Philadelphia, too, has a protest against Viet mag

Bolsavikland does not have exclusivity on people carrying on lengthy protests over perceived communist leanings. Philadelphia, too, is witnessing a protest that has been dragging on since early February, against Doi Moi magazine. (The magazine’s name spells similarly to, but has different diacritical marks from, the Vietnamese government’s doi moi perestroika policy. The magazine’s name means “new life.”)

Anyway, so there’s an ongoing protest against Doi Moi magazine, and you will never, ever ever, guess what the offending story was about.

Ready? Here it is: The story was about a woman’s hymen.

Seriously.

The Bolsavik is not making this up.

Nobody can.

You can read the summary by Michael Matza on the Philadelphia Inquirer here. Or you can read the detailed story as follows:

In many cities around the country, there are Vietnamese-language publications that carry mostly advertising with a few stories here and there, all copied from the Internet. They are, in a way, Viet Pennysavers with some contents.

The contents are almost all copied off of others – Nguoi Viet and Viet Bao in Orange County (which is why Van Thai Tran‘s camp made such remendous efforts getting its propaganda on these papers unedited) — as well as web sites published from Vietnam.

Doi Moi is one such publication.

And then one day it copied off an advice column about a woman’s hymen and how virgo intacta is or is not a required prerequisite for fidelity. (Doi Moi does not have a web site, but you can read the story, in Vietnamese, from its original source here.) Why someone in the 21st century still asks this kind of questions is an issue for another day.

At the end of the column, the author who lives in Vietnam threw in a line about “Uncle Ho‘s” teaching on morality. Which was copied onto the pages of Doi Moi — intacta.

How “Uncle Ho” would be relevant to a girl’s losing her virginity is, to say the least, unexpected. That’s precisely why Doi Moi was caught off-guard.

Doi Moi realized what it had done, and ran two long apologies, one running over three consecutive pages 5, 6 and 7 of its February 15 issue, and another on the front cover of its February 22 issue.

That wasn’t enough. A small band of protesters showed up on February 25, and they have been there on and off ever since.

These protesters, however, didn’t count on Doi Moi’s aggressive response.

And no surprise: Doi Moi’s publisher Quang Le (Vietnamese: Lê Thành Quang) was a graduate of South Vietnam’s national police academy (that’s him second left in photo), worked in national security for 9 years, and spent 11 years incarcerated in communist re-education camps. He is, in other words, not your average pushover.

In response to the protest, he engaged in an escalating war of words against his opponents. In the public dispute, Quang Le and his opponents each forced community activists to take side (the old with me or against me). They drew in a number of community organizations to their side, each claiming to be more authentically anti-communist than the other guy. Quang Le’s opponents include David Vo (pictured right), publisher of Viet-My magazine, radio personality Thuoc Nguyen (Vietnamese: Nguy?n T??ng Th??c) and Toan Le (Vietnamese: Lê Toàn) publisher of the Philadelphia Asian News (web site here).

He also sued David Vo and Viet-My magazine in court, accusing them of propping up these protests to shut down the competition. The lawsuit was heard by a judge and is under advisement, but David Vo told the Inquirer “that he had backed the protest not to thwart competition but because ‘this is politics, and [Le] put communist articles in his magazine.’”