{"id":181052,"date":"2018-12-25T08:03:58","date_gmt":"2018-12-25T08:03:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=181052"},"modified":"2018-12-28T06:30:55","modified_gmt":"2018-12-28T06:30:55","slug":"endless-culture-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=181052","title":{"rendered":"Endless Culture War"},"content":{"rendered":"

Linh Dinh \u2013 The Unz Review Dec 24, 2018<\/h1>\n
\"Ea<\/a>

Ea Kly, 2018. Click to enlarge<\/p><\/div>\n

In Bangkok for Miss Universe 2018, Miss Cambodia and Miss Vietnam made international news when they were idiotically mocked by Miss USA for not knowing English. The Vietnamese beauty, H\u2019Hen Nie, is a Rade from Dak Lak, a province well-known to many American Vietnam War vets, but otherwise not often seen by foreigners. Its waterfalls and elephants don\u2019t attract too many tourists, who prefer to crowd the beaches in Nha Trang, one province over.<\/h5>\n
\"46271998102_0910d49333_b\"<\/a>Typing this, I\u2019m lying on the floor<\/a><\/span>, with mouse droppings inches from my laptop, in Dak Lak<\/a><\/span>. It has been raining, often fiercely, for more than 24 hours. Outside my brownish steel doors are huge nylon sacks of plastic trash, or just trash. I\u2019m working as a foreman at my brother-in-law\u2019s plastic recycling plant<\/a><\/span>, and living in the back of it. Tripping towards old age, I must make minimal provisions. It\u2019s really cascading outside.<\/h5>\n
\"sorting<\/a>We have 30 employees, 23 women and seven men. The women\u2019s main tasks are sorting<\/a><\/span> the plastic pieces according to types and colors, and making sure no metal is left in them before they\u2019re fed into the pelletizing machine. To remove metal, these small but tough women use a hammer or meat cleaver, mostly, but sometimes a screw driver or plier. Banging away for hours is grueling work, obviously.<\/h5>\n
\"46309200691_8a02fcab85_b\"<\/a>Men load and unload heavy bags from trucks, operate<\/a><\/span> the pelletizing<\/a> machine<\/a><\/span>. When men work together, even the smallest and weakest must suck it up and hump as much and as long as the rest, for to quit would be too humiliating. Sport teams, construction crews and armies all operate on this principle. Our hardiest male employee is also the shortest and scrawniest.<\/h5>\n
The women earned $6.82 a day, but their paces were slow, so now they\u2019re paid by how many kilograms of plastic garbage they clear, which I track. Moving much faster, many routinely make more than $8.58 a day. The men are paid between $7.72 and $8.58. Around here, $6.43 daily is considered a decent wage, and most people don\u2019t have to worry about rent, mortgage or property taxes.<\/h5>\n
The women prefer working here to the coffee plantations or lumber yards, since it\u2019s inside and requires no heavy lifting. When a Rade woman was fired for repeatedly making mistakes, she threatened to bring her entire village down to take care of our manager, but nothing came of it.<\/h5>\n
Since the temperature inside the plant ranges from cool to moderately hot, it\u2019s odd to see all the women well-wrapped<\/a> up, so that only their eyes are visible. Perhaps they\u2019ve retained this habit from toiling outside, where the dreaded sun will turn their skin darker, which they hate.<\/h5>\n
This town, Ea Kly<\/a><\/span>, has around 20,000 people. Near our recycling plant, there\u2019s a caf\u00e9 with hammocks, so sometimes I go there to lie down, or to type<\/a><\/span>. The owner<\/a><\/span> used to serve beer, but she stopped when locals kept complaining about her price of 52 cents for a can of Saigon.<\/h5>\n
She only charges 34 cents for hot coffee with condensed milk, a Vietnamese standard, but it\u2019s never hot. In Saigon, no one would put up with this, but we\u2019re in remote, end of the road Ea Kly, OK, so just chill. In Hanoi, too, I\u2019ve been served tepid coffee as \u201chot,\u201d so it\u2019s sort of a northern thing. From her accent, I can immediately tell the Ea Kly lady is a northerner. Decades of hard-core Communism degraded all northern foods and drinks, so that the worst pho on earth is actually in Hanoi, its birthplace.<\/h5>\n
It took a dozen visits before I found out the lady\u2019s specialty is rice wine, home distilled, \u201cI had to make my own because all the suppliers I tried were so inconsistent,\u201d for they would use cheaper ingredients, hasten the process, cut corners. Though her wine has become famous locally, she won\u2019t sell it in bulk, for fear it will be diluted or swapped, thus ruining her reputation.<\/h5>\n
She and her husband moved to Ea Kly in 1982, and back then, the FULRO insurgents were still very active. FULRO stands for Front Unifi\u00e9 pour la Lib\u00e9ration des Races Opprim\u00e9es. Rade, Cham and Cambodians made up the bulk of their membership, but there were also Bahnar, Jarai and K\u2019Ho fighters, all unified by their hatred of the Vietnamese, who had stolen their lands.<\/h5>\n
You, too, are living on stolen land, and the fact that you\u2019re still here means your heroically murderous ancestors have wiped out plenty of people, or at least their cultures. Physical war may be sporadic, but culture war is constant, and what\u2019s at stake, always, is self-definition. The most common, persistent and insidious war is the fight between nations, often inside the same borders, over self-definition. Countless men have been willing to die to protect their nation\u2019s ability to define itself. If you lose sight of this objective, you\u2019re already defeated.<\/h5>\n
The caf\u00e9 owner\u2019s husband tells me, \u201cWhen I first moved here, the FULRO would occasionally show up to collect rice, but what they needed most were medicines. Hunger, they could handle, but not being sick in the jungle.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u201cDid they kill Vietnamese civilians?\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u201cNo, not when I was here. They were in trouble. Our government is very good at maintaining security. The FULRO were being chased around, so they couldn\u2019t set up base camps and grow vegetables, like our soldiers did during the war. A couple of times, drunk FULRO even walked down the middle of the road, shouting, \u2018We\u2019ll take this land back!\u2019\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u201cSo what happened?\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u201cWe never saw those guys again!\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u201cWhat do you mean?\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u201cThe government got them, I\u2019m sure. We had plants inside all the minority villages.\u201d<\/h5>\n
If it wasn\u2019t for the Vietnamese, the Cham would not be aligned with the Rade, Bahnar and K\u2019Ho, but subjugate and assimilate them into Champa, which once took up most of central Vietnam. These obscure and nearly obliterated nations should remind you that your nation, also, can easily meet the same fate.<\/h5>\n
With the Vietnamese, me included, surging into Dak Lak, the Rade<\/a><\/span> have become a minority here. Most still live in their own villages, which I\u2019ve been advised to stay clear of. Many Rade<\/a><\/span> are employed by Vietnamese, so I often see them going to work, sitting on the flat beds of tractor trucks. In our plastic recycling plant, we also have a handful of Rade employees.<\/h5>\n
Near the end of a long day, the sweating men are taking a brief break, during which one Rade spoke to another in their language, which prompted a Vietnamese to shout, \u201cStop speaking Chinese! We can\u2019t understand it!\u201d<\/h5>\n
Second Vietnamese, \u201cThat\u2019s not Chinese. That\u2019s Rade!\u201d<\/h5>\n
A third Vietnamese addressed the Rade in the one Cambodian sentence he knew.<\/h5>\n
Second Vietnamese, \u201cThat\u2019s Cambodian. They\u2019re Rade! It\u2019s a different language!\u201d<\/h5>\n
Fourth Vietnamese, \u201cThere\u2019s this song I\u2019ve heard. Maybe it\u2019s Rade. I can\u2019t quite remember the title\u2026\u201d<\/h5>\n
First Vietnamese, \u201cYou mean the one, \u2018I don\u2019t take a bath, and that\u2019s why I stink\u2019?\u201d<\/h5>\n
This kind of racist needling or bantering, I\u2019ve heard many times before, but as a minority in the USA. That\u2019s just how knuckleheads talk, the world over. Culture war winners freely crack jokes.<\/h5>\n
One of the Rade men is older and taller than the rest, so he\u2019s nicknamed B\u1ed1 Gi\u00e0, or Godfather. A bit kooky, he\u2019d fish out a plastic bracelet from the trash and wear it, or grinningly tilt a decapitated doll\u2019s head back and forth, just to see the blonde babe open and close her eyes.<\/h5>\n
Though Rade are generally darker than Vietnamese, you will occasionally run into one who\u2019s remarkably white, with vaguely or even quite pronounced white features, but this shouldn\u2019t surprise, for the French were here for decades, then the Americans dropped by. Capitalizing on the Rade\u2019s hatred of Vietnamese, the US armed them to fight the Viet Cong, but the Rade ended up killing a few ARVNs too.<\/h5>\n
In Saigon, you can\u2019t stumble a block without finding at least decent food options, but in Ea Kly, the culinary offerings are rather humble and humbling. Outside Vietnamese schools, there are usually a handful of vendors, at least, selling breakfast, lunch and snacks, but the elementary school near me has just one choice in the morning, sticky rice with bits of corn, fried onion, pork roll and dry, shredded pork.<\/h5>\n
Although dog and cat meat joints are very rare in southern Vietnam, there are a handful in Ea Kly, thanks to the many immigrants from the north. As for the Rade, they have their own dishes, of course. To prepare one delicacy, they place slices of beef over a nest of weaver ants, then poke it to get the pissed-off ants to swarm out to nibble on the meat and urinate on it. The ant piss-marinated beef would then be placed on a tin roof, to be baked by the sun. Weaver ants and their eggs are themselves eaten, in a sweet and sour soup. At banquets, guests wolf down medium rare beef or buffalo dipped in just MSG. Another Dak Lak tribe, the Mnongs, can boast of a barely-cooked-pork salad, served in the pig\u2019s hollowed out carcass.<\/h5>\n
Dak Lak is renowned for its coffee, including the super expensive c\u00e0 ph\u00ea ch\u1ed3n, Vietnam\u2019s version of kopi luwak, which is coffee beans collected from the excrement of a civet. This beast only selects the choicest coffee cherries to eat, and its intestinal enzymes imbue the coffee beans with an elegant flavor, and no, there\u2019s no shit to ingest after processing. When the French introduced coffee to Vietnam, it was an exorbitant beverage reserved for the priviledged, so coffee growers themselves could only afford crap, so goes the story, but this smell, to me, too much like later-invented illustration of Colonial oppression and class differences.<\/h5>\n
\u201cYeah man, they made us grow this java, but we could only sniff it, not drink it, so cursing our opprim\u00e9e fate, we drunkenly decided to brew some random shit, found on the ground, but dude, it turned out to be some boss shit! The best shit ever!\u201d<\/h5>\n
What if a Rade moves to, say, Minneapolis and decides to open a restaurant serving ant piss-marinated beef? If all cultures, and hence all cultural practices, are equally valid, then there\u2019s no reason why he can\u2019t, but of course he won\u2019t be able to, just as Muslims can\u2019t have their prayer calls broadcast across an American city, or Christians their displays of the Ten Commandments on public land. The more multicultural a society, the more muted and blunted each culture within it, and a man can only be fully himself within his own, self-defined context. As soon as a Rade, Indian, Kenyan, Swede or whoever is removed from his native soil, he\u2019s compromised, if not a sick caricature of himself.<\/h5>\n
Sometimes, I eat lame pho at a place run by a woman from Thai Binh. Here since 1995, she used to make excellent money serving bus passengers, \u201cThat\u2019s how we could afford to send our kids to schools. My place was open from 3 in the morning until 10 at night. Back then, a bus from South to North would take several days, so there were many stops.\u201d Now, with much better roads, they just zoom by, thus depriving her and many others of income.<\/h5>\n
She offered all types of dishes, \u201cI had fresh killed rabbits. I had dogs, but the dogs would cry and moan during the night, just like people, so I stopped.\u201d<\/h5>\n
Many of her customers have been Rade, \u201cMy husband went to Saigon and bought a 60 million dong [$2,500] flat screen, so the Rade would just sit here for hours, from 8 in the morning until 4!\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u201cBut they would order food and drinks the whole time?\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u201cHardly anything! Some would just get cigarettes for 5,000 [21 cents]. If they ordered dog meat, they would keep requesting extra lemon grass and skunkvine leaves, so they could dip them in the fermented shrimp paste, and I couldn\u2019t say no.\u201d<\/h5>\n
Once when she was away, her husband pissed off some Rade so they wrecked the place, \u201cThey thought he didn\u2019t want to serve them because they were Rade, but it was just because I wasn\u2019t around. He was drunk, though, so he didn\u2019t say it very nicely.\u201d<\/h5>\n
She goes home to Thai Binh every three years, but once stayed away for five, \u201cThe last time, it cost me 10 million [$429]. For each person I visited, I had to bring a tin of cookies, a kilogram of sugar and a packet of MSG. If it\u2019s an old person, then I would also give 500,000 [$21.45].\u201d<\/h5>\n
\"42363579200_d686a930c5_b\"<\/a>Like me, she moved to Dak Lak for economic reasons, and though she\u2019d rather be in Thai Binh, I\u2019m sure, where the culture is more familiar and congenial to her, she doesn\u2019t have a choice but to stay and, likely, die here. A visit to the local cemetery<\/a><\/span> showed that most of the deceased<\/a><\/span> came from elsewhere<\/a><\/span>. In the eyes of the Rade, they\u2019re all invaders, and so am I.<\/h5>\n
If you take the long view, no land is intrinsically the property of any tribe, so terms such as \u201cnative American\u201d or \u201cfirst nation\u201d are inherently nonsensical. Nations have always encroached on each other, and these include not just armies but immigrants, illegal and legal. Of course, outsiders have also been welcomed in, and the justification, nearly always, is that they benefit the host society. To this list, we can count African slaves to the Americas, Muslims to Europe and, now, Southeast Asians to Japan.<\/h5>\n
During Miss Universe 2018, H\u2019Hen Nie wore an outlandish banh mi outfit as Vietnam\u2019s national dress, but such is the evolution of culture. With its French bread, pat\u00e9 and mayonnaise, this bastard of French colonial rule has been embraced by Vietnamese to define themselves, to be draped onto a Rade whose self-definition has been much compromised by Vietnamese.<\/h5>\n
Since H\u2019Hen\u2019s mother speaks no Vietnamese, she\u2019s interviewed by vnExpress through a translator. She shares, \u201cAt that age [14], girls in my village start to get married, have children. Back then, if H\u2019Hen had listened to me, she wouldn\u2019t be able to shine so brightly today. I feel very happy and lucky that my daughter was so stubborn. From now on, I will never urge her to get married […] As a child, when I was still carrying her on my back to school, I could see that she was very special. As a child, she made everyone cherish her because she was so cheerful and positive. The road from home to school was very long, and got muddy each time there was a storm, but H\u2019Hen never dreaded it, but went to school diligently. There were days she went to school without breakfast. I feel guilty for not having the means to send her to school properly. H\u2019Hen\u2019s achievement today is mostly through her own effort.\u201d<\/h5>\n
Placing fifth at Miss Universe 2018, H\u2019Hen was paid $25,805, all of which she has already given to charities, with the main project the building of a library in her impoverished village, Sut M\u2019Dung.<\/h5>\n
It\u2019s not hard to see why H\u2019Hen is receiving a tremendous amount of love from fans, domestic and foreign, but cheering her on, Vietnamese can also congratulate themselves on proving to the world that 1) They don\u2019t discriminate against minorities 2) Despite having 54 ethnic groups, Vietnam is just one big, happy family. Similar delusions infected many Americans when they elected Barack Obama.<\/h5>\n
Having often been threatened with cultural annihilation, one society doesn\u2019t just know that self-definition is an endless war, but is willing to fight even to the death for it, and that\u2019s why it will endure. Warring against itself, the other one implodes.<\/h5>\n
Linh Dinh\u2019s<\/em><\/strong> latest book is <\/em>Postcards from the End of America<\/a><\/span>. He maintains a regularly updated photo blog<\/a><\/span><\/em><\/h5>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The more multicultural a society, the more muted and blunted each culture within it, and a man can only be fully himself within his own, self-defined context<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":146,"featured_media":181057,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[61],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181052","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-Commentary"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181052","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/146"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=181052"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181052\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":181067,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181052\/revisions\/181067"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/181057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=181052"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=181052"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=181052"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}