"It seems a fair test of any political movement to enquire not whether it is capitalist, communist or fascist, but whether it is fundamentally humane. A remark attributed to Giap answered this question for the Vietminh: ‘Every minute, hundreds of thousands of people die upon this earth. The life or death of a hundred, a thousand, tens of thousands of human beings, even our compatriots, means little.’ Ho Chi Minh’s conduct reflected the same conviction, though he was too astute a politician ever to be recorded by Westerners as expressing it. There has been much debate about whether he was a ‘real’ communist, or instead merely a nationalist driven by political necessity to embrace Lenin’s creed. Evidence seems overwhelming in favour of the former view. He was never the Titoist some of his Western apologists suggested: he repeatedly condemned Yugoslavia’s 1948 severance from the Soviet bloc. He avowed an unflagging admiration for Stalin, though the Russian leader never reciprocated either by trusting the Vietminh leader or by providing substantial aid to him."
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Max Hastings, Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 (2018), p. 44
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ho_Ch%C3%AD_Minh
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Ho Chí Minh
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