When visiting Ho's mausoleumm short pants are strongly discouraged, as are smiling and talking. Visitors are marched through the mausoleum two by two under heavy guard: absolutely no stopping or photos allowed. The burial chamber is heavily air conditioned. Ho's body is surrounded by four armed guards.
Ho looks like a cross beween Vladimir Lenin, Colonel Sanders and Hop Sing, the stereotype cook character from the 60's American sit-com, Ponderosa. Which is perhaps appropriate, as Ho was a galley cook in his young days when he shipped out to places such as France, Russia and China. He apparently taught himself to speak seven languages and to write five. He didn't defeat the most powerful war-mongering nation on Earth by being an idiot, apparently.
Here's the crazy thing about Ho's remains: every year since he died back in 1969, the government would ship the body over to Russsia for maintenance, as if he were a Lada or something. I'm not sure if the body still gpoes to Russia, but the Vietnamese government still closes the mausoleum ever year for a couple of months, I understand. (Granted I'm getting this in translation and my Vietnamese really isn't what it should be.) I guess the Russians must developed the best body shop for doing annual maintenance on dead former Communist dictators because of their experince with Lenin's remains. Political personality cults seem especially preponderant on the authoritarian left dictatorship side of the spectrum, while the right seems to worship their homocidal power-wielding thugs whilst they are still live and kicking (their opposition).
Lest it seem like I am romaticizing Ho's revolution, let me emphasize this is a place where small business often find it necessary to pay protection money to cops and where the state jails journalists for violating laws as arbitrary as 'spreading propoganda against the state of Socialist Republic of Viet Nam." This behaviour is governed under section 88 of the Vietnamese criminal code.
Take the case of Pham Tan Nghien, recently convicted of the above charge and sentenced to four years in prison and three years under surveillance by the Hai Phong City People's Court for writing she published on "reactionary websites in foreign countries" in 2007 and 2008. The stories covered the government's support policies to Vietnamese fishermen and victims of floods.
Nhgien reportedly admitted to her activities. An associate, Nguyen Xuan Nghia, was previously convicted and sentenced to six years in a related set of charges.
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