Guillotine Poem

(of Confucian Sino-Vietnamese origin)

The flame [of patriotism] burns in my heart to the very end,
I am now going to shed blood beautifying the Fatherland,
Don't feel sorry that I must go and you remain,
This sacrifice is simply a test, distinguishing cowards from great men,
It is now yours, the sacred duty to liberate our beloved land,
Success or failure will be in your hands,
Your victory in the future is my hope and my dream,
I want to share it in the golden stream (place where the deceased go).




Context: French colonialists often used public executions via guillotine to dissuade villagers from joining revolutionary organizations. This was a poem often recited by people before execution. Said to have originated in Phu-Tho prison where many were held in solitary confinement until execution, which escalated throughout the 1930s.

Decolonizing Decolonialism

I recently attended a seminar focusing on the decolonizing movements and thoughts of Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire and something that was addressed that I thought was very crucial was, how do we deconstruct and create a movement dedicated to decolonization without becoming the new colonizer?

The speaker brought up examples of People's Republic of China and Cuba where after successfully ousting colonialists from their respective nations, they proceeded with decolonization, in the case of People's Republic of China, with the Cultural Revolution and thus the subsequent and methodical destruction of all things Confucian and in the case of Cuba, the persecution and targetting of Christianity. We also see this in Việt Nam, where after the revolution, Catholics came under heavy fire from the new government for being ardent pro-colonialists during the war. All these events were described as having 'decolonization' intentions, but reality, resulted in material, reactionary suppression of populations.

Decolonization efforts, as Fanon argued, should center around both self-determinism and the creation of a new society. Are we really creating a new society by reverting back to oppressive techniques shown to us and ingrained in us by our colonial masters?

The revolt against colonialism should really strive to have a critical analysis of systemic oppression, namely a system that prevents self-determinism. In the context of culture, I feel that decolonization movements should strive to ask, what is culture? What is the goal of decolonization? Is it to handcuff ourselves to the past?

I think it is important to note that culture is dynamic, not static. Though it is extremely important to preserve culture and self, especially in the context of Western imperialism and colonization (remembering that colonization is the very real extermination and smothering of 'deviant' people by a dominant, white male supremacist capitalist western society), it is important to realize that we must be open to change and not be stuck on being static. For example, while it is important to realize the narrative between Confucianism and colonial Christianity, which sought to 'civilize' savages, often through force and brutality, and the importance of understanding Confucianism and how it plays into the social structures of a lot of East Asian 'cultures' it does no one any good to stay stuck on Confucianism, which is heavily invested in patriarchy.

The important thing about decolonization is to allow people to make their own decisions within their own contexts. This requires that people be treated as human beings with respect and dignity. As with other aspects of the struggle, decolonization is an issue of human rights, not civil or otherwise - decolonization will never fit into a piece of legislation.

Decolonization is and must be radical and requires a comprehensive, radical revolution that continues even after the colonizer is overthrown. As Frantz Fanon theorized, decolonization is a long term project, not a coup.

Colonialism

Ironically, the General who shot the man fled to America after the unification of Việt Nam and died poor and shunned by his colonial masters, a victim of American capitalism that he fought so hard to defend. Colonialism has a sick and twisted humor.

On The Ineffectual Nature of Rioting

"...colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with reason. It is a naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater violence."

"The colonized man liberates himself in and through violence. This praxis enlightens the militant because it shows him the means and the end."

- Frantz Fanon

Fanon argued that violence allowed for true liberation because the colonized, through means of violent resistance, can achieve both the removal of the colonizer and the liberation of the colonized subject. He goes on to argue that the process of decolonization is "the immobility to which the colonized subject is condemned can be challenged only if he decides to put an end to the history of colonization and the history of despoliation in order to bring to life the history of the nation, the history of decolonization." Ultimately, Fanon simply puts that decolonization is the constructive process of a new human being.

In regards to rioting

No doubt, rioting can be an inspiring spectacle, sparking the imagination of the people to what destruction of the current system can look like:
We must understand, however, that rioting can only take resistance so far. The large question that Fanon poses is this, "But how do we get from the atmosphere of violence to setting violence in motion?"

In rioting we see a sort of hibernation therapy - actions that put pressure on the power system and allow the oppressed to let off steam but quickly dissipates and is easily co-opted and pacified by the system. It is no surprise to see countless riots happening all across the globe and yet not one government is overthrown and no real concessions are made - in fact, the G8 and the G20 still met and operated - business as usual. Even the inspiring Greek Anarchist riots last December yielded no fruitful results. What ends up happening at riots is that hundreds of people are arrested and countless others are brutalized by the State -so essentially, instead of the collapse of a system, we see the expansion of the prison industrial complex and an almost unrelenting method of organized violence against the people, by the State.

In rioting, there is no real goal in mind and riots are often reactionary and destructive at best. We must remember that true liberation also involves construction - most importantly, construction of a new human being. This is key. Powerful movements such as the Black Panther Party, did not strictly involve resistance, but also implemented constructive aspects. The Black Panther Party ran extensive Serve The People Programs which ranged from free breakfast programs, free medical clinics, to political education as well as true Black history classes. In fact, armed resistance against police occupation of their communities, while a crucial aspect of the Party, was only a small aspect of the operation of the Party in relation to all the other activities they carried out. Same with the Viet Cong movement.

What differentiates a movement aimed at decolonization and liberation as opposed to a colonizing movement is that decolonizing movements aim to also construct a new human being and to replace the colonizing force - not simply repeat and continue colonizing tendencies of blind brutality and oppression. Therefore, if we want to see a movement aimed truly at the liberation of humanity from the oppression of humans by other humans, we must see a movement that has the means to actually liberate itself (through violence and forceful resistance) while at the same time, through liberation, see the construction of a new era of human beings.

The shortcomings of liberation movements, such as the Viet Cong movement or the Bolshevik movement, was that there was a failure to implement the construction of the new human being. What we see in history is that these 'socialist experiments' failed because there was never a true material implementation of the construction of a new human, rather, it fell short to nothing more than cheap political rhetoric, therefore, we see these otherwise inspiring experiments repeating the same colonizing practices they were originally fighting against.

We must remember that colonization involves the construction of the colonized subject by the colonizer and therefore, to completely decolonize, we must undo our construction in light of colonization and replace it with our own liberated constructed human being.

So in conclusion, rioting is more detrimental than positive to any movement. Rioting subjects otherwise useful comrades to being jailed, or killed by the hands of the bloodthirsty pigs without true cause. What is needed is organized resistance so that when we fall to the hands of the pigs, we do so while in the process of constructing a movement and ultimately, our own liberation at any costs.

Chiều Một Mình Qua Phố

What are the politics of sex?

Anarchists have quite the optimistic view. According to many schools of anarchist thought, sex is liberation. Sex is mutual aid.

Then you have the Catholic church. They're quite the opposite. Sex is temptation. Only the holiest of people devote themselves to a life of celibacy.

I don't know what I believe, in fact, I've only really begun to think about the politics of sex, not just in abstract, but in personal context only fairly recently.

Sex has historically been used by the colonizer to dominate communities. Take an example such a colonized Việt Nam. The French colonialists often raped women, not just as a way to terrorize a community, but to feminize the men as well as turn the community against each other. The children of the French colonizers obviously enjoyed far more privileges than the full-blooded Vietnamese children. This was repeated over and over again throughout history. Sex has historically been the weapon of the oppressor.

Where does sex come from? Where does this idea of rape come from? Proponents of Howard Zinn argue that it came from the white man. The colonizer. Where did the white man get the idea of rape?

What does it mean for me to be a heterosexual male and desire sex? Is it really because of some drive to procreate or is it just another system to keep me stupid and down? How many times do I think about sex a day when I could be thinking of a way to free myself?

What does it mean in regards to social division of labor? Language is so telling. Women get fucked. Men do the fucking. Sex usually stops when the man comes. Why is it that men are pimps but women are sluts?

What does it mean to get jealous? Is it some capitalist mind-set/fetish to own something that drives jealousy?

Is sex at the core of objectification?

Are humans naturally monogamous? What the fuck does it mean to be natural, anyways...

I wonder how many a great human being have died because of sex...

My Inner Whitey

I've been pondering a lot about my own internalized colonization lately, and I've decided to try and document the progression/development of my inner whitey, or just overall inner-colonization.

When I was growing up, my family really liked (and still likes) showcases of Vietnamese pop music such as Paris By Night. Consequently, one of my biggest idols when I was a wee-little kid was Đon Hồ:
But that didn't last very long. No one thought Paris By Night was cool even though I went to a school with so many Vietnamese kids the school celebrated Tết(Vietnamese New Years). Instead, my next idol (as well as every kid at my elementary school) was Red Ranger:

He was the first of many white people that I'd secretly idolize growing up. To speed things up, from elementary school to middle school, I was really interested in the military and grew fond of war movies - particularly movies about the Việt Nam War. The games I played growing up always involved killing VC's, not as a member of the ARVN, but rather, I always wanted to be Johnson, the white guy who jumped out of cool helicopters, blowing up villages and gunning down hordes of VC's with my M-16 rifle like Rambo.
Also, during this period of my life, I was first exposed to the annual April 25th protests in Westminster, where people lined the streets and set fire to Hồ Chí Minh pictures and Vietnamese flags (not that pro-colonizer yellow with red strips flag, I'm talking about the yellow star flag). I find it interesting that the only internationally reknown or historically recognized Vietnamese person I was ever taught about while growing up was someone who my community considered a fuck-up and traitor. No one ever made an effort to actually teach me about a Vietnamese figure I could be proud of and look up to, instead, they talked about how America was so great for letting us flee and take refuge in our Little Saigon.

Onwards to high school. It was in high school that I started developing my own musical tastes that branched out from what my parents exposed me to. My parents provided the foundation of my musical appreciation with bands such as The Beatles, Carlos Santana, and the Eagles. It was my friend named Cody Pettrow who really had an impact on the music I listened to as well as my decision to pick up playing guitar. He really got me hooked on Weezer, and we shared a deep love of Rivers Cuomo (bordering creepy fan-boy status):
Rivers Cuomo basically taught me that it was okay to be a loser - if you're white.

Next, I got into the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and for a while my idols were Anthony Kiedis and John Frusciante (who is still arguably one of my biggest musical influences as well as idols):











I don't think I cannot emphasize enough how much I really liked John Frusciante (picture on the right). It was a sort of affinity that lasted throughout high school and through much of college. I still have a folder with pictures of him on my laptop and I used to go on youtube just to watch live performances of him. I wanted tattoos because of him. I thought smoking was cool because of him. Yeah, kind of sad, I know. I had a small Frusciante hiatus when I really got into the Beatles and Nirvana and started looking up to John Lennon and Kurt Cobain.

Basically, I spent most of my life looking to the white heterosexual man for someone to look up to and idolize next, resulting in me spending a lot of time lamenting that I wasn't white and that my daydreams never actually involved the real me because no asian boy fits the mold of cool lead singer of a rock band or village-bombing figher pilot.

It wasn't until high school that I started having non-white idols again. I hung out with the group of asian kids who adored Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese (specifically, Taiwanese since the girl who had a thing for me was Taiwanese and she made an effort to distinguish the difference between Taiwanese and Mainland Chinese dramas). The girl who had a crush on me sort of projected her idols onto me such as Jun Matsumoto (left) and Van Ness Wu (right):


Basically, you couldn't be asian and cool unless you strove to be either Japanese, Korean, or from the Taiwanese boy band, F4. I remember Vietnamese friends trying to learn Japanese, Korean, or Chinese, but never once bothered to learn Vietnamese despite being unable to speak their parents' language. It wasn't cool to be Vietnamese, but I had the advantage of having long hair and not too many 'Vietnamese' features and could somewhat pass as an ambiguous asian, but seriously, despite going to a school with lots of Vietnamese kids, I associated with a predominantly Taiwanese and Japanese crowd. Hell, even I tried to learn how to speak Japanese at one point. Learning Vietnamese was called fobby while learning Japanese, Korean, or Chinese made you cool. Whenever we went out to eat, we'd drive far distances to eat Japanese or Korean food, but despite being only minutes from Westminster, I never once ate Vietnamese food with my friends in high school. The only time I remembered having Vietnamese pride as a kid was in middle school, not because I was proud of who I was, but because we had to stick together to fight back against violence from the Latino and white kids (which makes me question, where the hell did all the Taiwanese kids that I knew in high school go to middle school?!)

As an asian male in high school, I quickly learned what Yellow Fever meant before Wongfu made it cool and popularized. The girls I knew outside of the Japanese-worshipping clique, liked white boys. As a Vietnamese kid, I wasn't white enough for those asian girls and not Japanese enough for the other asian-asian girls. Fuck. It sucked hanging out with girls and have to listen to them talk about how hot white guys were and how lame asian boys were because we're so timid and lanky. I remember me and a bunch of guy-friends had huge bouts of 'fuck girls, they're stupid' phases.

I also remember that high school was when I first learned how to masturbate and first watched porn. This was significant because before this I was always teased about my penis size for being asian, but actually seeing another man's penis - and not just any type of man, but a white man - really fucked with me. When I realized that I actually wasn't as big as the guys in the porn I saw, it made me realize that all the things the white kids were saying to me in middle school could actually be right.

Anyways, I'll save college for later because I have to get back to studying, but yeah, I still carry a lot of this colonization with me today. I'm still insecure as fuck about my penis size. I get pissed, but also really sad, when I see an asian girl dating a white guy. I still can't imagine an asian guy as front person of a band. My concept of what it means to be a man is still all sorts of white. Regardless, the first step to fighting back against a colonized mindset is to know what the fuck went wrong.

I am NOT an American

I despise the label 'Asian-American'.

To me, it denotes ownership, more specifically, a nationalist ownership of generalized Asians by Americans. Just the very notion of adding a hyphenated term to my so-called ethnic identification signals being thrust into limbo - I am obviously not American otherwise they would just call me American but there's a need for the colonialist to have a sense of ownership over me, otherwise I'd be called asian.

Asian is what the colonist labels me. I had no say in my identity. The term Asian doesn't take into account my own personal narrative - a son of Vietnamese refugees. It doesn't take into account where I come from, where my parents come from, what language I speak, what food I eat, but rather, the label is a way for the colonialist to signify that I am not white - that I am different and therefore don't belong.

I sure as hell don't identify with the title 'American'. To be American, you must be a citizen of America. Being a citizen, to me, signifies a certain attachment to the country of America - a certain loyalty, but more importantly, it signifies someone who shares in the fruits of the country and shares a common language, culture, and practice. I don't share in the fruits of a country that was made for whites and is still run for whites. My community, the Vietnamese peoples obviously didn't share in the fruits of this country when it dropped more than 6.7 million tons of explosives and sprayed more than 40 million gallons of Agent Orange on our homeland, displacing millions of people. Don't let those numbers escape you. A 1-ton bomb is more than capable of killing 130 people and the amount of Agent Orange sprayed on Việt Nam has destroyed 1/4 of the arable land that was available before the war.

It is obvious that I am not a citizen because other citizens don't recognize me as such. Laws are all talk about equality but when I am still called gook and chink by white racists and when the pigs on the block condescendingly ask me if I speak english before threatening to arrest me, it is made painfully clear to me that nothing has actively been done to achieve any sense of equality.

Unfortunately, however, I'm certainly not Asian, or more accurately, Vietnamese, because America's social colonialism has made it so that I don't know how to fluently speak the tongue of my parents. I no longer know my parent's culture as my own, but rather, the culture I am faced with is a sad compromise in which, unless something is done to resist colonization, the culture of my parents will eventually be lost throughout generations as was done with blacks or more assimilated peoples such as the Japanese in America.

So fuck Asian-American, call it what it is: I am a colonized person. Every day American society tries to rid me of my culture and the culture from of my parents. Every day the generation gap widens between the colonized youth and the colonized adults and elders. We of the colonized youth hardly speak our language (in fact, we're told that our parents speak funny english!), know our customs, or can eat our own food. We look to the white person for a standard of beauty (or specifically for Vietnamese, we sometimes look to more 'higher' asians such as Japanese and Koreans). We've been taught not only to hate ourselves, but to hate our community.

So it's time to fight back against this continual colonialist take-over of our every day lives. Every time someone speaks Vietnamese, tries to cook Vietnamese food, questions where and why Vietnamese people practice certain customs - these are all forms of active resistance to dominant colonialism. We must be proud of who we are (and I'm talking about all colonized people - not just Vietnamese) because if we are not, this racist society will be quick to brainwash us into hating ourselves.