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Tradition and Arrogance
To some elements within the Vietnamese community in Australia, protest march and
yelling abuse seem to be their only means of dialogue. To these people, protest
has become the norm rather than the exception. In mid-1990s they protested
against the normalisation of diplomatic relations between the United States and
Vietnam. In 2001, they protested against the United States – Vietnam bilateral
trade accord. Last year, they protested against the land and border treaty
signed between Vietnam and China. Apart from those protests, they regularly
protest against Vietnamese artists performing in Australia at the invitation of
Australia. And now, they are protesting against SBS Television, because the
station has decided to broadcast a 30-minute news bulletin, which they regard as
propaganda, from a government-controlled satellite-based Vietnamese television
station. In short, they protest against anything from Vietnam.
You can be forgiven to think that they have, over the years, become professional
protesters, professional agitators, or may I say, professional bullies.
That explains why their language is not just demanding, but also very
patronising and uncompromising: “Do as I tell you what to do, or I will protest
against you.” In the case of SBS Television, “do as I tell” means SBS must stop
the broadcasting. SBS Television doesn’t follow their do-as-I-tell order, so
they resorted to protest, and they have promised more protests. The operative
principle dictating these arrogant protesters’ hostility to SBS Television has
little to do with whether the broadcasting news is propagandistic or not, but it
has something to do with tradition and arrogance.
To understand that proposition, an important question must be asked and
clarified: Who are they? They, those who motivated to protest or to email or to
call in abusing against SBS Television, are from the more extreme end of the
Vietnamese community in Australia. They are the “let us protest” or “let us
sabotage Vietnam” variety. I call them extremists. However, the most
important thing I want you to remember is that they do not represent the
mid-ground majority of Vietnamese Australians, who are not intimidated to join
their protest. Let me say that again, for emphasis: these extremists do not
represent the large majority of Vietnamese Australians.
During the past 30 years or so, these extremists have possessed or controlled a
powerful means in their hands: the community media. With that means, they have
been bombarding the Vietnamese community in Australia in the way the Iraqi
population has recently been bombarded by Saddam Hussein. It was a war of lies,
misinfornation and omission. The war, overwhelming and devastating, waged right
here in Australia, in the name of freedom of press.
During that period, they and their associated
media have presented to – or more accurately – imposed on, the Vietnamese
community and the Australian public at large their version of reality in
Vietnam: Backwardness, lawlessness, total corruption, poverty, brutality,
pretension, etc. In their view, the Vietnamese government
cannot understand what justice is, what fair play
is. Vietnam is not supposed to
progress, Vietnam is not allowed to have a good news, Vietnam must have bad
news. According to their version of perception, the present
government in Vietnam is unable to administer the country, unable to develop the
country. So much so that Vietnam’s development is either ignored or belittled.
In their cynical view, even if Vietnam has done
something right it must have been for the wrong reasons.
In the mean time, they have actively projected
their dark agenda, the infuriating agenda that inspires so much hostility toward
Vietnam: the self-righteousness, the feverish faith in its moral superiority,
the saccharine and infantile patriotism, and the deep self-persuasion that they
are not only the most powerful, but also that the truth is always theirs. They
say they always help oppressed people in Vietnam, to free them of their
shackles. They have no interests; no cynical, instrumentalist realpolitik
guides it. They are good guys and only have moral interests. The Vietnamese in
Vietnam are effectively called “the bad guys”. It's that simple. They are
indifferent to any perspective that is not theirs.
During such a long period, there has been virtually no challenge to the single
ideology and viewpoint held by these so-called “community leaders”. Anyone who
dares to publicly express a different view from community leaders’ view is
immediately labelled “a communist”. That is not an insult. That is a death
sentence within the community. In 1989, a writer and his artist wife, both
working for the magazine Tien Phong (in Virginia, United States),
were murdered because they had previously been accused of being “communists”. A
few years ago, in Sydney, a prominent academic in the community suggested that
many Vietnamese refugees had escaped from Vietnam were only to be imprisoned by
their own community in Australia, and he was immediately denounced as a
“communist”, or a “communist sympathizer”, and had subsequently been vilified
for more than a year. (At present, via their media outlets they accuse – in
Vietnamese only – SBS Television of being a communist organ, they even suggest
that the SBS Television Management had taken bribe from the government of
Vietnam!)
Because there is no dissent voice, the community is ideologically populated by
only two values: Good versus evil, right versus wrong, enemy versus friend,
etc. Anyone who is not fully committed to the their side is automatically
grouped into the “other side”. It is not surprising that in our community the
dictates of extremist power – of what simply must not be said if power is to
retain their appearance of legitimacy – are so effective in silencing almost
literally everyone.
So, these extremist “community leaders” have had a good run for many years.
They have been used to be in charge, by a cosmetic democratic process, by virtue
of who they were, and they were not interested in changing the underlying power
dynamics.
Then came along SBS Television ... The broadcaster’s decision to broadcast the
news bulletin from Vietam is a challenge to their intoxicated domination. They
are not used to this kind of challenge, and they lack a logical reasoning to
justify their objection, so their only option is to … protest, which they have
had considerable experience. The frequency,
consistence and passion with which they have used the lame excuse [that the news
bulletin is a propaganda] for the protest, and the fact that nearly no other
logical reasons are mentioned shows that this is the their only means of
dialogue.
However, the assumption underlying their objection to SBS Television is arrogant
and offensive. By suppressing news that they don’t like, they are effectively
saying that they know what is good and what is bad for us, ordinary Vietnamese
Australians – a total contempt. They seem to have learned well from the
dictatorial regimes of Nguyen Van Thieu and Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam that
they have been associated with.
Their objection to SBS Television also demonstrates their own hypocrisy. In
reality, what SBS Television starts doing is what the Vietnamese language media
in Australia has been doing for more than two decades. Indeed, during the past
20 years or so, virtually all Vietnamese language media outlets in Australia
have been getting news and articles from online newspapers in Vietnam. (They
also daily copy news and articles from mainstream Australian newspapers and
media organisations, but they never acknowledge the source). If you open any
Vietnamese language newspaper in Sydney or Melbourne, you will find that up to
100% of news content concerning Vietnam are simply copied from sources in
Vietnam. What makes difference is that SBS Television broadcasts news from
Vietnam in Vietnamese without alteration, so that viewers can judge for
themselves, whereas in contrast, Vietnamese newspapers and radios in Australia
pirate or plagiarise news and articles from sources in Vietnam, and then alter
the information so that they sound negative and unfavourable to Vietnam.
It is not that I am, or the community at large is, receptive of news from
Vietnam. It is a matter of balance. It is a matter of choice. It is a matter
of sanity. It is a matter of the right to information. I believe that the
right to information is a crucial underpinning of a participatory democracy.
The right to information is a fundamental human right which upholds the inherent
dignity of all people. Anyone who – either by tradition of power or by
resurrecting vile invectives and lie – narrows my choice is, in effect, to
restrict the horizon of thinking available to
me. That is, to me, a dangerous idea that must be kept away from Australia.
H Tran
Normanhurst
28/10/2003
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