Document – Ho Chi Minh, The Vietnamese Declaration of Independence (1945)

Abstract and Keywords

In September 1945, the same month that World War II officially ended, Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969) declared both Vietnamese independence and the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Ho, the head of the Vietminh (the League for the Independence of Vietnam), was both a Communist and the main leader of the Vietnamese nationalist, anticolonial movement. Ho had been raised in a pro-independence family, and he actually tried to present a petition for Vietnamese independence to President Woodrow Wilson in Paris in 1919. Rebuffed by the West, Ho turned to Communism and the Soviet Union, where he trained as a revolutionary in the 1920s. Having worked in the 1920s and 1930s as a revolutionary organizer in China and Moscow, Ho returned to Vietnam with the outbreak of World War II. There he established the Vietminh and cooperated, especially with American intelligence agents, in the war against the Japanese. The Japanese had ruled Indochina through the remaining French colonial authorities up to the very end of the war, when they set up direct Japanese rule. Thus, when the Japanese forces withdrew, there was no established government in Vietnam. Ho took advantage of this vacuum to proclaim the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence (1945), hoping that the United States would support his cause.

Document

All men are created equal; they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.

The Declaration of the French Revolution made in 1791 on the Rights of Man and the Citizen also states: “All men are born free and with equal rights, and must always remain free and have equal rights.” Those are undeniable truths.

Nevertheless, for more than eighty years, the French imperialists, abusing the standard of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,ⁱ have violated our Fatherland and oppressed our fellow citizens. They have acted contrary to the ideals of humanity and justice.

In the field of politics, they have deprived our people of every democratic liberty.

They have enforced inhuman laws; they have . . . prevent[ed] our people from being united.

They have built more prisons than schools. They have mercilessly slain our patriots; they have drowned our uprisings in rivers of blood. . . .

In the field of economics, they have fleeced us to the backbone, impoverished our people and devastated our land. . . .

[W]hen the Japanese fascists violated Indochina’s territory to establish new bases in their fight against the Allies, the French imperialists went down on their bended knees and handed over our country to them.

Thus, from that date, our people were subjected to the double yoke of the French and the Japanese [and] more than two million of our fellow citizens died from starvation. . . . The French colonialists either fled or surrendered. . . .

The Viet Minh League urged the French to ally themselves with it against the Japanese. Instead . . . before fleeing they massacred a great number of our political prisoners. . . . From the autumn of 1940, our country had in fact ceased to be a French colony and had become a Japanese possession.

After the Japanese had surrendered to the Allies, our whole people rose to regain our national sovereignty and to found the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam. . . . The French have fled, the Japanese have capitulated, Emperor Bao Daiⁱⁱ has abdicated. Our people have broken the chains which . . . have fettered them and have won independence for the Fatherland. . . .

We are convinced that the Allied nations, which at Teheran and San Franciscoⁱⁱⁱ have acknowledged the principles of self-determination and equality of nations, will not refuse to acknowledge the independence of Viet-Nam.

A people who have courageously opposed French domination for more than eighty years, a people who have fought side by side with the Allies against the fascists during these last years, such a people must be free and independent.

For these reasons, we, members of the Provisional Government of the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam, solemnly declare to the world that Viet-Nam has the right to be a free and independent country—and in fact it is so already. The entire Vietnamese people are determined to mobilize all their physical and mental strength, to sacrifice their lives and property in order to safeguard their independence and liberty.

Notes

Review

1. What ideas and values are expressed in the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence? How does it reflect Ho Chi Minh’s view of Vietnamese history and decolonization?
2. To what degree is the Declaration shaped by Ho Chi Minh’s Marxist ideology?

Notes:

(ⁱ) The rallying cry of the French Revolution.

(ⁱⁱ) The last Vietnamese emperor, he was little more than a figurehead under the French colonial administration. He abdicated in 1945.

(ⁱⁱⁱ) The conference in 1943 at Teheran in modern-day Iran issued a joint declaration by Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt calling for the establishment on democratic principles of a United Nations, and the conference in San Francisco in 1945 laid the foundation for the United Nations.