Re: New biography states that Ho Chi Minh attended Marcus Garveyrallies

[Dennis R Redmond <dredmond@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 15 Oct 2000, Louis Proyect wrote:

> NY Times Book Review, October 15, 2000
>'Half Lenin, Half Gandhi'
> A biography of Ho Chi Minh seeks to illuminate the leader who for all
> his prominence preferred to remain a cipher.

Hmm, interesting. According to the review, sounds like Duiker managed
to interview some of Ho's old buddies and compadres; his conclusion,
that Ho wasn't really running Vietnam in the 1960s, is of course a bit
disingenuous (probably a concession to the cadres he interviewed, who
are terribly nostalgic for Ho, but not quite willing to view their own
commitment to the one-party-state critically). The first chapter has some
fascinating material on Ho's childhood, for sure.

I've often thought that contemporary Marxisms would be enormously enriched
by first-rate psychobiographies of those two remarkable revolutionaries,
Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong, on the scale of Erik Erikson's simply
mind-blowing study of Gandhi and the cultural, psychological and
anticolonial roots of civil disobedience ("Gandhi's Truth"), or Sartre's
famous study of Flaubert.

-- Dennis