…was it really necessary tacitly to praise a man who killed approximately half-a-million people in an effort to consolidate his power, or to concede ideological similarities between the founding of the United States and modern Vietnam?…
Mary Katharine Ham
Hot Air
7/26/2013
…“…we discussed the fact that Ho Chi Minh was actually inspired by the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and the words of Thomas Jefferson.”
– President Obama talking to reporters alongside Vietnamese President Truong Tan Sang.
While Sterling Beard notes that this may be “factually true,” it is, at the very least, morally and politically problematic to throw Thomas Jefferson out as an “inspiration” to a man whose very name is shorthand for the slaughter of millions. You don’t even have to know anything about history to know that the likes of Stalin and Ho Chi Minh are not on the list of people you should be tacitly praising. Sure, there are communist chic figures like Che Guevera who made it out of history with their crimes covered and their murderous legacies masked by cool t-shirts, but Ho Chi Minh doesn’t even make it into that category. The ranks of the communist chic are a lot bigger in a tony, super-liberal, yuppy radical neighborhood like Hyde Park, but surely Obama learned to put such things out of his vocabulary better than this. Nope. My guess is this is where this comes from. He’s speaking off the cuff, he’s trying to be agreeable, and he reverts to a comfort zone of calmly stated professorial radicalism that was a-okay in the parlors of Hyde Park. He doesn’t think about being utterly careless with the legacy of those who fought and died in Vietnam, those who perished at the hands of leaders like Ho Chi Minh, and those who escaped them but still suffer trauma…
Read the entire article at Hot Air.
