Why Do Radical Leftists Make Heroes Out of Totalitarian Dictators?

Ho Chi Minh was a cadre of Stalin and Mao who seized power through terrorism and mass murder. The Viet Minh collaborated with French colonial forces to massacre supporters of the Vietnamese nationalist movements from 1945-6. When the Viet Minh went to war against France they continued their campaign to wipe out nationalist groups.[1] In 1952, Ho launched a "rent reduction" campaign in which communist planners decided to massacre 1 out of every 1,000 North Vietnamese.[2]

From mid 1953 to early 1956, Ho organized a ruthless "land reform" program in which French collaborators, anti-communists, and the "wealthy" were viciously massacred in what former Hanoi official Nguyen Minh Can calls a "genocide triggered by class discrimination."

Writer Tran Manh Hao witnessed the land reforms, which prompted the evacuation of most of his family to South Vietnam. "I saw the extreme horror, and I wondered what kind of regime this was, that had no other method than to repress and annihilate people," Hao said. "It took them to 'people’s courts' and shot them on the scene without a fair trial and even without any evidence. The land reform campaign was a crime of genocide like that of Pol Pot". Another writer, Duong Thu Huong, recalls seeing bodies as a child of eight when he went out to water vegetables: "Right in front of my house was a hanged man in the year of the land reform. When I was eight years old, I had to accompany the students to public locations where landowners were dishonored and tortured. In the back of my house lay another dead man who had been wrongly classified as a landowner. He cut his own throat by laying it on the railway track. At my age of eight when I went to water the vegetables, I witnessed such tragic deaths with my own eyes. They greatly horrified and scared me."[2]

5.68% of the population of some 14 million was targeted for persecution—an arbitrary ratio the party later admitted was “far too high”. Official records from the time suggest that 172,008 "landlords" were killed during the campaign, of whom 123,266 (71.66%) were later found to be wrongly classified.[3] Lam Thanh Liem, a major authority on land issues in Vietnam, conducted multiple interviews in which communist cadres independently gave estimates for executions ranging from 120,000 to 200,000. Such figures match the "nearly 150,000 houses and huts which were allocated to new occupants".[4] These figures are proportionally comparable to those for the Chinese land reform, in which millions of "landlords" were mercilessly slaughtered by Chairman Mao.

Viet Cong death squads assassinated perhaps 80,000 civilians in South Vietnam.[5] They sliced off the genitals of village chiefs and sewed them inside their bloody mouths; cut off the tongues of helpless victims; rammed bamboo lances through one ear and out the other; slashed open the wombs of pregnant women; disemboweled random civilians and draped their mutilated bodies on fences; machine gunned children; hacked men and women to pieces with machetes; burned down Montagnard villages with flamethrowers; closed hundreds of schools, abducted dozens of teachers, and cut off the fingers of small children who dared to get an education.[6]

Radical Left pseudo-scholars continue to whitewash the crimes of "Uncle Ho" and to credulously accept North Vietnamese propaganda at face value--while ignoring reports from refugees, foreign witnesses, dissident publications, and defectors. Am I wrong in assuming that the leftists who worship Ho, Mao, Fidel, Mugabe, and their ilk are totalitarian fanatics who wish to commit the same atrocities here?

[1]Robert F. Turner, Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development (Hoover Institution Press, 1975), pp57-9, 67-9, 74.

[2]Alex Holcomb, Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Summer 2010, quoting a translated Politburo directive from May 4, 1953. This directive was published in Complete Collection of Party Documents (Van Kien Dang Toan Tap), a 54 volume work authorized by the Vietnamese Communist Party.

[3] The History of the Vietnamese Economy (2005), Vol. 2, edited by Dang Phong of the Institute of Economy, Vietnamese Institute of Social Sciences.

[4] Lam Thanh Liem, "Chinh sach cai cach ruong dat cua Ho Chi Minh: sai lam hay toi ac?" in Jean-Francois Revel et al., Ho Chi Minh, (Nam A, 1990), pp 179-214.

[5]Benjamin Valentino, Final solutions: mass killing and genocide in the twentieth century, (Cornell University Press, 2005), p88. As Valentino is sympathetic to the communists, this could be an undercount.

[6]”The Blood-Red Hands of Ho Chi Minh” Readers Digest, November 1968.