Repression and Decline
Ta Thu Thau emerged from prison in poor health but still the most popular leader of the worker's movement in the South and the best known Trotskyist in Vietnam. Returning to Saigon from a consultation with the new Vietminh Government in Hanoi, he was assassinated by Vietminh adherents near Quang Ngai in September 1945.
The methodical assassination of Trotskyists in Saigon was reported in 1947 by Dwight Macdonald's politics magazine. "Virtually all of Trotskyist leaders" were murdered by Stalinists, according to Alexander, who wrote, "Although in August 1945 the Vietnamese Trotskyists were an element of substantial importance in the country’s politics, within a few months they had been virtually exterminated—politically and for the most part physically—by the Communist government headed by Ho Chi Minh. The few Trotskyists escaping this holocaust were forced to flee abroad."
Read more about this topic: Vietnamese Trotskyism
Famous quotes containing the words repression and/or decline:
“Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought. Repression in history leads to conciseness in the historian, and the rocklike hardness of much celebrated prose is due to the tempering of the tyrant.”
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