So what does happen to free thinkers in Vietnam?
They don't dissaper or show up years later "re-educated?
Did a million Chlians become "boat people"?
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I don't think much of anything happens to
"free thinkers" in Vietnam, unless they are dumb enough to challenge the Party or take active steps against the government. Maybe write a newsletter that deals with human rights or something like that - - then I would think they would get beaten up and/or thrown in jail. The Party spent a lot of blood and lives of people near and dear to them to bring independence and socialism to the Vietnamese people, and they aren't too anxious to see the gains they bled and died for eroded by the activities of anti-social schmucks. Not after what they had to sacrifice to get there.
I think if there is injustice in Vietnam - - well, I don't mean "IF," there
is injustice, of course there is, there is injustice everywhere on earth, even, believe it or not in God's Country, the United States of America - - most of the injustice would involve real or perceived
class enemies - - a man who used to be a merchant, or the son or even grandson of a family of landlords. These guys can wind up in jail for years for essentially nothing - - selectively enforced laws, like black marketeering, for example, when the whole fucking village was doing it and this one guy gets singled out. What a coincidence, his grandfather was the landlord!
As far as I know, there is no significant number of
"disappeared" in Viet Nam. I personally have never even read of any, let alone met anyone claiming to be a survivor of the disappeared. In Argentina, Uruguay and Chile, the secret police habitually after torturing a prisoner to death or to the point of death, would just make the body disappear - - bury it in a remote desert grave, or drop them, many times drugged and still alive, from night flights over the ocean. There are associations of the families of the disappeared in the "Southern Cone," the best-known being
Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, who gathered weekly in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, wearing white scarves. One of the mothers was even herself disappeared by the Argentine junta, but the mothers couldn't be scared off. My wife heard one of them address our synagogue years ago, and her impression was that these were women who felt that they had nothing left to lose. Although I guess in the torture chambers that one kidnapped mother realized just how wrong she had been. The courage of those women always amazed me. I could never have taken the risks they took. We were in Buenos Aires in December and the first place we wanted to go was the Plaza de Mayo (this was on a Thursday, the day of the Mothers' weekly walk) but we found out that their last walk was taken about a year before. All the families want is to know finally the fate of their loved ones, to know where is the grave. There are no family-of-the-disappeared organizations in Viet Nam (as far as I know) and if you know anything about the Vietnamese, you will know that family graves are very important. Families gather there to pray and remember. If there were a need for such organizations - - if there were lots of disappeared - - the need would have created the organization.
You also mentioned the
re-education camps. Again, being re-educated and released is not even remotely comparable to being tortured to death. Only a moral imbecile could equate the two. A long war of sacrifice had been waged by Uncle Ho against the French, the Japs, the Chinese, the French again and then the Amerikkkans. In the course of that war, there were traitors to their own people, traitors who had joined the foreigners (or at least the French and then the Amerikkkans) to fight against, torture and kill their own people for the sake of their foreign masters. Instead of killing them all immediately for their treason (which I admit is how I myself would have handled them) Uncle Ho decided instead to re-educate them. I'm no expert but my impression seems to be from the reading I've done and the Vietnamese that I've met here, the average re-education took around five to six years in a camp, less for the low-end civilian and military flunkies - - but here's a paper based on the experiences of a Lt.-Col. who was in for 11 years:
http://www.hmongstudies.org/PeterVanDoAReeducationCampStory.pdf It's interesting to note that although there are lots of complaints about poor health and sanitation, near-starvation rations, untreated illnesses, many of them fatal, there is not a single complaint of torture in the entire document. Again, compared to Pinochet, the contrast couldn't be clearer. In my eyes, Uncle Ho is a humanitarian for not killing the whole damn bunch. Also their sentences - - while prisoners of the Amerikkkan fascists face death sentences and probably will rot for 30 years to life, the longest that Uncle Ho held a treasonous rat in custody was 11 years.
<<Did a million Chileans become
boat people?>> Another comparison that only a moral imbecile could make. Someone who can't see the difference between allowing someone to take a boat ride to a new life, and torturing someone to death. No difference at all. Yep, that proves it. Yes, after a war whose Amerikkkan phase alone had lasted ten years, had taken 2 million lives and had poisoned the earth, air and water of the nation, you might think there would be some degree of popular anger directed at the sell-outs and quislings who had fought for the Amerikkkan invaders. I would not want to hang around very long either had I betrayed my country to the invader and had the invader then been driven out by the Resistance forces. There is always the possibility of the righteous anger of the people delivering a little sidewalk justice one day when you least expect it.