Foreign Policy (5/12/20) illustrates a story on “repression” in Vietnam with a photo of a “propaganda poster” encouraging people to wear masks.
A recent piece in Foreign Policy (5/12/20) is headed with a photograph of a placard that features an image of a nurse demonstrating the importance of wearing a face mask as both personal and interpersonal protection against the coronavirus. But reader beware: It’s not public education, it’s a “propaganda poster”—because it’s not from New Jersey, but was “seen on a wall in Hanoi.”
The message of the piece, headlined “Vietnam’s Coronavirus Success Is Built on Repression,” is exactly that subtle, and apparently you’re not meant to look too carefully at the reasoning. Vietnam, authors Bill Hayton and Tro Ly Ngheo tell readers, is a country where…wait for it…the state “knows your mobile phone number.”
Yes, they’re receiving praise for limiting infections from Covid-19, reporting zero deaths so far, but the praise isn’t warranted, because “the disease control mechanisms that have been effective are the same mechanisms that facilitate and protect the country’s one-party rule.”
OK, so what are the elements of this horror? First, it’s explained, Vietnam has “neighborhood wardens and public security officers who keep constant watch over city blocks.” Sounds scary. Would those be anything like the police officers in Kentucky who shot Breonna Taylor to death while storming her home, on a no-knock warrant for a man who’d already been arrested 10 miles away? Or the ones who beat a man and sat on his head in New York City, while enforcing social-distancing protocols? I guess not.
In Vietnam, “the structures that control epidemics are the same ones that control public expressions of dissent.” Good thing we don’t have any of that dissent-controlling here, right? Although the mayor of New York City did just declare public protest illegal, and cops did just arrest writer Jill Nelson for writing “Trump = Plague” in chalk on an abandoned building.
But in Vietnam, you can “barricade government critics inside their houses to prevent them meeting journalists.” That would be nothing like Steven Donziger, under house arrest in New York since prosecuting an environmental case against Chevron in Ecuador, the company having stated explicitly that its long-term strategy was to “demonize” him.
In Vietnam, though, “The enforcers can be quite sure that their behavior is not going to be challenged by an independent judiciary, because the Communist Party decides what the law is.” That sounds bad; should we get a weigh-in from US Attorney General Bill Barr, who just got through saying that it didn’t matter that the Justice Department dropped charges against former national security advisor Michael Flynn (who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in 2017), because “history is written by the winners”?
And while other countries have used phone-tracking and surveillance to trace infected people, Foreign Policy explains, Vietnam is different and blameworthy, because they’re able to do so “without the need to submit to legal or parliamentary oversight.” Worlds away, we are to understand, from the US—except that the US Senate just now voted down an amendment to the Patriot Act that would have protected Americans’ internet browsing and search history data from secret and warrantless surveillance by law enforcement.
The piece is clearly trying to say: Don’t envy another country’s pandemic response, because it comes at too high a cost. That might be food for thought, except that Foreign Policy doesn’t seem to want you to bother thinking very much at all.
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Black potty talk
Look, you sound like a 13-year-old idiot who has never lived under an overtly repressive regime.
Yes, there are countries where swats of the population are used to enforce dogma upon all the rest, especially the ones who dare to think differently.
For a historical example, you can look at Germany during the Nazi government and later on the East side of Germany during the faux socialist state surveillance apparatus.
I mean, you’re mind-numbingly fucked up in what you’re writing here.
Look, I appreciate your effort in establishing Fair and I think Fair does have a place in the current environment though not as relevant as before, because we already have an impeached conman in chief, so, regardless of how active you are, you’re organization is not the remedy for where it pains in the US society en mass.
Look, I’m not saying the United States is amazing, again, it was the United States that let Jamal travel to Turkey while highly likely they had already intercepted his killing order via NSA’s spying tools, but this piece is a shitty one because it misses where the fight actually should be.
Look, you have two ways of going forward:
– hiring someone who understands the complexities of a surveillance state and who can tell you where the battlefields for journalism from a moral liberalist perspective are; and perhaps he or she contribute to your publication.
– you should fucking avoid penning anything in these regards and retract this piece and issue an apology in your news-letter.
Of course, you can do something in between, for example, you can call me, we can have a video-chat about how life under such a regime feels like, where you should criticize the US and where you shouldn’t and why that piece in the Foreign Policy deserves praise.
You should have fucking praised that piece as a Media Watch Dog because as the author writes: “the country has received near-unanimous praise for its successful handling of the current pandemic.”
Baby, it’s a fucking dangerous situation at the moment [I mean, the global rise of nazis & conmen], so mistakes like these should never happen, especially in times like these they are incredibly costly.
But I mean, would you listen to my comment? NOPE! So, then what’s the point of being a Media Watch Dog when you yourself can’t and won’t correct yourself ♂️
Lead by example and apologize and retract your piece, please!
PS. Look, I’m not saying your criticisms of the US are irrelevant but the relevance of it has nothing to do with what is actually going on: battles are won one at a time. and someone who writes a critical piece of a repressive regime doesn’t mean that he or she won’t criticize other regimes for minor offenses regarding mass repression!
look, yeah, and you don’t have a clue to what it’s like to live in a right-wing dictatorship, like what happened in the 1980s in Central America and what’s happening now in South America —
And the criticism of the US are entirely relevant now because of the pandemic and the supposed concept of American being the ‘moral authority’ of the world. Unless you want to have the US standard the same as Vietnam. And even then the US fails cause it’s the fricking most powerful, richest nation on earth and look at how badly they’re screwing things up.
Look, like I’ve lived in Guatemala and I’ve lived in Cuba. Look, give me Cuba any day of the week for so many social things. And that country has survived under the criminal blockade for more than 60 years. Unless all you know is the economics of a country, and if you’re rich then take the right wing shits, if not then you don’t have a clue. Look, when Foreign Policy does the same hatchet job against Brazil, that is doing nothing to help its people under the pandemic, and continues to do it’s best to destroy the environment, then I’ll take you seriously. Until then, look, get a clue.
“you can look at Germany during the Nazi government” – thank you for giving us an example of Goodwin’s law.
“Lead by example and apologize and retract your piece, please!” this is a rather harsh remedy for someone who opposes nazis.
The U.S. govt is having a hissy fit over the idea that any other govt is responding to the pandemic better than we are let alone the fact that we and our best allies are the hardest hit; especially western Europe. We can barley bring ourselves to acknowledge S.Korea and belittle their accomplishment by bellowing, ‘we have done 10 times more testing then they have’. This is the same as a fire dept bragging about how much water they have used fighting fires. S. Korea’s testing was used to control the outbreak, we are playing catch up.
Vietnam, Russia, China, Venezuela, Iran, all of these countries must be lying or brutalizing their public because we will it to be true.
I don’t know about Vietnam but a retraction? 99% of the garbage on FOX needs to be retracted.
“That sounds bad; should we get a weigh-in from US Attorney General Bill Barr, who just got through saying that it didn’t matter that the Justice Department dropped charges against former national security advisor Michael Flynn (who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in 2017), because “history is written by the winners”?”
Please check. This statement is taken completely out of context by MSM and is virtually ‘fake news’.
Protip: we all know that “Fake News” just means “Facts that make Trump look bad” you brain dead Nazi.
There is so much that is problematic with this piece. But nothing more so than the author Hayton’s behavior since – attacking anyone on social media who disagrees with him. His co-author a Vietnamese who the publication claimed had to use a fake name for her own safety – has also been named on Twitter by Foreign Policy and is tweeting in defense of Hayton. Hayton is well known to Vietnamese Twitter as a conspiracy theorist. The western expats whose tweets Hayton uses to back up his points have both criticized the story. Both have consistently praised Vietnam’s incredible handling of COVID-19. His response suggests that the piece was written to attack those who praised the government, rather than the government itself. In short, he used his platform to try and get these people into trouble. Check out Hayton’s Twitter recent timeline.
I live in Vietnam and my sense is that the article’s factually correct but lacks some important context.
On the basic facts – neighborhood surveillance, cyber-surveillance, Communist Party having complete control – the article is right. It’s a repressive communist dictatorship. We all know that.
What’s overstated is how people feel about the government’s response to the COVID outbreak. I know long-standing anti-Communists and people who have no love of this government saying how happy they are to live under these controls at the moment, how much they appreciate the mandatory quarantines and the fact that there’s an effective system of contact tracing.
The reason is a combination of watching other countries struggle with the virus and memories of Vietnam’s own SARS experience in 2003. In Vietnam right now, people are outdoors, restaurants are open, schools are back in session, and because the country’s locked up tighter than Mitch McConnel’s libido, most people feel that the virus isn’t likely to come in from outside. The general sense is, “We beat it and other countries did not.”
It’s axiomatic that people are usually willing to give up personal freedoms if they feel scared enough. Autocrats do this all the time: scare the people till they acquiesce. The question is: this time around is there something “real” to be scared of? The general sense is: yes there is, and until the threat passes I believe most of us are happy to step in line and do what we’re told to protect our families and the community at large.
Do you prefer they allow armed domestic terrorists to bully the population?
I’m really surprised at your take on their attempt to contain the virus. Look at what other countries are doing fines and even jail
It’s downright ignorant and stupid to compare wrongful, individual acts in the US with systematic, state oppression in Vietnam. And you call yourself fair and accurate reporting?
It’s interesting that some media are seeking to support an opinion or almost a verdict rather than to report without bias. One of the things I liked during the years I lived and worked in Vietnam was that doctors were often ordinary salary earners paid by the state – without the god confusion and enormously high professional fees that plague visiting a doctor and sometimes a dentist in many so-called developed countries.
Brilliant analysis, Ms Jackson!
Regarding AG Barr’s comment about how history is written:
NBC News has admitted that it broke the rules in using a deceptively edited clip of Attorney General William Barr speaking about the case of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.
FAIR needs to revise its claim of challenging media bias.