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…