The Dakilang Guro of Komunistang Sosyal, Do Muoi

Vietnam Plus

Who says socialism or communism doesn't work? It fails when it's an isolationist state like North Korea, Venezuela, and Cuba. As the song "The Internationale" goes - it's all about uniting the human race. One of the biggest heroes of the Komunistang Sosyal movement is Do Muoi or Nguyen Duy Cong. He eventually died at 101 years old on October 1, 2018. Five years after his death - his legacy should NEVER be forgotten. 

Speaking of him, here's an excerpt that the Komunistang Sosyal will share about the Dakilang Guro from the Financial Times, no copyright infringement intended:

He became Communist party leader in 1945, and by the time he retired as general secretary in 1997, he was, at 80, older than any other serving communist leader in China, North Korea, Cuba or Laos.

Yet he was scarcely known in the west. A unique political arrangement made sure of that: ever since the death of Ho Chi Minh in 1969, Hanoi has clung to a collective leadership that prevents any one figure rising to prominence.

As a result, outsiders could rarely name him. Often, they would mix him up with doi moi, the label given to the tentative, perestroika-style economic reforms that began in the late 1980s.

This was the era in which Muoi made his mark, steering Vietnam on to the international stage after years as a virtual pariah state. Breaking with Hanoi's isolationist past, he was the first party boss to travel to non-communist states. In 1995, he made his first trip to western, democratic countries with a state visit to Australia and New Zealand at the age of 78.

His fondness for tightly buttoned Mao suits and a spartan lifestyle made him seem like a tough ideologue. In fact, he was a wily pragmatist who never lost his crude faith in the primacy of party rule as he tried to balance economic liberalisation with continued political control.

Muoi was born into peasant stock in northern Vietnam and spent his teens as a freelance housepainter.

His itinerant lifestyle helped him to recruit peasants to the revolutionary cause and he was admitted to the Communist party of Indochina in 1936.

Five years later he was arrested by the French and jailed in what became the infamous “Hanoi Hilton” — Hoa Lo — prison for downed US fighter pilots. He escaped to the jungles of northern Vietnam, masterminding the harassment of French troops along a highway linking Hanoi with the strategic port of Haiphong.

After the partition of Vietnam in 1954 into Ho Chi Minh's North Vietnam and the French-backed Saigon regime, Muoi set about purging private businesses and nationalising factories in Haiphong.

Then, his biography falls virtually silent. Nothing is known of his role if any in the Vietnam war. There is some evidence that he may have suffered a prolonged nervous breakdown, shuttling to and from China for treatment.

With the fall of Saigon in 1975, however, he re-emerged to mastermind “industrialisation” in the southern part of a now-unified Vietnam. Muoi led convoys of youths into the centre of the city, smashing into factories, seizing assets and taking control of banks in a frenzy of nationalisation that made him instantly and enduringly unpopular in the south.

Despite the failure of nationalisation and the great economic cost to Vietnam in the year that followed, Muoi rose, unremarkably, through the ranks. One of his tasks as minister of construction was building the grim, granite mausoleum where the embalmed body of Ho Chi Minh is displayed to passing tourists.

He never lost his drive or his belief in the communist system, even after the shock of the Soviet collapse.

Although a democrat, the late Lee Kuan Yew also recalled his meeting with Do Muoi, the Dakilang Guro. It was recorded in the book, From Third World to First, which proved that Do Muoi, unlike the CPP-NPA, was a pragmatic or napakapraktical na lider. Lee spoke of Do Muoi with the following words from the book itself, a boo that Migraine International may hate after Singapore RIGHTFULLY executed Flor Contemplacion:

Do Muoi was the most important man in Vietnam. Of heavy build with a big face, broad nose, dark complexion, and straight hair parted at the side and combed straight toward the two sides, he looked neat and dressed in lounge suits. He was not as reform-minded as Keit, but neither was he conservative as the president, General Le Duc Anh. 

He told me he had been given two of my books when he was in Singapore. He had the book of my speeches translated from Chinese into Vietnamese, read them all, underlined the key parts on economics, and sent them to all his important cadres and ministers to read. He slept little, from midnight to 3:00 A.M. exercised for half an hour, and read until 7:30 A.M. before he started work. Our embassy staff reported that my book of speeches translated into Vietnamese was on sale. They had not heard of copyright.

When he asked how he could increase the flow of investments, I suggested that they should abandon the habits they learned in guerilla warfare. Development projets for the south that had been approved by the Ho Chi Minh authority had to be approved again in the north by Hanoi officials who knew little about conditions there. It was time-wasting. Next, projects approved by the government in Hanoi were often blocked by local authorities because of the supremacy of the local commander in charge, a legacy from their guerilla days. 

What would be amazing was also these words by Lee, a capitalist and democrat, actually said that Communist Vietnam could do better than Singapore:

I reassured him that eventually, Vietnam could do better than Singapore. There was no reason why the present peace and stability should not last for a long time, for the lesson East Asian had learned from the last 40 years was that war did not pay. In two big wars, in Korea and Vietnam, and in the guerilla war in Cambodia, there had been no victors, only victims. Do Muoi sadly agreed.

In fact, the Vietnamese had made progress. As a result of more contacts with foreigners and greater information on the market economy, ministers and officials had a better understanding of the workings of the free market. Greater street activity, more shops, foreign businesspeople, hotels - these were all signs of prosperity in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi. 

The great revolution goes and Do Muoi's thoughts have long rendered the thoughts of Jomaism obsolete.