<http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/47805-forgetting-and-re
membering-the-vietnam-war>
Excerpt: "A seeming acknowledgment and an attempt at reconciliation, has
become commonplace among Americans; the Vietnam War no longer casts a dark
cloud over the nation's consciousness."
'By controlling the narrative of the wars we fought, we justify the wars we
are going to fight in the present.' (photo: teleSUR/Twitter)
<https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/01/viet-thanh-nguyen-interview-vietnam-war>
Forgetting and Remembering the Vietnam War
By Yahya Chaudhry and Viet Thanh Nguyen, Jacobin
09 January 18
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen on the self-serving
stories the US state tells about the Vietnam War.
come here mindful of the past, mindful of our difficult history," Barack
Obama said during a May 2016 visit to Vietnam, "but focused on the future -
the prosperity, security, and human dignity that we can advance together."
Such a sentiment, a seeming acknowledgment and an attempt at reconciliation,
has become commonplace among Americans; the Vietnam War no longer casts a
dark cloud over the nation's consciousness.
This shift in rhetoric is accompanied by the United States' reinvigorated
campaign to establish Vietnam as an allied, capitalist bulwark against China
- part of Obama's vaunted pivot to Asia. The United States has sought to
promote neoliberal economic policies through trade deals and sponsorship of
a private university (Fulbright University Vietnam), while also lifting a
decades-long ban on the sale of military equipment to Vietnam.
Against such neoliberalization, false reconciliation, and historical
amnesia, Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel
<http://www.groveatlantic.com/?title=The+Sympathizer> The Sympathizer, is
waging a literary battle on behalf of the Vietnam War's forgotten victims.
The Sympathizer follows a Vietnamese communist double agent living among and
spying on Vietnamese refugees. In it, Nguyen tackles cultural insularity,
nationalism, and imperialism, which drive American cultural production about
the Vietnam War.
Last year Nguyen was nominated for the National Book Award for Nonfiction
for <http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674660342> Nothing
Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, a cultural history of the
conflict. Together, the two works offer a stern rebuke to narratives of the
past that attempt to absolve the United States and relegate the victims of
its imperialism to the background.
Jacobin sat down with Nguyen to talk about collective memory, US-Vietnam
relations, and how to resist corporatizing universities.
YC: How did coming to the United States as a child refugee during the
Vietnam War affect your identity and politics?
VTN: My own narrative memory begins with being taken away from my parents
and sent to live with a sponsor family as a way to leave the refugee camp in
Pennsylvania, so in that sense being a refugee was imprinted on me from the
very beginning of my consciousness.
Awareness of being a refugee continued throughout my childhood. I observed
how my family lived as refugees trying to survive in the United States and
was cognizant of the inequities of memory: how Americans chose to remember
the Vietnam War
<https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/06/hardhats-hippies-and-hawks-an-interview-
with-penny-lewis> that had produced me and how Vietnamese refugees
remembered the war.
The end result was to produce in me someone who was always aware of the
inadequacies of any side's perspective. When I was in my parent's household
or in the Vietnamese refugee community, I was seeing it through the eyes of
an American, and when I was outside of that environment, I saw American
culture through the eyes of the Vietnamese people. That produces some
skepticism about ideologies and viewpoints.
All of us who have ideologies and viewpoints feel pretty certain about the
justness of our point of view and the unjustness of other point of views. I
was always interested in trying to understand where different perspectives
were coming from, but I was also very skeptical about each of these
perspectives as well, given the sense that all groups are self-interested,
and, given enough opportunity, all groups would be tempted to abuse the
power they have: Americans have done it, but the Vietnamese might very well
do the same thing if given the chance.
That led me to being a writer, specifically a writer who wrote Nothing Ever
Dies and The Sympathizer - it's the refugee's capacity for empathy for the
outsider and the skepticism of everyone's point of view.
YC: What is the role of Cold War literature and art, including films like
Apocalypse Now, in shaping the public's memory?
VTN: The Cold War was experienced as a hot war by the countries in which the
antagonists were fighting. The people in these countries are often rendered
as background actors to a Western drama, even though they paid the steepest
price in terms of human losses and natural destruction
<https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/09/vietnam-war-ken-burns-us-imperialism> .
The Sympathizer and Nothing Ever Dies are meant to rebut that by
foregrounding the experiences of the people for whom the Cold War was hot.
If we're talking specifically about literature and film from the American
point of view, we see a lot of ambivalence about the Cold War and its cost
for Americans. But we also see a reiteration of the American perspective on
history. Even if these literary texts and films could be interpreted as
antiwar, they nevertheless carry out that portrayal through an American or
Western viewpoint, so it centers the West again.
The Sympathizer is meant to contest these types of portrayals by making
visible how these texts do that work. There's a satirical section about a
movie that looks suspiciously like Apocalypse Now but is really a
compilation of all the various kinds of American movies about the Vietnam
War.
The Sympathizer tries to make the point forcefully and explicitly that
America's Cold War cultural production functioned as a kind of propaganda.
Even if it portrayed the United States negatively, it still functioned as a
kind of propaganda for the United States by making the rest of the world
deal with it from the American point of view.
YC: There has been a recent emergence of popular literary fiction about the
Cold War by authors of various Asian backgrounds. What do you think of this
trend?
VTN: The American literary industry
<https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/03/pen-america-writers-resist-adrienne-rich
-baldwin/> has the same ideology that dominates throughout American
society, a liberal multiculturalism. That ideology is integrated with
capitalism, and so just as American corporate life needs diversification in
order to be possible, so does the American literary industry.
This is why we see an interest in narratives that could be classified as
multicultural. Even though the publishing industry is 89 percent white, it's
still interested in this sort of diversification and commodification. The
very same capitalist system that drives the United States and other Western
countries to engage in colonialism and war eventually leads to this desire
to hear stories from different people about those very same histories. So
capitalism creates the conditions by which these Asian or Asian-American or
Asian-international writers emerge.
The flexibility of American ideology, which is perfectly capable of
acknowledging that the United States has done bad things in the past and in
the present, encourages the production of stories that deal with these kinds
of histories. Now, the question is, even if these stories talk about these
histories, how critical are they? Do they acknowledge these histories only
to eventually reconcile with the demands of liberalism and capitalism? Or do
they actually try to be more revolutionary or radical?
I think that the latter is actually a lot more rare. Even if you have these
sorts of authors, they are not necessarily doing anything radical. What they
are doing is telling the stories of their peoples, which again is completely
reconcilable with a flexible kind of democratic capitalism that is willing
to acknowledge its own faults.
YC: You've written that "all wars are fought twice, the first time on the
battlefield, the second time in memory." How is the memory of the Vietnam
War still being contested today?
VTN: Just to talk about America and the Vietnam War, the control over the
past - the memory of this war - is critical in both countries because memory
is a strategic resource in any country, especially the memory of wars. By
controlling the narrative of the wars we fought, we justify the wars we are
going to fight in the present.
In Vietnam, the state attempts to tell the story of the war as a victorious
one, of revolution, unification, and liberation, all of which buttresses the
legitimacy of the Communist Party and its government in the present. If that
history is contested, it threatens the authority of the Communist Party,
which is why any kind of dissidence domestically or from the diaspora is
considered very dangerous by the ruling government.
In the United States, because we're not an authoritarian government, the
battle over the past is not so straightforward, so Hollywood has the license
to make movies that depict the American war there very negatively. But that
narrative reconnects to the American point of view, and the dominance of the
American point of view is partly what led the United States into the Vietnam
War in first place.
The interpretation of the Vietnam War has shifted from the negative
portrayal we see in the seventies and eighties - that Vietnam was a bad war
- to the present, where presidents from both parties, the government in
general, the Pentagon, and the State Department have actively worked to
change that narrative: it's now considered a noble but failed war. If we
learn such positive lessons we can fight contemporary wars more effectively,
according to these voices. That's an example of how control of the
reinterpretation of this particular war's legacy justifies how we conduct
wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and in other countries.
YC: In his book In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies
<https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300182798/praise-forgetting> , David
Rieff argues that it may be moral to forget because collective remembrance
can be toxic. What do you think about letting oneself forget?
VTN: That's a classic dilemma. For individuals and societies to function,
you have to forget something in some way; it's obviously a necessity. But
how to remember and how to forget, those are the crucial questions.
There are ethical and unethical ways of remembering and forgetting, but we
cannot talk about those ethics in some kind of abstract way. We can have a
code of ethics about how to remember. In Nothing Ever Dies there are ethical
pathways for doing this, but I think ethics are insufficient without an
understanding of inequalities. We have never had just memories and just
forgetting, if the society itself is unjust.
For example, in an economically unequal society where different groups have
different levels of access to the means of production, there are also
different levels of access to the means of representation. So it's not
possible in the United States to have a just accounting of issues like
slavery. If one population has greater access to the means of production,
the means of representation, and therefore the means of memory, they are
going to dictate how we remember and forget, and those who are disempowered
are going to feel that is unjust. The inequalities of the past are
structurally embedded in the present.
YC: How do you analyze the United State's warming relations with Vietnam in
light of the country's history and the Obama administration's pivot to Asia?
VTN: There is a real desire for reconciliation on the part of the United
States and on the part of Vietnam too, but this desire is pretty much
impossible to extract from the geopolitical considerations that you mention.
The United States rarely acts purely out of altruism, so behind acts of
altruism and reconciliation, there's an agenda and self-interest.
The United States was interested in Vietnam and Southeast Asia in the first
place partly to contain Communism as a global competitor, but also to
provide a bulwark for the development of capitalism
<https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/05/trans-pacific-parternship-china-united-s
tates-asia/> in East Asia. Even though the United States lost the war in
Vietnam, it won the larger campaign for stabilizing the region for
capitalist development. What that means is that America's attempt to
continue the growth of relations with Vietnam is part of the larger campaign
to secure East and Southeast Asia for American interests - not just American
military dominance but America's economic dominance as well.
The self-interest is not just about capitalist development in Vietnam. It's
also against China. All of this must be understood in the longer history
that goes back to the nineteenth century, when the United States began its
expansion into the Pacific with the intent of using the Pacific and the
islands therein to reach China with its marketplace - where China was not
the competitor but the ultimate prize.
YC: Former Senator Bob Kerrey
<http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/20/opinion/bob-kerrey-and-the-american-trage
dy-of-vietnam.html> attracted controversy in 2016 when he was appointed
chairman of the Harvard--sponsored Fulbright University Vietnam (FUV). What
is your opinion of his appointment and the role of the university?
VTN: I was disappointed for two reasons. The most obvious reason was the
idea that his appointment would serve as a kind of reconciliation between
the United States and Vietnam given his war history. There can be
reconciliation, but not just by appointing him the head of a university. If
he wanted to reconcile with his past in Vietnam
<http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2048043,00.html> , then
he should go to the village where his men killed twenty innocent civilians
and apologize to the survivors, and Fulbright University Vietnam should
ensure that anybody from that village who wants to go to FUV can go on a
scholarship. If Bob Kerrey is installed on campus as the head of the
trustees, there should be a monument to victims on that campus too.
Another dimension that is talked about less is the fact that he was a
university president at The New School, and he was a controversial one. He
is part of this national effort to corporatize academia and turn it into an
engine of neoliberalism, and FUV's presence in Vietnam is arguably going to
do the same.
This is an example of what the Pacific pivot means: reconciliation really
serves to advance global capitalism in Vietnam. FUV's primary purpose is to
train a class of Vietnamese people as managers of global capitalism within
Vietnam; that seems to pretty much be the explicit agenda of the university,
the implication of contemporary Western university standards around science,
technology, business management, and administration, where the humanities
and social sciences are sort of an afterthought.
YC: What can scholars and academics do to respond? Boycott?
VTN: That's a hard one, because it seems to be obvious that all of us at
research universities are already working within the neoliberal system. For
people like me to say anyone should boycott FUV would be hypocritical,
because I participate in the system that FUV would perpetuate.
But that doesn't mean every policy these universities enact is something
that we agree with or go along with, so there should be room for demanding
that these institutions do more than simply perpetuate a system of economic
neoliberalism. That is something that can hopefully be contested by people
within the system. For example Harvard University is the sponsor of FUV and
that would be an issue for Harvard academics, just as Yale academics should
look at the Yale-NUS <https://www.yale-nus.edu.sg/> collaboration in
Singapore.
This issue of a boycott might not work too well in this particular instance
because what we're talking about is a need for a reformation of the entire
system of corporatizing academia that led to designing and implementing FUV
in the first place.
YC: Do you think boycotting has a role to be played in academia, for example
in the Boycott, Divestment, Sanction (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights
and recognition?
VTN: Going back to the FUV example, boycotting in the sense of not
collaborating with the university or teaching for it, I think is actually a
viable option. For people who are concerned about the functions of these
sorts of universities in foreign locations like NYU Abu Dhabi
<https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/06/nyu-abu-dhabi-john-sexton-uae-emirates-a
cademic-freedom/> , NUS, and now FUV, this is a legitimate way of not
cooperating.
In the case of BDS
<https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/04/israel-palestine-boycott-divestment-sanc
tion-sheldon-adelson> and Israel, a boycott can work. You're trying to
boycott something that is contained: no further collaboration with the
Israeli state or Israeli academia. I think the bluntness of it is part of
what makes it effective because it recognizes that colonization, apartheid,
and inequities benefit everybody in that situation, and that it's actually
very difficult to try isolate that.
It would have been a perfectly legitimate move during the Vietnam War to
boycott the United States because everybody in the United States was
benefiting from that kind of a system. I'm perfectly okay for other
countries to boycott the United States now for the kinds of policies it
carries out.
<http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize>
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