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brings opportunities as well as dangers. Vietnamese revolutionaries joined the fight against
Japan in hopes of establishing a free Vietnam at war's end.
Ho Chi Minh was one such revolutionary. His name, one of many pseudonyms, means
“One Who Enlightens.” He went abroad in 1911 working on a French liner. During World
War I, he may have been one among the thousands of Vietnamese working in French muni-
tions factories. In 1919, during the Paris Peace Conference, he sent a petition to Woodrow
Wilson pleading that Vietnam be allowed the “self determination” that Wilson had pro-
claimed to be the right of all people. When his petition was swallowed by the indifference
of the victors, Ho joined the Communist Party, moved to Moscow, and became an agent
of world revolution. He returned to Vietnam in 1941, working with American agents in the
war against the Japanese. At war's end and with the help of American translators, he spoke
at a rally in Hanoi, proclaiming the words of The Declaration of Independence.
Figure 18.5. Ho Chi Minh
But once again, Americans listened with deaf ears. Fear of communism was the new
American foreign policy. President Harry Truman supported France in its demands to re-
claim its former colonies. American money and supplies went to the French, and the war
against Japan was now replaced by the French war against the Vietnamese. The statistics
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