Having recently published an article on conceptualizing "success", when I saw "Redefining Success" in Vietnam (published locally), I picked it up. The book presents brief stories about people who started NGOs, social enterprises and corporations that serve a public good. The book is written by Dinh Duc Hoang, Nguyen Huu Phung Nguyen, Nguyen Ngoc Long, and Nguyen Thi Quynh Giang and published by Women's Publishing House in Ha Noi. A few notes:

"A third dimension shared by these social pioneers is the courage to stand alone and convince a community to accept a new perspective, a new mindset, and encourage them to place their confidence in a person who has not received it before. They encounter difficulties explaining themselves. Given their own "unreasonable" nature, social entrepreneurs face the risk of being misunderstood regarding their motives, being besmirched, doubted, challenged or resisted." (p. 10)

"Nhung kept asking herself how to bring Do paper back to the daily lives of Vietnamese people. That was the only way to help do paper survive time. They decided to develop a social project with a mission of making contemporary products with the focus on paper conservation and development. However, it was never an easy job. According to Nhung, in Vietnam there is now only one family making Do paper on a regular basis…" (p. 64)

"The social entrepreneurs in the book chose social enterprises as their instruments to remedy and settle these social issues. Social enterprise represents a philosophy, a conduct an approach to social issues. Social enterprises operate based on the philosophy that an extremely crucial activity, business (including, in a broader sense, research, innovation, production of and trade in goods and services) creates the major impacts defining society." (p. 253) 

A trip to Vietnam brought the occasion to remember that I had Walden Bello's "Ho Chi Minh: Down With Colonialism" (2007) on the shelf. The book is a collection of speeches and writings of Ho Chi Minh, with an introduction by Walden Bello. The Vietnamese revolutionary leader died in 1969, having fought the French, Japanese and Americans from Vietnamese soil. The book was – unexpectedly – so familiar to the Ethiopian thought and writing of the era, although that should not have been as both were Marxist-Leninist inspired struggles. Nonetheless, that the same slogans and language were used in East Africa and East Asia are a compelling case for the power of ideas. Some notes:

"Only by carrying out land reform, giving land to the tillers, liberating the productive forces in the countryside from the yoke of the feudal landlord class can we do away with the poverty and backwardness and strongly mobilize the huge forces of the peasants in order to develop production and push the war of resistance forward to complete victory." (p. xxiii)

"The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, made at the time of the French Revolution, in 1791, also states all men are born free and with equal rights, and must always remain free and have equal rights. Those are undeniable truths. Nevertheless, for more than eighty years, the French imperialists, abusing the standard of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, have violated our fatherland and oppressed our fellow citizens. They have acted contrary to the ideals of humanity and justice. Politically, they have deprived our people of every democratic liberty. They have enforced inhuman laws..." (p. 51)

"The enemy wants to win a quick victory. If the war drags on, he will suffer increasing losses and will be defeated. That is why we used the strategy of a protracted war of resistance in order to develop our forces and gather more experience. We use guerrilla tactics to wear down the enemy forces until a general offensive wipes them out. The enemy is like fire and we like water. Water will certainly get the better of fire. Moreover, in the long war of resistance, each citizen is a combatant, each village, a fortress. The 20 million Vietnamese are bound to cut to pieces the few scores of thousands of reactionary colonialists." (p. 60)

"… our war of resistance is a long and hard, but surely victorious, one. It is long because it will last till the enemy is defeated, till he 'quits'. The eighty-year-long oppression by the French imperialists is like a chronic disease that cannot be cured in one day or one year. Don't be hasty, don't ask for an immediate victory: this is subjectiveness. A long resistance implies hardships, but will end in victory." (p. 123)

"The barbarous US imperialists have unleashed a war of aggression in an attempt to conquer our country, but they are sustaining heavy defeats. They have rushed an expeditionary force of nearly 300,000 men into the South of our country. They have fostered a puppet administration and puppet troops as instruments of their aggressive policy. They have resorted to extremely savage means of warfare - toxic chemicals, napalm bombs, etc. - and applied a 'burn all, kill all and destroy all' policy. By committing such crimes, they hope to subdue our southern compatriots… However Viet Nam has not flinched in the least." (p. 197)

"It is common knowledge that each time they are about to step up their criminal war, the US aggressors will resort to their 'peace talks' humbug in an attempt to fool world opinion and lay the blame on Viet Nam for an unwillingness to engage in 'peace negotiations'." (p. 198) 

Ho Chi Minh (1890-1969), a pseudonym meaning 'he who enlightens', was the leader of the independence struggle in Vietnam and served as the President of North Vietnam (1945-1969). He was a leader of the anti-colonial struggle in Asia, advocating for revolutionary action long before the establishment of the Community Party in 1930. A short book, "The Selected Works of Ho Chi Minh" (2011), presents a chronological ordering of short works (written between 1922 and 1960). Another book, by Walden Bello, put the work in context (to be covered in a future post). Interestingly, Ho worked on a French ship during the 1910s, taking him to ports in Africa and America. He lived in London and then France, and the first contributions in this book were penned while he was in France (until 1923). The next selection of works were penned in Moscow (until 1924), Guangzhou (until 1927), then Brussels, Paris, Thailand, Hong Kong. After 1930, he led the Indochinese Communist Party. The book offers a glimpse into the thoughts, perspectives and ideas of Ho Chi Minh. A few notes:

1922: "The mutual ignorance of the two proletariats gives rise to prejudices. The French workers look upon the native as an inferior and negligible human being, incapable of understanding and still less of taking action. The natives regard all the French as wicked exploiters. Imperialism and capitalism do not fail to take advantage of this mutual suspicion and this artificial racial hierarchy to frustrate propaganda and divide forces which ought to unite." (p. 10)

1922: "While the life of an Annamese is not worth a cent, for a scratch on the arm, M. Inspector General Reinhardt receives 120,000 francs compensation. Equality! Beloved equality!" (p. 26)

1923: "We have racked our yellow brains in vain, yet we cannot succeed in discovering the reason which led the men and women of France to found the remarkable institution called the 'Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals'. First, the reason escapes us because we see that there are still so many unfortunate human beings who appeal without result for a little care." (p. 43)

1924: "The same system of pillage, extermination and destruction prevails in the African regions under Italian, Spanish, British or Portuguese rule. In the Belgian Congo, the population in 1891 was 25 million, but it had fallen to eight and a half million by 1911. The Hereros and Cama tribes in the former German colonies in Africa were completely exterminated. 80,000 were killed under German rule and 15,000 were killed during the 'pacification' period in 1914. The population of the French Congo was 20,000 in 1894. It was only 9,700 in 1911. In one province there were 10,000 inhabitants in 1910. Eight years later there remained only 1,080. In another province with 40,000 black inhabitants, in only two years, 20,000 people were killed, and in the following six- months 6,000 more were killed or disabled." (p. 78)

1945: "All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free. The Declaration of the French Revolution made in 1791 on the Rights of Man and the Citizen also states: "All men are born free and with equal rights, and must always remain free and have equal rights." Those are undeniable truths. Nevertheless, for more than eighty years, the French imperialists, abusing the standard of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, have violated our Fatherland and oppressed our fellow-citizens. They have acted contrary to the ideals of humanity and justice. In the field of politics, they have deprived our people of every democratic liberty. They have enforced inhuman laws; they have set up three distinct political regimes in the North, the Center and the South of Vietnam in order to wreck our national unity and prevent our people from being united. They have built more prisons than schools. They have mercilessly slain our patriots; they have drowned our uprisings in rivers of blood. They have fettered public opinion; they have practiced obscurantism against our people. To weaken our race they have forced us to use opium and alcohol. In the field of economics, they have fleeced us to the backbone, impoverished our people, and devastated our land. They have robbed us of our rice fields, our mines, our forests, and our raw materials. They have monopolized the issuing of bank-notes and the export trade. They have invented numerous unjustifiable taxes and reduced our people, especially our peasantry, to a state of extreme poverty. They have hampered the prospering of our national bourgeoisie; they have mercilessly exploited our workers." (p. 85)

1956: "We should not stand in one place and wish for another one" (p. 129)

1956: "We are clearly aware that our common enemy's clamours only betray their fear in face of new forces and new victories. Faced with the ever more perfidious schemes of the imperialist reactionary influence, now more than ever, we must strengthen and develop ideological unity, solidarity among communist and workers' parties, and tirelessly struggle to defend the purity of Marxism-Leninism, which is our common treasury; study and apply correctly the theoretical principles of Marxism-Leninism to the realities of each country. We are confident that under the banner of Marxism-Leninism, victory will certainly be ours." (p. 139)