This is likely done, not in order to claim that Ho Chi Minh influenced cubism and other movements in the 20th century, but in order to show that he and Vietnam were part of a wave of historical materialism.
In any case, the upstairs displays make up a fascinating montage of graphic design and artwork, commemorating a man (and his generation) that most American youth today know next-to-nothing about.
Meanwhile, we need to remind ourselves and the youth of today that those individuals who grew of age in America of the 1960s or 1970s would have been told at times by propagandists that this relatively humble leader was the "devil incarnate on earth". In other words, although Ho Chi Minh had never threatened to invade the USA, he had been known in my childhood as our generation's Osama bin Laden. Therefore, both Australia and New Zealand would send troops to serve alongside the Americans in Vietnam during the 1960s.
ARCHIPELEGOS, BEAUTY AND THE GULF OF TONKIN
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