HCM Museum: Cameras, Not Clues

It is quite a bike to the HCM Museum, and a scary one. The scenery is a kaleidoscope of heavy highway traffic and slums by the canal. During a huge segway (going over a large bridge and having to turn around and re-cross it) I passed by the Majestic Hotel, where my mother and I spent last New Years.

Tucked away in the filthy Saigon Harbor, the Ho Chi Minh Museum is quite an attractive building.

I don't know who this is, but he's a big commie.

He's now cursed with an eternal view of Vietnam's progress.

The snack bar has a tree growing out if it!

A neat vase

Here's the big man himself. Communist sculpture is so prevalent, and so awful. This guy can dance the robot and that's about it.

And here is his dumbell set.

HCM, always ready to put out fires.

This Museum had some pretty heavy communist rhetoric, even more so than the war museum, with phrases like "teaching to erraticating the illiteracy," with a photo of HCM himself teaching a classroom. It's all true--the French colonists certainly didn't want their slaves to read and write. I'm just saying the rhetoric is heavy. The highlight of my trip was talking to a high school kid about what American History teaches about Ho Chi Minh. Which is not a whole lot. If you want to end a conversation with a right wing vet, just say "Pentagon Papers." Because there is the ugly, in your face reason for the war. And also because your right winger will have no idea what "Pentagon Papers" means.

Here's Ho Chi Minh's possible plan to "abolish the hunger" with macaroni and bean pictures.

For the most accurate commentary, I always go to the kids. Here's Ho Chi Minh playing pokemon with the children in the park (sign says "age 3")

HCM playing real life chess fun!

I thought this saying was very touching. Though even now there is great prejudice between North and South Vietnamese, and Southerners are not fond of visiting Hanoi.

Clockwork HCM reading Lenin! I was hoping it moves on the hour--waited for a while and then gave up.

If this don't make you wave a little flag, what will?

Alien baby loves airstrikes! Yay!!

This is a relief of Angkor Wat. Shortly after the Nixon War, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and ousted the murderous Khmer Rouge, apparently to retaliate for ethnic cleansing in Cambodia. Now Cambodia owes them big.

These are adorable dioramas of temples set up in honor of Ho Chi Minh.
You might think its a god complex, but it's part of the Confucian way of honoring one's ancestors.

Can't say I learned a lot from this museum, but the basic story is Ho Chi Minh grew up while the French colonized Vietnam and pretty much enslaved the whole population plantation-style. He somehow got to travel around Europe and learned about Communism in France of all places. Made sense to him--Vietnamese were poor farmers enslaved by an imperialistic elite, so Communism was the obvious answer (many countries turned to worse governments in answer to imperialism, especially from the US--from African Countries to the Middle East, North Korea and Myanmar). Then he came back to Vietnam and they filmed Full Metal Jacket.

Today, it seems every Government starts out different and turns out the same. Communism in Vietnam is in the power of the Government and devoid in its economic growth--almost exactly like the US. While the ratio is still in favor of the poor, a few people get really, really stinking rich in Vietnam, and the industrialization they're working for will bring the class issues we all know well. Healthcare is NOT socialized--hospital prices are cheap, but that will change real soon thanks to growing insurance companies.

I'll save the rest of the commentary until I hear the Truth from John Stewart.