Ho Chi Minh's Declaration of Independence
Vietnam is the clearest case of a superpower losing a war it chose to fight. The USA poured money, troops and bombs into Vietnam for two decades and still watched the country unite under communist rule in 1975. To see why, start with the man the Americans ended up fighting, and with what he actually wanted.
A Vietnamese nationalist movement led by Ho Chi Minh. It fought Japan during the Second World War, often helped the US military, and aimed to win independence from France.
Vietnam was a French colony. Japan occupied it in 1940 but left the French in charge until March 1945, when it disarmed them. When Japan surrendered in 1945, France wanted its colony back. The Viet Minh moved first. On 2 September 1945 Ho read out a Declaration of Independence for the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
The Declaration is a carefully built argument against France:
- France had handed Indochina to Japan in autumn 1940, leaving the Vietnamese under what Ho called a "double yoke" of French and Japanese rule.
- Ho said that more than two million Vietnamese in the north had starved to death between late 1944 and early 1945. Historians estimate between about 400,000 and 2 million.
- On 9 March 1945 Japan disarmed the French troops, who fled or surrendered. In Ho's telling, France had sold the country to Japan twice in five years.
From this he drew his conclusions. The new Provisional Government cut every colonial tie with France, cancelled the treaties France had signed on Vietnam's behalf and ended French special privileges. The people would resist any French attempt to reconquer them.
Look at who the Declaration is aimed at. Ho reminded the Allies that at Tehran and San Francisco they had accepted self-determination and the equality of nations.
He described a people who had resisted France for over eighty years and had fought on the Allied side. He was asking the wartime winners, the USA above all, to live up to their own principles. Ho fully expected American support.
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