When President Barack Obama visited Vietnam’s President Truong Tan Sang?last week, he remarked on how Vietnam’s late iconic communist leader, Ho Chi Minh,?had once said he was?inspired by Thomas Jefferson:
…we discussed the fact that Ho Chi Minh was actually inspired by the U.S.? Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and the words of Thomas? Jefferson.
Right-wing activists and their media arm, Fox News, immediately attacked Obama, noting that?Ho violated people’s human rights — even though this didn’t have anything to do with whether or not he was inspired by Jefferson. A Fox News reporter sniped:
It may come as some unwelcome news to the families of the nearly 60,000? Americans who died in the Vietnam War that the whole thing was just a? misunderstanding.
Meanwhile, the right-wing blogosphere erupted with Ammoland shrieking in horror, “Obama Compares Ho Chi Minh to Thomas Jefferson,”and WND indignantly huffing, “Obama: Vietnamese Dictator ‘Inspired’ By Jefferson.” Yet Media Matters points out that this isn’t really what happened at all:
On July 25, President Obama met with Vietnam’s president, Truong Tan Sang, in hopes of strengthening trade ties and military cooperation. During the press conference that followed, the president acknowledged the fact that the Vietnamese declaration of independence used language inspired by America’s declaration in an effort to stress the long, if troubled history between the two nations […] But Obama was merely referencing the fact that the Vietnamese declaration paraphrases the U.S. Declaration of Independence when it says: All men are created equal; they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. Fox has a long history of manufacturing phony scandals, something?Media Matters has repeatedly documented.
Here’s the video from Fox, courtesy of Media Matters:
In fact,?Ho quoted Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence extensively, because Vietnam under French rule lacked independence, as any number of articles show. Of course Jefferson could have no say in who read and quoted his work. He wasn’t even alive when?Ho rose to power. So it is strange that conservatives see it as an insult to Jefferson that Minh was inspired by him. It is not surprising that a lot of people would be inspired by the Declaration, considering that it is a well-written document and one of the most famous in the world. Sun Yat-sen, a founding father of the Chinese republic and a socialist, was also inspired by America’s rich political history. He took particular inspiration from Abraham Lincoln and Alexander Hamilton.
From the very beginning, Sun Yat was highly influenced by Abraham Lincoln’s idea of republicanism; government of the people, by the people, for the people. Based upon the same he formulated his three principles of the people widely known as nationalism, socialism and sovereignty. – Sun Yat-sen
Learning the ideals of the French and American revolutions, Sun Yat-sen was also influenced by the ideas of Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln. – Chinatown Honolulu
The founding father of modern China, Dr. Sun Yat-sen, inspired by Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, elevated the consciousness of freedom and democracy for the post-Deng generations. – MinnPost
Sun Yat-sen help found the Nationalist Party, which eventually fought the Communist Party during the Chinese Civil War, but he was a supporter of socialism himself, and he made an effort to gain support for international socialist organizations to establish China as a socialist republic. If we look around the world, I’m sure we can find revolutionaries from many other foreign countries who were inspired in part by the American revolutionaries. If that’s the case, conservatives must apparently be turned off by America’s Founding Fathers. Maybe they will stop wearing tricorn hats at Tea Party protests because they don’t want to support anyone who inspired a communist. But in reality it Minh having been inspired by Jefferson says nothing bad about Jefferson. It’s not like Jefferson was inspired by Minh. Those who deny that?Ho quoted Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence heavily must be inspired by Erick Erickson, he who claimed that grocery inflation is a big problem even after seeing charts that proved it wasn’t.
Presidents Barack Obama and Truong Tan Sang in Vietnam. Image from Rappler.Com.
Edited/Published: EAP
