“… when we are in Paris, why not go and greet the creator of so many canvases that are difficult to understand and whose art has conquered so many people?”
-Ho Chi Minh, 1946
For a casual liberal of the West, it could be difficult to find a more alien scene than the 2025 celebration of Vietnam’s independence, declared by Ho Chi Minh amid the fluidities that ended WW II. Peaceful and unifying independence took another 30 years of bloodshed with the French, the United States and with internal, non-Communist blocs. But the masses of red and yellow clad celebrants clogging the streets of 2025 Hanoi evidenced little interest in quibbling over a few decades in the long, obscure sweep of these things.
A few days adrift in the Hanoi metropolis offer up a people as eager to slide back every chair for the monied visitor as to threaten life and limb in the motor biked throngs swarming every corner. A people eager with a gentle insistence, to remind a visitor of their nation’s forever love for the West and their forever victory over it. For the liberal, the price seemed beyond a trifle stifling, but alas every freedom exacts its toll.
If an ever mutable griftitude is a prerequisite for making one’s far way, it’s perhaps unsurprising to discover links between Ho Chi Minh (1890-1969) and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). Picasso remorselessly realigned the faces of modern art. Ho Chi Minh remorselessly realigned the colonial faces of Southeast Asia.
Unsubstantiated chatter suggests they may have been personally acquainted. The HCM mausoleum museum explicitly connects them - amid a redoubtable stream of history and propaganda - with a permanent hall devoted to Picasso’s Guernica:
