This past weekend, Vietnam marked a big anniversary: 35 years since showing the world’s greatest military superpower the door and uniting the two halves of the nation under the grand banner of communism. That last bit actually didn’t work out so well for everyone, as you may know, but that hasn’t stopped the government propaganda machine from pumping out platitudes extolling the unspeakable wonderfulness of freedom, independence and money-grubbing happiness under socialism, or the new communism, or whatever they’re calling it these days. All weekend there were the requisite dancing in the street, parades, celebratory speechifying and solemn tributes to Ho Chi Minh, who’s worshipped pretty much as a god around these parts, despite the fact that he bears what may or may not be a coincidentally uncanny resemblance to Colonel Sanders (who, in point of fact, also occupies a pretty high spot on the local totem pole). The celebrations fell back-to-back with Vietnam’s Labor Day holiday this year, so posters like the pair below blanketed all of Saigon for the week preceding, giving the whole city the feel of being trapped in a retrospective of 1920s Soviet Union constructivism.

These posters all sort of neglect to mention that every house, every vehicle, every thimbleful of dirt that had previously been owned by a resident of South Vietnam before 1975 was ‘reallocated’ to someone from North Vietnam immediately following the events of 35 years ago. For them, ‘independence’ tastes a lot  like a shit sandwich. You don’t hear them complaining, though – perhaps because it’s illegal to complain.

Freedom! Independence! Happiness, goddamit!

Very rough translation: "Celebrate 35 years of independence and a united country with a bucket of KFC Original Recipe®"

Here’s a little news item guaranteed to chill the hearts of all peace-loving folk.

Russia to help Vietnam Build Submarine Base

MOSCOW, March 25 (Xinhua) — The Russian Navy will help Vietnam build a submarine base, Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov said Thursday.

Russia and Vietnam have bright prospects of bilateral military and technical cooperation, he said. “Vietnam needs a submarine base and the Russian Navy will provide help.”

As my mother used to say to me, “You and I seem to have different understandings of the meaning of ‘need.’” From where I’m sitting, Vietnam needs a submarine base like a hyperactive 12-year-old needs a bazooka. I wouldn’t object to the idea of a submarine base per se. It’s the troublesome possibility that a submarine base might lead, like a gateway drug, to even more dangerous fixations. Like, say, submarines.

This is troubling on any number of levels. To begin with, a Vietnamese person is constitutionally incapable of doing a 100% job of almost anything. Rather, he or she does exactly the minimum work necessary to achieve whatever a task requires in a way that gives it the appearance of having been achieved. I should note that this is most definitely not a matter of laziness but of job security. When the job needs re-doing, as it inevitably will, the result is more work for the person who did a half-assed job in the first place. If this were an individual character trait, you might expect it not to work out so well for that person. As it happens, this is a universial ethic, borne of the longstanding communist imperative that every person have a job, no matter how menial, pointless, redundant, counterproductive, bureaucratic, or obsolescent. What better way to assure that everyone is ‘working’ by doing every job at one-quarter the speed, proficiency, acccuracy and thoroughness it requires?

Secondly, the technology does not exist that the Vietnamese have not found a way to misunderstand, misuse, misapply, or otherwise endanger themselves with. Whoever invented the wheel umpteen hundred thousand years ago would faint if he saw what your typical Vietnamese person does with it on a daily basis. And if he and the guy who created the cellphone could together see the way those two technologies are used in tandem, they’d claw their own eyes out.

So with all due respect, this is a society that could fuck up a bowling ball, if they could ever get around to it. And now they want a submarine?

The article goes on to note that:

“They (Vietnam) will also need rescue and auxiliary vessels,” he added.

You can say that again.

It’s been tough lately not to follow the blow-by-blow of the recent dust-up between Google and China. Tough, that is, unless you’re one of the 1.3 billion human beings living in China, where all media accounts of the embarrassing fracas, wandering as it has over the sensitive terrain of government censorship, have been censored. Meta-censorship, let’s call it. On mainland China, any and every reference to the actual reasons for Google’s departure, and the fracas itself, have been meticulously removed from the public record by the 40,000-strong legion of government censors who maintain the Great Firewall and its many filters, sieves, traps, honeypots, hack squads, and political prisons.

Here in Vietnam, where the antennae of government officials are carefully tuned to the pronouncements of their communist counterparts in China’s bureacratic hallways, it’s been some surprise that accounts of the Google-China battle have been widely available on the Internet. Vietnam shares China’s distaste for political and religious expression; the only difference is that they lack the resources of their rich northern neighbor. The spirit is strong, you might say, but the flesh is weak. Vietnam would probably love to have a Great Firewall of their very own, but at the moment this developing economy still has to rely on foreign aid (and engineering knowhow) to build roads and bridges.

Recent word out of Mountain View, however, may change that. News reports this morning had the company lambasting a new target for alleged cyber-espionage:

Security engineers at Google Inc. and computer security company McAfee Inc. said malicious software was used to spy on government critics in Vietnam in what analysts suspect is the second major example in recent months of an Asian country trying to quash dissent on the Internet.

A posting on Google’s online security blog Tuesday said the software has targeted “potentially tens of thousands” of people who downloaded software enabling them to type in Vietnamese, and that the software was used by unknown persons to attack blogs criticizing the government’s policies. “Specifically, these attacks have tried to squelch opposition to bauxite mining efforts in Vietnam, an important and emotionally charged issue in the country,” wrote Neel Mehta, a Google engineer.”

At the moment, reports of the story are available in Vietnam on many news sites, though the BBC’s website is unavailable. It’ll be interesting to see how long those reports continue to be available here. For that matter, it’ll be interesting to see how long this particular blog remains available.

With all due respect to both living and deceased parties involved, I’m confident the only reason this beast didn’t end up as dinner for the entire village is because it was already dead and rotting.

Thousands Mourn Dead Whale in Vietnam

An enormous whale known as “Your Excellency” received last rites and was buried today at the mouth of the Cai Cung River at southern Bac Lieu province in Vietnam, according to an Associated Press report.

On Sunday, the 15-ton, 52-foot-long whale was observed floating dead 26 miles off the coast. It took several dozen fishermen on 10 boats just to bring the whale ashore.

Thousands of people were expected to attend today’s funeral. Yesterday, 10,000 mourners had already gathered to honor the whale in the southern Vietnamese village. The air was thick with incense burned during such sacred occasions.

Plans are already underway to build a temple at the site of the whale’s burial.

“Whenever whales arrive, dead or alive, local fishermen believe they bring luck and safety,” Do Tien Ha, a coast guard in the area, told AP.

Also, just so we’re clear, “last rites” are the final prayers and ministrations given to Christians by Christian clergy upon death. There’s a remote chance that one or two of this gang may have been Christain, but you can bet none of them was wearing a cassock and speaking Latin. That goes double for the whale.

Say what you will about in the downsides of living in a communist nation whose grasp of modernity operates roughly at the Pleistocene level, officials here know how to prioritize threats to the nation. Elsewhere in 21st-century reality, global leaders gnaw their nails down to the quick over whether the day’s terrorism threat level should be orange, ochre, or hot pink, and can’t sleep at night worrying over whether citizens with preexisting conditions will be able to afford tummy tucks. Here in Vietnam, wise leaders know exactly what the problems are, and they know just what to do about them:

New law could ban sensitive subjects at private schools

Newly drafted regulations released Tuesday aim to prohibit private universities from providing degrees in law, journalism and education, according to Vietnam’s Ministry of Education and Training.

Having tired of the menace such subjects represent to orderly, Stone Age-era society, Vietnam officials have decided that the teaching of such deviant ideas should be squashed and their practitioners placed in leg irons. The obvious solution is that all higher ed should now be controlled by — cue Psycho shower scene music  — The Government.

Despite the rapid growth of higher education quality in the country, many shortcomings have been found, particularly in the process of establishing new schools. This has urged the National Assembly to put education under its supervision from this year.

In other news, production of stone axes and animal-hide loincloths reached record levels here in the first quarter of 2010.

I recently watched a TV documentary on the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, which I feel certain the cool heads at the History Channel programmed as a way of diffusing the overblown panic gripping the world over the H1N1 outbreak by depicting just how bad it’s not. See how tens of millions of people succumbed to a seemingly innocuous viral contagion that drowns its victims in their own bloody phlegm? That’s exactly what isn’t going on in your neighborhood. Yet.

I managed not to throw myself off my fifth-floor balcony to preempt the inevitable end. But on my return to work earlier this week, I discovered others have not been so calm about the looming threat of the near-certain eradication of the human species. Last week one of the 4,000 students at my university was diagnosed with swine flu. Shortly afterward, a faculty member, a friend of mine in fact, was also labeled one of the Infected. Both were quickly snatched out of the school, tossed into a van and carted off to the local quarantine hospital, which, if you’ve ever seen a hospital in Vietnam, resembles a cross between The Island of Dr. Moreau and a Bangalore slum, only less hygienic. On the advice of Vietnam government health officials, the school initially insisted that all students and faculty who’d had contact with the two pariahs confine themselves to their homes until seven days had passed or the world ended, whichever came first. But after some consultation with, one supposes, health officials who actually understand the germ theory of disease, university officials reversed themselves and allowed the Almost-Infected to return to school.

On Wednesday and Thursday of last week, therefore, the student population disappeared behind a deluge of cheap, completely useless surgical masks. Lecture rooms looked like casting calls for Scrubs. Hallways throbbed with youth who appeared to be en route to a late-era-Michael Jackson fan club convention. Faculty members awaited the inevitable call for all lecturers to don masks themselves, resigned to a week or more of dressing like a Halloween punchline.

Yet once again, logic, or at least a close substitute, prevailed. For reasons probably having more to do with public relations than modern medical enlightenment, RMIT International University has locked the doors and barricaded the entrance (literally) until the morning of Monday, August 3.* (Updated) It’s hard to complain about an extra-long weekend. But it’s also hard to imagine we won’t be here again in a week or two weeks or three. In the meantime, I see 28 Days Later is showing this evening. One good thing about global pandemics: they’re always entertaining.

RMIT Vietnam extends Saigon South closure to Monday 3 August

24/07/2009

RMIT International University Vietnam has decided to extend the temporary closure of its operations at Saigon South until Monday 3 August.

RMIT Vietnam’s President, Professor Merilyn Liddell, announced the measure today following an initial decision yesterday to close the campus until at least Monday 27 July.

“We have consulted further with local health authorities over the past day, and the good news is that the number of people so far affected by H1N1 has remained very small.

“The total of students confirmed to have this influenza remain at only three, with one staff member also diagnosed. We expect that this number may still rise in coming days, but we believe the quick action we have taken to curtail the spread of the virus will give us every chance of keeping the total number small.”

Professor Liddell said the decision to extend the closure for a further full week, to Monday 3 August, was taken to allow time to consider assessing whether or not the small outbreak has been fully contained.

“We believe it is sensible to continue our precautionary approach for a longer period, and the local health authorities agree with this approach.

“The early action we have taken to minimise the spread of H1N1 appears to have worked to this point, so we believe it’s prudent to continue this approach for a further seven days to provide the maximum opportunity to ensure all sources of potential infection are fully cleared from the premises.”

Professor Liddell said the university placed the highest priority on the health and safety of its students and staff.

The Saigon South campus will maintain a skeleton staff of essential personnel only during the coming week, and senior management will continue to monitor developments and advise students and staff of developments as necessary. General telephone calls will be diverted to the Hanoi campus, which remains open as usual.

“We are encouraging all of our students and staff to keep checking their emails and the RMIT Vietnam website for regular updates through the week, prior to the resumption of all classes from the morning of Monday 3 August,” Professor Liddell said.

“We know there will need to be some rescheduling of examinations and other student activities. Those affected will be advised of what they need to know during the coming week.

“We will be working to ensure that no students are disadvantaged by this temporary closure.”