#vietnam booking

[sir-fluffbutts]

fluff are u rich or summ you're always on vacation I swear

my dads head explodes if we don't go on vacation once every 4 months

[sporesgalaxy]

microinfluencing you to read To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise by Bethany Moreton 🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀 microinfluencing you to read Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era 🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀 microinfluencing you to listen to Behind the Bastards 6-part Henrey Kissinger podcast episodes 🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀 Ooooh you wanna get mad with me about how little u.s. policy has changed in the last 70ish years sooo baadddd

[gre4zerz]

Darry and Ponyboy making Soda's favorite dish and making everything nice for him...

Just to find out he died in Vietnam the month before.

(⁠ㆁ⁠ω⁠ㆁ⁠)

[scrumptiousstuffs]

Only Friends Fanmeeting Vietnam

Source: GMMTV IG and Fan’s Twitter

05/07/2025

[drsonnet]

Quest for Identity: #SREBRENICA

“In all their simplicity, these items are the last resort of identity, the last permanent reminder that these people ever existed.” A stark but powerful tribute to the victims of the Bosnian War.

Photographs and text by Ziyah Gafic

We first discovered this work after it was submitted to the Visual Storytelling Awards 2014. Although it was not chosen as a finalist by the jury, the editors of LensCulture were moved by its simplicity and power. In honor of this year’s Visual Storytelling Awards—and to inspire other visual storytellers—we have decided to publish this feature article.

These are simple objects: clocks, keys, combs, glasses. They are the things that victims of genocide in Bosnia carried with them on their final journey. This was the first act of genocide on European soil since the Holocaust.

During the four years of conflict that devastated the Bosnian nation in the early 90’s, approximately 30,000 citizens went missing. Most of them were killed in the early days of the war and towards the end of hostilities, when UN safe zones like Srebrenica fell into the hands of the Serb Army. As part of the process of identifying those who disappeared, personal belongings found with the victims remains have been collected by the International Commission on Missing Persons. The main goal is to identify those lost in the killings—no body should remain undiscovered and unidentified.

[arctic-hands]

You ever be totally immersed in a story and then you come across a line about a subject and you realize you know more about this subject than the author and what the author wrote down was completely wrong and it's not even that the author didn't do research so much as the author didn't even think this was something that even needed to be researched? And it drives you absolute cuckoo bananas?

[t00thpasteface]

shebbz i just want to say that you are single-handedly convincing me to watch mash... i know nothing about the show but ur chipping away at my brain like a misfolded protein

just make sure you watch it without laugh tracks

[thathartleykat]

Hilda comics are now officially available in Vietnam!

As a huge Vietnamese fan, I feel like this is a dream too good to be true, but... it's here!

5 years ago, when I started getting into Hilda, I'd never think I'll be where I am now.

I didn't even think I'd be able to find people in my country who have the same interest in the show, given how it was not available officially on Netflix in the first place.

Then I've found a small team of people, and we later formed a small community within our cartoon / movie groups. Many of our posts regarding Hilda gained quite some traction. We just thought maybe letting people knowing about the show is more than enough.

Earlier this year, a local publisher reached out to our team and informed us about bringing the comic here. Until the day we saw the review copies, we almost thought someone was pulling a prank on us.

Even though the Netflix series is still not officially available due to the lack of subtitles / audio for our language, this is a great start for us to help Hilda reach wider audiences here, and we'll continue to do our best to help Hilda become known across the nation.

[dayurno]

i rbed something as a joke yesterday about jean being dyslexic but i've been thinking about it all day and now i think it's cute and real. (heavy french accent) kévi what does zis say

[sunspira]

the number one most interesting analysis anyone ever made about the legend of korra is that the benders in republic city were clearly an oppressed and exploited population. NOT the non-benders. and therefore the equalists are nothing more than essentially a nazi party or kkk or other hate group that likes to masquerade itself as the victims to a scapegoat minority that is somehow a danger to normal people in order to oppress and eradicate them.

the most compelling evidence that benders actually represent and function as marginalized people is that they occupy characteristic marginalized roles in society. organized crime, factory laborers, pro-sports, music and film entertainment. (ESPECIALLY the more physically taxing high impact sports such as boxing and football!! the fighting ring nature of pro-bending absolutely reflects this. this is no golf tournament). with those roles that offer any hope of upward mobility being limited to only a few and as inherently exploited by producers as it is. or otherwise abject poverty in city slums.

non benders such as Mr. Sato own large successful corporations. benders do labor for him. benders do cheap manual labor for low pay in the early 20th century steampunk metaphor city and live in slums. while the ruling class non-bender turned out to be a raging bigot funding the equalist "movement"

so when korra yells at the equalist cunt doing a little infowars rant in the park and tells him to "shut up" and "im not oppressing you!! you're oppressing yourself" and everyone got mad at her for on tumblr being a bigot you were all wrong she was out there tearing down the zionist missing person propoganda posters before i even knew what the IDF stood for she was the fucking legend forever

AND she said acab !!!

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #15 – Vietnam: A New History by Christopher Goscha

This was my third history book of the year, and is about what you’d expect from the title and knowing it’s written by an academic historian – right down to the solid 100 pages of notes and citations at the end of it. I honestly picked it up because, well, because there was a tumblr post with a really intriguing quote from it floating around a few weeks back, and because I haven’t read any East/South-East Asian histories in a couple of years, and most of all because my library had a copy with no one ahead of me in the line for it.

The basic conceit of the book is that a great many English (and French) language histories that purport to be about Vietnam are in fact about the Vietnam War. That is, they are in truth about the years from 1945 to 1975, with the whole rest of history being either prelude or denouement, and, what’s worse, that they’re at least implicitly histories of Vietnam from the perspective of Americans. So it is trying to be a corrective, writing from the viewpoint of the Vietnamese and paying more attention to internal developments and contradictions than either Cold War grand strategy or the minutia of military operations. It...mostly succeeds?

The book’s very much...I want to say postcolonial, but honestly it’s been so long since I was in an actual seminar I’m probably butchering the term. Anyway, it is very suspicious of both colonial mythology and the sort of patriotic, anticolonial propaganda that a distorted version of is probably the median western anglophone’s only exposure to Vietnamese history. The book Fire in the Lake comes in for a lot of criticism, both in its own right and just as a synecdoche for the whole corpus of work that subordinated careful history or sociology with presenting Vietnamese history as one monolithic tale of glorious resistance to foreign imperialism – which, whatever its merits as political interventions in the America they were published in (then doing its level best to bomb the country into a corpse-strewn hellscape), simplify and exaggerate the actual history they’re telling to the point of deception.

Which really starts with the idea that there’s a singular, coherent Vietnam that has a history vanishing into the ancient past, let alone one always on the side of resistance and independence. The first several chapters of the book are devoted to Vietnam’s precolonial history, with a great deal of emphasis paid to the fact that its present borders are the result of a multi-generational imperial project of conquest, forced assimilation and mass settlement that was still active and ongoing as the French first moved in to colonize Cochinchina. This is complimented by an admittedly slightly tacked-on feeling section at the end of the main narrative that’s basically an explicit counterhistory, covering the same period of the rest of the book from the perspective of the Cham and the highland peoples who ultimately lost out to the Viet and Vietnamese state-making projects.

The book makes a whole organizing principle out of analogizing this Viet colonial project with first the Chinese (both Han and Ming) and later the French colonization of both the Viet and the whole region. It’s very interested in how they interacted with each other, as well – how post-Ming Viet rulers used Confucian/Han high culture to differentiate themselves from other SEAsian peoples and justify conquering them, how the French often continued and intensified campaigns of Viet settlement so as to have easily legible labor to exploit, how the romanized script introduced to make colonial administration easier became the medium of nationalist mass politics, that sort of thing.

The meat of the book is dedicated to the French colonial period and to a lesser extent the wars of independence, focused on the different national and colonial projects dedicated to developing or creating a ‘Vietnam’ or ‘Indochina’ or ‘Tonkin’ or what have you. Something it keeps returning to is that neither the French nor the Viet nor the various highland peoples ever had any singular, unified project they were all united behind – internal contradictions were often just as great as the conflicts between them.

Which, even if I didn’t know for a fact, I more or less took as a given regarding the colonized. But I really hadn’t realized how riven with contradictions and self-defeating the whole French colonial project was? There actually were fairly significant constituencies among the Vietnamese intelligentsia and bourgeoisie for the whole schema of colonial republicanism, for a liberal capitalist or social democratic state in some sort of wider French orbit. The French, in turn, used them or imprisoned them seemingly at random, and gave them basically nothing but words. The Catholic Church was better at indigenizing its hierarchy than the French Republic. They made the British in India look like reasonable honest brokers! (The end result of all this being, of course, that anyone who’d been willing to work with the French on anything but mercenary terms ended up marginal and delegitimized.)

The reasoning is pretty obvious (in that it mostly just boils down to ‘le racisme’), but it is kind of interesting how right up until the end the French colonial authorities were convinced Vietnam was a land of naturally conservative, traditionalist Confucian peasants, and that if they could just get a pliant Emperor to play the part and establish his ‘natural connection’ to the mandarinate and the peasantry the whole nation would be at peace. (Relatedly, Bo Dai’s whole biography reads like a parable).

Goscha’s natural sympathies are pretty clearly with what you might call the cultural intelligentsia, especially as the book moves through the war years. The members of the Literary Self Strengthening Movement, the writers of pacifist novels, poets and academics. The tragedy of inconvenient artists, whose perspective on the war was too bleak or mournful for either the Communists or the Nationalists and who ended up repressed regardless of which side of the partition they were on, gets a particular focus.

As does the similar fate of liberal democratic nationalists – the political tendencies Goscha pretty explicitly sympathizes with. He holds something of a grudge for how the Communist Party formed coalitions or alliances with these groups then systematically sidelined or violently suppressed them as soon as it was tactically convenient – but he’s also pretty clear-eyed that the French, Diem regime, and Americans did more or less the exact same thing as needed. The whole process is portrayed as a bit of a tragedy.

Despite the book’s professed intentions, the war years still eat up something like a third of its page count – but in its defence, those pages are far more interested in nation-building an cultural shifts than the specifics of military operations (with the two exceptions of Dien Bien Phu and the Tet Offensive, for obvious reasons). As far as high politics go, the book loses interest in the Nationalists almost entirely after the fall of Diem, which has the effect of portraying the American client governments that followed as hopeless and purely mercenary even compared to the plantation owners who collaborated with the French.

The sections covering post-reunification Vietnam are easily the book’s weakest, which is rather a shame. It’s essentially one long epilogue – the section on the Chinese invasion and the events preceding it was tantalizing and just crying out for more details (and I, uh, did not realize the degree to which the government just fell back on discourses of near-explicit racism and collective responsibility re: the large Chinese ethnic minority, especially in the south).

The rest of the book after that – there’s a passage I read at an impressionable age, about how every history book since the ‘90s has been obliged to end with a hopeful chapter about the connective power of the internet and the rising middle class and the irresistible spread of freedom and democracy, and how as time goes on more and more things happen but that future never seems to really get any closer. This is not a perspective I’d really generally endorse (certainly less so now than in peak End of History years), but it’s one that really comes to mind reading the book’s perspective on the years since the economic reforms and opening to global markets. Power and government policy are talked about in vague, general terms, and individual activists and civil society members are highlighted and lionized instead. The talk about how the communist party has functionally transitioned into a class-iniclusive formation legitimized by nationalism and consistent economic growth and how that growth might in time force it to liberalize sounds identical to how people talked about China in the 2000s.

(The tragic irony that, from 10,000 feet, the United States has everything it might have wanted out of Vietnam – strategic partner against China, enthusiastic participant in the mechanisms of global capitalism – and killed millions of people over a decade of warfare for functionally nothing is repeatedly remarked upon.)

Anyway, that disappointment aside, still a very interesting and informative book. Not one that really lives up to its promise, and its strongest chapters are specifically those focused on the more distant past – but even its weakest chapters still have at least some interesting anecdotes thrown in for colour. Potentially grading a bit generously because I’m comparing this to my last big 600 page history book in my head, but I don’t at all regret reading this one.

[captainpluto13]

The Son of Poseidon

I just made some blue cookies, reread The Lightning Thief, and listened to the musical again. I feel like I’m in middle school again and it just makes me feel so nostalgic. Vietnamese Percy propaganda again you cannot escape Viet Percy… ever.

[deadpresidents]

Awash in conflicting reports from unstable battlefronts, [President Gerald] Ford wanted a firsthand appraisal [on the situation in Vietnam] from someone he could trust. General [Frederick] Weyand was his chosen emissary. "You are not going over to lose," he instructed Weyand, "but to be tough and see what we can do." Ford conceded that any military options were severely limited. "I regret I don't have the authority to do some of the things President Nixon could do," he remarked wistfully. As the Oval Office emptied, photographer David Kennerly stayed behind. "You know, I would really like to go with the General," he said. Ford needed no persuading. As a journalist, and a friend, with extensive knowledge of the region from his two-year stint as a combat photographer for UPI, Life and Time, Kennerly could be counted on for an honest assessment of events -- more honest, perhaps, than that of diplomats and military men -- and with it, the pictures to back him up. Kennerly returned to his first-floor office with a sign dangling from his neck. GONE TO VIETNAM. BACK IN TWO WEEKS.

That evening the irreverent photo hound dubbed Hot Shot by the Secret Service appeared in the upstairs family quarters to say goodbye. Ford threw a protective arm around the young man's shoulders.

"You be careful. You have everything you need?"

As a matter of fact, Kennerly's pockets were empty. Local banks were closed and he could use some cash. Ford opened his wallet and handed over its contents, $47, as Betty Ford gave Kennerly a hug. He was striding toward the door when the President called out his name. "Here," said Ford, tossing Kennerly a quarter. "You might as well clean me out."

-- Richard Norton Smith, on White House photographer David Hume Kennerly's interactions with President Gerald Ford after Kennerly asked to accompany a General on a fact-finding mission to Vietnam in March 1975, shortly before the Fall of Saigon, An Ordinary Man: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

[witsserviceablesubstitute]

The Seanchan are ImperialismTM, and especially American Imperialism in all its aggressive social conditioning and slave-owning ugliness. There's a reason the Seanchan culture is a mash up of China and America particularly. It's deliberate. It's also a wonky metaphor written by a well-meaning Southern white man in the 90s, so it's far from perfect. Ultimately the Seanchan are no more or less evil than Americans during most of the USA's colonial history. That is to say they are and they aren't. Some swallow their conditioning wholesale, others fight against it, some relish the power the system gives them over others, others are uneasy about the cruelty expected of them yet continue to comply regardless, some break away altogether in an exceedingly painful process. Any dissenting information is buried, any outward revolt is squashed brutally, but it does exist. Of course it exists.

Maybe it's because I'm not American but I find irony in Americans especially being absolutist about the Seanchan because it feels like they're either condemning themselves or blind to how the USA has operated globally and historically. That might be a poor way to see it though, idk.

[scrumptiousstuffs]

Enjoy your time boys!

Source: Book’s IG

Only Friends Fanmeeting Vietnam

06/07/2024

[drsonnet]

Yes, he is wanted...#WarCriminalNetanyahu

Published first in Mondoweiss #Gaza #Palestine

Art: Carlos Latuff