Rad Geek People's Daily

A few days ago, The Guardian newsblog noted the visit that Donald Evil Lord Skeletor Rumsfeld made to Viet Nam. Here’s how the Master of War tried to impress his hosts and express his admiration for the achievements of Vietnamese civilization:

Mr Rumsfeld, who first served as defence secretary almost three decades ago, just a few months after the North Vietnamese defeated South Vietnam, turned on the charm during his visit.

At the Temple of Literature, one of Hanoi’s main tourist attractions, he enthusiastically struck a ritual gong. He also told Vietnam’s defence minister, Pham Van Tra, that when the university was founded, some 700 years before the US existed, people in North America were living in mud huts.

Of course, when the university at the Temple of Literature was founded, 700 hundred years before the U.S. existed, it was A.D. 1076. So the people in North America whose backwardness Rumsfeld was referring to were not, actually, white Americans like Rumsfeld, but rather American Indians. Thus we have the fascinating sight of a white man trying to turn on the intercultural charm and express some cultural humility — by mentioning the primitive living conditions of people in a different civilization from his own that happened to be living, at the time, on the land that he now lives on. I guess that’s one way to practice internationalism.

In any case, let’s check out some of those mud huts that people in North America were living in at the time:

Bloody savages.