Word: ho
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...after an intensive course in subversive techniques at Moscow's University of the Toilers of the East (during which he established the beginnings of a close friendship with Stalin), Ho struck the theme that would resound throughout his career. Addressing the Fifth Comintern Congress that summer, he took European Communists to task for failing to appreciate the potential for revolution in underdeveloped areas. "You will forgive my frankness," he said, "but I cannot avoid explaining that the speeches of my comrades from the mother countries have given me the impression that they are trying to kill a snake...
Teacher's Pet. Giving up the soft life of a Moscow student, with its "party spouses" and anticapitalist polemics, Ho set out for China under the name of Nguyen Ai Quoc (roughly, "Smith the Patriot"), as agitator and translator for Stalin's agent Mikhail Borodin. Their mission: to penetrate the Kuomintang and train Communist can bo (cadres) to infiltrate French Indo-China. At Canton's Whampoa Military Academy, Ho demonstrated his skills as a disciplinarian. Any student-agitator who failed to show sufficient diligence was promptly betrayed to the French when he infiltrated Viet Nam. Most...
...Ho's academic career ended abruptly in 1927, when Chiang Kai-shek turned on the Chinese Communists and drove them underground. Ho's hegira took him back and forth between Moscow and China for the next 13 years, forming new parties, resting in British or Chinese jails, organizing hunger strikes, taking a concubine who later bore him a daughter, and writing inspirational poetry when nothing more inspiring could be done...
Planted Seeds. In 1940, for the first time in 28 years, Ho returned to his native Viet Nam. Operating from the mountainous caves of Cao Bang province (where he dutifully dubbed a streamlet "Lenin Spring"), Ho planted the seeds of the Viet Minh-the underground outfit that would carry him to power. During the five-year Japanese occupation of World War II, he carefully nursed alliances with the Chinese Communists, the Kuomintang and the American OSS, receiving some aid from all three. His steady aim: to strengthen the Viet Minh and one day kick out the French...
...tough young trooper named Vo Nguyen Giap, harassed the Japanese and perfected the tactics of jungle Marxism. When 200,000 Chinese Nationalist troops marched into Viet Nam with French approval at war's end, Giap's guerrillas were ready to continue the struggle. But Ho typically preferred the more subtle tactic of turning ally against ally, and promptly sought to persuade the French to oust the Chinese again. Ho knew that France would be an easier adversary to deal with. Besides, there was the age-old hatred and fear of the Chinese. As Ho told his "United Front...