Ho Chi Minh
By Syed Akbar Ali
This is a short story. It has significance to what is going on in our country.
Ho Chi Minh was the great Vietnamese freedom fighter, liberator, statesman and hero of the oppressed peoples. Ho Chi Minh died in 1969, when I was nine years old. Also known as 'Uncle Ho', his birth name was Nguyen Sinh Cung. Ho Chi Minh who was of Chinese ancestry translates to 'He Who Enlightens'.
At that time the US was bombing Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia back to the Stone Age. It was called the Vietnam War. I clearly remember watching the ‘Dunia Di Sana Sini’ program on Television Malaysia (no RTM yet at that time) which would show black and white footage of American GIs using flamethrowers to burn attap huts belonging to Vietnamese villagers.
Till today I cannot figure out how attap huts in Vietnam were a threat to the security and vital interests of the ‘Yewnited States of Americky’ That is one evil and adulterous generation (Matthew 14:6-8) which is still dancing around the fire in the Yewnited States.
At that time the Americans successfully brainwashed all of us into believing that the Vietnamese were bad people led by an ugly monster called Ho Chi Minh. So like the simple, Third World, Mat Salleh wannabe bumpkins that we were (and many many still are) we all chorused the American line that our own neighbors were monsters.
The French colonials started taking control of Vietnam in the 1860s. By 1863 the entire country was a full fledged French colony.
