Resolution on the Status and Mission of Combatting Enemy’s Ideological Sabotage Efforts During This New Period

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Ministry of Interior, Socialist Republic of Vietnam

Independence - Freedom - Happiness

No. 02/BNV        

Hanoi, 15 December 1980

Resolution

on the Status and Mission of Combatting Enemy’s Ideological Sabotage Efforts During This New Period

Part One

I-The Plans, Organization, Methods, and Tactics That the Enemy Uses to Sabotage Our Ideology

1) -After the defeat of the American imperialist war of aggression against South Vietnam and the defeat of the Chinese reactionaries in their wars of aggression against our southwestern and northern borders, imperialist and international reactionary forces have been continuously attacked and isolated on the international stage.  However, because of their stubborn, warmongering, reactionary character, the imperialists, led by the American imperialists and the reactionary clique in Beijing, have continued to collude with one another in making feverish preparations for war, in launching insane counterattacks against the world revolutionary movement in all areas, and they have made a particular effort to step up their actions aimed at destroying political and ideological unity within the international Communist movement by focusing their attacks on Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and Cuba (three countries that occupy important positions and that form the biggest obstacles to their worldwide counter-revolutionary strategy) and on carrying out counter-revolutionary “peaceful evolution” in Poland.

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Our enemies call their effort to destroy our ideology “psychological warfare”, “ideological warfare”, “a war of nerves”, “political warfare” or a “Cold War”.  These actions form an important part of their overall efforts and they constitute a national policy that is part of the worldwide counter-revolutionary strategy of the imperialists and of international reactionary forces.  Reactionaries who exploit the religions and ethnic feelings in our country and reactionary Vietnamese exiles living abroad are devoting special attention to carrying out actions designed to destroy the ideology of our cadres and our people.

2) -International imperialist forces and international reactionaries are now working closely together to carry out a series of constant action campaigns designed to destroy our people’s thinking and ideology in many areas - political, spiritual, cultural, social, lifestyle, moral, and human feelings and emotions.

The American imperialists assert that now that Vietnam has been unified and is advancing toward socialism, the U.S. has no hope of changing the situation in Vietnam as long as the current generation, or even the second or third generation, of Vietnam’s leadership is in power. However, they believe that they still must patiently continue to attack our ideology in order to damage the prestige of Vietnam’s Communist Party cadres and Party members so that by the time that the fourth or fifth generation of leaders take power, when there has been enough time to forget the pain of war and to forget their class hatred, the U.S. will be able to implement peaceful evolution to destroy the revolution in Vietnam.

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One U.S. newspaper has admitted that the U.S. must employ all types of massive and sophisticated tactics to destroy the ideology of the Vietnamese people and to create “bastards of war” who are inculcated in Western thinking and who they can incite and direct to fight and die for American interests under the illusion that they are fighting and dying for their homeland.

In May 1977 a NATO conference in London (England) passed a resolution on stepping up the sabotage operations of the NATO intelligence agencies directed against the socialist countries. The resolution devoted special attention to working to increase “the trend toward instability” within the Communist world, to strengthening and elevating the role of dissident elements, and to supporting changes in the political forces inside the socialist countries that would benefit the West.

The reactionary Deng Xiaoping and the traitor Hoang Van Hoan have asserted that:

- If China pins its hopes on only military strength, then no matter how large a war of aggression [invasion] it wages, victory could not be won easily, because the Vietnamese nation, which is one nation, has an indomitable spirit - every time the Fatherland is invaded, the entire nation immediately rises up to fight aggression.  This kind of strength is difficult for any force to crush.  However, if we (meaning China) conduct a war on many fronts, coordinating the use of many different measures to strike powerful blows against Vietnamese minds (ideological sabotage) and Vietnamese stomachs (economic sabotage), Vietnam will certainly be defeated.

The enemy’s psychological warfare actions are incredibly dangerous and evil.  They are working to create reactionary tendencies and reactionary thinking, to create an ideology hostile to the revolution. They are working to create a class of the population that is depraved, that wants to live a fast life, that thinks only of its own enjoyment and consumption, that despises labor, that lives lives of sexual depravity and decadence, or at least to cause our people to  become vague in their class thinking, to reduce our controls and oversight, to cripple our people’s will to fight, to reduce trust and confidence in the regime, and to reduce belief and trust in the Party and in our key Party and State leaders. Their goal is to create divisions between ethnic groups and divisions between religions, to create a split between the people and the Army and Public Security, to create a split between our people and the Party and the Government, to create divisions between Vietnam and the Soviet Union and between Vietnam and Laos, Cambodia, the countries of the socialist bloc, and the progressive peoples of the world. 

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They hope to create opposition tendencies and opposition groups, to create rot and decay within the heart of our socialist regime, in order to carry out their long-term, basic plan to take over our country and conquer our people. 

3) -The imperialists and the international reactionary forces have mobilized their entire State [governmental] apparatus, their political parties, and their political organizations to conduct activities aimed at destroying our revolutionary ideology. This includes their intelligence agencies, their counter-espionage agencies, their information, propaganda, and press agencies, their entertainment and cultural agencies, and their organizations that exploit ethnic minorities and religions - these are their most dangerous forces. 

Today the American and Chinese reactionary agencies and organizations that conduct ideological sabotage operations constitute an enormous reactionary political force.  Recently the American imperialists have formed a new specialized professional office that is responsible for conducting research and for luring in, recruiting, and directing those within the socialist countries who are hostile to the revolution to sabotage us from the inside. They did this by merging the U.S. Information Agency with the U.S. State Department’s “Educational and Cultural Office” to form the Information and Cultural Agency (a new center specializing in ideological sabotage) that is directly controlled by the U.S. National Security Council, and they have strengthened their other psychological warfare and ideological sabotage  organizations, such as the Radio Freedom Committee, the Free Europe Committee, the Working People’s Alliance, and Radio Free Asia, that have offices in the capitalist countries, and especially in the ASEAN countries.

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The American imperialists and international reactionary forces have assembled groups of reactionary Vietnamese refugees to publish 117 [Vietnamese language] newspapers in 14 imperialist and capitalist countries to spread propaganda opposing the Vietnamese revolution. The Beijing reactionaries have colluded with the American imperialists to assemble exiled reactionaries from the three countries of Indochina (Hoang Van Hoan, Truong Nhu Tang, Sihanouk, Khieu Samphan, Pol Pot, Ieng Sari, Son Sen, Vang Pao, Kong Le) in a plot to form reactionary organizations like the “Indochina Front” to deceive international public opinion and to spread propaganda aimed at inciting reactionaries in the three countries of Indochina.

The American imperialists and the Beijing reactionaries are striving to persuade and then utilize satellite, lackey countries that are members of ASEAN and NATO to oppose Vietnam.  They have assembled Vietnamese exiles, Vietnamese, Lao, and Cambodian refugees, and especially personnel from former puppet psychological warfare organizations who have fled abroad, high-ranking puppet government officials and puppet army officers from the former Saigon regime, dissatisfied intellectuals and cadres, and leaders of reactionary religions and political parties like Nguyen Cong Hoan (former Deputy in our 6th National Assembly), Thich Giac Duc and Thich Giac Nhien from the Buddhist religion, Hoang Huu Quynh (an irrigation engineer from our Ministry of Irrigation and Water Projects), etc. to serve as their mouthpieces in spreading propaganda aimed at inciting reactionaries in our country and other people to oppose our regime.

They have increased their use of psychological warfare centers (prime examples being the “Asian Cultural” agency (called ASIA for short), the U.S. Information Agency (USIA for short), the Writers Association [PEN International], news agencies, radio stations, “international development” agencies, reactionary exile organizations, religious organizations and churches, psychological warfare research institutes, philosophical [theoretical] research institutes, ethnic studies institutes, etc.), and they have also used intelligence agents masquerading as clerics, journalists, writers, diplomats, experts, ship’s crewmen, students, tourists, and members of international organizations that operate using different cover names such as “Amnesty International”, “Refugee Relief” “Human Rights Institute”, and other so-called “non-political” [non-governmental organizations - NGOs], delegations studying the effects of Agent Orange, etc. to carry out actions designed to destroy our people’s ideology.

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The enemy is using every means possible to send in spies mixed in with delegations and groups that visit our country and among overseas Vietnamese returning home to conduct ideological sabotage operations.  The enemy is feverishly trying to contact and recruit former puppet army and governmental officials, former personnel of enemy psychological warfare organizations, reactionaries in the different religions (especially in the Catholic and Buddhist religions), reactionary elements of ethnic minority groups, members of the exploiting class who have refused to be reeducated, lackeys of the Beijing regime, dissatisfied, opportunist individuals who have been corrupted and have become reactionaries, etc. to participate in their efforts to sabotage and destroy our ideology.

Our enemies are now plotting to use religions organizations, religious issues, and ethnic issues as a “club that will break the back of the Communists.”

In our country the enemy is exploiting the Catholic religion, which has fabricated and disseminated “letter from the Virgin Mother” along with fabricated stories about “appearances by the Virgin Mother” and the “Five Small Families” story to pull together and incite Catholic believers to oppose the regime and to flee abroad.

During the time period that the Pol Pot-Ieng Sari clique was conducting a war of aggression against our southwestern border, the reactionaries spread propaganda designed to slander and distort our Party’s ethnic policies in an effort to incite the Cham and Khmer Krom ethnic minorities in our country to rise up to oppose our government.  During their war of aggression against our northern border, the Chinese expansionists put out the slogan, “drive out the Vietnamese ethnic group, annihilate the Tay ethnic group, rescue the ethnic Chinese, and forgive the Nhang ethnic group” as part of their scheme designed to create divisions between the different ethnic groups.

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They put out propaganda that said “China is the true Fatherland of the Meo [Hmong] people”, to incite the formation of an opposition force to establish “the autonomous Meo kingdom,” and to stir up narrow-minded ethnic nationalist ideology among backward and dissatisfied elements among the ethnic minority groups in a scheme designed to create riots, violence, and disorder in order to overthrow the government.

The different opposition targets both at home and abroad are colluding with one another to carry out actions aimed at sabotaging and destroying our ideology.  Many of the actions carried out by bad elements inside our country are being directed by imperialists and reactionaries abroad who are supplying these bad elements with technical equipment.  Reactionaries inside our country are actively supplying information to reactionaries abroad to use in propaganda attacks against us on the international stage.  We should take special note of the case in Haiphong in which Nguyen Chi Thien sent a collection of reactionary poems that he had written to an employee of a foreign embassy in Hanoi, and this collection of poems was sent abroad to be published, and of the case of Hoang Hai Thuy in Hanoi, an American spy who, acting under the guise of being an artist, wrote articles and poems that slandered our regime and then gave them to a foreigner to be delivered to exiled reactionaries for them to publish overseas in imperialist and capitalist countries.  A number of targets who are members of the “International Amnesty” organization who visited Vietnam during late 1979 met with a number of former members of the puppet army and puppet government and with bad intellectuals and artists to obtain information and to incite and direct opposition activities.

The enemy pays special attention to using dissatisfied cadres and Party members along with intellectuals, artists, entertainers, youths and children (especially university and high school students) whose revolutionary spirit is weak and who have become depraved and backward, and uneducated elements of ethnic minority groups and religions as unpaid enemy propaganda mouthpieces.  They consider these elements “fertile ground on which to spread reactionary thoughts and ideas and to serve as a strategic reserve force” in their scheme to attack and destroy our ideology.

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4) -The imperialists and international reactionary forces are coordinating their use of various types of equipment and of different forms and schemes for spreading propaganda and for conducting activities designed to destroy our people’s ideology.

They believe that radio broadcasts are an especially important method for spreading propaganda, believing that this is the best method for spreading reactionary political ideas, for influencing large number of people, and for inciting widespread internal opposition and sabotage among all classes of the population, including those who have little education and those who are illiterate.

The enemy has established many broadcasting centers with hundreds of radio transmitters in imperialist and capitalist countries and in areas where revolutionary movements are growing.  In Southeast Asia the American imperialists, the Beijing reactionaries, and the ASEAN nations have set up radio transmitters, including many very modern, powerful radio stations, such as the Voice of American (VOA), BBC Radio, Beijing Radio, Radio Free Asia, Radio Veritas (run by the Catholics in the Vatican), “Democratic Kampuchea Radio”, etc.  Even along our northern border the Beijing reactionaries have established a very powerful radio station that broadcasts propaganda against Vietnam night and day.

The enemy is constantly improving and modernizing his network of radio broadcasting stations opposed to the socialist countries and to Vietnam, the number of stations is constantly increasing, and the enemy is constantly increasing the number of broadcasting hours during which they broadcast reports, opinions, and other items that are designed to adversely affect and sabotage our ideology.  A number of these stations have increased the hours during which they broadcast American-style rock and roll music and propaganda that praises the Western lifestyle in order to sabotage the ideology of our youth and to encourage our people to flee our country (this is especially true of  VOA).  Radio Veritas broadcasts many hours of sermons that propagandize their religious thinking in an effort to strengthen the faith of their followers and to incite Catholic believers to oppose the revolution.

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The enemy is increasing his efforts to send into Vietnam psychological warfare letters and reactionary and depraved cultural publications through the international mail system, through the diplomatic pouch [of foreign diplomatic missions], or through visitors from foreign countries who personally deliver these items to people in our country. Especially dangerous are the psychological warfare letters sent by individuals who have fled our country.

Our inspection of letters sent from imperialist and capitalist countries during 1980 show that in Hanoi alone we have found 51,796 letters containing reactionary content and counter-revolutionary propaganda, and Quang Ninh Province has found 4,500 letters designed to incite opposition to our regime and to encourage our people to flee abroad.

The enemy pays special attention to using books, newspapers, magazines, phonograph records, photographs, and movies to spread propaganda designed to encourage a deprived lifestyle and to plant the seeds of reactionary ideology.  During 1978 our local authorities throughout the country confiscated 22 tons of books and newspapers, 56,417 records and songs, 4,770 tape recordings, 550 movies, and 393 photographs containing reactionary, depraved, debauched content designed to incite opposition and encourage our people to flee the country.  In our large cities, and especially in our capital city of Hanoi, in Ho Chi Minh City, in Haiphong, and in Danang, there are still many instances of underground, secret showings of films that promote sexual and other types of depravity.

The American imperialists and the Beijing reactionaries are trying to exploit our current short-term economic problems by sending leaflets and other psychological warfare materials into Vietnam from the sea, along our rivers, and overland.  During 1980 alone the Beijing reactionaries conducted 200 individual incidents involving the dissemination of leaflets into our country in ten different provinces, including four of our provinces that are deep inside our interior.

Of special significance, after the Chinese reactionaries failed in their war of aggression against our northern and southwestern borders, the enemy’s efforts to sabotage and destroy our ideology have greatly expanded and have involved many extremely dangerous methods and plots.

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The enemy along with bad elements in our society have produced reactionary poems, songs, and jokes, they have spread leaflets, put up posters, and sent anonymous letters with reactionary content, and they have spread vicious, untrue rumors.  A number of bad artists, entertainers, and intellectuals in the south, and especially in Ho Chi Minh City, have used legal [public] forums such as seminars, conferences, newspaper articles, club activities, etc. to spread reactionary propaganda designed to incite opposition to the regime, to support neocolonialist cultural ideas, to criticize the Party’s cultural and educational policies, and to criticize the Party’s leadership.  They have secretly published or re-published books, newspapers, and magazines with superstitious, reactionary, depraved content.  We have recently taken strong action to repress these actions, but these individuals have begun to conduct a type of secret activity that they call “tunnel entertainment”.

An especially serious development is that a number of bad elements and dissatisfied, unhappy cadres have used the newspaper “Tia Sang” [Ray of Light] published in Ho Chi Minh City and a few newspapers published in Hanoi to publish articles with vague, two-sided content to spread stories designed to slander our socialist regime and to slander our Party and State leaders.

Of all the different forms that the enemy uses to conduct his psychological warfare activities, the radio stations, the psychological warfare letters and materials, the word-of-mouth whispering campaigns, and the spreading of unfounded rumors are especially dangerous. 

The enemy regularly exploits those times when the revolution is shifting into another phase, when the revolution’s strategy changes, when a new enemy appears or when there is a change in the revolution’s direct, most dangerous enemy, and when the revolution is having problems to conduct his ideological sabotage operations.  The enemy uses propaganda schemes that are partially secret and partially overt, using a combination of fabricated stories and blatant slanders expressed in vague, ambiguous ways or true events that they then take out of context and distort in order to create suspicion and mistrust, using various methods to besmirch and threaten us combined with efforts to persuade and bribe their targets.

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The enemy exploits the superstitious psychology of religious believers and of backward, uneducated people by using religious arguments to blind them.  The enemy exploits the ardor and enthusiasm of young people by using material goods to seduce them; he uses money, girls, and degenerate books, magazines, and films to entice people to follow the wrong path and even to oppose the revolution.

The enemy is feverishly blockading our economy to try to destroy our economy as part of an effort to make the lives of our people more difficult with the ultimate goal of destroying our people’s faith and belief in socialism.  The enemy is striving to uncover and utilize any other negative factors in our society so that he can use these factors to attack and destroy us ideologically.

5) -All of our enemies make efforts to destroy their opponents’ ideology based on their individual abilities to do so in order to support both their immediate and their long-term goals in their overall counter-revolutionary plans.  However, generally speaking the enemy’s activities are usually focused on the following areas:

- Spreading propaganda that slanders and attacks the policies of our Party and our Government, and especially our economic policies regarding things such as living standards, distribution of goods, travel, salaries, currency, prices, foreign relations, security, and defense as well as our policies for our Party’s cadres.  They accuse us of invading Laos and Cambodia and they accuse us of being lackeys of the Soviet Union. They make up stories to slander our key Party and State leaders and they criticize the armed tools of our dictatorship of the proletariat, primarily our People’s Army and our People’s Public Security forces.

- They make false and slanderous accusations against us, claiming that we have supposedly violated human rights by pushing Vietnamese citizens out of our country and by expelling and discriminating against the ethnic Chinese.  They constantly conduct campaigns that use extremely evil, vicious tactics to incite our people to flee our country.

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- They spread reactionary capitalist theories such as convergence, Maoism, consumerism, etc., and they spread propaganda to incite young people to “live life fast”, enjoying life to the fullest and living only for the moment, and they incite lust of the flesh and the basest desires of our young people.

- They selectively exploit negative factors in our society, they work to deepen and exploit short-term problems and difficulties, and they distort and exaggerate the problems we are having with managing our economy and our society.

The Chinese reactionaries rely primarily on using Chinese capitalists, reactionaries within our ethnic minority groups, and cadres who have vague and weak political positions or who are dissatisfied to spread slanders and fabricated stories aimed at attacking the prestige of our Party and State leaders. They are aggressively promoting the traitor Hoang Van Hoan and are working to persuade those who have fled our country to organize reactionary groups and to spread propaganda aimed at inciting the masses to “totally remake the Vietnamese revolution”. They are assembling exiles from the three countries of Indochina to form the so-called “Indochina People’s Front” in order to conduct actions opposed to the Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Lao revolutions. They are inciting dissatisfied elements from the artistic and intellectual classes who are opposed to us to form a movement to write and produce poems and songs that spread reactionary ideology, and they are inciting the ethnic Chinese and members of our other ethnic minority groups to conduct opposition actions, protests, and acts of violence to oppose our regime and to overthrow it.

Meanwhile the American imperialists rely primarily on the religions, and especially the Catholic religion, and they utilize former puppet soldiers, puppet government officials, members of reactionary political parties, intellectuals and artists from the old regime, and traitors and ralliers to spread propaganda aimed at slandering and besmirching socialism, at promoting capitalism and the Western lifestyle, and at promoting degenerate culture to further their efforts to destroy our spirit of nationalism, to corrupt our youths, our intellectuals, our artists, and our cadres, and to incite counter-revolutionary actions.

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II-The Work of Struggling to Combat the Enemy’s Efforts to Sabotage Our Ideology

As one of the forces to which the Party has entrusted the mission of fighting the enemy on the ideological front, we in People’s Public Security have viewed this as an extremely important part of the struggle against counter-revolutionaries and against the enemy’s sabotage efforts in order to protect the purity of our Marxist-Leninist ideology, to protect our Party, to protect our Fatherland, and to protect Vietnam’s socialist regime.  We have affirmed that the struggle to combat the enemy’s ideological sabotage efforts is an urgent matter, a strategic mission that is intimately linked with the revolutionary cause of our entire Party and our entire population.

After the Party Secretariat issued Bulletin No. 95/TTTW on 23 August 1979 on conducting the struggle against the enemy’s psychological warfare, the Ministry issued Directive No. 32, which spelled out in concrete detail the responsibility of Public Security agencies at all levels for combatting the enemy’s ideological sabotage efforts. The Public Security offices of Quang Ninh Province, Ho Chi Minh City, Haiphong City, Hai Hung City, Hanoi City, Tay Ninh Province, Ha Nam Ninh Province, and of the provinces along our northern border have done a good job of providing staff advice and recommendations to our local Party committees on using a combination of mass organization, administrative [governmental], and professional measures to struggle against the enemy’s ideological sabotage efforts in close coordination with measures to combat problems in our administration of our economy and of society in order to promote and develop civilized, cultured life-styles and to protect and maintain a solid posture on the ideological front.  A number of City and Provincial Party Committees, including the Party Committees of Quang Ninh, Haiphong, Hai Hung, Cao Bang, Hanoi, Lam Dong, Ha Tuyen, Ha Nam Ninh, Long An, and An Giang Provinces have held conferences focused on this specific subject or have issued Party resolutions or directives on combating the enemy’s ideological sabotage efforts at the local level, and they have been able to achieve some good progress in this area. 

Public Security agencies at all levels have coordinated with the different sectors, and especially with our Propaganda and Training, Education, Information, Cultural, Youth, and Labor Union agencies to utilize various methods to increase our domestic internal propaganda activities, and they have furnished information to our Diplomatic agencies to promote the struggle to expose the enemy’s plans and activities in the international arena in order to help other countries to understand us better and to clearly recognize the reactionary nature and the evil plots and schemes of the imperialists and the international reactionaries, especially of the American imperialists and of the Beijing reactionary clique.

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As part of our Protect the Fatherland’s Security movement, we have provided education to the people in order to increase their vigilance and to encourage them to actively struggle against the enemy’s ideological sabotage efforts.

We have also begun to conduct exchanges of experiences with the Security agencies of the fraternal socialist camp about how to conduct the struggle against the enemy’s ideological sabotage efforts.

We are making strong efforts to conduct research and investigations to obtain information on the situation, to understand the opinion of the masses, to figure out and reconstruct the enemy’s previous ideological sabotage activities, and to identify all of the individuals who conducted psychological warfare, spread rumors, and spread false information; we are searching for sources of information to identify target individuals and are using many different methods to deal with those who participate in ideological sabotage operations and to isolate, crush, or quickly block the enemy’s psychological warfare arguments.

Currently our Public Security agencies have uncovered and initiated dozens of struggle cases [formal investigations] of groups that are conducting ideological sabotage operations in our capital city of Hanoi, in Ho Chi Minh City, and in a number of other provinces and cities.   We have identified, arrested, and quickly punished many of the leaders of these intellectual sabotage organizations.  During 1980 Public Security organizations at all levels uncovered a total of 298 instances of the enemy distributing leaflets, spreading enemy oral slogans, or writing anonymous reactionary letters; we interrogated and dealt with 357 individuals (including 47 of our own dissatisfied cadres and soldiers); of these, we initiated  prosecution cases against 30 of these individuals; sent 36 to concentrated reeducation [reeducation camps, prisons], and conducted in-place [at home] reeducation for 291 of these individuals.

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As a result of our stepped-up ideological activities inside the Party and among the civilian population, and of our stepped-up struggle operations to combat ideological sabotage, recently the enemy’s psychological activities have been reduced and things have quieted down.

However, our struggle operations to combat the enemy’s psychological warfare and to combat the enemy’s psychological sabotage efforts still have a number of shortcomings and weaknesses. These shortcomings and weaknesses are:

-Many of our cadres, Party members, and fighters do not yet have a sufficiently deep understanding of the dangerous nature of the enemy’s war to ideologically sabotage us.  Many of our Party chapters and Party cells have not devoted the proper amount of leadership attention and guidance to the struggle against the enemy’s ideological sabotage efforts, rightist tendencies are still widespread, and there are even locations where our vigilance has been paralyzed [destroyed] and the need for struggle has been ignored.

-Our propaganda, education, and mass mobilization activities are measures that are strategically important in the effort to combat the enemy’s ideological sabotage, but we have not carried out these measures adequately enough, regularly enough, or in sufficient depth.  Our propaganda, education, and mass mobilization content and methods being use to combat the enemy’s ideological sabotage are still simplistic and too shallow and perfunctory.  One element of our cadres, our Party members, and our mass followers have been indifferent to the problem, and have even echoed the enemy’s psychological warfare counter-propaganda and have openly spread the enemy’s ideological sabotage arguments.

-Our employment of professional measures in our efforts to combat the enemy’s ideological warfare has, in many respects been weak and immature.  We have primarily conducted the battle against the enemy’s ideological sabotage efforts domestically, inside our country, and have not paid sufficient attention to the enemy’s efforts to attack us from abroad.  We have not boldly employed professional Public Security techniques to attack the centers of the enemy’s ideological warfare efforts located in the imperialist and capitalist countries.

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Our reconnaissance and recruited intelligence agent operations are still weak and have not yet been able to identify the leaders and organized groups so that we can pro-actively block them as soon as they initiate their plans.  We have not devoted sufficient attention to causing the enemy to lose his sources of support inside our country for his ideological sabotage efforts.  Our efforts to conduct investigations to identify targets, incidents, and enemy ideological sabotage efforts and to run them down have been very weak. There have been many such efforts and incidents, many of which have been extremely serious, but we have not initiated investigations, hunted the perpetrators down, and arrested and punished them.  There have been cases of enemy ideological sabotage efforts that our Public Security agencies have stopped at simply recording the enemy’s arguments and claims, mechanically summarizing them, and reporting them to higher authorities without ever trying to conduct investigations to identify, hunt down, and punish the culprits.  Many localities have exhibited rightist deviation in the work of suppressing ideological sabotage activities and in arresting counter-revolutionaries and other bad elements who spread counter-propaganda, who have openly criticized our regime on numerous occasions but still have been ignored.

-Our organization of the apparatus that specializes in combating the enemy’s ideological sabotage efforts is not unified, it is diffuse, its guidance and leadership is not focused or unified, it is not effective, it fails to provide timely, sharp, effective advice to our Party committees and governments, and our struggle operations to directly combat the enemy have been weak and not very effective.

Because of our weaknesses, in some areas and at certain times the enemy’s operations have had adverse effects, and in some cases seriously adverse effects that have reduced the confidence of the masses in our regime and in their trust in our Party and our State.  A number of our cadres and Party members have been seduced by the enemy into becoming enemy lackeys or have been transformed into opposition elements whom we have been forced to punish.  Some of the masses have been incited to flee abroad by the enemy, and the enemy has created negative attitudes in many of our people. These things have adversely affected the Party and the State’s efforts to carry out our policies and have adversely affected our production and the living standards of our people.

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In a number of the provinces along our northern border, the enemy’s actions have damaged solidarity between our different ethnic groups, damaged solidarity between our army and our civilian population, and have incited bad, dissatisfied, and misguided elements to oppose the revolution or to flee across the border into China.

PART TWO

1-Guidelines and Missions for the Struggle Against the Enemy’s Efforts to Sabotage our Ideology In the New Situation

The struggle against the enemy’s ideological is an important part of our revolutionary cause led by our Party in which the workers have mastery and which the State administers; it is the mission of our entire Party and of our entire population. The struggle against ideological sabotage is in fact a life-or-death struggle between two opposing ideologies - between socialism and capitalism, between Marxism-Leninism and Maoism and other revisionist ideologies of every stripe, in every area, both within our country and abroad; it is a very difficult, ferocious, complex, and long-term struggle, but in the end, our side will certainly win this struggle.

In order to win complete victory in the struggle against the enemy’s ideological sabotage efforts, we must correctly carry out every one of our State’s policy decisions, policies, and laws.  We must mobilize and organize every force, uniformly implement every measure, combine political and ideological education to persuade and mobilize our people with forcefully suppressing our enemies, combine administrative and legal measures with economic measures, and combine mobilizing the masses with the use of professional measures of our dictatorship of the proletariat, but of all of these different measures, the most basic, most essential that of mobilizing the masses.

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Our Public Security agencies must pay special attention to the need to correctly mobilize the masses, to using reconnaissance and recruited intelligence agents, to properly carrying out their operational functions and providing staff advice and recommendations to their Party committees and governments while at the same time serving as the force that directly fights to crush every enemy operational scheme on the ideological front in order to contribute to the task of protecting our political and spiritual unity and our unity of will and action among the people in order to protect the purity of our Marxist-Leninist ideology.

We must constantly struggle against the enemy’s ideological sabotage efforts, paying special attention to those times when the revolution is shifting to a new phase, when it is shifting to a new strategy, when its direct, most dangerous enemy changes, when a new opponent of the revolution emerges, and when its economic situation is difficult and the lives of the people have become hard and difficult.

We must pro-actively prevent and crush the ideological sabotage efforts of every one of our enemies. We must focus the spearpoint of our struggle against the ideological sabotage efforts of the reactionary Beijing clique and of the American imperialists and against any appearance of rightist deviation and of laxness and indifference.

We must struggle against ideological sabotage on all fronts and in all areas, and first of all we must actively contribute to the effort to keeping our domestic front solid and strong. We must pay special attention to our big cities (Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Haiphong City, Danang City), to our northern border, to areas where large numbers of ethnic Chinese live, to areas where there are large concentrations of ethnic minority groups or large concentrations of clerics and religious followers (especially of Catholics, Buddhists, and Protestants), to areas where there are concentrations of dissatisfied artists and intellectuals, of backward youths and students, and to areas in which the Beijing reactionaries and/or the American imperialists have particularly focused their operations.

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A Number of Major Tasks

1)-Strengthen our efforts to educate the masses, launch a mass movement for the people to understand the need to resolutely struggle against every effort to sabotage our ideology

On the foundation of building pure, strong Party chapters and Party cells and working in close coordination with our mass organizations, we must ensure that we educate everyone in the need to fully implement all four disciplinary regulations laid out in the Politburo’s resolution on organizational tasks (maintaining discipline in obeying directives and resolutions; in reporting information; in speech [statements]; and in maintaining secrecy. We must properly carry out the Party’s guidelines for conducting ideological tasks during the new phase. We must make sure that everyone truly understands the revolution’s current situation and its mission; that everyone has a deep understanding of our strategic allies and of our enemies, and especially of the Chinese reactionaries and the American imperialists; that everyone has a firm political position that agrees with the Party’s domestic and foreign policies; that everyone understands both our advantages and the problems that we face and that they correctly understand the reasons, and especially the subjective reasons, for these advantages and problems; and that they clearly affirm the responsibilities of each individual unit and each individual person, and especially of the responsibilities of leaders.

We must intensify our internal political activities, we must conduct good education about current events and about our policies, and we must quickly expose every enemy plot, scheme, and method of conducting ideological sabotage in order to ensure that everyone is able to correctly distinguish between right and wrong, so that everyone is vigilant against every false enemy argument, so that one one listens to or repeats false arguments, and that everyone is able to spot, identify, and struggle against every ideological sabotage action and every individual and group that is conducting such actions.

Initially, we recommend that the Party and the State launch a deep, broad-based campaign within our entire Party and our entire population to oppose the enemy’s ideological sabotage efforts; this campaign should be intimately linked with combating negative factors in our economy and our society, with special focus on opposing negative factors in our ideology, and that we should make this campaign a constant, perpetual campaign that in fact represents self-initiated revolutionary action conducted by the masses. 

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Combatting the enemy’s ideological sabotage efforts must become part of the internal rules and regulations of our agencies, enterprises, neighborhoods, schools, and city blocks so that every person on his or her own takes action and also encourages and checks one another while carrying out these actions.

In our efforts to propagandize and educate the masses, we should make sure to use things like conducting exhibitions, giving talks, writing books, and holding seminars aimed at countering the enemy’s ideological sabotage efforts.  We need to work with the Propaganda and Training Department, the Ministry of Education, and the Ministry of Colleges, Universities, and Technical High Schools in order to conduct studies and introduce the subject of combatting ideological sabotage efforts into the educational programs, the lecture plans, and the study seminars of our schools.  We should step up our efforts to write books and articles, to produce films, to conduct artistic and entertainment events, to plant articles in the press and reports on the radio and on television at both the national and the local level to combat the enemy’s ideological sabotage efforts. 

When conducting our mass propaganda and educational efforts to combat the enemy’s ideological sabotage efforts, we must under no circumstances repeat the counter-propaganda arguments being used by the enemy and other bad elements.

The struggle to combat the enemy’s ideological sabotage efforts must be linked with the struggle against other kinds of enemy activities and the struggle against negative problems in our economy and our society, and especially against ideological negativity and weakness.

2)-Further strengthen our investigations to gain an overall, total, systematic grasp on [understanding of] the enemy’s ideological sabotage plans and actions, both inside our country and abroad, in order to properly support our requirements for combatting the enemy

We need to gain a complete, comprehensive picture of the status of the enemy’s different ideological sabotage plans and activities, and we must constantly work to quickly uncover and identify major developments in the ideological sabotage plans, methods, arguments, and operational tactics that are being used by the imperialists and the international reactionaries, and most especially the Beijing reactionary clique and the American imperialists.

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a)-Content required to grasp the situation [to understand the situation]

We need to make sure that we grasp and understand arguments that attack the Party’s policies or attack the key leaders of our Party and our State; that incite violence and unrest, that incite actions to sabotage our economy, to oppose and disrupt our policies, to damage solidarity and fight to attain political demands, to incite people to flee abroad, to propagate ideas and concepts that oppose our Party or propagate reactionary theories or advocate depraved lifestyles, that promote capitalism, that spread superstitions, or that spread neocolonialist art and culture.

We need to grasp and understand efforts to use artistic, literary, or academic license to write articles that are ambiguous and can be interpreted as having dual meanings, to produce reactionary folk sayings or jokes, to publish or to send abroad for publication reactionary materials, to store and disseminate reactionary or depraved books, magazines, newspapers, or movies, and to conduct counter-propaganda activities aimed at inciting opposition to our regime or creating confusion and fear among our people.

We need to grasp  the degree to which the enemy’s psychological warfare is affecting each type of person, each sector, and each area.

We need to have a firm grasp [understanding] of the enemy’s organization, his methods and his operational plans aimed at sabotaging our ideology both domestically and abroad, and especially the enemy’s organizational structure and command and guidance relationships, how the enemy is coordinating his actions inside our country with his actions abroad, and the centers from which the enemy’s directs his ideological sabotage operations targeted against our country.

b)-The targets we need to devote attention to in order to grasp the situation:

-All types of spies working for the imperialists, the capitalists, and the international reactionaries, and especially Chinese and American spies and the spies of their allies.

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We need to pay attention to spies operating undercover as members of permanent mission stationed in our country, as members of visiting delegations or groups, as ship crewmen, as tourists, as overseas Vietnamese returning to visit our country, or as businessmen from imperialist or capitals countries that are visiting our country.

-Both former and new reactionaries inside our country, paying special attention to those reactionaries who exploit religions, reactionary political parties,  ethnic minority groups, ethnic Chinese, former puppet army and puppet government personnel who previously made propaganda for or participated in artistic or cultural efforts for the Americans and their puppet, high-ranking intellectuals (especially those whom the Americans or the puppets trained in the social sciences), the “nhân văn giai phẩm” crowd,^[1] etc.

-The Maoists, the dissatisfied, and the opportunists, with special focus on dissatisfied artists, entertainers, and intellectuals.

-Members of the exploiter class who have refused to accept reeducation.

Pay special attention to obtaining information on enemy efforts to conduct ideological sabotage operations aimed against the following targets:

-Our cadres, Party members, and students who are working or studying in imperialist or capitalist countries or in countries whose political situations are unstable;

-Our cadres working in the artistic, entertainment, or science and technology fields;

-Our cadres who are in regular contact with people from imperialist or capitalist countries;

-Our cadres who are responsible for studying and analyzing [foreign] publications and documents or for monitoring the enemy’s radio broadcasts and news agencies;

-Our youths and our high school and university students in our large cities.

We need to develop plans to protect these targets in order to prevent the enemy from sabotaging the ideology of our cadres and our people.

c)-In addition to using its own reconnaissance forces, recruited agents, and secret informants, Public Security must also rely on Party, governmental, and mass organizations to obtain information about the enemy’s ideological sabotage operations.

3)-Strengthen our professional measures

First of all, we must concentrate on properly carrying out the following main tasks:

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a)-Correctly implementing the investigative tasks spelled out in the resolution passed by the Ministry’s 3rd Investigative Conference, 1 November 1977.

Public Security City Bureaus and Provincial Offices need to quickly finish their efforts to reconstruct the organizations and the personnel of the American and puppet cultural, chieu hoi, information, propaganda, and psychological warfare agencies, with special focus on the American USIS [U.S. Information Service] and the radio broadcasting stations and information offices and on the puppet government organizations that conducted cultural and entertainment entertainment activities, also including the cultural, information, and propaganda organizations of Taiwanese intelligence, of the other imperialist and capitalist countries, and of the ethnic Chinese community.

Regularly re-investigate each individual member of these organization, focusing first on those individuals that worked actively and were trusted by the Americans and the puppets and on those who worked for or are suspected of having worked for the enemy’s intelligence organizations.  Draw up lists and then check the names and identities of the remainder, determine the names of those who have fled the country, and then quickly hunt down and locate those whom we have been unable to locate.  Strictly carry out tight administrative control measures, focusing those who are left.  Obtain a firm grasp on [a solid picture of] the activities of those who have fled our country and the contacts they have with those who are still in our country in order to quickly block hostile activities, conduct struggles [investigations], and take measures to deal with [punish] violators.

Draw up lists of all individuals who have made counter-propaganda arguments [statements], who have repeatedly put out false rumors, intentionally or unintentionally; establish investigative files on target individuals who are involved in carrying out ideological sabotage and draft plans to continue to monitor and educate and to prevent them from carrying out such activities.

Investigative files must be constantly updated and finalized and then summarized and categorized on a regular time schedule, and we must use these investigative files to properly support our struggle to combat the enemy’s ideological sabotage efforts.

b)-Focus to the maximum extent possible our leadership and guidance efforts and mass your reconnaissance forces for use in conducting your current struggle cases as well as new struggle cases.

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Use your investigative struggle cases to conduct studies and to uncover and identify the enemy’s ideological sabotage plans, organization, and schemes and tactics in order to be able to pro-actively combat the enemy’s efforts more effectively.

With regard to the enemy’s ideological sabotage centers [headquarters] located abroad (such as information and propaganda agencies, the “Amnesty International” organization, the “United Nations Human Rights Commission”, non-governmental and non-political organization, radio broadcasting stations, etc.), we must in all cases coordinate with the Security agencies of the socialist bloc countries to collect information and to conduct deeper studies of their organization, their plans, their methods, and the operational tactics in order to block their ideological sabotage activities.

c)-We must make sure that we utilize the capabilities of our current networks of recruited agents and secret informants to obtain a firm grasp of the status of the enemy’s ideological sabotage efforts and to identify and hunt down those who are putting out counter-propaganda.  We must greatly expand our network of recruited agents and secret informants in key, focal-point areas and we must closely monitor and quickly detect every ideological sabotage effort conducted by the different types of target individuals and groups.  We must pay special attention to expanding our network of recruited agents and penetration agents [moles inside the enemy’s ranks] in order to provide better support to our efforts to combat the enemy.

d)-The [Public Security’s] Intelligence Department must do everything possible and exploit every opportunity to boldly recruit or insert recruited agents into the enemy’s ideological sabotage centers located abroad, with special focus on the ideological sabotage centers of the Beijing reactionaries and the American imperialists.

4)-With regard to administering our cadres and students who are working or studying abroad, especially in the imperialist and capitalist countries, we must place special focus on combatting all forms of ideological sabotage being conducted by our enemies.  We must increase vigilance in order to prevent the enemy from winning over or recruiting our cadres and students.  Everyone must understand the need for vigilance in order to protect himself and to uncover and identify the enemy’s plots and schemes in order to come up with plans to combat the enemy and protect our cadres and students.

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5)-A number of concrete policies

a)-Recommend to the Party and the State that we officially forbid all of our cadres and all of our citizens from listening to enemy radio broadcasts, from reading enemy newspapers, and from spreading the arguments [information] that the enemy broadcasts and news agencies are disseminating.  Recommend that the Central Committee’s Propaganda and Training Section draft concreted, detailed regulations to listen to enemy radio broadcasts, to read enemy newspapers, and to read the [Vietnam] News Agency’s information bulletins on the enemy’s arguments and activities in order to support our struggle operations against the enemy’s efforts.  The documents and information collected on the enemy’s ideological sabotage arguments and activities must be tightly administered and handled as “top secret” materials - “Forbid all careless statements and forbid the use of forums, seminars, scientific activities…to criticize our policies and organizations, to slander our leaders, or to cause confusion among the masses and among our Party members” (Footnote: Quote from the Politiburo Resolution on organizational tasks, pages 23 and 24). Anyone who intentionally violates these regulations must be called in, questioned, warned, educated, or forced to conduct self-criticism in front of his collective group and sternly disciplined.

As for individuals who are in charge of information agencies, newspapers, or radio or television broadcasts and who allow enemies or bad elements to exploit such organizations to disseminate articles or images with reactionary or depraved content in the press, the radio, or on the screen, we must recommend to the relevant Party committee that immediate and timely action must be taken to deal with those individuals.

b)-We need to work with the Central Committee’s Propaganda and Training Section, the Ministry of Culture and Information, and Vietnam’s Literary and Artistic Association to draw up lists of those books, newspapers, paintings, movies, music records, and music tapes that have reactionary or depraved content that are banned from being distributed to the general population and of being possessed by members of the general public.  We must regular conduct campaigns to encourage the people to turn in such materials along with conducting sweeps to confiscate reactionary or depraved books, magazine, or articles and to arrest and punish those individuals who knowingly possess or distribute all types of reactionary documents, books, and newspapers or materials that promote lifestyles of sexual depravity and other vices.

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c)-When ideological sabotage efforts are detected, Public Security organizations must immediately isolate and snuff out the enemy’s counter-propaganda arguments, they must confiscate and tightly administer confiscated materials, and they must put out explanations to the masses to ensure they are not deceived by the enemy’s tricks.  Public Security must quickly pursue leads back to the original source in order to uncover the enemy personnel and organizations involved so that they can be dealt with appropriately.

For serious cases, we must tightly administer and strictly protect the scene of the crime, take photographs, collect evidence, locate and question witnesses, and quickly establish an investigative case to investigate the incident.

With regard to major cases, reports on developments and on plans to deal with possible eventualities, and on the concrete results obtained from investigations must be submitted to the Ministry or to the local City Public Security Bureau or Province Public Security Office.

d)-Letters that are sent into our country from imperialist or capitalist countries, no matter what route is used to send them, must be strictly checked and inspected by [Public Security’s] Technical Department III [codename KG-3]. Any letter that contains reactionary or depraved content, that contains propaganda slandering our regime, that incites opposition, or that encourages people to flee abroad, must be reported to the Ministry’s leadership for instructions on how it should be handled and so that all such letters can be turned over to those components that are responsible for conducting the struggle against the enemy’s ideological sabotage efforts so that the letters can be analyzed, categorized, and files can be established to investigate both the senders and the recipients.

e)-With regard to enemy leaflets and other psychological warfare materials that are dropped or distributed in any area, local Public Security and local governments must confiscate all such materials and quickly turn them over to the Public Security component of the Ministry or of the City or the Province involved that is responsible for conducting the struggle against the enemy’s ideological propaganda efforts. At the same time we must also arrange to disseminate propaganda to the people that exposes the false and deceitful arguments being used by the enemy.  

All confiscated psychological warfare materials that are confiscated must be handled carefully and all such materials must be turned over to the City Public Security Bureau, Province Public Security Office, or Ministry component responsible for combatting the enemy’s ideological sabotage efforts.There must be a location specified to store and preserve such materials and there must be someone specifically responsible for tightly controlling such materials in order to avoid allowing these materials to harm our cadres or to adversely affect the masses of the population.

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Those individuals who possess, hide, and/or disseminate the enemy’s leaflets or other psychological warfare materials must be dealt with sternly, including the possible prosecution of intentional violators, while those who because of greed or a lack of vigilance should receive warnings and education, and the materials involved must be confiscated.

g)-The categorization and handling of target individuals

Categorization and handling of targets:

-For counter-revolutionaries and their lackeys who spread counter-propaganda, they must be quickly investigated and detained for reeducation or for prosecution for violating our laws in order to suppress these actions and as a warning, to block the enemy’s efforts and to raise the level of political consciousness and vigilance among the popular masses.

-For bad elements, such as fortunetellers, numerologists, physiognomists, sorcerers, witch doctors, and those who claim to be kings or to be preparing the way for kings, who have been called in, questioned, warned, and educated repeatedly but who have continued to violate our laws and who have adversely affected the minds and the emotions of the people, these individuals must be subjected to public criticism and criticism and self-criticism before the people and placed in detention for reeducation.

-For elements who have become dissatisfied, corrupted, or degraded and who participate in ideological sabotage activities, first of all the Party committee, the government, or a Public Security agency should call them in, remind them, educate them, and warn them, but if they continue their opposition activities we must arrest them, establish a file on them, and send them to reeducation camps or reeducate them at place [force them to attend reeducation classes while still living in their homes].

-For individuals who are backward, ignorant, whose political awareness is lacking, who are weak, or who lack vigilance and who participate in ideological sabotage activities or repeat the enemy’s counter-propaganda arguments, the local grass-roots level Party committee, government, or mass organization should call them in, remind and warn them, educate them, or subject them to criticism in their local collective (office, enterprise, city block, hamlet or village).

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As for those individuals who have committed serious violations, they must be disciplined.

Categories of methods of dealing with targets:

-For minor ideological sabotage activities, the target individual only needs to be called in for education and criticism by the individual’s local village or city ward Public Security organization.

-For serious ideological sabotage activities, the target individual must be prosecuted in our court system or detained and sent to a reeducation camp/prison. These actions are to be carried out by a district or higher level Public Security organization.

-If the target individual who is involved in ideological sabotage activities is a local-level notable [elder], intellectual, religious leader, or political party leader,, or if the individual is a cadre who is under the administrative control of the local City Party Committee or Province Party Committee, the local City Public Security Bureau or the Province Public Security Office will handle such individuals directly.

-If the target individual who is involved in ideological sabotage activities is a well-known notable or intellectual, or if the individual is the leader of a political party or religion, or if the individual is a cadre under the administrative authority of the Party Central Government and the Government [the national government], the Ministry will be directly responsible for investigating and dealing with those kinds of target individuals.

6)-Consolidating and strengthening the apparatus responsible for combatting intellectual sabotage

The City Public Security Bureaus and the Province Public Security Offices will form Cultural and Economic Security and Combatting Ideological Sabotage Offices subordinate to the People’s Security Command Section.  Precinct, district, and province capital Public Security organizations will have Cultural and Economic Security and Combatting Ideological Sabotage Cells subordinate their People’s Security Units.

The cadres assigned to combatting ideological sabotage duties must be carefully chosen, must have solid political positions, firm theoretical and class thinking, excellent moral character, pure ideological spirit, a firm understanding of the Party’s and the State’s policies, political acuity, professional excellence, and be capable of organizing and mobilizing the masses.

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II-Organization and Guidance for Implementation of this Resolution

1)-Local Public Security organizations should recommend that their local Party Committees should quickly hold a conference specifically devoted to combating ideological sabotage and at the same time the local Public Security organizations should provide direct leadership and guidance to all of the different sectors and levels of authority so that they can correctly carry out the struggle against ideological sabotage in their own respective units and localities.

Public Security agencies at the city and province level should meet with their local Party Committee Propaganda and Training Sections to discuss the current situation and measures to be use to combat the enemy’s ideological sabotage efforts, while at the Ministry of Interior level the Ministry should hold similar meetings with the Central Committee’s Propaganda and Training Section once every month.

2)-All Bureaus and Departments at the Ministry level and all City Bureaus and Province Offices need to conduct briefings for cadres and personnel on the nature and the mission [responsibilities] of these operations to ensure that everyone has a correct understanding of the mission and that everyone knows that it is their duty to guard against the enemy’s ideological sabotage efforts against them as individuals and at the same time, based on the functions and missions of their individual units or localities, to use the guidelines for combatting the enemy’s ideological sabotage efforts to draft concrete, detailed operational plans for their units or localities in order to step up implementation of these operations in the future.

3)-In 1981 Public Security agencies at all levels together with the Propaganda and Training Section are to coordinate with culture and information agencies and literary and artistic agencies at the national and local levels to organize special discussion sessions on combatting ideological sabotage in the literary and artistic communities; to also work with the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Group and education agencies at the national and local levels to organize specialized discussions on combatting ideological sabotage among young people, children, and high school students; and to work with the various agencies involved to hold discussions on combatting ideological sabotage among ethnic minority groups and religious groups.

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Public Security is to also work with our Diplomatic agency in order to utilize overseas Vietnamese organizations to combat ideological sabotage that is being conducted abroad.

4)-From this date forward, the monthly, quarterly, and annual reports that the different bureaus, departments, and local Public Security agencies sent to the Ministry must include reports on the ideological sabotage situation and on the results achieved in the operations conducted by the respective units and locations to combat the enemy’s ideological sabotage efforts.

         Signed on behalf of the Minister of Interior

         [signature]

         Deputy Minister Tran Dong

^[1] “nhân văn giai phẩm” refers to a liberal, progressive artistic movement in North Vietnam during the late 1950s that was similar to China’s “hundred flowers” movement.  The name comes from two journals that were published during this period - “Nhân Văn” [Humanities] and “Giai Phẩm” [Masterpieces].  The North Vietnamese government closed down these two publications and arrested and “reeducated” their publishers and writers.