President Ho Chi Minh

President Ho Chi Minh brought Vietnamese national culture to humanity and the times. Affirming national identity and absorbing the quintessence of human culture is a dialectical viewpoint in Ho Chi Minh's thought on culture. He linked cultural nuances for a peaceful and developed future.

“Linking many cultural nuances into a single Vietnamese culture”

The lasting values that create the Vietnamese cultural identity are ardent patriotism, the indomitable spirit of fighting against foreign invaders; solidarity, love and unity between the individual - family - village - Fatherland; compassion, tolerance, respect for morality and ethics, diligence, creativity in work, simplicity in lifestyle, closeness to nature... All converge and shine in the national liberation hero, outstanding cultural figure Ho Chi Minh. Prime Minister Pham Van Dong, his long-time student and comrade-in-arms, commented: "President Ho is Vietnamese, more Vietnamese than any other Vietnamese" (1). But in this Vietnamese person, there is always an attitude of respecting all cultural values of humanity, constantly open to accepting positive and progressive elements to enrich Vietnamese culture.

**President Ho Chi Minh working at the Northern Palace in 1946.** Photo: Archive

With the motto of finding commonalities as the basis for accepting other values, so that peoples can live together in harmony and develop together, President Ho Chi Minh always found and emphasized common denominators - which can bring people closer together to be able to walk the same path while still preserving differences. Those commonalities are universal values: ethical principles, humanity, goodness, love of freedom, aspiration for national independence... He said: "Although the customs of each nation are different, there is one thing that all nations have in common. That is, all nations love goodness and hate evil" (2). It can be mentioned that President Ho Chi Minh quoted a number of points in the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1791 to open the Declaration of Independence giving birth to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on September 2, 1945 as a prominent example to illustrate.

Since 1990, Dr. M. Ahmad, Director of UNESCO Asia-Pacific region, in his study wrote: “Ho Chi Minh - The person who linked many cultural nuances into a single Vietnamese culture”. He also wrote: “He was able to do this thanks to his deep understanding and respect for different cultural characteristics” (3).

The embodiment of cultural tolerance

President Ho Chi Minh's cultural thinking is always open, far from cultural discrimination. In Ho Chi Minh, there is always an attitude of respecting human cultural values, constantly opening up to receive positive, progressive and humane elements, enriching Vietnamese culture. This is the spirit of cultural tolerance of Ho Chi Minh. This spirit of tolerance originates from the tradition of humanity and tolerance, from the flexible and dynamic characteristics of accepting new elements of Vietnamese culture that were inherited and enhanced by President Ho Chi Minh. In the thinking and revolutionary actions of President Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese people resolutely resisted French colonialism but did not oppose the cultural values of the French people, opposed American imperialism but still respected American cultural and revolutionary traditions. This has been affirmed by many Ho Chi Minh researchers. American researcher David Halberstam wrote: “Uncle Ho Chi Minh not only liberated his country, changed the direction of colonialism in Asia and Africa, but he also did something more remarkable: using the culture and soul of the enemy to win” (4). Moreover, Ho Chi Minh is the embodiment of a future culture, a culture of peace and development. “Nguyen Ai Quoc radiated a culture, not European culture, but perhaps a future culture” (5) - that is the profound and subtle comment that we are familiar with from the Soviet poet Oxip Mandenxtam in his memoir Visiting an international communist soldier - Nguyen Ai Quoc more than 100 years ago.

**A car carrying a portrait of President Ho Chi Minh enters the stage during the 70th Anniversary of Dien Bien Phu Victory.** Photo: NDO

Today, humanity has all the economic, cultural, scientific, technical and technological conditions to build a better world order. However, humanity is also facing global problems with great challenges of ecological degradation, poverty and inequality, bloody religious and ethnic conflicts that still occur every day, etc. The growing hatred in many places is demanding a vision of peaceful coexistence. The soul of that vision is tolerance. Tolerance does not solve all problems, but it can help us find ways to behave in a better direction. Tolerance can help us open the paths to solidarity, peace and prosperity.

President Ho Chi Minh is the embodiment of the Vietnamese spirit of tolerance and humanity. He inherited and elevated the tradition of humanity and tolerance of the Vietnamese people to a new height. In him, the culture of tolerance always shines in his thoughts, in his feelings and in all his actions, and Ho Chi Minh's example of cultural tolerance is admired and honored by humanity.

The person who guides the development of Vietnamese culture

For President Ho Chi Minh, taking care of national characteristics in culture also shows the desire for peace, friendship, and freedom of the entire Vietnamese people with the world. This contributes to blending human cultural values with Vietnamese culture to create a culture with historical value, adaptability and development, selecting and absorbing the quintessence. On the basis of national culture, President Ho Chi Minh absorbed the quintessence of Eastern and Western cultures, drawing out the good things, the reasonable things, the positive aspects of many doctrines - from Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism to Jesus, Sun Yat-sen, Gandhi...

As President Ho Chi Minh believed, “Whatever is good in the West or the East, we learn to create a Vietnamese culture. That means taking the good experiences of ancient and modern cultures, cultivating a culture with a pure Vietnamese spirit to match the democratic spirit” (6). The new Vietnamese culture is unified in diversity, inheriting the good cultural traditions of the nation, both absorbing the quintessence and creating on the basis of identity, contributing to enriching human culture. That is the assimilation of the quintessence of human culture, making those quintessence become good, good, beautiful things with “pure Vietnamese spirit”. This is the “Vietnamization” of selecting what comes from the outside, turning it into something natural like the existing endogenous elements of Vietnamese culture.

President Ho Chi Minh also understood better than anyone the shortcomings and deficiencies of Vietnamese culture as it gradually emerged from the “bamboo fence” of Vietnam to integrate into the world. Traditional Vietnamese culture, built on a long-standing agricultural civilization, still has many shortcomings and limitations. Our scientific and technological level is still low, our thinking is not modern, labor productivity is still low, many small-scale farming habits have not been overcome...

To overcome this situation, it is important to absorb new, progressive elements of world culture, acquire new knowledge to master science and technology, to keep up with the level of human civilization. This is also consistent with the law of cultural development, which always has exchanges and mutual influences between cultures. This is also an inevitable trend of national cultures to affirm their values, to not lose themselves when integrating, to not fall behind the human civilization that is globalizing every day, when the world is becoming an economic and cultural symbiotic environment, when the development of a community, a nation, a country is inseparable from the development of other communities, of other countries and the development of the whole world. Standing firmly on the national culture to conquer and assimilate foreign cultural values, that cultural character of the Vietnamese people was further promoted by President Ho Chi Minh in building a new Vietnamese culture during the period of national liberation revolution.

President Ho Chi Minh brought national culture to the culture of humanity and the times - this was unprecedented in Vietnamese history. Affirming national identity and absorbing the quintessence of human culture is a dialectical viewpoint in Ho Chi Minh's thought on culture. These two contents guide the development of Vietnamese culture today.

Thien Phuong

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