Ho Chi Minh

At the end of the nineteenth century, revolutionary movements began to arise throughout Asia. Asian Nationalists struggled against the oppressive European imperialists who ruled much of the continent. Many of these revolutionary movements were at least nominally Communist. Mao Zedong led Chinese Communists against Japanese forces in World War II and against a rival group of Chinese led by Chiang Kai-Shek in a civil war before assuming control of the entire nation. Pol Pot, who would go on to become one of history’s worst mass murderers, became ’s dictator by leading the Khmer Rouge rebels, a Communist group. Ho Chi Minh, who led the Viet Minh, became the leader of . Ho, despite his communism, was fiercely nationalistic, refusing to let or the Soviet Union dictate the way his country was run. After being internationally recognized as the leader of , Ho led the country on a path toward his ultimate goal of unification, despite an inevitable clash with the . 

When Ho Chi Minh was born, what is now known as was ruled by the French, divided into three of the five states of French Indochina. By the time he entered his teenage years, Ho had already begun working with Vietnamese insurgents. In his early twenties, Ho left aboard a French merchant ship and eventually ended up in Paris. Ho’s nationalism was already prominent, as he began calling himself Nguyen Ai Quoc, which means Nguyen Who Loves His Country. He read widely and began an association with the far left wing of French poitics. At the end of World War I, Ho Chi Minh presented a proposal for stronger Vietnamese participation in government to the Versailles peace conference. Ho had not yet begun to demand independence, but was laughed at. By the next year, Ho was officially a Communist. In the French Communist Party, he found a group more open to his fight to liberate .