Ho Chi Minh - Legacy

Legacy

The former capital of South Vietnam, Saigon, was officially renamed Ho Chi Minh City on 1 May 1975 shortly after its capture which officially ended the war. However, the people of the city continued to refer to their home as Sài Gòn, and there is a growing demand to change the city's name back to its original name.

Ho's embalmed body is on display in Hanoi in a granite mausoleum modeled after Lenin's Tomb in Moscow. Streams of people queue each day, sometimes for hours, to pass his body in silence. This is reminiscent to other Communist leaders like Kim Jong-Il and his father Kim Il-Sung, Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong.

The Ho Chi Minh Museum in Hanoi is dedicated to his life and work.

Chilean musician Victor Jara referenced Ho Chi Minh in his song "El Derecho de Vivir en Paz" ("The Right to Live in Peace").

In Vietnam today, Ho's image appears on the front of all Vietnamese currency notes. His portrait and bust are featured prominently in most of Vietnam's public buildings, classrooms (both public and private schools) and in some families' altars. There's at least one temple dedicated to him, built in Vinh Long in 1970, shortly after his death in Viet Cong-controlled areas.

The Communist regime has also continually maintained a personality cult around Ho Chi Minh since the 1950s in the North, and later extended to the South, which it sees as a crucial part in their propaganda campaign about Ho and the Party's past. This is similar to personality cults created around Mao Zedong, Kim Jong-Il and Kim Il-Sung, and Vladimir Lenin in other communist nations. Ho Chi Minh is frequently glorified in schools to schoolchildren. Opinions, publications and broadcasts that are critical of Ho Chi Minh or identifying his flaws are banned in Vietnam, with the commentators arrested or fined for "opposing the people's revolution". Ho Chi Minh is even glorified to a religious status as an "immortal saint" by the Vietnamese Communist Party, and some people "worship the President", according to a BBC report.

In 1987, UNESCO officially recommended to member states that they "join in the commemoration of the centenary of the birth of President Ho Chi Minh by organizing various events as a tribute to his memory", considering "the important and many-sided contribution of President Ho Chi Minh in the fields of culture, education and the arts" who "devoted his whole life to the national liberation of the Vietnamese people, contributing to the common struggle of peoples for peace, national independence, democracy and social progress." However, this was met with an uproar amongst some overseas Vietnamese, especially in North America, Europe and Australia, who criticize Ho as a Stalinist dictator and for the human rights abuses of his government.

Publications about Ho's non-celibacy are banned in Vietnam, as the Party maintains that Ho had no romantic relationship with anyone in order to portray a puritanical image of Ho in the Vietnamese public. A newspaper editor in Vietnam was dismissed from her post in 1991 for publishing a story about Tang Tuyet Minh. William Duiker's Ho Chi Minh: A Life (2000) presents much information on Ho's relationships. The government requested substantial cuts in the official Vietnamese translation of Duiker's book, which was refused. In 2002, the Vietnamese government suppressed a review of Duiker's book in the Far Eastern Economic Review.