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 Phan Thiet.
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. When Japan occupied Vietnam in 1941, he resumed contact with ICP leaders and helped to found a new Communist-dominated independence movement, popularly known as the Vietminh, that fought the Japanese.
In August 1945, when Japan surrendered, the Vietminh seized power and proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in Hanoi. Ho Chi Minh, now known by his final and best-known pseudonym (which means the “Enlightener”), became president.
The French were unwilling to grant independence to their colonial subjects, and in late 1946 war broke out. For eight years Vietminh guerrillas fought French troops in the mountains and rice paddies of Vietnam, finally defeating them in the decisive Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Ho, however, was deprived of his victory. Subsequent negotiations at Geneva divided the country, with only the North assigned to the Vietminh.
The DRV, with Ho still president, now devoted its efforts to constructing a Communist society in North Vietnam. In the early 1960s, however, conflict resumed in the South, where Communist-led guerrillas mounted an insurgency against the U.S.-supported regime in Saigon.
Ho, now in poor health, was reduced to a largely ceremonial role, while policy was shaped by others. On September 3, 1969, he died in Hanoi of heart failure. In his honor, after the Communist conquest of the South in 1975, Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City. Ho Chi Minh was not only the founder of Vietnamese communism, he was the very soul of the revolution and of Vietnam’s struggle for independence. His personal qualities of simplicity, integrity, and determination were widely admired, not only within Vietnam but elsewhere as well.
– Interviewing President Ho Chi Minh (English subtitle), June 1964
– The Path Which Led Me To Leninism
– Bài Ca Hồ Chí Minh! Ballad of Ho Chi Minh!
– Basic Introduction of Ho Chi Minh ideology
– Think Like a Vietnamese Commie
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I’m not saying we should go back in time and kill Gibson and Sterling before they can write The Difference Engine, but i think if we show them footage of the whole “Steampunk” fad from a few years ago they will voluntarily choose to avert that timeline out of pure cringe.
Which is funny because from what I remember of The Difference Engine, it was mostly “If the British actually built a Babbage machine everything would be much, much worse”. Somehow the steampunk fanciers never managed to stumble on the idea that the era of high colonialism was very bad and mechanical computers would have made it badder.
I think this is a necessary limitation of the Genre. Cyberpunk is, at it’s core, a warning, and as such most stories are about a future that sucks, a point at which things have gone so wrong that none of the individual actors in the story have a chance to do anything beyond look after themselves and their close friends.
A lot of post-cyberpunk stories do go beyond this, positing futures where capitalism can fail and technology once again becomes a tool rather than a cage, even if a very dangerous tool. Personally I think Cyberpunk a tool whose time has passed. They warned us, we didn’t listen (I mean I did, I’m typing this on a telegraph machine from an undisclosed location in the remote wastes of Iowa), and now that we got the Bad Future it takes a little more oomph to tell a relevant story in the genre.
Oh boy steampunked =) The 19th century London aspects of it never really appealed to me, Idk. Actually never read The Difference Engine tho!
Yeah, I’m certain there are good cyperbunks out there trying to do interesting things with the genre, like I haven’t read The Fortunate Fall for instance, it just seems like CP2077 de-evolved the entire thing for a lot of people, which I hate to see Idk. Post cyberpunk…
I don’t remember much of the difference engine except at one point the British were besieging a city in England. They used the computer they had with them to mathematically plot how to create a firestorm by firing incendiary shells at the right points around the city to kill the most people possible in the most horrific way possible. And I was like yeah, that tracks.
The entire meta-genre of cautionary tales is a fool’s errand.