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#8 POSTCARD SAIGON: DESIGNER COMMUNISM BY HCM

Posted on February 28, 2011 Leave a Comment

Grubsheet is in Indochina this week, marvelling at the breathtaking transformation of the city the locals still refer to as Saigon, 36 years after their communist masters insisted on changing its name to Ho Chi Minh City in honour of the wispy-bearded architect of their revolution. The French colonisers who Uncle Ho deposed before his lieutenants deposed Uncle Sam two decades later used to call Saigon the Pearl of the Orient. It still is and holy pho, what a monster strand the city’s elite wears around its collective neck nowadays.

By far the biggest obvious change since we last visited three years ago is an explosion in the trappings of wealth of Vietnam’s movers and shakers. The accompanying photo pretty much says it all. Long gone are the bicycles, black pyjamas and conical straw hats or the later Vespas and Levis. This is now communism with the imposing front grill of a Bentley, clad in Armani or Chanel and shod with Jimmy Choo. All of which amounts to a pseudo-capitalist nirvana for an unelected clique still masquerading as “socialists” who preside over a one party dictatorship in which their fellow citizens never get a chance to remove them because they don’t get a vote. Funny how all totalitarian countries wind up the same.

The upside is that the Vietnamese people are still charming and the food sublime. Just pity the platoons of beggars on Saigon’s streets for whom communism is no different from capitalism. They still have to kow-tow to those at the top while only ever being able to dream of making the party connections that are the only route to success. Ironies abound. But to think that this ostentatious decadence was precisely what the legions in black pyjamas were intent on destroying when they swept into Saigon in April 1975. Was this really what Uncle Ho had in mind?

The morning paper brings a delightful start to the week. A local woman with a face as pitted as a pineapple has just turned 121. Like all good journos, the Vietnam News reporter asks her the key to such a long life. It’s eating only fish and never telling a lie, she says. Nothing about political longevity, of course,  but Julia Gillard would do well to take note.

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About Grubsheet

Graham Davis
Grubsheet Feejee is the blogsite of Graham Davis, an award-winning journalist turned communications consultant who was the Fijian Government’s principal communications advisor for six years from 2012 to 2018 and continued to work on Fiji’s global climate and oceans campaign up until the end of the decade.

 

Fiji-born to missionary parents and a dual Fijian-Australian national, Graham spent four decades in the international media before returning to Fiji to work full time in 2012. He reported from many parts of the world for the BBC, ABC, SBS, the Nine and Seven Networks and Sky News and wrote for a range of newspapers and magazines in Australia, New Zealand and Fiji.

 

Graham launched Grubsheet Feejee in 2011 and suspended writing for it after the Fijian election of 2014, by which time he was working at the heart of government. But the website continued to attract hits as a background resource on events in Fiji in the transition back to parliamentary democracy.

 

Grubsheet relaunches in 2020 at one of the most critical times in Fijian history, with the nation reeling from the Covid-19 crisis and Frank Bainimarama’s government shouldering the twin burdens of incumbency and economic disintegration.

 

Grubsheet’s sole agenda is the national interest; the strengthening of Fiji’s ties with the democracies; upholding equal rights for all citizens; government that is genuinely transparent and free of corruption and nepotism; and upholding Fiji’s service to the world in climate and oceans advocacy and UN Peacekeeping.

 

Comments are welcome and you can contact me in the strictest confidence at grubsheetcontact@gmail.com

 

(Feejee is the original name for Fiji - a derivative of the indigenous Viti and the Tongan Fisi - and was widely used until the late 19th century)

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