Category: Vietnamese

Complaint About Ho Chi Minh

Let’s talk again about an all-too-familiar subject: Ho Chi Minh and his ghastly credos. What follows is a series of remarks addressed to the readers of this letter and to Minh himself. There are no two ways about it; I have a tendency to report the more sensational things that he is up to, the more shocking things, things like how he wants to put salacious thoughts in our children’s minds. And I realize the difficulty that the average person has in coming to grips with that, but the baneful nature of his epithets is not just a rumor. It is a fact to which I can testify. Far be it for me to force onto us the degradation and ignominy that Minh is known to revel in. I apologize if what I’m saying sounds painfully obvious, painfully self-evident. However, it is so extremely important that I must definitely say it.

I indisputably believe that discrediting ideas by labeling them as perfidious is an old tradition among his cronies. My views, of course, are not the issue here. The issue is that if he is going to talk about higher standards, then he needs to live by those higher standards. And what of it? Minh is careless with data, makes all sorts of causal interpretations of things without any real justification, has a way of combining disparate ideas that don’t seem to hang together, seems to show a sort of pride in his own biases, gets into all sorts of rotten speculation, and then makes no effort to test out his speculations — and that’s just the short list! Why doesn’t he point a critical finger at himself? It may be soothing and pleasant for him to think that “”the norm”” shouldn’t have to worry about how the exceptions feel, but it may seem difficult at first to set the record straight. It is. But in order to solve the big problems with him, we must first understand these problems, and to understand them, we must establish clear, justifiable definitions of sectarianism and insurrectionism, so that you can defend a decision to take action when his lackeys defuse or undermine incisive critiques of his obtuse behavior by turning them into procedural arguments about mechanisms of institutional restraint.

Don’t give Minh’s wheelings and dealings a credibility they don’t deserve. In any case, when I first became aware of Minh’s covert invasion into our thought processes, all I could think was how Minh intends to create a new social class. Materialistic dipsomaniacs, unrestrained sociopaths, and juvenile unforgiving amnesiacs will be given aristocratic status. The rest of us will be forced into serving as their henchmen. A central fault line runs through each of his wisecracks. Specifically, if we don’t soon tell him to stop what he’s doing, he will proceed with his nativism-oriented tricks, considerably emboldened by our lack of resistance. We will have tacitly given him our permission to do so. Take it from me: I would never take a job working for Minh. Given his unstable editorials, who would want to? Everybody knows that he is a supporter of everything that was trendy in America in the 1960s — the marvelous effects of LSD and other psychedelic drugs, pyramid power, various oriental religious cults, transcendental meditation, UFOs and extraterrestrials, CIA conspiracies, you name it — but you should consider that at no time in the past did crotchety cads shamble through the streets of cities, demanding rights they imagine some supernatural power has bestowed upon them.

This is not the first time we’ve had trouble with the worst kinds of unregenerate mob bosses I’ve ever seen, and it unquestionably won’t be the last, to put it mildly. Some will say I exaggerate, but, actually, I’m being quite lenient. I didn’t mention, for example, that Minh says it is within his legal right to trick academics into abandoning the principles of scientific inquiry. Whether or not he indeed has such a right, if, five years ago, I had described a person like Minh to you and told you that in five years, he’d set up dissident groups and individuals for conspiracy charges and then carry out searches and seizures on flimsy pretexts, you’d have thought me infantile. You’d have laughed at me and told me it couldn’t happen. So it is useful now to note that, first, it has happened and, second, to try to understand how it happened and how some people are responsible and others are not. Minh falls into the category of “”not””.

Nobody wants Minh to leach integrity and honor from our souls, but Minh insists on doing it anyway. His zingers have kept us separated for too long from the love, contributions, and challenges of our brothers and sisters in this wonderful adventure we share together — life! On a personal note, his assistants’ thinking is fenced in by many constraints. Their minds are not free because they dare not be.

What Minh does in private is none of my business. But when he tries to perpetuate the nonsense known technically as the analytic/synthetic dichotomy, I object. It has been proven time and time again that he believes that he never engages in disloyal, puerile, or jackbooted politics. That’s just wrong. Continue reading “Complaint About Ho Chi Minh”