SUSAN DUNN
549
He was totally ignored. When he tried to obtain a hearing, Wilson
neither received him nor acknowledged his appeal. Despite the American
leader's principle of self-determination for all nations, Vietnam to him
did not exist. Wilson focused all of his energy on his political vision: the
creation of a League of Nations. At such a critical moment, the American
president felt that he could not risk alienating his French allies by under–
mining their colonial empire. Indeed, as the historian-statesman Conor
Cruise O'Brien noted, whereas underdeveloped countries would eventu–
ally have an important voice in the United Nations, Wilson's League of
Nations represented the "haves of the world against the have-nots."
On the one hand, Ho must have been disappointed to have his cause
rejected out of hand at the Peace Conference. On the other, the young
man had traveled only a very short distance to reach Versailles. In 1917, at
the age of twenty-seven, he had moved to Paris to study "what lay behind
the words
liberte, egalite,Jraternite."
As a young boy in Vietnam, he had seen
the revolutionary slogan inscribed in stone on public buildings. What did
the words mean? What did the French Revolution stand for? It was diffi–
cult to come by answers. French authorities forbade the translation of
Rousseau and Montesquieu into Vietnamese. In libraries in Vietnam,
works on the French Revolution existed only in French and were inac–
cessible in Vietnamese.
After World War I, Paris was the exciting haven for scores of dissidents
and revolutionaries from the French colonies and from the rest of Europe.
Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping lived there in the twenties as did one of
the pioneers of Vietnamese nationalism, Phan Chu Trinh. Ho enjoyed
wandering around the streets of Paris with his friends, discussing the future
of Asia .
Though Woodrow Wilson had not even recognized Ho's presence, Ho
attracted the attention of some of France's leading socialists, incl uding
Leon Blum. In Paris, Ho joined the French Socialist Party. He later admit–
ted that he joined the socialists because those "ladies and gentlemen... had
shown sympathy toward me, toward the struggle of the oppressed people."
In Ho's first serious work of political propaganda,
French Colonization
011
Trial,
he described the French colonial system, detailing its injustices
along with the sadism of colonial rulers. The forced participation of colo–
nized people in World War I especially enraged him. Suddenly,
second-class "dirty Negroes and dirty Annamese," he bitterly remarked,
were promoted to the supreme rank of "defenders of law and liberty,"
forced to fight for rights and freedoms of which they themselves were
deprived. They were obliged to leave their "rice fields or their sheep, their
children and their wives in order to cross oceans and go and rot on the bat–
tlefields of Europe."
