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Tito headed the partisans who fought the occupying Nazis during World War II. “There were many partisans who had been wounded in a recent battle on this side,” our guide told us near a broken iron bridge over the gorge through which rushed the river Neretva.
... a hamlet on the winding canyon road from Sarajevo to Mostar. Graphically, it spoke of Tito’s legendary charismatic leadership.
After Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic’s death in 2003, his followers campaigned to rename the main street of Sarajevo in his memory. The Serbs objected and the street is still called the Marshall Tito Boulevard. There were no other visible memorials in Sarajevo to Tito, who when he died in office as President of Yugoslavia in 1980, was still very popular in that country. Unlike Ho and Mao and Lenin, Tito was not mummified. They did not erect many statutes honoring him even while he was alive. I found one memorial to him, however, more compelling.
Ba Dinh Square where Ho publicly read Vietnam’s declaration of independence is now the site of a lotus-shaped mausoleum bearing his mummified body which is refreshed by Russian technicians every September.
Our guide said of the French that they came to Vietnam “with Bible in one hand and a sword in the other hand. That pretty much summarized the sentiment of resistance they met here. Hanoi was the capital of the French Indochina and its Government House here was their seat of power. When Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam’s independence from France in 1945, he refused to move into that building, saying that “the Government House smelled of Colonialism,” our guide said.
In Kashgar, the furthest south-western city of China, for dinner we went to Chini Bagh (Chinese Garden), once a famous venue of international intrigues. It was the residence of British India’s representative in Kashgar during the Great Game rivalry between Imperial Britain and the Tsarist Russia in the 19th century. A most charming building and evocative of nostalgia for British visitors who flocked there, Chini Bagh now seemed totally out of place. It was flanked on one side by a plaza hosting one of the biggest statutes of Mao I had seen in China -at a height of 60 feet.
I have also seen evidence of the apotheosis of living men in our times, especially among those who honor “materialism.” In Lanzhou, central China, I showed my tour guide the pictures of Tiananmen Square which was dominated by Mao’s visage.
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