The following is the text of the speech made by Bob Purdie at the Ho Chi Minh Memorial meeting in London on September 20th.
The death of comrade Ho Chi Minh is a bitter blow. We had in our thoughts of the future imagined him enjoying the reward of his long life of struggle, the only reward he asked, and the only reward appropriate for that [illegible] Vietnamese people at last defeat imperialism, and [illegible] kind of society which will reflect the abundant courage and self-sacrifice which for so many decades has been expended in fighting simply to achieve [illegible].
We grieve his loss because he tenaciously fought for that future for the Vietnamese people; in many different battles, against many different enemies, he kept before the eyes of his people the ends for which they were struggling, and despite the attempts of the world's mightiest powers, he resisted the temptation to compromise that ultimate end. Even when U.S. imperialism was bombing North Vietnam, when they seemed willing to destroy the whole of the society which had been so painfully built up in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh, there was no compromise, no settlement which would have delivered the North, and bound the South in the chains of imperialism.
And we grieve because the Vietnamese people grieve. As their fight has become the centre of the world struggle against imperialism, we who live in the heartland of imperialism and who have come to understand the need for its destruction, have identified ourselves more and more closely with the Vietnamese; their aspirations, their fears, their victories and defeats, we regard as ours. It is this identification which has radicalised thousands of young people in Europe and North America: it is this identification which has awakened once more that force which is the most potent person within an imperialist nation, the force of revolutionary internationalism. And as this internationalism has grown in influence and depth, we have re-discovered our own traditions, we have re-discovered men like James Connolly and John Maclean and we have understood that the venal social democracy that holds sway in the Labour movement at present does not represent the true history of working class struggle in Britain. [illegible] with consciousness of the world struggles, from the Russian revolution to the fight of the Vietnamese [illegible] we will build a powerful revolutionary movement here. [illegible] for Ho Chi Minh we identify with [illegible].
And because Ho Chi Minh so closely personified the struggle of his people we cannot mourn him without also mourning the thousands of Vietnamese who have died in that struggle, and those whose lives have been rendered a living hell by the brutality of imperialism. And because the Vietnamese epitomise the world historical struggle against imperialism, we mourn all who have fallen in that struggle, in particular Che Guevara, murdered almost two years ago by the C.I.A., and if the news is accurate, Inti Peredo, murdered a few days ago in La Paz by the reactionary Bolivian regime.
The slogan of this meeting is appropriate: "Turn grief into revolutionary action". Grief has always been a potent source of revolutionary action - we need only think of the Russian revolution of 1905, which was sparked off by the "Bloody Sunday" massacre, or of the funeral of the old fenian, O'Donovan Rossa, in 1916, where the Citizen Army and the Irish Volunteers cemented the alliance which at Easter was to explode into the most heroic chapter in the long struggle of the Irish people against British imperialism, a chapter which as we are aware, has not yet closed.
It expresses also another great truth, the necessity for revolutionaries to turn aside occasionally in grief. The struggle has been long and hard and bloody, and we are grimly aware that more blood will be shed, more lives lost, before victory on a world scale will be in sight. But it is imperialism which sheds that blood and squanders those lives, not us; it is imperialism which is threatening to destroy the world rather than relinquish its power, not us; it is imperialism which is inhuman, not us. We are trying to change the world so that it conforms to the ends of human progress; imperialism seeks to subject all human beings to the lust for profit of a few monopolists. It is because it is essentially human that our struggle is revolutionary, and we must constantly reinforce our struggle with dedication to the humanity on whose behalf we believe we are fighting.
But imperialism feels no grief, no matter how many lives are lost in the struggle, but because we are concerned with the future of humanity, each life lost is a bitter blow to us. And because our struggle is so essentially human we must express the essential human emotion of grief. And from that grief, reinforce our determination to take revolutionary action.
Venceremos! We Will Win!