Catastrophic American Imperialism

VIET THANH NGUYEN — THE SYMPATHIZER — 2015

This book is essential to understand the present evolution of the world in the 2020s, along with COVID-19 and Trump’s-now-Biden’s commercial war with China that looks more and more like the fight between a funfair goldfish and a giant catfish in the Mississippi delta or a shark in the Gulf of Mexico. Are there sharks in the South China Seas?

The subject is the war of independence of Vietnam that came like a historical accident. The French took advantage of the weakness of the Chinese in the 19th century. China was, at the time, ravaged by the various opium wars waged mostly by the English. China’s control, marked by the use of the Chinese writing system in Vietnam, was weakened. The French arrived with their Latin alphabet and Vietnamese intellectuals who were all pro-Vietnam nationalists adopted it and the century-old vague dream of independence and freedom finally took form and it will only take Ho Chi Minh going to France, working for Renault in Boulogne Billancourt, meeting Zhou Enlai there working the same way, getting in touch with French Communists who were all on the line of Lafargue, Karl Marx’s son-in-law, and his fundamentalistic reduction of Marxism, for Asia to take the path it is following today with great success.

That was not easy, and this book proves it. The defeat of the French was in Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The ensuing Geneva agreement cut up the country in two temporarily, but the south part was seized by some military and political essentially Catholic mafia that declared the independence of the Republic of Vietnam and called for help from the USA since the French were not willing, especially since they were engaged in another colonial war in Algeria that lasted up to 1962. By then it was too late to repair the damage that the US presence started to work into the country and this damage was going to be multiplied by the assassination of JF Kennedy since Lyndon B. Johnson was for an all-out offensive war that got into trouble straight away, but Nixon multiplied the war and invaded Cambodia and Laos till he resigned, and then the pacifier, Kissinger, took over…