"Social evils are on the increase, even among children," a loudspeaker blares. "Traditional morality is in peril."
It sounds like a religious revival. But Vietnam is in the grip of an old-fashioned socialist campaign. The daily barrage aims to stir up the populace for what official newspapers call a war against cultural poisons from abroad.
"Cultural imperialism is pouring money and decadent anti-national and reactionary cultural items" to "force other countries to change their political and social system," New Hanoi said in an editorial.
"This war is being fought fiercely, without guns but still quite dangerously as it has penetrated into each family to confuse normal, happy life."
The targets of the battle are many: unapproved video tapes and musical recordings, calendar art and ads that show skin, pornography, gambling, prostitution and drug use.
Despite the campaign, Hanoi residents have not suddenly turned puritanical. Young women in tight jeans, their dates in leather bomber jackets, still cruise the city on Saturday nights. Motorbikes jam the sidewalks in front of smoky karaoke bars, and lovers grope in dimly-lit cafes.
The campaign aims mainly at Communist party members, but also goes down well with the military and Vietnamese veterans, who resent the popularity of Western pop culture among Vietnam's youth.
Authorities in Ho Chi Minh City -- formerly Saigon -- showed they mean business by rounding up 30,574 video tapes and 12,473 cassette tapes and crushing them with a steam roller.
Books have not been burned yet, but calendars and pornographic pictures have.
With its xenophobic, anti-free market undertones, the campaign contrasts strikingly to the government's 1995 emphasis on greater exchanges with the outside world. Last year brought diplomatic relations with the United States and membership in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
But now Vietnam is preparing for a Communist Party conclave in June that will pick the nation's leaders for the next five years.
Despite a budget deficit, the government has announced it will spend $16 million this year in the war on fighting cultural poison.
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