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Jake Humbert
Williams
English 112
16 April 2015
Ho Chi Minh and His Communist Regime
What would it be like to have a leader who is a mass murderer? Unfortunately, this is
what the Vietnamese people experienced in the 1950s and 1960s due to their Communist leader,
Ho Chi Minh. The crimes committed by Ho Chi Minh and his communist regime toward the
Vietnamese people must not be exhibited in any form of government today. The killing and
starving of innocent people cannot be justified. Nobody deserves to be treated the way these
people were, and governments should not treat their own people like animals. We must never
allow another government with a leader like Ho Chi Minh again.
It all started near the end of World War II. The French were defeated and The Vietnamese
were no longer under French control. This opened up for Vietnamese nationalism (Moise). This
is where Ho Chi Minh and The Viet Minh come into play. The Viet Minh did all they could to try
and make friends with The United States. Even Ho Chi Minh contacted U.S. officials in Asia,
who supplied him with weapons. However, these attempts at a new friend were in vain. By the
end of 1945, The French were back in Vietnam and wanted to control them, even though Ho Chi
Minh wanted independence. When 1946 arrived, The French and Vietnamese were at war
(Moise). At the end of this war, Ho signed a peace treaty with The French , however, before long,
he dismissed it and

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continued on (Moise). He wanted absolute rule with his Communist party. Leading up to the
Vietnam War, a terrible thing happened- The land reform terrors.
The land reform terrors occurred in 1955, a year before the war. The land reforms were a
massacre of good, innocent, and honest people, mainly due to class discrimination (Mudie). Any
person accused of being a landlord was either starved, killed on the spot, or thrown in prison to
die (Mudie). The point of this was to break up trust and companionship within a village, and
recruit new Communist Party members. A former Hanoi government member, Nguyen Minh Can
says it amounted to genocide, with about 172,000 plus killed (Mudie).
In 1956, Ho invaded South Vietnam. Now that South Vietnam has been invaded, the
terror of war begins. Minh was trying to unite Vietnam together as one Communist state.
However, The Southern Vietnamese, The U.S., and the Vietnamese people were fighting back.
Ho unleashed his relentless violence. Civilians were murdered, POWs murdered, anyone who
opposed his rule was murdered. The Northern Vietnamese were fighting relentlessly. All
throughout the war, the typical torturing and killing was observed. Despite this, before and after
the war seemed to be the worst times. With The Northern Vietnamese emerging victorious, The
Southern Vietnamese, prisoners of war, and civilians were placed in reeducation camps. The
idea of these camps were to learn about the ways of the new government. The Northern
Vietnamese treated people very harshly in these camps (Kuklewicz). The conditions were poor,
the food was scarce and bad tasting, and there was little medical attention. The worst part,

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however, was the actual labor. The prisoners were worked to death and never caught a break
(Kuklewicz). The camps became more of a work camp than a reeducation camp.
Having a leader of your government like Ho Chi Minh would be terrible. There were too
many innocent people killed for no reason. There is no justification for actions like these,
especially when committed by ones own government. Any governments today similar to these
would be terrible to society.

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Works Cited
Kuklewicz, Andrew. Vietnam Bibliography. Ed. Dan Duffy. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Mar. 2015. Moise,
Edwin E. The Emergence of The Viet Minh. N.p., 1998. Web. 24 Mar. 2015.
Mudie, Luisetta. 50 Years on, Vietnamese Remember Land Reform Terror. Ed.
Rummel, R.J. Statistics of Vietnamese Democide. Ed. R.J. Rummel. N.p., 1997. Web.
Who was Ho Chi Minh? A Deceitful Mass Murderer. N.p., 14 Apr. 2014. Web. 24 Mar. 2015.

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