Selected Ho Chi Minh

Poet Ho Chi Minh who punches from Vietnam to all humanity. No cannon will erase the furrow of your rice field. The right to live in peace. So sang Victor Jara the legendary Chilean singer-poet on behalf of millions around the world who were inspired by the heroism of the Vietnamese people and by their leader Ho Chi Minh. Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh / We shall fight we shall win! For a revolutionary whose name is immortalised in songs and slogans worldwide astonishingly little of Ho Chi Minh’s writing is available to a global readership. This volume seeks to fill that gap in some measure. It is often said of Ho Chi Minh that he was not a theorist and that he did not leave behind a corpus of theoretical texts. This is a narrow and false judgment. Ho Chi Minh did not have the time to set out a major theoretical treatise on the nature of the Vietnamese Revolution but the texts he left behind – a fraction of them collected in this volume – help us to understand the theory that enabled him to lead the Indochinese Communist Party and then the Workers Party to victory against imperialist aggression and to start the process of constructing socialism in Vietnam.