Yearlong Viet Weekly Boycott Ends

Our good friend Hao-Nhien Vu, a.k.a. the Bolsavik, the ex-Nguoi Viet Daily News managing editor who lost his job thanks to anti-commie protests, has another big scoop on his blog today. Apparently, protesters who have been demonstrating outside the Historic Main Street offices of Viet Weekly for the past year have taken their miniature South Vietnamese flags, blaring martial music and desecrated Ho Chi Minh doll and gone home.

I wrote about the protests last month and sort of predicted this might happen. Or at least people I spoke to (like the Bolsavik) predicted it. Now, only one thought comes to mind: what the hell are these guys going to do with themselves now that they've given up trying to shut down the Vietnamese version of OC Weekly? Come after us? After all, I'm a commie agitator, too.

(I'm not, actually. Okay, GI? VC number 10!!!)

As usual, the Bolsavik has the answer. In his post today, he writes that "one of the leaders of the protests, Hung Phuong Nguyen, also a PR man for Assemblyman Van Thai Tran, went on the radio last night on the ironically named “Anti-Communist Forum” (Vietnamese: Dien Dan Chong Cong) and called off the protests against the magazine Viet Weekly. The reason he gave was that the protest organizer Coalition Against Resolution 36 has to prepare to picket against the visit to the U.S. of communist Vietnam’s Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung — whose itinerary does not include California."

The funniest thing about all this is the crazy accusations that keep flying back and forth about who's really communist. The protesters say Viet Weekly is a communist paper, others say the protesters are actually doing Hanoi's dirty work by dividing Little Saigon, and on and on. Check out the comments section of Bolsavik's post for just the latest examples.