Ho Chi Minh

As a young man in Paris, Ho petitioned the 1919 Versailles conference for Vietnamese rights and was ignored; he then concluded that Leninism, with its theses on national and colonial questions, offered colonised peoples the only serious ally. His 1945 declaration of independence opened by quoting the American Declaration of Independence. He is the clearest case of anti-colonialism fused with communism, and of the one-party state and long wars that followed.