Staying ignorant and failing to maintain vigilance will certainly lead to failure in the fight against “peaceful evolution”. “Turning revolutionary vigilance into obscurity” represents an extremely malicious trick employed by hostile forces that should not be underestimated. While raising revolutionary vigilance, we must always correctly identify and resolutely, persistently combat such cunning stratagem to win victory in this fierce “unarmed struggle”.

In order to “turn revolutionary vigilance into obscurity”, hostile forces have pointed their strategy at the “people’s hearts and minds”. To that end, they have made impacts on social consciousness via foxy artifices aimed at effectuating ideological transformation amongst individuals and in each group of citizens, controlling the people’s thoughts and actions, and promoting “self-evolution” and “self-transformation” in every aspect of social life.

In ideological and theoretical field, to realise their scheme of perverting our society, destroying our ideological foundation, and removing our socialism, they have quietly sown seeds of rebellion and manipulated cadres, party members, and citizens’ awareness and sentiment, thus leading to “self-evolution” and causing doubts about Marxism-Leninism, Ho Chi Minh’s thought, the Party’s guidelines, and the State’s law. They have frequently edited out or assembled theoretical issues like a “square peg in a round hole” to distort and deny Marxism-Leninism. In fact, they have deliberately evaded approaching theoretical issues of Marxism-Leninism in a coherent whole with this doctrine’s undeniable “cornerstones”. Moreover, they have sought different ways to create theoretical and ideological chaos, diminish our political ideology, and bring about misconception that there has been no class struggle so far at all. Unfortunately, those artifices have partly worked. While “peaceful evolution” is being enhanced by hostile forces with a variety of extremely dangerous versions, many people are ambiguous and believe that “peaceful evolution” is just a fiction of communists. It will be much more dangerous if those thoughts gradually grow within our society. Hence, it is vital to resolutely combat hostile forces’ trick of “turning revolutionary vigilance into obscurity”.

Taking advantage of international integration and cultural exchanges, hostile forces have been injecting “cultural tranquillisers” into our society to disseminate evil culture and pervert traditional and socialist cultural values, thereby leading to degradation in political ideology, morality, and lifestyle amongst a section of cadres, party members, and citizens. Via scientific researches and conferences, discontented intellectuals and opportunists have been transformed from propaganda mouthpieces into “oppositional groups from inside”. They have also turned up our national history with subjective judgements and distortions of historical events. It sounds justifiable, but those activities have been aimed at only undermining our national great unity block and causing doubts about our national history since the inception of the Party.

Economic field is where hostile forces have “enchanted” many people via well-organised tricks. Exaggerating adaptive changes of some developed capitalist countries and making prejudiced, unfriendly evaluations of our country’s economic drawbacks, hostile forces have focused on distorting, denying, and revisiting the fundamentals of Marxist-Leninist economics and Ho Chi Minh’s thought and our Party’s economic guidelines; at the same time, they have advocated the development of capitalist economic factors within our country’s economy. More dangerously, such strategy has been implemented via the training of our cadres and a contingent of foreign experts in research and teaching within our country. Hostile forces have also enhanced aid, investment, and joint venture activities to step by step discolour our socialist socio-economic foundation. Many people don’t know that behind aids and investments, hostile forces have always laid down conditions to deliberately create political pressure, an imbalance in our national economy, a sense of entitlement, and pragmatic lifestyle, with the aim of gradually transforming our economy into the capitalist orbit. All those artifices become more dangerous when they are under the cover of “liberalisation” and cooperation for mutual development to blur the boundary between partners and opponents.

In education field, the surface of hostile forces’ sabotage strategy is just distortions of the Party’s guidelines and the State’s management work. However, the real danger lies in the ambiguity of right and wrong caused by hostile forces’ sabotage strategy in this field. More specifically, they have plotted to discolour our young generations by means of education and training together with extremely cunning artifices. Taking advantage of our Party and State’s policies on a fundamental and comprehensive reform in education and training, they have formed public opinion to put pressure on reduction of contents of political, ideological, and history education at all levels of education. They have also made use of our country’s policies on international integration and overseas study to encourage xenophilia amongst the youth and derail young citizens from the Party’s revolutionary ideals. Without correct identification and assessments, that situation will possibly lead to both long-term and short-term far-reaching consequences.

Additionally, “liberty”, “democracy”, and “human rights” have always been held high by hostile forces with nice words and noble humanistic ideal to cover up their dark political conspiracies, deceive the people, and gather forces against our Party and State. To distract the people, hostile forces have frequently combined fake news with real one, while taking readers and viewers to a matrix of information in cyber space with traps led by “decoying” comments and shares as well as subjective, circumstantial, biased, ambiguous analyses to cause doubts and panic amongst readers and viewers. More seriously, the disclosure of disordered, false news has made many people lose their faith, boycott good news, and feel sceptical about even official information and truth. Without revolutionary vigilance, we will be easily misled, deceived, or hypnotised; as a result, we will be unable to realise that we are falling into “self-evolution” and “self-transformation”.

In order to facilitate their on-the-spot sabotage strategy and create pretexts for interventions from the outside, hostile forces have devoted efforts to establishing domestic opponents via unions and associations representing different social groups, such as “patriotic youth group”, “association for victims of land confiscation”, “former Vietnamese prisoners of conscience”, and “Vietnam human rights network” so as to publicly, legitimately develop the so-called “civil society” and political organisations and forces in opposition to the Communist Party of Vietnam towards a “colour revolution” or a “street revolution”. They have “bewitched” the masses via different artifices. On the one hand, for the sake of policy manipulation, they have acted as anti-corruption “strategists” and pretended to provide constructive opinions; on the other hand, they have dedicated themselves to gathering the masses, inciting the mass psychology, and organising demonstrations to destabilise political security and social order and safety and form “hot spots” as an excuse for interventions from the outside. To involve many people, they have rather effectively employed tricks of demagogy and deception in the name of representative of social groups’ interests, taken advantage of some people’s gullibility and ignorance, and closely cooperated with a lot of international organisations against Vietnam, such as Reporters without Borders (RSF) and Amnesty International (AI). Many Vietnamese people have stupidly believed in them and realised their “true face” only when encountering legal problems. Definitely, losing revolutionary vigilance during the fight against “peaceful evolution” will cause consequences for each individual or social group, but also for the survival of our regime and nation.

Measures should be taken to deal with a lack of revolutionary vigilance amongst our cadres, party members, and citizens due to hostile forces’ conspiracies and artifices. First of all, due attention should be paid to strengthening all-level party committees and authorities’ leadership and direction in the fight against a lack of revolutionary vigilance right at grass-roots level.  Importance should be attached to raising the quality and effectiveness of propagation and education to render cadres, party members, and citizens fully aware of hostile forces’ plots and artifices as well as the consequences caused by a lack of revolutionary vigilance amongst a section of cadres, party members, and citizens themselves nowadays. Doing so will help heighten a sense of responsibility of each party organisation, cadre, party member, and citizen in the fight against “self-evolution” within every field and organisation.

In today’s peaceful life, people more easily relax their vigilance. That is when the seeds of sabotage quietly grow. Therefore, “self-evolution” and “self-transformation” prevention and combat amongst cadres, party members, and citizens must be a routine task. Each person needs to equip themself with basic knowledge and improve their “immunity” against distortions. All citizens must grasp and strictly conform to statutory regulations on accessing and exploiting information, particularly the Law on Access to Information, the Law on Cyber Security, and the Code of Conduct on Social Networks. Each cadre and party member must heighten self-criticism and criticism, regularly exercise “self-review” and “self-correction”, set good examples in the observance of the Party’s Charter and workplace regulations, and remain cautious about their speeches, shares, comments, and assessments on social networks. That is also the way for us to escape the matrix of information and hostile forces’ trick of “turning revolutionary vigilance into obscurity”.

Lt. Col. PHAN NGOC PHUC, MA, Military Region 5’s Political Department