In his Declaration of Independence, Ho Chi Minh claimed that Vietnam had rendered certain services to the Allies during the World War II, and for this, the country had deserved freedom. Ho (1960) states, “A people who…have fought side by side with the Allies against the Fascists during these last years…must be free and independent” (p. 21). Therefore, the main justification for declaring the independence of Vietnam was that the country had been supporting the Allies in their war against the Axis powers, and had been doing so despite suffering what Ho (1960) calls “the double yoke of the French and the Japanese” (p. 18), i.e. the oppression of two occupation forces. Besides, the Vietnamese leader claimed that, although the French had been oppressing the Vietnamese people for decades, the Vietnamese always acted humanely toward the oppressors and helped them escape repression from the Japanese.
There are several paramount principles recognized in the westerns world that Ho refers to when declaring independence, but instead of showing examples of situations in which those principles had been reasserted, he accuses the Allies of not following those principles. For examples, Ho addresses the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity—the three principles declared by the French Revolution (Fall, 2015)—and states that the French nation had violated them when it conquered Vietnam and oppressed the people of this country. Also, Ho refers to some of achievements of the Tehran Conference and Treaty of San Francisco, i.e. international agreements that acknowledged the rights of nations to self-determination (Simpson, 2014), and states that, according to those agreements, Vietnam has every right to be independent.
Finally, one of the arguments that the Vietnamese leader uses to justify the independence is that the French had been committing many crimes against the nation during their occupation rule. He lists such things as bringing the people of Vietnam to extreme poverty, controlling the country’s natural resources and using them without bringing benefits to the Vietnamese, forcing the nation to use alcohol and opium, supporting ignorance and obscurantism, and exploiting workers. However, the gravest crime of which Ho (1960) accuses the French oppressors is repression; he claims that the French had built many prisons, executed many Vietnamese people, and “drowned our uprisings in rivers of blood” (p. 17). Mass killings are the most severe crime of which an occupation government can be accused, and the most appealing justification for independence.
References
Fall, B. B. (2015). The theory and practice of insurgency and counterinsurgency. Military Review, 95(5), 40-45.
Ho, C. M. (1960). Selected works (Vol. 3). Hanoi, Vietnam: Foreign Languages Publishing House.
Simpson, B. (2014). The many meanings of national self-determination. Current History, 113(766), 312-317.