Opinion of Ho Chi Minh

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HP. Let's not get so caught up in condemning American involvement in Vietnam (which, for the record, was immoral and stupid) that we forget that the North Vietnamese regime was truly horrible.

Yeah, it's really horrible to make sure that people have a place to sleep, food to eat, adequate medical care, and a job.

Communist=HP

I think its funny how Lenin, Mao and Ho. Despite fighting for communism for their whole lives. Their countries eventually adopt capitalism

Interestingly enough, the USSR was never capitalist at any point during it's 70 year lifespan and capitalism itself was not restored there until the USSR was overthrown by internal counterrevolutionary elements among the Stalinist bureaucracy and external economic and military pressures. Likewise, both Vietnam and China retain state-owned, state-directed economies, in spite of adopting market-oriented reforms since the 1970s. Neither of those countries are capitalist, however.

As for the OP, Ho Chi Minh was a Stalinist despot who purged the Trotskyists (i.e. the actual Marxists) that made up the majority of the Indochinese Communist Party in the 1940s and set back the struggle for independence by making deal after deal with the Western powers and only moving to actual resistance whenever popular opposition pushed him in that direction. That said, the Vietnamese struggle for independence and unification was a progressive historical struggle that wiped out capitalism in Indochina (where allied communists came to power in Laos, and later (after the stamping out of the primitivist Khmer Rouge by the Vietnamese) Cambodia) and uplifted the poor peasantry of the country, greatly enhancing social welfare for the masses of these countries, improving literacy, and opening up equal opportunity for women.

That his Stalinist forebears have moved away from all these things in an attempt to pursue 'peaceful coexistence' with Western imperialism is not surprising given it's unstable social position and need to balance itself against a (growing) Vietnamese working class with social power that could threaten its ability to rule. Nonetheless, Vietnam remains a (bureaucratically deformed) workers' state today, one in need of a political revolution to oust  Ho's heirs and place the workers and poor farmers of Vietnam in power.

Voted FF in the poll in protest of the anti-communist garbage in this thread.

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anti-communist garbage

There's no such thing.

How about these guys?

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Amazing if you weren't an air traffic controller, black person (what with the CIA funneling crack-cocaine into the ghetto for the whole of the 1980s!), Nicaraguan peasant, miner, Afghan woman, etc, etc.

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anti-communist garbage

There's no such thing.

Reagan, and Thatcher were amazing leaders

The point being, as long as Superman thinks that at least one of those people is garbage, his point makes no sense.

They're either great or communists themselves as far as I'm concerned. I mean, it's not like communists have ever fought one another, right?

We don't talk about Trotsky.

So if Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, etc, etc. were actually communists, wouldn't it be easier for them to gain power, oh, I don't know, as members of the respective communist parties that existed in the countries they took power in? Also, I would think that being a communist and sending hundreds of thousands of self-described communists to concentration camps and/or murdering them would be pretty bad form in terms of being a communist, wouldn't you agree? And this doesn't even begin to address the fact that the Nazi Party and other fascist groups were funded by industrialists (a group of people who definitely have an interest in communists not coming to power, so it would be bizarre for them to fund communist groups, don't you think?), and that upon coming to power the Nazis returned nationalized industry to private control (!!!!).

But don't let the facts get in the way of your masturbatory libertarian fantasy. The truth is that for anti-communists, no measures go too far and nothing should be held back, lest the commies win. Whether you'd like to admit it or not, the systematic murder of hundreds of thousands of people is not alien to anti-communism. In fact, it's a fairly systematic component of it, given that any brief 'Red Terror' pales in comparison to what follows, as the example of the Paris Commune illustrates fairly vividly.

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@TNF: Was that Lech Walesa with Hitler and co. in your post?

Yep. He was the front-man for the AFL-CIO bureaucracy/CIA/Catholic Church/Wall Street backed counterrevolution in Poland, after all.

Arthur Scargill was completely correct in calling 'Solidarity' anti-socialist.