Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam

Questions for Further Study

• 1. The text makes reference to the Dutch Declaration of Independence of 1581. Consult that entry and prepare a list of the similarities between the Dutch Declaration and the Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
• 2. Vietnamese independence was part of a broader movement toward decolonization that was taking place in the 1940s and beyond. In particular, France was losing its colonies, both in Vietnam and Algeria. Compare this document with the Proclamation of the Algerian National Liberation Front of 1954. What similar—or differing—impulses motivated the Vietnamese and the Algerians?
• 3. Vietnam eventually became a Communist nation. To what extent did Vietnam realize the aspirations expressed in documents by other prominent Communists, such as Cuba's Fidel Castro (History Will Absolve Me), China's Mao Zedong (“Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan”), or Russia's Vladimir Lenin (What Is to Be Done?)?
• 4. From the early to mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, the United States was embroiled in a highly divisive war in Vietnam. Would the history of those years have been any different if the Truman administration had acted differently in the years following the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence? Explain.
• 5. The Japanese played an important role in the history of Asia in the 1940s. How did its role in Vietnam resemble its earlier role in Korea, leading to the Korean Declaration of Independence in 1919?