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What "service" did Vietnam render during World War II, according to Ho Chi Minh's independence speech? How does he argue that Vietnam's independence aligns with the Allies' principles?
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Ho Chi Minh argued that Vietnam rendered service during World War II by fighting alongside the Allies against Japanese fascists. In his independence speech, he stated that Vietnam's struggle against both French and Japanese imperialism aligned with the Allies' principles of freedom and independence. Ho emphasized Vietnam's sacrifices and argued that their courageous opposition to domination justified their right to be free and independent, paralleling the U.S. Declaration of Independence.
By September 2, 1945, the forces of Imperial Japan had been defeated, largely by the United States with the assistance, as in Vietnam, of local insurgents. Ho Chi Minh was the leading public figure among the Vietnamese and of the Vietminh guerrilla movement opposing French and Japanese occupation. A communist revolutionary concerned primarily with the liberation of his country from French occupation, Ho sought to continue his anti-Japanese alliance with the United States but was confronted with French determination to reassert its control over much of what was called Indochina. In declaring the independence of Vietnam from French occupation, Ho first sought to emulate the ideals reflected in the U.S. Declaration of Independence from 1776. As with that seminal document from American history, Ho placed his declaration of independence for Vietnam within the context of the wrongs it had suffered at the hands of imperialist countries and the costs Vietnam...
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had paid for its independence. In doing so, he emphasized the Vietnamese people’s long painful struggle against both French and Japanese imperialism. In emphasizing that struggle, Ho noted the difficulties and indignities inherent in being confronted by the imperial ambitions of not just one but two larger stronger powers:
“. . .our people were subjected to the double yoke of the French and the Japanese. Their sufferings and miseries increased. The result was that from the end of last year to the beginning of this year, from Quang Tri province to the North of Vietnam, more than two million of our fellow-citizens died from starvation. On March 9, the French troops were disarmed by the Japanese. The French colonialists either fled or surrendered showing that not only were they incapable of “protecting” us, but that, in the span of five years, they had twice sold our country to the Japanese.
Ho proceeded in his declaration to note the brutalities inflicted on the Vietnamese by the French, referencing the massacre of political prisoners carried out by the French occupiers, while holding out the opportunity to put such atrocities behind them and forge a new relationship with France from the position of a newly-independent nation. Ho’s declaration ends with a reaffirmation of Vietnam’s right to independence and the price it has paid for that right:
“The truth is that we have wrested our independence from the Japanese and not from the French. . .A people who have courageously opposed French domination for more than eight 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.”
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