What I Was Taught Were Lies

By Anonymous / Spring 2022

How I was fooled?

I still vividly remember what my teacher taught me when it was the first day of school. Those were five things that Ho Chi Minh emphasized, the necessary elements for becoming a good student and a great citizen in the future.

1. Love our country, love our people

2. Study hard, work hard

3. Be friendly, be discipline

4. Keep clean

5.  Be humble, honest, and courageous

Like many other Vietnamese, I used to admire Ho Chi Minh. I thought he was the founding father of Vietnam. Without him, there would not be Vietnam, there would not be peace, and there would not be Vietnamese. Students were forced to write about him every year to learn his values and ethics. I also believed in the leaders who ran the country. I thought that they did good things for the country. Even when I was 18, that destructive way of thinking still took over my mind. Everyone who said something bad about the states was either a propagandist or a terrorist to me. I was taught in my politics class that most of them received money from a foreign country to make Vietnam become unstable and finally collapse. Those bad people wanted Vietnam to be unstable to control us. To keep Vietnam stable and prosperous, they taught me to believe in the Communist party, the only political party in Vietnam.

The event that made me change

“They called us propagandists. They said that we received money from others to protest”, my friend angrily talked to me. In 2016, there was a marine life disaster in Vietnam, which damaged hundreds of hectares of coral reefs and killed hundreds of tons of fish. Not only did the ocean get destroyed, but people’s lives were also affected significantly. Many people have health problems eating seafood from that polluted area. Then, many people who lived by catching fish lost their jobs because no one would eat fish anymore.  According to Vietnamese news, my friend’s province was considered a place where people had a tradition of “loving the country and fighting hard against foreign invaders” until this event. People in my friend’s town started to protest, they only wanted their normal life back, and at least the government would do something to help them through the hard times. Instead of punishing the company that caused the disaster, the government showed support for that company and insisted that it was just a natural event. The water was so polluted that many people did experiment by getting some water near the beaches closed to the company and putting saltwater fish in; none of them could live more than three minutes.

Who was the propagandist?          

The government started to hire fake experts to give comments about the event on mainstream media. There were fake marine life experts from many countries in the world. “It was just the red tide, and it happened a lot. In Japan, many similar events like this happened, killing millions of fish”, said the fake marine life expert from The University of Tokyo. He lied through his teeth and then he got exposed that he was not a professor from The University of Tokyo but just a paid actor.

Put those rioters in jail!

People in the places that got affected by the event started to protest peacefully but got labeled as “rioters.” Many people got beaten and put in jails. Again, the government gave fake news about police officers passing away or getting injuries from the “rioters.” “Why is the government I have always believed in now making its citizens suffer to protect a foreign company? Why it is treating “our people” as “our enemies”? What is happening?”, I asked myself. I felt desperate to see people get oppressed.

Looking back, I felt like a coward when I did not dare to protest in my city. I remember there were some group of protesters who got in trouble with the police in my city, which made me scared thinking about it. I still remember watching a video about one courageous student holding a banner “Fish needs clear water, Vietnamese need a clear answer” alone on the street near my house and got apprehended by the police.

Finally, they accept their fault

From the pressure of people and many test results of the abnormal water, the company finally accept their fault and give some money to people who got affected.  However, many people reported that they did not receive money and food as the mainstream media stated. Some people even report that they got spoiled rice from the government which was in charge of distributing the money and food to help them. In that event, only a few politicians involved got a warning. Some of them now live happily in Canada, thanks to their corruption.

I drink the red pill.

Let’s look back at what I was taught about five essential things Ho Chi Minh believed and link them with what the government was doing. I felt the leaders violated all of those values. The politicians did not love the country and the people as they put the foreign company above the citizens. They beat and oppressed the Vietnamese while trying many ways to hide the company’s fault. They love their people so much that they give them spoiled food to help them get through this challenging time. They were not humble, honest, and courageous at all. All I could see from those leaders now were greed and lies. Admittedly, it was not easy for me at first to accept facts that were not in the textbooks. For example, reading about the land reform policy started by Ho Chi Minh where thousands of people were killed shocked me. It took me a long time to accept that fact.

Eventually, I had the courage to drink “the red pill”, open my mind, ask more questions and finally become a “propagandist” under the government’s eyes. Unfortunately, many Vietnamese still believed in those politicians and what they taught. I wish more of them would have the courage to drink the red pill, get out of the matrix full of lies and make Vietnam a better place.