Category: English

Interview with The Final Straw Radio

Mèo Mun is an anarchist collective working to make anarchist materials and ideas more accessible to a Vietnamese audience, together with providing an analysis of social struggles from a Vietnamese anarchist lens. Over the next hour you’ll hear three collective members, Mai, Will and tùng share their critiques of leftist misrepresentations of the Vietnamese State as Socialist, lasting impacts of imperialism and war on populations of Vietnam, the centering US imaginaries of Vietnam, the struggles of working class people in general (and queer folks and sex workers in particular) in Vietnam, nationalism promoted by the government and other topics.

Is queerphobia in Vietnam a mere product of colonialism, and does it matter?
See also the video version by veritas et caritas here.

Content warning: queerphobia, queerphobic slurs, discussion of genocide

There is a tendency in some post-colonial societies to blame all social ailments, such as queerphobia, sexism, and misogyny, on colonialism and Western imperialism. Whilst the evils and destructiveness of colonialism are indubitably pervasive, such reductive thinking is overly simplistic, and can be detrimental to marginalised groups in post-colonial societies.

Western leftists, communists, and anarchists alike routinely call for ‘unity’ with the authoritarian oppressors in their favourite ‘socialist’ states. They value a cheap, doomed-to-end-in-failure unity with the statists, the genocide deniers, and the red reactionaries, more than the well-being and liberation of marginalised groups.
See also the video version by veritas et caritas here.

Vietnam 2021, the mood in the air seems to be that of optimism. The government’s relentless pursuit of a Zero-COVID strategy has won them widespread approval both domestically and internationally. The economy managed to squeeze out positive growth whereas many of its neighbours suffered a decline from the pandemic. Yet underneath all this bravado, one could sense that something is amiss. There’s this nagging feeling that no one seems to be able to put a finger on. Almost as if, there is a spectre haunting Vietnam, the spectre of communism — the true kind without any bells and whistles.