Nothing beats the smell of napalm in the morning to whistle you for an ice cold beer.
At least that’s what the owners of Rickshaw Bar seemed to think when they opened a Vietnam-themed watering hole in Melbourne, Australia – in an area of the city known as ‘Little Saigon’.
Now community members are calling on the establishment for its ‘hurtful and insensitive’ decorative motif, including pint glasses filled with bullets, used dog tags, discarded military aircraft materials and references to the chemical weapon Agent Orange, which the US notoriously used to eliminate forest cover and harvests for North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces during the 20 Years War.
Rickshaw Bar customers are called upon to “settle into a booth or bunker at the bar”.
“There is no smoke without fire,” read the other signage.
Asian-Australian media site Liminal magazine shared a scathing Twitter criticism of the concept on Tuesday.
“Imagine a war in which more than a million people died, and then imagine deciding to make it an aesthetic, to sell bullet shell cocktails, with an Agent Orange theme,” they wrote in a tweet that saw the support of nearly 1,500 on Twitter.
“My family still has PTSD and you thought it was a good idea to take advantage of their pain.”
The Vietnam War, also known as the Second Indochina War, started in 1954, with millions of lives lost, including 58,000 American soldiers, about 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers, about 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters and as many as 2 million civilians who were killed. caught in the crossfire.
“In a year when anti-Asian racism has risen dramatically, this bar opened * in Richmond *, a suburb with a strong Vietnamese population, including people who * literally fled this war *. This is horrifying, ”continued Liminal in his post.
According to a response to the tweet, eateries in Melbourne have not immediately identified why the bar could be considered problematic.
“Also disturbing is that none of the editors at @concreteplay and @UrbanListMELB saw a problem. @UrbanListMELB even wrote: ‘no objection from us’, ” they pointed out, with stories about the new establishment.
Following the response on social media, Rickshaw Bar has since removed the offensive images and ads from their feeds.
“We have removed our content and apologize to anyone who was offended or found the content inappropriate,” the bar wrote on Instagram on Wednesday. “We have revised our tone and are working hard to make up for this. Sorry for the suffering that has been caused – it was never our intention. “
Before removing the material on Instagram, their page was inundated with criticism, accusing the bar of “downplaying other people’s trauma,” according to the Independent, who got screenshots of the comments before they were removed.
“My family is still suffering from PTSD and you thought it was a good idea to take advantage of their pain,” said one ailing bar visitor.
Despite the war finally ending in 1975, the Vietnamese continue to live with its deadly remains, including unexploded landmines that continue to injure and kill innocent people today. Traces of Agent Orange – a mixture of herbicides linked to life-threatening diseases such as cancer, leukemia and Parkinson’s – are also having lasting effects on the country’s population and environment.
The controversy comes at the end of a year with renewed prejudice against the Asian population, linked to the Chinese origins of COVID-19. Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, anti-Asian attacks have soared worldwide, peaking at 150% in hate crimes against Asian-Americans between 2019 and 2020 alone, according to a new analysis released by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. , an impartial research and policy group.