by Ray Black
Ho Chi Minh
Many people will be familiar with the term ‘Viet Cong’ or ‘VC’. It was an abbreviation for ‘Viet Nam Cong San’, which was the name of the Vietnamese communists who fought for the independence of South Vietnam against the USA and others during the Vietnam War 1959–75. Before the Viet Cong there were the Viet Minh. They were the League for the Independence of Vietnam, formed by Ho Chi Minh in 1941. At that time Vietnam was a colony of France and was shortly after invaded by Japan as a development of World War II. On September 2, 1945, immediately following Japan’s surrender to the Allied Powers, Ho Chi Minh seized the day by proclaiming his country to be the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
Things were not to be that simple though, for other nations had vested interests in the Vietnam– Cambodia peninsula. For a start, the French still laid claim to ownership of the territory, so they were not about to give it up just like that. In addition, the Soviets and Chinese wanted a slice of the proprietorial action. Following 1945, the French did their utmost to suppress Ho Chi Minh. Between 1946 and 1954 the First Indochina War was fought between the French and the Ho Chi Minh’s forces. Ultimately the French were defeated fairly and squarely at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, which saw Vietnam divided in two along a line of latitude known as the 17th parallel. Some 400,000 soldiers and civilians lost their lives.
To the north of the line was the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam), controlled by Ho Chi Minh. To the south of the line was the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) controlled by Ngo Dinh Diem. North Vietnam was backed by the Soviet and Chinese communists while South Vietnam was backed by the anti-communist United States of America. It was a recipe for continued trouble and strife, which eventually erupted into the Vietnam War (Second Indochina War) in 1959. Between 1955 and 1959 tensions steadily rose between North and South because the territorial divide was not secure, so that in essence a civil war was on the cards.
For the first four years of the war, 1959–63, it was fundamentally that – a civil war between the Vietnamese factions. But then Ngo Dinh Diem was overthrown in a military coup d’état and assassinated. The military had seen Diem’s government as a failing one and decided to take control. This escalated the war so that US troops began arriving in 1964 to support the South Vietnam army. Diem had been so unpopular that a Buddhist monk, named Thich Quang Duc, had self-immolated (set fire to) himself in the middle of Saigon, which led to images of his burning to death being broadcast worldwide. It served to heighten awareness of the tensions unfolding in Vietnam and encouraged the US to offer support.
From 1964 onwards the Vietnam War proper raged between North and South Vietnam. The Viet Cong, under Ho Chi Minh, waged a war that proved highly effective, so that the US–SV army struggled against them and lost more lives than expected. By 1969 the USA had over half a million troops in Vietnam, yet they could do nothing to overpower the Viet Cong. The trouble was that the Viet Cong were far more efficient at jungle warfare than the US troops. They secreted themselves in underground camps and used guerrilla tactics to ambush the enemy. The USA resorted to blanket bombing with incendiaries and napalm in an effort to smoke the Viet Cong out from their foxholes, but to no avail. Eventually US public opinion, which had initially been in favour of intervention, swayed the other way due to the number of soldiers returning in body bags. The USA had never lost a war before, so there was a sense of defeatism that led to the withdrawal of troops.
The Viet Cong eventually won the war outright and declared the whole country to be the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1976, having captured Saigon in the far south in 1975. It has remained a single party nation until the present day, although it gave up the communist ideology in 1986, allowing a transformation to democracy and capitalism.
As for Ho Chi Minh; he died in 1969 at the very apex of the Vietnam War. He was seventy-nine years of age and died of heart failure. Even though he didn’t live to see Vietnam become the communist state he dreamt of, his successors continued in his name, such was the influence he had over his people. His embalmed body is held in a mausoleum in the northern city of Hanoi. His memory has become so revered by the Vietnamese that he is referred to as ‘Uncle Ho’ and Saigon has been known as Ho Chi Minh City since 1975.
Although Ho Chi Minh played a part in the deaths of many people during his lifetime he was not a tyrant in the same mould as other rulers, such as Pol Pot in neighbouring Cambodia. He was a political activist who pursued the communist ideology because he felt that communism offered a better future than continued rule by the French and a better future than the capitalist ideology adopted by South Vietnam. Unlike Pol Pot, he was a highly intellectual person who didn’t have a chip on his shoulder about his place in society. He was noted for being polylingual – speaking Vietnamese, Chinese, Thai, English, Spanish, German and Russian. On his 100th anniversary – May 19, 1990 – he was recognised as a ‘great man of culture’ by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) for his humanitarian achievements.
Ho Chi Minh is one of those historical figures who is the victim of propaganda. The success of the Viet Cong against the US army inevitably earned him a reputation for being yet another ‘Dirty Red’ in the eyes of the Western world, such was the anti-communist feeling of that era. Since then, however, the world has realised that his motives were sincere and that he didn’t actively practise cruel methods in the name of a communist utopia.
With regard to atrocities committed during the Vietnam War, it has become clear that it was a two-way street. That is to say, the US army carried out a number of massacres during their campaign, which overshadow any attempts to accuse the Viet Cong of playing unfairly. Due to the guerrilla modus operandi of the Viet Cong the USA were always at odds with them in terms of what is proper warfare etiquette and what is not. This in itself led to the US massacres, because the US troops were always on edge when they searched settlements for signs of enemy presence. The slightest disturbance could result in soldiers opening fire through paranoia at the thought of being trapped. Panic could easily lead to the slaughter of innocent civilians in order to be better safe than sorry.
Josip Broz ‘Tito’
Some people might be described as killers in a good way, perhaps! Josip Broz ‘Tito’ falls into that category, because his enemies were primarily the Axis Powers during World War II. He was regarded, by the Allied Powers, as an important resistance leader in the Balkans area of Europe during that period.
He was born Josip Broz in a place that is now in Croatia, but was then in a country known as Austria-Hungary, which has since been dissolved. In 1913, at the age of twenty-one, Josip was enlisted into the Austro-Hungarian army, prior to the hostilities of World War I. At the outbreak of war he ended up fighting on the Eastern Front against the Russians, where he was caught and imprisoned as a POW in 1915. He managed to escape in 1917 and hide out with a Russian family until 1918. By then he had been influenced by the communist ideology of the Bolsheviks and returned to his homeland with new political ideas.
When Josip returned to his stamping ground Austria-Hungary no longer existed, because his side had lost the war. Instead, various regions had formed a new union known as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes – later to become the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (First Yugoslavia), which comprised Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia and Vojvodina. Josip joined the outlawed Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) and became politically active.
Josip spent the next decade working as a machinist and being generally oppressed by the Yugoslav government, which was anti-communist. In 1934 he adopted the moniker ‘Tito’ as a codename and the following year moved to Russia once more, where he was actively involved with the Stalinist regime. All communist parties belonged to an international umbrella organisation known as the Comintern, which Stalin orchestrated. In 1936 they sent him back to Yugoslavia to purge the CPY of anyone Stalin considered suspect. It led to the murder of the CPY Secretary-Gene
ral in Moscow in 1937, so that Tito took his place.
The CPY was still an illegal organisation at that time, but it was gaining in strength due to the turmoil in Europe that would erupt into World War II. Tito was defiant and openly voiced his criticism of both the fascists, who would form the Axis Powers, and the democrats, who would form the Allied Powers. Consequently the CPY became a partisan guerrilla force and hostilities began in 1939. Yugoslavia itself wasn’t invaded until April 1941, by the Axis Powers of Germany, Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria.
In July Tito called an emergency meeting of the CPY. He had held back from attacking the fascists until then because Stalin had signed a treaty with Hitler, but then Hitler turned on his word and invaded Russia. Seeing his opportunity, Tito made himself military commander of the CPY and announced plans to attack the occupying forces with the aim of catalysing a communist revolution in Yugoslavia. When the Germans realised what was afoot they introduced retaliatory measures to check the activities of the partisans. They announced that 100 civilians would die for every one German soldier killed, or fifty civilians executed for each soldier injured.
Despite these measures, which the Germans readily carried out, by the close of 1942 Tito had managed to liberate enough territory to form a governing body, known as the Anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation of Yugoslavia, of which Tito was named president. Initially the Allied Powers were reluctant to support Tito, as they had vested interests in returning the government exiled at the outbreak of war. However, Tito was so effective at resisting fierce attacks by the Nazis that Churchill and Stalin gave him the recognition he deserved. With Allied support he continued his war of attrition against Hitler’s forces, managing to evade capture on a number of occasions. Ultimately he allowed Soviet troops to enter Yugoslavia in their push westward, driving the Nazis back into Germany to end the war in 1945.
Following the war, the Yugoslav peoples had a collective election. The CPY won the election, with Tito as premier. Although the various Yugoslav peoples had nationalist sentiments, Tito’s government suppressed divisive ideas in favour of maintaining Yugoslav unity. Tito was unrelenting in his aims. He imprisoned an archbishop for collaborating with the Nazis, and thereby found himself excommunicated from the Catholic Church by the pope.
In 1948, Tito severed ties with the Cominform (the new version of the Comintern) and made an enemy of Stalin. When Stalin attempted to have him assassinated he simply responded by letting Stalin know that he would be assassinated, too. Remarkably, Stalin backed off, although it led to the deaths of many communists who were seen as Tito sympathisers and could conceivably be bringers of death to Stalin’s door. Relations improved between Yugoslavia and Russia in 1953 when Stalin died of a stoke, but tensions would rise again in the late 1960s.
In 1963, Tito renamed his country the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and introduced some reforms to relax the communist hold. He allowed private enterprise and gave people the freedom of speech and religious expression, effectively making Yugoslavia an evolving democracy, much to the chagrin of the Soviets. Then, in 1967, Tito opened the borders of Yugoslavia to all foreigners. Despite these seemingly uncommunist moves, the Soviet block found a way to tolerate Tito, because he was a popular and well-respected politician on the world stage.
A new Yugoslav constitution was passed in 1974, which saw Tito named President for Life. He lived for six more years, in which time he made sure that Yugoslavia maintained a neutral stance with regard to the Cold War between West and East. He died in 1980 at the age of eighty-eight. By then he had become such a humanitarian figure that his funeral is recorded as the largest in history, attended by statesmen from all four corners of the world.
If anything, Tito became the exact opposite of a killer, because his leadership maintained an equilibrium among the Yugoslav peoples, so averting bloodshed. Inevitably, following his death instabilities developed so that a decade later a series of Yugoslav ‘civil’ wars were fought, leading to the disintegration of Yugoslavia. There are now nine separate countries: Slovenia, Macedonia, Central Serbia, Serbia (Vojvodina), Kosovo, Montenegro, Croatia, Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Republic of Srpska.
Clearly Tito had had his work cut out managing to keep so many different populations happy under one roof. Fittingly, it is said that his nickname ‘Tito’ was the marriage of the two Serbo-Croatian words ti to (you-that), which he used to use as a phrase to order people about: i.e. ‘you do that’. Others think it may have been a reference to the Roman emperor Titus. Either way, it was a sobriquet that fitted the man.
PART THREE: Cold-Blooded Women
Elizabeth Bathory
Belief systems are peculiar and dangerous things. Humans have minds that rationalise the world around them by processing information and constructing interpretations of reality based on their ability for common sense and the level of their self- education. Alas, more often than not this leads to people believing in things that stem entirely from their own imaginations, as in the case of Elizabeth Bathory. She became so obsessed with ideas of the occult, that it led her to believe that bathing in the blood of young virgin girls would halt the ageing process in her skin. She also drank their blood because her belief system naturally concluded that it would prevent her ageing from within, too. Consequently her beauty regimen made her perhaps the most prolific female serial killer in history. Women preyed upon by other women are rather rare, but Bathory made up the numbers nicely and she got away with it for good measure.
There are comparisons to be drawn between Elizabeth Bathory (1560—1614) and Gilles de Rais (1404—40). Both were wealthy nobility of the European Renaissance period, who developed interests in the worship of mystical powers and lured hundreds of innocents to their deaths to fulfil the carnal demands of their demons. It appears that they both must have also ‘got off’ sexually from delivering pain and suffering to their victims and were in the perfect position to satisfy their sadistic appetites.
They both lived in castles and used their social advantage to entice their young victims with the promise of work. Both also had accomplices in their employ and managed to evade detection until they had killed a great many victims. Gilles de Rais ended up being hanged for his evil deeds, but Elizabeth Bathory escaped execution because she was so well connected that the authorities thought it better to place her under house arrest and convict her accomplices instead. Despite her attempts at rejuvenation, she continued to age and eventually died of natural causes, albeit at the relatively young age of fifty-four.
Elizabeth Bathory was a Hungarian countess who resided in an area that is part of Slovakia in modern times. To be fair, like Gilles de Rais, it is impossible to know just how many people she killed. For one thing there was no forensic investigation as there would be now. In fact, there was virtually no investigation, as the trial of her collaborators was based around the accounts of witnesses who had lost children and the fact that a few victims were found dead and alive within the confines of her castle. The testimonies of her accomplices and those of other witnesses led to a great deal of conjecture and hearsay, as one might expect.
Consequently, rumours, legends and myths were generated that probably distorted and exaggerated whatever the truth may have been. For this reason the number of reported victims varies between several dozen and several hundred. In addition, the motives vary also, from pure sadism to a genuine desire for immortality, or a combination of both. One thing is for sure, Elizabeth Bathory was only prevented from continuing with her murderous activities for the final three years of her life. Also, her husband was frequently away on campaigns of war during their marriage and he died around 1600, so it seems likely that she was able to carry out her evil deeds for at least thirty years, more or less uninterrupted. So, even a conservative estimate of one a month puts the figure at 360. One account puts the figure at 650, based on a diary that was supposedly kept by Elizabeth Bathory, although there was no official record of its existence during the trial.
&n
bsp; It is only possible to speculate about the behaviour of Elizabeth Bathory, but she seems to have been a pathological sadist. That is to say, she acquired and developed a taste for torturing her victims because it satisfied a maladjusted mind. Some people have naturally dulled senses, so that they can only reach sexual arousal with the heightened stimulation that comes from witnessing the death throes of unfortunate souls. All of the senses are supplied with sensations that do not come from everyday life with the result that the person enters a frenzied state of excitement. In turn, endorphins are released by the brain that activate opiate receptors to achieve analgesia. In simple terms, this means that the experience becomes addictive and the sadist craves for the experience to be repeated time and time again.
For Elizabeth Bathory the bringing together of her sadism with the occult must have seemed like a natural marriage. It would have legitimised her behaviour in her own mind and those around her. She would have had licence to torture and kill in the name of sacrifice to the demons she worshipped. Similarly, it would have been only a short step to begin developing ideas of attaining immortality and perpetual youth. She wasn’t an attractive woman to begin with, judging by contemporaneous portraits, so she probably felt the impact of ageing all the more for that reason. It is said that she convinced herself that bloodied areas of her skin seemed more supple and pure, so she took to bathing her entire body in blood as a matter of routine.
Having consulted with her occult shamans she developed a method to get the most from her victims. She would have them strung up by the legs above her bathtub and then climb in below. The victims would then have their throats cut so that their warm blood poured directly into the bath, where she performed her abhorrent ablutions. She would also drink blood from the streams coming from the victims as their lives slowly drained from their bodies. Inside her castle, Elizabeth had a gynaeceum. This is a part of the castle where only females are allowed. In the gynaeceum she had dungeons and torture chambers, with all manner of gruesome devices at hand to carry out her work. She always had a stock of new victims imprisoned so that she could satisfy herself whenever she had the slightest whim.
