Considering his CIA connections, it would be weirder if he weren’t mentioned

Thanks, I was looking for something like this

Google is the CIA, so maybe it’s the best place after all? I wonder if he got personalized ads based on all these emails, or was he whitelisted as exempt from metadata collection?

troi dat oi em noi chuyen giong robot qua 😂

Oh no, the lying troll is disappointed! 😭

LMAO I’m the bad actor? My wife went to school here, as well as all my neighbors and their children. You’re a fake and an obvious liar. You don’t know shit. Just stop.

I was about to ask why you’re obviously pretending and making shit up, but then I saw the “reddit” in your name. Makes total sense now.

LOL Is this reddit? Do you just come here to lie on the internet?

I saw that too, its horrifying. Also one of the most direct examples of the imperial boomerang I can think of.

It’s honestly depends. If you complain about “human rights” and all other Western cliche, then you would certainly be invited to a tea by the authorities at minimum.

LOL. Okay. Sure.

The NGOs whine about that crap and nobody arrest them. That’s not why people here get arrested or harassed by police. Everyone here knows, you don’t?

I agree with your outline here. Although I think there are deeper roots to the corruption problem that go back to lack of ideological coherence between regions, ethnic groups and factions during the war. Obviously, Uncle Ho was very good at getting ideologically disparate people to unite against colonialism, but afterwards getting everyone to understand and believe in socialist reconstruction has been a bigger challenge. Its a small country, but attitudes, dialects and world views can vary to the extreme depending on where you are. The corruption we have to deal with here, comes from people who only believe in money and family. It is a great shame to see so many wear the uniform and the symbols, but not care at all about what they are supposed to represent.

There are good things, but I don’t spend my time worrying and talking to people about the good things. Many workers, especially men, here do 10-12 hour days and spend their free time drinking heavily. Not much time for history, current events or politics. Students have more time, but social media (we have tiktok zombies too) and mobile slop games often consume it. Some of the kids who recently served in the armed forces here have pretty decent knowledge.

It’s nice to at find people who are interested in the world outside their routine.

I’d prefer not to be too specific, but lets say south-central. I travel to TPHCM/Bien Hoa somewhat frequently and I’ve been as far north as Ha Noi and Lao Cai. There is definitely a reactionary bias here. What region do you live in?

I’ve had to explain what a color revolution is, and how they operate, to full-grown adults here. I’d love to be more optimistic too.

I know being critical of VN is personally dangerous and also likely to tilt the mods here. Anyone here who doesn’t think a Viet ML, living in Viet Nam, doesn’t know how it is, I invite them to come learn the language and live here for a year and see for themselves.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/3/who-was-libyas-saif-al-islam-gaddafi

I think it’s a mix of genuine concern about presrving sovereignty (or i guess you could call it pride) and the government’s fear of being accused of or seen as being a proxy or a vassal

I think here it’s more of an alignment issue, which is, IMO, rooted in economic coercion by the US for decades. By the time China became a major power Viet Nam was already very dependent on US imports. Corruption is a massive problem, too. Capitalism thrives in corruption and our soil very is fertile.

Not in my experience.

I live in a south-central area of the country where it’s still fairly rural. Maybe it’s a little better up north, I don’t go to Hanoi very often. Down here, no one even knows what communism or socialism are, nor are they inclined to discuss it. Especially not openly. Saying anything political can get you arrested, so people avoid the topic entirely.

The entry point to anything ostensibly political is generally by joining the police and working you way up. The police and government officials are basically just motivated by taking bribes and making connections.

Don’t let our flags, decorations and art fool you, most people here think that shit is annoying. People will roll their eyes if you speak positively of it (or mention it all, really). Uncle Ho is a mainly figure of nationalism and there’s little understanding of what he believed in beyond studying his poetry (though everyone will tell you they are an “expert” about Uncle Ho). The symbols of communism are usually associated with nationalism, so positive views toward communism tend to represent an internalized sense of masculine strength.

I was recently talking to a couple kids who completed primary last year and was trying to start a business together. Neither of them knew who Marx, Lenin or Mao where. Weird since Lenin (LêNin) appears all over the place in school books. I never went to the primary schools here, so I don’t know what’s going on there.

The bookstores here don’t sell anything related to Marxist theory, economics or history at all. BUT they DO sell hagiographies of Richard Nixon, Friedman, Trump, Trump Jr., Henry Kissinger, Karl Rove, Betsy DeVos, Netanyahu, Modi, Ronald Reagan, Papi Bush, Dick Cheney, John Bolton, etc… I get pretty mad about it sometimes. Some of the kids here think it’s really fucked up too, so maybe there’s some hope. I have to order most of my books in English and from outside the country.

The actual expats have their own little quarter in TPHCM and don’t bother anybody for the most part.

It’s the US social media, NGOs and CIA-linked schools that are doing the most damage. Going to these western schools is a sign of prestige and wealth, and you can probably guess what they teach and you’d be right.

There’s something of a scandal at one of these schools a few years ago that the students were being shown hollywood movies about the Viet Nam war, and being taught to be extremely sympathetic to the invading genicodal nazis – to the extent that Vietnamese students were literally crying about how sad it was that Amerikkkans were “forced” to kill Vietnamese.

On the official government level the relations are pretty good from what i can tell.

At a state level, relations are probably the best they’ve ever been with China. It’s warming, but still very cautious.

There are also extensive economic ties between the two countries and a lot of Chinese investment.

Yes, but there are lot’s of areas where Viet Nam desperately needs investment and modernization (#1 among those is clean energy and clean water infrastructure), but Viet Nam has this delusional “we’d rather go it alone” attitude towards China, but warmly embraces western investments of any kind. As a result, out vital infrastructure gets ignored while cities like TPHCM become increasingly financialized and turned into real estate speculation nightmares – to the extent that it’s becoming almost impossible for people to afford to live there.

We still mostly burn coal for power, and many homes now have 3-6 air conditioners to survive the summers here. The grid is a rats nest, and the more we cool our homes, the more unbreathable the air gets from all the pollution. There’s been talk about building a nuclear plant, but it would probably take 30+ years and pretty much no one believe it will ever happen. Not unless we accept a lot of help from China.

what lingering animosity there still is at the level of the everyday people seems to be entirely one sided

Very true. I’ve never met a Chinese person who bears any ill feelings toward vietnamese, but you still see some weird animosity in some of the older (40+) people here, especially in the south. It’s funny because it’s not really even about the border war with the PRC, but about the cultural memory of Imperial Chinese occupation, which mostly just exists today in old music and movies.

The attitude among the petite bourgeois here (often landlords), living in China has become enviable. Your son getting a white-collar job in China is starting to become a bigger brag than someone else’s son doing similar living in Amerikkka.

i think China and the Chinese people as a whole definitely would help Vietnam in case of a conflict

Yes, but will we accept that help? That’s the real question.

The US doesn’t want to invade Viet Nam again; they want us to be proxies against China. What happens will probably depend on how effective the narrative manipulation is. Nepal waited to long to try to regulate or ban US social media. Only vietnamese really know how corrupt things are here – from bottom to top, but no one here understand how Facebook is a weapon.

Many people here wear US flags on their clothes. They US flag stickers on their cars. They hate Viet Nam and wish the US “won” the war, especially the calis (viet gusanos). I regularly talk to the children and grandchildren of collaborators who secretly wish for the US to re-invade. Recently one woman I was talking with, who was 9 years old in 1975, told me she misses the war because her traitor father used to bring home hamburgers and cookies from the US bases. Her father abandon her when he fled to the US on a naval ship and she blames the ‘dirty communists’ for taking her dad away. People here very reluctant to talk about any kind of politics or history (alcohol helps), but it’s usually really bad tbh.

I hope the government is just playing a careful game by openly licking US and Israeli boots, and doesn’t just sell us out.

That was 1975 and you have no idea how reactionary most of Viet Nam is today. I live in the south and everyone here worships some idealized fantasy of american middle-income consumerism. Many vietnamese born after the war straight up worship white men (kissing hands, kneeling/groveling, etc.) Most people here despise the government and distrust the party, and not without reason, either.

You have no idea how much facebook has destroyed people’s brains, or how politically apathetic we’ve become. I’ve been warning for years that the US will pull an Arab Spring kind of social media campaign and how easy it would be to ignite a civil war here. Look at what happened to Nepal and I’ll tell you it could happen here, too.

Most people here believe that if Amerikkka comes back, it will be in parachutes and machine guns again. Virtually no one understands what information warfare and color revolution are, or that Google, Facebook and US media are weapons.

It’s not good.

Khey guyz, you can truzt uz, khwe PROMIS.