Parenting & Family Quote by Ho Chi Minh

Clarity, here, isn’t a stylistic preference; it’s a revolutionary tactic. Ho Chi Minh’s instruction treats language like logistics: if your words can’t travel, your movement can’t either. The demand to be “readily understood” by the young and the old, by men and women, “even by children” signals a politics built on mass participation, not elite initiation. He’s warning against the seductions of insider speech - the kind that flatters the writer’s intellect while quietly shrinking the audience.

The subtext is discipline. In a liberation struggle, verbosity and abstraction aren’t harmless; they’re friction. Every metaphor that needs decoding, every imported bit of theory that requires prior education, risks turning propaganda into private correspondence among cadres. Ho is also sketching a moral hierarchy: the writer owes comprehension to the reader, not the other way around. That reverses the usual prestige economy of intellectual life, where difficulty is mistaken for depth.

Context sharpens the point. Ho operated in a multilingual, colonized environment where literacy levels varied, censorship loomed, and political legitimacy depended on reaching peasants, workers, soldiers, and families - not just urban students. Simple, direct language becomes a tool for unity across class and region, and a way to outflank colonial power that often gatekept “proper” discourse.

There’s a subtle tightrope, too: aiming for universal readability risks flattening complexity, but Ho’s wager is pragmatic. A revolution can’t be written for the seminar room. It has to be spoken in the marketplace, memorized on the march, and retold at the dinner table.