Trước khi nói tới hoà hợp, hòa giải, tới việc với tay tới những “khúc ruột ngàn dặm”, việc đầu tiên người Cộng sản Việt Nam cần làm là nói lên lời xin lỗi về những thảm họa, chết chóc, oan khiên, dối trá, nhũng lạm mà sự du nhập một chủ nghĩa ngoại lai đã đem lại ra cho dân Việt từ Bắc chí Nam trong suốt 70 năm qua. Trước khi quá muộn, cho vận mạng đất nước và đặc biệt những thế hệ tương lai. (TD, 06/2010)
Trùng Dương: Thời đại của xin lỗi
Blog NXH VOA
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Bắt VC xin lỗi, thì cũng... OK thôi.

Khổ một nỗi, VC nào ở đây, đứng ra xin lỗi?
Nếu là thứ VC... ngày nào, thì đám này chết hết rồi.
GNV đã từng đưa ra nhận xét 'cay đắng', cuộc chiến Mít khủng quá, nuốt sạch đám Mít tinh anh, cả VC lẫn không VC, thứ sống sót thì đều là phế liệu, đồ bỏ đi, chiến tranh chê, đếch thèm giết! (1)

(1)
Trước 1975, thời gian phụ trách trang Văn Học Nghệ Thuật của tờ nhật báo quân đội Tiền Tuyến, trong một bài giới thiệu tác phẩm đầu tay của một nhà văn đã có vài tuổi lính, nhớ tới nhà văn Y Uyên vừa mới tử trận, tôi có đưa ra một nhận xét: Hãy cố gắng sống sót, và, nếu may mắn sống sót, nếu may mắn hơn Y Uyên, bạn sẽ còn phải đụng với một cuộc chiến khác, khủng khiếp cũng chẳng kém trận đầu: văn chương!

Ý nghĩ này, tôi gặp lại, sau 1975, khi đọc Người Mẹ Cầm Súng của Nguyễn Thi, chết trận Mậu Thân, hình như ở khu Chợ Thiếc, Chợ Lớn, Sài Gòn. Liên tưởng tới bạn bè, phóng viên nước ngoài đã từng có dịp được quen biết, và đã tử trận, như Huỳnh Thành Mỹ, Sawada... tôi bỗng nhận ra một điều, cuộc chiến thật thâm hiểm, tàn nhẫn: nó nuốt sạch những ai thực sự dám đương đầu với nó.
GNV đọc Nỗi Buồn của Bảo Ninh  

Thành thử GNV không có ý kiến về cái vụ xin lỗi, mà chỉ nhân đây, dịch bài viết trên NYRB, Việt Nam bây giờ, Vietnam Now.
Đọc bài viết, là chúng ta đếch thèm bắt VC xin lỗi, và cũng vờ luôn chuyện, hay là mình cũng có khi phải xin lỗi, dân Mít, vì đã để cho VC phải xin lỗi!

Vietnam Now

Vietnam: Rising Dragon
by Bill Hayton
Yale University Press, 254 pp., $30.00

 

Reading Bill Hayton’s enlightening and persuasive narrative about postwar Vietnam I wondered, as I have before in these pages, how the Vietnamese won their long wars against the French and the United States. After Dean Rusk retired as secretary of state during much of the war, his son, Richard, asked him, “Short of blowing them off the face of the earth how could we have defeated such a people? Why did they keep coming? Who were these people? Why did they try so hard?” Rusk replied, “I really don’t have much to answer on that, Rich.”
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After succinctly tracing Hanoi's poolitical history after 1979, Hayton setttles down to a revealing description of Vietnam today. This includes "rocketing economic growth" that distorts the economy toward "the wants of the few rather than the needs of the many"; the need to create one million jobs every year; the emergence of a well-off urban class; the erosion of traditional rural values; the disdain for minority peoples; vast official corruption; an overwhelming security system; and above all the Party's determination to stay in power by any means, including the carefully supervised revival of religion and folk beliefs. Much of this could be said of China, but it would be a mistake to describe Vietnam as merely post Mao China writ small. Despite some political and economic echoes of China in its smaller neighbor, the two countries are fundamentally different, as the Chinese found out in 1979 when they unsuccessfully fought the Vietnamese.
One similarity with China is that many foreigners either believe or want to believe that economic reform will lead to more liberal, even democratic, reforms. The World Bank, Hayton notes, has hailed Vietnam as a "poster boy" for "economic liberalization." There is something in this claim for the advantages of the market, Hayton writes. But he adds that "Vietnam's transition was marked by rising state involvement in the economy .... The state remained in control, and foreign investment was directed into joint ventures with state firms." Hayton-forgetting China claims that this coordination has produced "economic growth, poverty reduction and political stability unmatched by any other developing country." And, he adds, an avalanche of endemic corruption and wildly erratic lending by state banks, with some firms becoming "mini-empires." Some of these state-controlled corporations "became outright criminals."
    Hayton tells us how it work at the very top, the fifteen-member Politburo. No one ascends to that height, he writes "without building up a network of supporters"-in China this web of relationships is called guanxi-"and delivering them benefits in return." He shows how President Nguyen Minh Triet built his fiefdom in Binh Duong province, near Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), by securing foreign money that helped create hundreds of thousands of jobs. This involved pharao, fence bending, "to get things done." Now his nephew runs Binh Duong, and under what Vietnamese call his "umbrella" his family and retainers are "protected" from the law. Such arrangements, the norm with national leaders, extend down through provincial and yet-lower-tier officials who have turned capitalism into family businesses, what the Vietnamese call "son of father, grandson of grandfather," meaning "the young offer loyalty, the old offer protection."
    These relationships are financially valuable, and investors-this, too, is true in China-will pay handsomely for introductions into such families. On a day-to-day basis every official transaction is likely to require some form of hidden payment. Corruption is built into every public activity:

    Kindergarten teachers will have to bribe the boss to get hired, the children’s parents will have to bribe the teacher to ensure their children         get well-treated, high school pupils will bribe their teachers to get good marks in exams, and Ph.D. students pay to get their theses written     for them by their examiners' colleagues .... Extra payments are required to get good treatment in hospitals, to get electricity connections         fixed and to get business.

The environment is a deepening disaster. The rivers surrounding Ho Chi Minh City are "biologically dead," and the air in Hanoi is poisonous, two more parallels with the waterways and cities of China. Sewage and other waste in both cities are dumped raw into the rivers and landfills and eventually poison the local water supplies. As in China local people unsuccessfully complained about such pollution for years but now that the urban middle classes are up in arms about smells and tastes action is slowly beginning to be taken. Hayton says that a World Bank report has warned that pollution will frighten away tourists and harm economic growth. In the north of the country, Ha Long Bay, Vietnam's premier tourist attraction with its low mountains rising straight from the water, is now a biological disaster zone, its waters polluted by the effluent from northern Vietnam's…. 

The New York Review of Books, June 24, 2010

TV sẽ post, và hy vọng, sẽ chuyển ngữ toàn bài viết.
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Việt Nam: Lền rông (1)
Lền rông, đọc ngược lại, thành rồng lên, rising dragon.
[Đừng đọc lộn, ‘rồng lộn’, đấy nhé!]

VC xin lỗi.
Giả dụ, Nguyễn Minh Triết đứng ra xin lỗi? 

Hayton kể, VC làm ăn ra sao, ở trên đỉnh, tức cái đám 15 tên trong Bộ Chính Trị. Tác giả bài viết Việt Nam Lền Rông viết, chẳng ai leo lên tới đó “mà không xây dựng một màng luới những đàn em, đệ tử, ủng hộ viên – tại TQ, màng lưới này có tên là quan-xi – và ‘xoa đầu’, ban phát bổng lộc, để bù lại”. Ông cho thấy bằng cách nào, chủ tịch nước Nguyễn Minh Triết xây dựng lãnh địa Bình Dương bằng cách bỏ túi tiền viện trợ của nước ngoài để tạo công ăn việc làm cho hàng trăm ngàn con người. Người cháu của ông, Ông Trùm Bình Dương, và dưới ô dù của Ông Trùm, cả gia đình bà con dòng họ tha hồ tự tung tự tác, và đều được ‘bảo vệ’ trước luật pháp. Quốc sách này có tên là biến của công thành của tư, biến chủ nghĩa tư bản thành công chuyện làm ăn trong gia đình, người Việt Nam gọi quốc sách này bằng cái tên “con trai của cha, cháu trai của ông nội’, có nghĩa, ‘đám trẻ trung thành, đám già bảo bọc’.

Cứ coi như chuyện viễn tưởng, chủ tịch nước NMT đứng ra xin lỗi, dân Mít chịu không?

Gấu đếch chịu!

The Chinese Communist Party
The permanent party
An entertaining and insightful portrait of China's secretive rulers 

The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers.
By Richard McGregor.
Harper; 302 pages; $27.99. Allen Lane; £25

 Any study of the Chinese Communist Party today will soon confront two jarring questions. The first is how a party responsible for such horrors - the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, the death of some 35m-40m people in the worst-ever manmade famine from1958-1960 - has stayed in power without facing any serious threat, the 1989 Tiananmen protests aside. The second is why it still calls itself "communist", when China today seems closer to the cut-throat capitalism of Victorian England than to any egalitarian dream.
The second question is easier. In 1979 Deng Xiaoping, the pragmatic founder of the new China, answered it in "four basic principles", the most important being "the leading role of the Communist Party". Richard McGregor's masterful depiction of the party today cites a less pompous tautology, from Chen Yuan, the son of a Long March veteran and hero of central planning, who is himself a leading state-banker: "We are the Communist Party and we will decide what communism means."
This willingness to jettison ideological baggage while clinging to Leninist first principles also helps answer the first question, about the party's surprising durability. Flexibility has been essential as the party has both led and adapted to wrenching change since 1978. It has had, as Mao Zedong, a less pragmatic communist, might have put it, to "manage contradictions". In the process, Chinese people have learnt to enjoy freedoms and prosperity unimaginable under Mao. The system, Mr McGregor rightly points out, still relies, ultimately, on terror. But no longer are party rule and terror absolutely synonymous.
Through anecdote and example, Mr McGregor, a longtime correspondent in China for the Financial Times, illuminates the most important of the contradictions and paradoxes. There is the obvious one, for example, between the demands of the market and party control. Mr McGregor describes one almost comical battlefield the overseas stock market listings of Chinese state-controlled companies.
Wall Street bankers scratched their heads over how to describe the role of a firm's party committee. John Thornton, a former boss of Goldman Sachs, describes an "eye-opening" lecture he received as a member of a Chinese board: the committee was responsible for six functions "and they were the ones that mattered." Prospectuses tend to solve the conundrum by avoiding mention of the party's role.
A more stomach-churning example of this contradiction was the discovery in 2008 by Sanlu, a dairy firm, that some of its products had been contaminated and were harming and killing children. Commercial logic, not to mention basic humanity, demanded an instant recall. But the boss's first loyalty was to the party, which had demanded that bad news be suppressed so as not to spoil the atmosphere at that year's Beijing Olympics.
Then there is the tension arising from the party's dependence-shown most graphically in Beijing in 1989-on the army to keep it in power. This has led to booming army budgets, as the generals acquire high-tech kit. But this in turn leads them to think of themselves as professional soldiers defending China when their job is to serve the Communist Party. Tensions surface in the mysterious occasional harangues in the press against those calling (though not in public) for the "depoliticisation" and "nationalization" of the armed forces.
Third, there is the paradox that China's leaders recognize that the main threat to their authority is corruption, yet their power rests on a system that makes it almost inevitable. Indeed, as Mr McGregor puts it, corruption has become a sort of "transaction tax that distributes ill-gotten gains among the ruling class ... 1t becomes the glue that keeps the system together." No outside body is allowed to have authority over the party. An independent anti-corruption campaign, as Mr McGreegor notes, "could bring the whole edifice tumbling down".
This is part of what the author calls the "fundamental paradox": "That a strong, all-powerful party makes for a weak government and compromised institutions." This leaves it ill-equipped to cope with the next change, as China "rebalances" its economy to stimulate domestic consumption, provide a decent social-security net and "take on the vested interests now profiting from the distortions".
Mr McGregor seems to think that the party's record suggests it will find a way to manage this next transition, too. But he also notes that the triumphalism of China’s leaders in recent months seems "brittle". Party rule has always made it hard to picture the future as very different from the present. But in China it usually is .•
The Economist June 16^th 2010

Thương hoài Đảng Ta: The permanent party

“We are the Communist Party and we will decide what communism means."
Chúng ông là Đảng CS Mít, và chúng ông sẽ quyết định chủ nghĩa CS nghĩa là gì

Bất cứ một nghiên cứu Đảng CS Mít nào bây giờ thì chẳng chóng thì chầy sẽ đụng với hai câu hỏi nghịch lỗ nhĩ.
Thứ nhất, tại làm sao mà Đảng Ta [không chịu xin lỗi, khi cả thế giới đang ở trong ‘thời đại của xin lỗi’], đã gây ra bao điều kinh hoàng, nào cải cách ruộng đất, nào cuộc chiến tương tàn, đánh tư sản mại bản, đưa dân Nam Mít đi kinh tế mới, nào Lò Cải Tạo… vậy mà vẫn cứ vững như bàn thạch chẳng sứt một sợi lông chim?
Thứ nhì, tại sao nó vẫn cứ gọi nó là CS, trong khi nó là một thứ quái thai gì gì đó, hay nói như me- xừ VC nằm vùng Đào Héo, ‘nó’ ăn nhằm một thứ đô la độc, gien đột biến, biến thành ruồi?

Việt Nam bây giờ

Jonathan Mirsky
đọc
Vietnam: Rising Dragon
by Bill Hayton
Yale University Press, 254 pp., $30.00