Fight against sectarianism and localism

As a human being, everyone has a private part, which is their family, clan, friends, and homeland. In their thoughts and feelings, everyone has a “private corner” for those close relationships. Raxun Gamzatop once said: “One can take a person out of their homeland, but one cannot take the homeland out of a person.”

The Vietnamese have a tradition of community solidarity to fight against natural disasters and invaders. From that, people have a strong sense of loyalty and affection for their homeland, family, and friends. When someone is successful, the whole community admires and is proud, and sometimes even relies on them. They believe that “a drop of blood is thicker than water”. The more difficult the community is, the more closely united it is, the more obvious this is.

If that were all there would be no need to discuss further.

When these relationships and concepts develop in a distorted way, it is easy for people to only "see the trees but not the forest", to only be stuck in a small space without seeing the big, overall thing; to only see the immediate, individual thing without seeing the common, long-term benefit,... and that is a bad habit - a "fertile ground" for individualism to develop.

Illustration: Internet

The most dangerous thing is when there are leaders of sectors, localities, and units who create "playgrounds - heroes of the moment". They create cliques, from the same hometown, same family, same interests, power is corrupted, exploited, creating group interests. There are cases where programs and projects are prioritized in the boss's hometown; there are cases where the cadre organization is only the one who carries out the "rationalization process" under the boss's direction; there are even phone calls from superiors "vetoing" an entire cadre planning for the entire term; it is not that there are no profit-sharing deals "do one job, eat for life",... Public opinion cannot help but be indignant when in many places there appear the situation of "one person becomes an official, the whole family benefits", "our family's Party Committee", "our village's People's Council",...

In some localities, agencies and units, from localism and factionalism, sensitive issues have emerged such as planning votes, confidence votes, evaluation votes, election votes, etc. in personnel work, elections in congresses or in conferences to vote on investment decisions for important projects. This is a "fertile ground" for individualism to develop and opportunism to prevail.

Resolution 4 of the Central Committee (12th tenure) has pointed out that localism and factionalism in personnel work is a very dangerous disease, one of the manifestations of moral and lifestyle degradation among cadres and party members, weakening the leadership role of the Party, the nature of the state of the people, by the people and for the people. Therefore, identifying and resolutely fighting and eliminating this dangerous "disease", purifying the cadres and party members, enhancing the fighting capacity, prestige and leadership role of the Party is an urgent issue today.

Since October 1947, in his work “Reforming the way of working”, President Ho Chi Minh had already pointed out one of the diseases that a part of cadres and party members suffered from was “forming cliques”, from cliques leading to division. He affirmed that this disease was “very dangerous”, “very harmful to the Party”, because: “It harms unity... It destroys the friendship and solidarity between comrades. It causes suspicion”.

Recently, General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong once said that among the signs of moral and lifestyle degradation of a number of cadres and party members, "The people and public opinion are most concerned and most concerned about the situation of corruption, factionalism, localism, and group interests among a number of party members with positions and power, including among a number of high-ranking officials of the Party and State."

Preventing, combating and fighting against factionalism and localism is one of the key, regular and urgent tasks to clean up the current public administration apparatus. To do so, it is necessary to promote the exemplary responsibility of cadres and party members in maintaining the Party's unity and consensus. Self-criticism and criticism must be seriously implemented; attention must be paid to inspection and supervision, especially inspection and supervision when there are signs of violations, making inspection and supervision truly a sharp sword and a solid shield to protect the Party and the regime, paying attention to building a truly clean and strong Party committee and organization, maintaining and promoting the tradition of democracy, loving each other as comrades; respecting party members with different opinions but not harming the common goals and interests of the collective, community and country.

To foster a true spirit of solidarity, each cadre and party member - especially the leadership, needs to focus on selecting and educating to improve political qualities, honesty, humility, and nobility for each cadre and party member, especially the leader. One must have a strong will, not letting bad people steer them into "cronies" for unhealthy motives and purposes. One must be honest, demonstrate one's own frankness and impartiality, and say "no" to wrongful acts of following and flattering. One must be humble to listen, learn, and absorb the good things of comrades, teammates, and people, and stay away from narrow-minded attitudes when perceiving and evaluating. One must be noble to behave faithfully and humanely with colleagues in the agency or unit, not letting personal "ego" overwhelm collective "we", leading to unnecessary cracks and cracks within the organization.

Every cadre and party member, especially key cadres, must know how to harmoniously resolve and properly handle the relationships between the public and the private, between society and family, between the collective and the individual; not to let sentimental and cronyistic thinking, concepts, and lifestyles dominate public affairs and public interests, affect discipline and the law, and erode the people's trust in the Party, the State, and the regime.