When I was little (2000s) the consensus seemed to be that Vietnam was a shitshow. It was sort of not talked about because it was considered an embarrassment for the west.
Lately on Boomer TV I’ve been seeing a lot of stories about gusano Vietnamese that “escaped” the “eeeevil communist north Vietnam”.
Shits weird. It’s one thing to paint a country like North Korea as evil because it’s easy to make shit up about an isolated country. But people can watch like a billion travel shows that show communist Vietnam is a normal ass country. The idea that people fled from that becomes less harrowing when you see that it’s a beautiful place that’s just as free as any other country.
It’s clearly timed to coincide with the recent 50th reunification day anniversary, and yeah, I’ve seen a shit load of it on wechat. Wechat gets an awful lot of western propaganda from these mayfly accounts. Probably because I’m from the UK the algorithm feeds me this slop constantly. Recently there has been a lot of Vietnam nonsense, usually clips from war movies that portray the Vietnamese as inhuman monsters and the US as being somehow unfairly caught up in the conflict.
I fucking hate the west, I really do. So many gormless tourists wandering around Hanoi during this period who will go home having listened to and learned jack shit.