[Vientiane, 7/23/23] China Daily presents China in the best light. Across the globe, you can find this propaganda rag. Sitting at Cafe Vanille in Vientiane, Laos, I open its July 7-13, 2023 edition to find this tiding: The Peace Ark, the largest hospital ship of the People’s Liberation Army Navy, departs from a port in Zhoushan, Zhejiang province, on July 3, to conduct humanitarian medical work overseas […] the hospital ship will visit Kiribati, Tonga, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and East Timor during the Harmonious Mission 2023 operation […]
Full disclaimer, I also write a column for China Daily. Also covered the Xin Civilization, but my way. Still, it is brutal editorial, man. They basically tell you what to write, and then insert some more Party line. Almost like German state media, but childlike. If they don't like you, they politely reject. So weak. In Germany, they report you to state security. American media only support Americans.
I had a recent experience of seeing "American Exceptionalism" on display... A couple weeks ago I attended a Sikh wedding in Milwaukee.
During the reception of this wedding, in the courtyard on a balmy evening, a woman who may have mistaken her invitation to a wedding for one to a hippie convention stood in front of 4 individuals with only one strap attached on her dress. The other strap had been released, unveiling her right breast. Attached to that breast was a ten week old child, barely covering even the nipple. The woman carried on, talking with the people, 3 men and a woman, as if nothing were happening. The men, all appearing to be rather servile just kept talking and ignoring the obvious oddity of her behavior. The woman had spiky, purple hued hair and a mannish disposition and may have been enjoying the show.
These people were all Westernized Americans in this conversation.
The Sikh's were all dressed in their best and ceremonial attire. Admittedly, they well-outdressed me, but at least I wore underwear.
Reading your article reminded me of this... well... I don't really have a word(s) for it - "Oblivious, yet entitled, arrogance" comes close - of this woman who while being a guest at a wedding amongst an entirely different culture felt it completely OK to whip out her udder to let the boy suckle at her abundant teat. She made no effort to be discreet, no effort to sit in the corner somewhere away from people and wear one of those nursing shrouds, or, dare I say, excusing herself to one of the MANY empty rooms that existed in this building to attend to her intimate motherly duties. It was almost as if she was being joyously gratified by doing it.
Of course, no one walked up to her and said, "get a fucking room lady..." - Including me...
After seeing a display like this I am reminded why much of the rest of the world views "America" the way it does. Utilizing a tactic of exhibitionist entrapment to "breastfeed" those in other countries with its "special" kind of benevolent humanitarian aide. This mindset makes NO effort to "read the room" - or, if one is even welcomed in the room - or to even have the self-awareness to acknowledge that there is no extra degree of "specialness" which allows one to continue to put such overt narcissism on perpetual display.
"American Exceptionalism" goes to the extremes on all metrics. Not just the crass, offensive and vulgar, but on the other end of the spectrum, there are the tone-deaf displays of abject weakness.
Case in point is Janet Yellen's mindless kowtowing to a mid-level offficial in the middle kingdom:
'The hospital ship will visit Kiribati, Tonga, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and East Timor.'
The Chinese are apparently focused on who they can sway, which might be why they're not visiting Fiji (in thrall to Australia and USA), Samoa (New Zealand and USA), French Polynesia (France), Papua New Guinea (Australia), Cook Islands (New Zealand).
Still, Chinese medical visitation to 5 nations in the south Pacific should ensure that Australia responds in kind with a diplomatic furore and gifts of military left overs.
Oh no Jon, I thought we in Oz were waiting on our gifts of military leftovers from our big brother with which to fight out glorious war of independence from the Yellow Peril, you don't mean we have to hand them over too do you? Perhaps they can spare us an old submarine?
It never ceases to amaze me that otherwise lucid and intelligent people like Pepe Escobar and Alexander Mercouris etc. should be so enamored with China and laud it as a beacon for the future of mankind.
Anyone with less than half a brain can see that America and China are two evil twins joined at the hip. It's no secret that China's Wuhan virus factory is funded and tacitly approved by Uncle Sam.
In the short span of a few weeks we have seen the likes of Blinken, Yellen and Kissinger scurrying to curry favours with Xi, while nobody in the West would deign to touch Putin even with a very long pole.
China is in cahoots too with the Masters of the Universe at the WEF, IMF, BIS, WHO etc. In fact, the New World Order after the Great Reset should look very much like China today.
As for the infamous 15-minute smart cities being planned for the unsuspecting populations of the West, they would be looking very much like the Uyghur cities in Xinjiang.
If there is anything China is very good at, it's to play on the gullibility and greed of the West. It has beguiled Uncle Sam into making it the world's factory.
Beautiful and insightful as always, Linh. I have informed others of where you are now so you might have a bit of uptick in traffic.
While the "Fuck Putin" graffiti likely was scrawled by a typically disrespectful Westerner, do not discount it came from the hand of a Lao exposed to the filthy pop culture that emanates from Los Angeles and New York and London and Berlin or some wannabe that sees only the glitz and averts its eyes from the carnage. Once the United States no longer can export mass death, it still will be engaged in cultural imperialism and always on the hunt for new places to poison.
When I have traveled and lived abroad, my countrymen in the form of the stereotypical Ugly American never really bothered me. It was just as you described, the cool and polished ones who were able to subvert and destroy. As a Southerner I witnessed it in my homeland firsthand, so it was a familiar evil when encountered in another land. It would have been futile to warn about those bearing gifts.
Yes, ascendant China will take up the mantle of greed and theft as the Global American Empire fades, but will it be able to propagandize with algorithm-derived trash like its predecessor? Likely not, which means it will have an even shorter run as hegemonic looter. Laos also will survive the Sino imperialism. Will the Hmong and other expats return there once there are no McDonald's or Great Wall-themed golf courses? Of course they won't. Addiction is a bitch.
Thanks for an interesting perspective. I was recently travelling in southern Italy (am from Northern Europe), and many of the locals mentioned the large amount of Americans that were in Italy this summer (up 86% from last year I think) and how entire cities had been transformed by this influx of people who say Italy as an "anything goes"-kind of place.
Hey Linh, I now have every incentive to move to the Philippines permanently as my daughter has taken a teaching position in Shenzhen, Hong Kong-Shenzhen Pearl Valley megalopolis a short flight from Manila. But the geopolitical risk makes me crazy. What is she thinking? I understand world leaders let Anthony Blinken a la the Biden administration know they really need to cut the shit, or dial tensions down. But Mao is on a mission in Taiwan, a country China can probably have for nothing if exercising patience they no longer seem to have. But I see my daughter’s point of view, between housing costs and student loan extortion her future is being robbed from her, and the folks in China have simply offered her a better deal. Don’t give up on the beerlao! A line from The Deer Hunter I forget, those who lose the taste for champagne lose the taste for life. Something like that. I gotta eat and run, Caio
"Tactful, modest or just resigned, lesser nations don’t force anyone to listen to them. Quietly, they mind their business. With just seven million people, landlocked Laos doesn’t project any power, hard or soft, but it will defend its borders and traditions, though, and that’s enough."
I think that's an advantage of small, less populous nations. I've been to Finland recently and I got a similar vibe. They are in better shape than Germany, for instance. But joining NATO might signal a change for the worse, with more multiculturalism and more US influence. We'll see, I guess.
A few years ago I was walking behind a group of black women on a crowded Balinese market street, I gathered they were from Los Angeles, a market seller called out to them, "friend, stop here please", one of the women responded with, "fuck off, I'm not your friend".
While we certainly dropped a boatload of bombs on Laos, we didn't bomb the people. As the Vietnam war ended we had to get rid of the munitions, I'm suffering some amount of hearing loss today from having to listen to F-4's taking off over my head non-stop from 6AM till 10Am every day for months.
Linh, I hope you aren't eating the lob baa still!!!
American bombs were dropped on many Lao villages and even Phonsavan, a sizable town in the Plain of Jars.
On 2/3/20, I wrote, "The Plain of Jars has many more secrets, not least the CIA’s Secret War. Initiated by Eisenhower, it would be clandestinely sanctioned and escalated by Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. It was here that the “intelligence” agency became a rogue fighting force, accountable to neither the Pentagon nor Congress, much less the eternally clueless American public. Using unprecedented airpower and a proxy army, the Hmong, the CIA’s Secret War in Laos provided the template for other American interventions, down to our days. Instead of using troops to conquer an enemy, America would just bomb the targeted society into submission. It would be machine against flesh, often civilian. Drones have no conscience, never cower and cannot be mourned.
[...]
"The horrors of war are often drowned out by heroic propaganda or rendered much less bloody through dry historical accounts, penned by academics, but there’s a slim book, Voices from the Plain of Jars, that allows suffering civilians to recount their terror filled existence under constant American bombs.
"Edited by Frederic R. Branfman, it has a foreword (in the second edition) by Alfred W. McCoy, who notes, “Since there is no other book written by the villagers of Indochina, these ‘voices’ can, in a sense, speak for the countless Vietnamese and Cambodians who also suffered under the U.S. bombing. Not only does the 2.1 million tons of bombs dropped on Laos from 1965 to 1973 rank among the largest air wars of the twentieth century, exceeded only by the 2.7 million tons dropped on Cambodia, but it also was a precursor for the way wars would be fought in the twenty-first century and beyond […] this book recovers an obscure yet significant moment in military history and documents an air war so intense that it became a testing ground for a new form of global force projection.” The CIA’s Secret War in Laos reverberates into everyone’s life, in short, even after the American Empire has disappeared.
"When not conducting secret wars, your clean-cut CIA merely runs drugs, for the American government is the world’s largest, most successful and coolest criminal outfit. Losing nearly every war, it always returns a boffo profit for its handlers. McCoy is known for his groundbreaking book, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, Afghanistan, Southeast Asia, Central America.
"In Voices from the Plain of Jars, there’s a drawing by a 33-year-old woman that shows three planes dropping bombs on a decapitated head, a severed arm and two mangled bodies, with this narration, “A life whose only value was death. I saw this in the village of my birth, as every day and every night the planes came to drop bombs on us. We lived in holes to protect our lives. There were bombs of many kinds, as in this picture I have drawn. It is not beautiful but it shows the shooting and death from the planes, and the destruction of the bombs. This kind of bomb would explode in the air and was much more dangerous than other ones. I saw my cousin die in the field of death. My heart was most disturbed and my voice called out loudly as I ran to the houses. Thus, I saw life and death for the people on account of the war of many airplanes in the region of Xieng Khouang. Until there were no houses at all. And the cows and buffalo were dead. Until everything was leveled and you could see only the red, red ground […]” The book is filled with such accounts.
"For the record, about 40,000 Laos have died from American bombs, with nearly half of these killed after the war, from the millions of ordnances, especially cluster ones, left all over eastern Laos, an area corresponding exactly to the Ho Chi Minh Trails or controlled by the Pathet Lao, before they took over the entire country."
Linh, I don't doubt any of that. My perspective is from the 1973-1975 era when I was at Da Nang (3 months - war ended for USA troops - lucky guy me) and Nakhon Phanom RTAFB. My views are also colored by my friendships with several former Royal Lao Air Force guys who I met after finally getting back to the USA in 1983. Fun Fact: If you had a pickup at your village residence you were a big deal, but, if you had a chopper - oh ho!
With their Ho Chi Minh trails, the North Vietnamese brought the war to Laos in the first place. Still, all these Lao villages near the Vietnamese supply line had to pay.
If 20,000 Laos were killed during the war, another 80,000 were likely wounded, with half a million, perhaps, displaced. Many of these people were tribal minorities living in the most remote parts of Laos. Leery of modernity, they suddenly became its worst victims!
What kind of clod from the West travels halfway around the world, only to spray anti-Russian graffiti (or graffiti of any kind, for that matter)? And from your photo, it appears to be spray paint, so unless they brought it with them, they actually had to go acquire that in Laos to do the deed. Amazing.
Worse still, there appear to be two separate "graffiti artists" - the first with the "Fuck Putin" and a second countering with the red pro-Russian "Z".
The "good night white pride" graffiti sticker must be from a German traveler. It's lyrics from a German Oi/skinhead/punk band, Loikaemie. The best translation might be loitering as anarchy. Skinheads are nowadays thought of exclusively as neo-nazis. But there are also lumpen leftists who hate the right-wing bands, but whose sound and singing style is indistinguishable.
It would be nice to know that the spray-painted obscenity in English was either washed off or painted over. Laos don't deserve that: It is ugly, it diminishes. Linh? Can you somehow arrange to have it erased? Is there some way to do that favor?
As a visitor, I can't arrange to have anything done here. Since most Laos can't even read that, they have no idea it's obscene, but sooner or later, some nearby business will have it painted over.
A powerful piece of writing, Linh. I especially liked these sentences: "Although Sam dropped a record number of bombs on Laos, and his cluster bombs here continue to kill, Sam is not seen as a genocidal maniac, but a cool, hip guy who’s easy going and often goofy. Whatever his age, he’s often seen in preteen attire. His T-shirts with cartoon figures emphasize his boyishness. is superheroes renew myths, if only to idiots. Though clumsily staged, his moon landings still awe ." Strange isn't it? He also sends hospital ships around the world spreading good will and no one thinks twice, because its those jolly Americans doing good again.
What an honest and beautiful description of the Lao people! Back in the early 2000s I was treated to a Lao brother's gracious hospitality at his farm in West Virginia. Good man, good people. 👍🏾🤩🐶
Full disclaimer, I also write a column for China Daily. Also covered the Xin Civilization, but my way. Still, it is brutal editorial, man. They basically tell you what to write, and then insert some more Party line. Almost like German state media, but childlike. If they don't like you, they politely reject. So weak. In Germany, they report you to state security. American media only support Americans.
I had a recent experience of seeing "American Exceptionalism" on display... A couple weeks ago I attended a Sikh wedding in Milwaukee.
During the reception of this wedding, in the courtyard on a balmy evening, a woman who may have mistaken her invitation to a wedding for one to a hippie convention stood in front of 4 individuals with only one strap attached on her dress. The other strap had been released, unveiling her right breast. Attached to that breast was a ten week old child, barely covering even the nipple. The woman carried on, talking with the people, 3 men and a woman, as if nothing were happening. The men, all appearing to be rather servile just kept talking and ignoring the obvious oddity of her behavior. The woman had spiky, purple hued hair and a mannish disposition and may have been enjoying the show.
These people were all Westernized Americans in this conversation.
The Sikh's were all dressed in their best and ceremonial attire. Admittedly, they well-outdressed me, but at least I wore underwear.
Reading your article reminded me of this... well... I don't really have a word(s) for it - "Oblivious, yet entitled, arrogance" comes close - of this woman who while being a guest at a wedding amongst an entirely different culture felt it completely OK to whip out her udder to let the boy suckle at her abundant teat. She made no effort to be discreet, no effort to sit in the corner somewhere away from people and wear one of those nursing shrouds, or, dare I say, excusing herself to one of the MANY empty rooms that existed in this building to attend to her intimate motherly duties. It was almost as if she was being joyously gratified by doing it.
Of course, no one walked up to her and said, "get a fucking room lady..." - Including me...
After seeing a display like this I am reminded why much of the rest of the world views "America" the way it does. Utilizing a tactic of exhibitionist entrapment to "breastfeed" those in other countries with its "special" kind of benevolent humanitarian aide. This mindset makes NO effort to "read the room" - or, if one is even welcomed in the room - or to even have the self-awareness to acknowledge that there is no extra degree of "specialness" which allows one to continue to put such overt narcissism on perpetual display.
"American Exceptionalism" goes to the extremes on all metrics. Not just the crass, offensive and vulgar, but on the other end of the spectrum, there are the tone-deaf displays of abject weakness.
Case in point is Janet Yellen's mindless kowtowing to a mid-level offficial in the middle kingdom:
https://nypost.com/2023/07/08/us-treasury-secretary-janet-yellen-commits-embarrassing-bow-during-beijing-visit/
Janet Yellen was tripping out on "magic mushrooms" she ate at a restaurant in Beijing the night before.
Hallucinogens don't turn people into cucks. That is a character trait.
'The hospital ship will visit Kiribati, Tonga, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and East Timor.'
The Chinese are apparently focused on who they can sway, which might be why they're not visiting Fiji (in thrall to Australia and USA), Samoa (New Zealand and USA), French Polynesia (France), Papua New Guinea (Australia), Cook Islands (New Zealand).
Still, Chinese medical visitation to 5 nations in the south Pacific should ensure that Australia responds in kind with a diplomatic furore and gifts of military left overs.
Oh no Jon, I thought we in Oz were waiting on our gifts of military leftovers from our big brother with which to fight out glorious war of independence from the Yellow Peril, you don't mean we have to hand them over too do you? Perhaps they can spare us an old submarine?
It never ceases to amaze me that otherwise lucid and intelligent people like Pepe Escobar and Alexander Mercouris etc. should be so enamored with China and laud it as a beacon for the future of mankind.
Anyone with less than half a brain can see that America and China are two evil twins joined at the hip. It's no secret that China's Wuhan virus factory is funded and tacitly approved by Uncle Sam.
In the short span of a few weeks we have seen the likes of Blinken, Yellen and Kissinger scurrying to curry favours with Xi, while nobody in the West would deign to touch Putin even with a very long pole.
China is in cahoots too with the Masters of the Universe at the WEF, IMF, BIS, WHO etc. In fact, the New World Order after the Great Reset should look very much like China today.
As for the infamous 15-minute smart cities being planned for the unsuspecting populations of the West, they would be looking very much like the Uyghur cities in Xinjiang.
If there is anything China is very good at, it's to play on the gullibility and greed of the West. It has beguiled Uncle Sam into making it the world's factory.
So good to see so much truth in a vitally interesting peregrination.
Beautiful and insightful as always, Linh. I have informed others of where you are now so you might have a bit of uptick in traffic.
While the "Fuck Putin" graffiti likely was scrawled by a typically disrespectful Westerner, do not discount it came from the hand of a Lao exposed to the filthy pop culture that emanates from Los Angeles and New York and London and Berlin or some wannabe that sees only the glitz and averts its eyes from the carnage. Once the United States no longer can export mass death, it still will be engaged in cultural imperialism and always on the hunt for new places to poison.
When I have traveled and lived abroad, my countrymen in the form of the stereotypical Ugly American never really bothered me. It was just as you described, the cool and polished ones who were able to subvert and destroy. As a Southerner I witnessed it in my homeland firsthand, so it was a familiar evil when encountered in another land. It would have been futile to warn about those bearing gifts.
Yes, ascendant China will take up the mantle of greed and theft as the Global American Empire fades, but will it be able to propagandize with algorithm-derived trash like its predecessor? Likely not, which means it will have an even shorter run as hegemonic looter. Laos also will survive the Sino imperialism. Will the Hmong and other expats return there once there are no McDonald's or Great Wall-themed golf courses? Of course they won't. Addiction is a bitch.
Again, great work.
Thanks for an interesting perspective. I was recently travelling in southern Italy (am from Northern Europe), and many of the locals mentioned the large amount of Americans that were in Italy this summer (up 86% from last year I think) and how entire cities had been transformed by this influx of people who say Italy as an "anything goes"-kind of place.
Hey Linh, I now have every incentive to move to the Philippines permanently as my daughter has taken a teaching position in Shenzhen, Hong Kong-Shenzhen Pearl Valley megalopolis a short flight from Manila. But the geopolitical risk makes me crazy. What is she thinking? I understand world leaders let Anthony Blinken a la the Biden administration know they really need to cut the shit, or dial tensions down. But Mao is on a mission in Taiwan, a country China can probably have for nothing if exercising patience they no longer seem to have. But I see my daughter’s point of view, between housing costs and student loan extortion her future is being robbed from her, and the folks in China have simply offered her a better deal. Don’t give up on the beerlao! A line from The Deer Hunter I forget, those who lose the taste for champagne lose the taste for life. Something like that. I gotta eat and run, Caio
"Tactful, modest or just resigned, lesser nations don’t force anyone to listen to them. Quietly, they mind their business. With just seven million people, landlocked Laos doesn’t project any power, hard or soft, but it will defend its borders and traditions, though, and that’s enough."
I think that's an advantage of small, less populous nations. I've been to Finland recently and I got a similar vibe. They are in better shape than Germany, for instance. But joining NATO might signal a change for the worse, with more multiculturalism and more US influence. We'll see, I guess.
I hate graffiti.
A few years ago I was walking behind a group of black women on a crowded Balinese market street, I gathered they were from Los Angeles, a market seller called out to them, "friend, stop here please", one of the women responded with, "fuck off, I'm not your friend".
While we certainly dropped a boatload of bombs on Laos, we didn't bomb the people. As the Vietnam war ended we had to get rid of the munitions, I'm suffering some amount of hearing loss today from having to listen to F-4's taking off over my head non-stop from 6AM till 10Am every day for months.
Linh, I hope you aren't eating the lob baa still!!!
Hi Bill from Florida,
American bombs were dropped on many Lao villages and even Phonsavan, a sizable town in the Plain of Jars.
On 2/3/20, I wrote, "The Plain of Jars has many more secrets, not least the CIA’s Secret War. Initiated by Eisenhower, it would be clandestinely sanctioned and escalated by Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. It was here that the “intelligence” agency became a rogue fighting force, accountable to neither the Pentagon nor Congress, much less the eternally clueless American public. Using unprecedented airpower and a proxy army, the Hmong, the CIA’s Secret War in Laos provided the template for other American interventions, down to our days. Instead of using troops to conquer an enemy, America would just bomb the targeted society into submission. It would be machine against flesh, often civilian. Drones have no conscience, never cower and cannot be mourned.
[...]
"The horrors of war are often drowned out by heroic propaganda or rendered much less bloody through dry historical accounts, penned by academics, but there’s a slim book, Voices from the Plain of Jars, that allows suffering civilians to recount their terror filled existence under constant American bombs.
"Edited by Frederic R. Branfman, it has a foreword (in the second edition) by Alfred W. McCoy, who notes, “Since there is no other book written by the villagers of Indochina, these ‘voices’ can, in a sense, speak for the countless Vietnamese and Cambodians who also suffered under the U.S. bombing. Not only does the 2.1 million tons of bombs dropped on Laos from 1965 to 1973 rank among the largest air wars of the twentieth century, exceeded only by the 2.7 million tons dropped on Cambodia, but it also was a precursor for the way wars would be fought in the twenty-first century and beyond […] this book recovers an obscure yet significant moment in military history and documents an air war so intense that it became a testing ground for a new form of global force projection.” The CIA’s Secret War in Laos reverberates into everyone’s life, in short, even after the American Empire has disappeared.
"When not conducting secret wars, your clean-cut CIA merely runs drugs, for the American government is the world’s largest, most successful and coolest criminal outfit. Losing nearly every war, it always returns a boffo profit for its handlers. McCoy is known for his groundbreaking book, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, Afghanistan, Southeast Asia, Central America.
"In Voices from the Plain of Jars, there’s a drawing by a 33-year-old woman that shows three planes dropping bombs on a decapitated head, a severed arm and two mangled bodies, with this narration, “A life whose only value was death. I saw this in the village of my birth, as every day and every night the planes came to drop bombs on us. We lived in holes to protect our lives. There were bombs of many kinds, as in this picture I have drawn. It is not beautiful but it shows the shooting and death from the planes, and the destruction of the bombs. This kind of bomb would explode in the air and was much more dangerous than other ones. I saw my cousin die in the field of death. My heart was most disturbed and my voice called out loudly as I ran to the houses. Thus, I saw life and death for the people on account of the war of many airplanes in the region of Xieng Khouang. Until there were no houses at all. And the cows and buffalo were dead. Until everything was leveled and you could see only the red, red ground […]” The book is filled with such accounts.
"For the record, about 40,000 Laos have died from American bombs, with nearly half of these killed after the war, from the millions of ordnances, especially cluster ones, left all over eastern Laos, an area corresponding exactly to the Ho Chi Minh Trails or controlled by the Pathet Lao, before they took over the entire country."
https://linhdinhphotos.blogspot.com/2020/02/plain-of-jars-university.html
Linh
Linh, I don't doubt any of that. My perspective is from the 1973-1975 era when I was at Da Nang (3 months - war ended for USA troops - lucky guy me) and Nakhon Phanom RTAFB. My views are also colored by my friendships with several former Royal Lao Air Force guys who I met after finally getting back to the USA in 1983. Fun Fact: If you had a pickup at your village residence you were a big deal, but, if you had a chopper - oh ho!
Hi Bill,
With their Ho Chi Minh trails, the North Vietnamese brought the war to Laos in the first place. Still, all these Lao villages near the Vietnamese supply line had to pay.
If 20,000 Laos were killed during the war, another 80,000 were likely wounded, with half a million, perhaps, displaced. Many of these people were tribal minorities living in the most remote parts of Laos. Leery of modernity, they suddenly became its worst victims!
Linh
What kind of clod from the West travels halfway around the world, only to spray anti-Russian graffiti (or graffiti of any kind, for that matter)? And from your photo, it appears to be spray paint, so unless they brought it with them, they actually had to go acquire that in Laos to do the deed. Amazing.
Worse still, there appear to be two separate "graffiti artists" - the first with the "Fuck Putin" and a second countering with the red pro-Russian "Z".
The "good night white pride" graffiti sticker must be from a German traveler. It's lyrics from a German Oi/skinhead/punk band, Loikaemie. The best translation might be loitering as anarchy. Skinheads are nowadays thought of exclusively as neo-nazis. But there are also lumpen leftists who hate the right-wing bands, but whose sound and singing style is indistinguishable.
Hi Billy Thistle,
I first saw a "good night white pride" sticker in Leipzig, Germany in 2015. In 2017, I caught one in Durham, NC, so it got around.
Linh
It would be nice to know that the spray-painted obscenity in English was either washed off or painted over. Laos don't deserve that: It is ugly, it diminishes. Linh? Can you somehow arrange to have it erased? Is there some way to do that favor?
Hi James,
As a visitor, I can't arrange to have anything done here. Since most Laos can't even read that, they have no idea it's obscene, but sooner or later, some nearby business will have it painted over.
Linh
A powerful piece of writing, Linh. I especially liked these sentences: "Although Sam dropped a record number of bombs on Laos, and his cluster bombs here continue to kill, Sam is not seen as a genocidal maniac, but a cool, hip guy who’s easy going and often goofy. Whatever his age, he’s often seen in preteen attire. His T-shirts with cartoon figures emphasize his boyishness. is superheroes renew myths, if only to idiots. Though clumsily staged, his moon landings still awe ." Strange isn't it? He also sends hospital ships around the world spreading good will and no one thinks twice, because its those jolly Americans doing good again.
This phrase spoke most powerfully to me: "Meekly they burn." Ain't it the truth.
What an honest and beautiful description of the Lao people! Back in the early 2000s I was treated to a Lao brother's gracious hospitality at his farm in West Virginia. Good man, good people. 👍🏾🤩🐶