Pulitzer Prize winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen talks about his featured article in the Nation magazine called Greater America Has Been Exporting Disunion for Decades.
Transcript:
Mitch Jeserich:
Good day, and welcome to Letters and Politics. I’m Mitch Jeserich. This is a quote. “I wanted to understand more intimately how the United States had gone from fighting communism in Vietnam to doing the same in Central America, and how this global counterinsurgency effort was intertwined with my own journey from Vietnam to the United States of America as a refugee. This war against communism had ultimately produced me as an American, what had it done to Salvadorans?” That’s from Pulitzer Prize winning author, Viet Thanh Nguyen. An article in the latest edition of the Nation Magazine called Greater America has been exporting this union for decades. So why are we still surprised when the tide of blood reaches our own shores? He joins us to talk about it. Viet Thanh Nguyen is a professor of English, American studies and ethnicity and comparative literature at the University of Southern California. He’s the author of a number of books, including The Sympathizer, which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Viet Thanh Nguyen, I thank you very much for taking this time to join us today.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Hi, Mitch. It’s a pleasure to be here with you.
Mitch Jeserich:
You really reminded me in this article in the Nation Magazine just sort of in time how close the Vietnam War of the 1960s and ’70s, of course, Vietnam has a much longer experience with war before that, with the French occupation of Vietnam, but with the United States 1960s and ’70s in Vietnam and then in the 1970s and ’80s in Central America. And I think it’s sometimes easy to forget that there may have been a connection. There’s a sequence in time here that’s important to keep in mind in going from what our involvement in Vietnam to Central America. This is what you went to investigate.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Absolutely. And for me, one of the reasons why I wanted to investigate was because I came to the United States as a refugee when I was four years old in 1975. And by the time I came into consciousness, I would say I was like in the 10 or 11 years old and reading newspapers like Newsweek Magazine in the dentist’s office and there were stories about El Salvador and Nicaragua and Honduras, but specifically about El Salvador, the El Mozote massacre and the murder of Archbishop Romero and four American church women, this all happened in 1980 and 1981, and I didn’t really have, obviously the capacity at 10 years of age to make sense of the geopolitics of all of this. But these images that I saw in the newspaper and the magazines stayed with me and left El Salvador as a place that was of curiosity to me, but I didn’t really have the chance to do much about it until February of this past year.
I’ve spent quite a lot of years investigating war and memory throughout Southeast Asia. That’s my own personal history. But in February, I had the opportunity to go to El Salvador, and coincidentally, I arrived in El Salvador on the very same day that Marco Rubio arrived in San Salvador. We were there in the same city. He was staying at the much more fashionable Hilton, and I was staying a few miles away at the Sheraton, and he was there signing the prison deportation agreement with President Bukele. And I was there to investigate a little bit of this history of the Salvadoran civil war that I had stumbled across as a young boy.
Mitch Jeserich:
And again, Vietnam, Central America, El Salvador, this was all in the name of fighting communism.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
What I didn’t realize when I was a little boy reading that magazine was that in fact, the geopolitics had shifted from Southeast Asia to Central America for the United States. Now, we all have heard of the domino theory. That was the political justification and phobia that said if countries started to fall to communism in Southeast Asia, beginning with Laos and then to Cambodia and Vietnam, then the dominoes would keep on falling across Asia, but they would eventually also reach the Americas. And with the fall of Vietnam from the American perspective, the fall of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia to communism was enormously catastrophic, a major defeat for American politics and American military standing.
And in 1983, President Reagan gave an important speech where he said very explicitly, “We failed in Laos. We let the Laotian government fall to the path at Lao, who were the communist revolutionaries. We’re not going to let that happen in El Salvador. We’ve already lost Nicaragua.” So El Salvador is going to be the focal point of this renewed domino theory with this movement of the hot point of the Cold War to Central America just immediately south of the United States. And of course, Cuba had already fallen to communism in the 1960s. So the Cold War mentality of the United States was very, very strong. The paranoia about the potential for communist invasion was very, very strong. And Reagan just very clearly articulated the connection between Southeast Asia and Central America in this geopolitical imagination for the United States. And that’s why El Salvador just became this really intense, very hot war, mostly just completely being waged by Salvadorans against each other. But the El Salvadoran government and its military was backed up and trained by the United States.
Mitch Jeserich:
Staying with the experience of Southeast Asia and Southeast Asian refugees, you write this, “Refugees fled from those countries as they also fled from El Salvador. Many made their way to the United States. Some of the Cambodian refugees who came as children never got their US citizenship, committed crimes and were deported back to a country that most of them barely remembered and whose language they could not speak.” Of course, as I read that, I also think about Salvadorans today.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Absolutely. Of course, today we have very significant deportation crisis, if that’s the language one wants to use. I think it’s actually much more serious than just a crisis. The Trump administration has imagined that there is a war being conducted against the United States by immigrants, illegal and otherwise, undocumented and otherwise. And that this idea of an invasion warrants a counter-attack by the United States and its Department of Homeland Security. But deportations have already been happening for a very long time, both against Latinos, but also against Asians as well, and African Americans. I mean Africans and black people also. But most people, I think, are not aware of what’s been happening to Asian deportees. And the Cambodian example is not unique to Southeast Asia. This has also happened to Lao, the Hmong, the Vietnamese as well.
A lot of these people who came as refugees did not get their citizenship. Some of them did commit crimes, they did their time and hundreds of them have been deported back to their various countries in Southeast Asia. This is actually one of the blowback effects of war that I think a lot of Americans are not aware of. So also, for example, Korean adoptees, people who were adopted by well-meaning American families brought over from Korea in the wake of the Korean War, some of these American families did not get citizenship for their adopted Korean children. And some of those adopted Korean children have been deported back to Korea as well. So war refugees, adoptees, deportation, all of these things are wrapped up together. Wars don’t end neatly simply because there has been a ceasefire signed.
Mitch Jeserich:
The blowback, as you said, it’s important to remember the blowback.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
It is important to remember blowback because I think for Americans, if they remember wars at all, which is a big question mark to begin with, but if they remember wars at all, I think the American tendency is to think that there’s a clear starting point and a clear ending point for a war. And that wars are fought overseas. That’s a luxury that the United States has had since the Civil War. It’s not a luxury for most countries where wars are fought on their territories. But for Americans, the issue is blowback. That is the things that we do overseas oftentimes have unforeseen consequences domestically that we’re not aware of.
So we’re talking about the Vietnam War. You know there’s 58,000 plus American soldiers who died during the Vietnam War. Their names are commemorated on the memorial in Washington D.C. There are probably tens of thousands of American veterans who committed suicide after the end of the Vietnam War. Their names are not recorded anywhere. That’s a huge kind of blowback that’s very personal for Americans. That’s definitely a consequence of the war that most Americans are not aware of. But there’s other forms of blowback as well. And if we’re talking about deportation today, one of the most important forms of blowback is the fact that we have waged a forever war in the United States for quite a long time. And part of the consequence of that has been the militarization of our police. That is we’ve produced such an excess of military weaponry that they have been shipped back to US domestic police departments and that has transformed the appearance and the tactics of our police departments so that it’s hard to distinguish between paramilitaries and the US police at this point. And that’s what we’re seeing in the streets of the United States.
Mitch Jeserich:
I want to ask you about that. You are joining me from Southern California. Again, the article, Viet Tanh Nguyen, that you have published in the Nation Magazine is called “Greater America Has Been Exporting Disunion for Decades. So why are we still surprised when the tide of blood reaches our own shores?” Is that what you’re talking about? What we’re seeing happening right now in California, specifically in Southern California?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
There’s such a long history of this. And again, part of the issue here is where do we draw the line between the domestic and the foreign? Many of the things that we’re seeing happening today in the United States are deeply shocking for a lot of Americans, but I would say especially white Americans who are not used to having some of these tactics deployed against them. But I think most of the things that the Trump administration and beforehand, the Obama and Clinton administrations too, and Biden administrations, many of the things they have done domestically have been done to peoples of color or to minorities throughout American history. So the question of deportation, for example, is vivid and shocking at this current moment. But we have been deporting people for a very long time, both countries overseas, but also to different regions within the United States.
So for example, Japanese-American incarceration that was a deportation of Japanese-Americans, many of them citizens to interior camps within the United States, the deportation of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the 1930s, up to two million people, including citizens, sent back forcibly to Mexico or the deportation of indigenous peoples, what we would call forced removal of indigenous populations from their homelands to reservations. This has gone on throughout American history.
And so again, the line between domestic and foreign tactics is very thin. And throughout American history in terms of crisis, we have seen that line being breached repeatedly. James Baldwin, for example, I’m teaching No Name in the Street again this week, but in that book published in 1972, he says very explicitly that the repression directed against the Black Panthers in Oakland, where you’re calling from domestically by the FBI and other kinds of domestic police agencies, was in direct parallel to what the United States was doing to the Viet Cong in Vietnam. So he saw a clear connection between counterinsurgency strategy in Vietnam conducted by the US and what he would see as counterinsurgency strategy directed against African-Americans and specifically the Black Panthers. So we have a history of the integration of what we have done overseas with what we have done domestically to minoritized populations.
Mitch Jeserich:
The war comes home.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Absolutely.
Mitch Jeserich:
Viet Tanh Nguyen, you mentioned that your work and your novels really focuses on memory and war in Southeast Asia. With that in mind, tell me about your trip now to El Salvador.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I went initially, actually, I’m a board member for the International Rescue Committee, which is a major refugee aid organization. We have operations all over the world, including in El Salvador. So I was going to go and watch the operations in place, and literally a week before I was about to go, the whole trip was canceled because this was the time when the federal administration decided to just cut all kinds of federal aid to humanitarian organizations, including to the IRC. 40% of our budget comes from the federal government. So I can no longer see the operations, but I decided to go anyway since I was already on my way. And I got there with the explicit intent then to go look at the history of the Civil War, including El Mozote. So I arrived in San Salvador, discovered, I did not know this, that the currency in San Salvador, in El Salvador is the US dollar. Just another sign of how important or how integrated El Salvador is to the United States.
And a five-hour trip south of San Salvador is El Mozote. And El Mozote is where the Salvadoran army committed its most infamous anti-communist massacre. The Salvadoran army, which was trained by the United States, wore American uniforms, carried American weapons, was flown in by American Huey helicopters and who look exactly like the US military. And so if you see photos of the El Salvadoran army in operation, it looks eerily like the Vietnam War because the landscape of El Salvador is beautiful and green. And if you’ve seen an Oliver Stone movie, you’ve seen what the El Salvadoran army looks like in operation except with Salvadoran army troops. And in 1981, the Salvadoran army had already been in conflict for a while in the Civil War, which had run from 1979 to 1992. And the Salvadoran army was arrayed against a coalition of leftist guerrillas.
Many of them were communists or anarchists and ideologies like that. And the war was already brutal at that point. In fact, the war was so brutal. Human rights violations were so high that Jimmy Carter in 1977 wanted to tie US aid to El Salvador to the El Salvadoran human rights record and the El Salvadoran government rejected that and instead turned to Israel, which supplied 83% of El Salvador’s military needs in the late ’70s and early ’80s. So I arrived in El Mozote where in 1981, this Salvadoran army unit, a massacred a thousand civilians. This is indisputable, men, women, children, none of them were guerrillas, most of them had no sympathies for the leftist guerrillas, but the Salvadoran army was in a scorched earth mood, and it just went in and everybody out, or many of the people out.
I met with three survivors, two of them my age, which meant that when I was 10 years old reading about the El Mozote massacre, these were little boys running from the Salvadoran army and losing many, many, many of their relatives. It was just a devastating experience meeting them. They did not recount their horrors. I’d already read about them, so I didn’t need them to tell me about them, but just to be in their presence and to hear about their struggles for reparations and recognition of what happened to their villages, and seeing the El Mozote Memorial, that was all very deeply moving to me.
Mitch Jeserich:
You had a similar experience in going back to Vietnam as well?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Absolutely. What can I say? What Americans call the Vietnam War involved, not just Vietnam, but Laos and Cambodia as well. And it was not simply 1964 to 1973 or 1975, but preceded 1964 and went on after 1975. I’ve been to many of the battlefields, many of the cemeteries throughout these three countries, many of the massacre sites throughout these three countries. I think Americans, if they have any memory, will recall the 58,000 plus American dead, but don’t remember three million Vietnamese dead of all sides, military and civilian, plus hundreds of thousands of Lao, Cambodian and Hmong who died during the war, that there was a genocide in Cambodia after the war that was a direct consequence of American bombing of Cambodia, a genocide that killed 1.7 million Cambodians, about a third of the population, huge outflows of refugees from all of these countries, many of whom died on the journey. So untold tens and hundreds of thousands of people in the aftermath because of the refugee experience, because of unexploded ordnance, because of Agent Orange.
So it’s been a landscape that was utterly devastated for so many years. And these countries are beginning to recover. Vietnam most strongly and most vividly. But these are countries that I think are still wrestling with how to recall these devastating histories, especially as these were civil wars between pro-American and anti-American forces, pro-communist and anti-communist forces. There is still bitterness in these countries between victors and the vanquished. So for me, investigating the history of the war in Southeast Asia, it also means investigating the consequences of the war, which are still quite vivid for so many people.
Mitch Jeserich:
When you talked about the El Mozote massacre, I personally couldn’t help but think about the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
The My Lai Massacre is simply the most infamous massacre, obviously 500 Vietnamese civilians massacred by US army troops. That’s indisputable as well. But Nick Turse, the journalist, in his book, Kill Everything That Moves, argues that in fact, My Lai was simply one of many, many kinds of massacres, small and large, that were committed by the United States because of, I mean, Nick Turse concludes, and I agree that it was racist policies and attitudes set by the United States military at the highest levels that filtered down to the troops. So if you’re already strategically bombing and carpet bombing people, and you’re not regarding them as human beings from the strategic perspective, you can hardly expect American troops who knew nothing about Asia or Southeast Asia or Vietnam, Laos or Cambodia, and who are being trained to dehumanize their enemies, you cannot expect them not to engage in racist policies in their war conduct.
So Turse argues that in fact, thousands of Vietnamese civilians were massacred in various ways throughout the Vietnam War. And there is a memorial, very moving one at My Lai or Son My as the Vietnamese people call it. But you have to remember, out of all the dozens of American soldiers that pulled triggers in My Lai, only one, William Calley, a platoon lieutenant was convicted, and he didn’t serve very much of his time. So everybody else above him from Captain Ernest Medina, who was there definitely on the fields of My Lai to the battalion chief circling in the helicopter above to the Generals who set the tone, none of those people were ever convicted of or held responsible in any way for what happened in My Lai.
And likewise in the Salvadoran Civil War in which about 80,000 people died, most of them civilians, in which most of the atrocities were committed by the Salvadoran army, as various investigations have concluded, very, very few people have been convicted or held accountable for any of the things that took place.
Mitch Jeserich:
With the refugee experience from East Asia that was caused by the US war there, how do you reflect on the experience of Salvadoran migrants here today?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
The United States, because the United States did remember the war in Vietnam very vividly for a while, at least for a couple of decades-
Mitch Jeserich:
There was a movie. We grew up watching movies.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
There were movies. That’s right. But people were also watching this as the so-called first television war or the first living room war where these images were being beamed into American households. And then in the aftermath of the war, the very visible so-called Boat People Crisis was also splashed all over the news pages and on TV as well. Because of that, the United States felt an obligation to try to aid or take in as many refugees as possible. So that was one of the bright spots that hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Lao and Cambodians were taken in by the United States and by other countries as well, which has led to the creation of a very large Southeast Asian diaspora in the United States, but in dozens of other countries as well. The issue with El Salvador and with other kinds of wars and atrocities throughout Central America that the United States has had a hand in is that for many Americans, these incidents were not as visible.
There were certainly visible to some, there was a pretty strong anti-war, anti-government movement in the United States in regards to El Salvador, for example. So some of the activist slogans at the time in the United States and elsewhere was that El Salvador is Spanish for Vietnam, for example. So the left was making a protracted effort, and there was a sanctuary movement in the United States designed to protect Salvadoran and other Central American refugees who were coming north. But I think as a whole, there wasn’t that same kind of general spirit because there was a lack of awareness, I think, on the part of the United States about how deeply involved the US was in Central America, partly because there weren’t as many American soldiers visible. So there were American advisors in Central America, but they numbered in the hundreds rather than in the hundreds of thousands in the case of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
So the results of the Salvadoran Civil War in terms of refugees, is that obviously a lot of people did flee north and came to the United States. A lot of them came to Los Angeles where there’s a substantial Salvadoran population. Some of them did become gangsters. And in the early ’90s, the Clinton administration started to deport some of these people back to El Salvador. And arguably, this was crucial to the formation of a gang problem in El Salvador in subsequent years that reached a real crisis according to many Salvadorans, that these gangs were a real threat.
And then came the rise of President Nayib Bukele, who came to office in 2022 with the promise of subduing this gang problem. And he did. He went in and without due process, arrested about 80,000 people and sent them into the prisons without trial. And many of these people were not actually gangsters. How many is unclear. But at least 7,000 were released, and there are allegations that many more are not actually gangsters. Anybody could end up in these prisons, gangsters or not. That model was very successful from an electoral perspective because Bukele’s popularity rating was around 83 to 87% as a result of that. It’s declined a bit since then, but he’s still a popular strongman figure. And his policies have had an impact throughout Central America, and obviously with the Trump administration as well. That’s why Marco Rubio was dispatched there on his first trip as a Secretary of State.
Mitch Jeserich:
You are reminding me that my first, I should have remembered this already, but my first protest ever was my aunt taking me to a protest for El Salvador in the ’80s in San Francisco. And it’s interesting that you mentioned there was this connection made between El Salvador and Vietnam, but the amnesia, when I picked up your article, I was like, oh, this is a really important, interesting perspective. But it is a perspective that once existed.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
It is, absolutely. And of course, if you were an anti-war activist, American anti-war activist in the 1960s and 1970s, 1983 was not that much later. You had just grown up a little bit. You were in your thirties perhaps, or forties, and you can make those connections. But again, I think for a lot of them, again, it’s very typical, a lot of Americans, once the crisis is over, they turn their attention away to something else. The ’80s was the me decade, the yuppie decade, and so on. So there was a shift in general in American politics, but there was still, I think, a substantial leftist movement, because I certainly remember reading about the sanctuary movement as well, but maybe I was more tuned than a lot of teenagers at the time. But it’s been a struggle, obviously, for the American left to sustain the same kind of opposition to wars as was evident in the 1960s and 1970s.
And I think that’s because during the 1960s and 1970s, there was a draft. People’s lives were on the line, and there were much more inclined to be political rather than being sent to fight a war they didn’t believe in. But with the rise of the all-volunteer army in the seventies and eighties, the pressure was taken off the American population as a whole to be aware of what was happening in other countries due to American foreign policy and to the use of American troops and military aid.
Mitch Jeserich:
Tell me about the Vietnamese American community today, and of course, no one group is a monolith, but you do write towards the end of this piece in the Nation Magazine that there were a number of Vietnamese Americans who went to the Capitol building on January 6th after the election of 2020. I remember hearing reports that Donald Trump had somewhat significant support within the Vietnamese American community. Is there a remembrance and a connection for folks?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I think so. There was a South Vietnamese flag waved at insurrection at J-6. You can see it in the Washington Post, very visible. And on Facebook, I’ve seen pictures of the Vietnamese Americans who went there draped in both American flags, but also Southern Vietnamese flags as well. And so what happened after 1975 was that the overwhelming bulk of the Vietnamese in the United States were refugees who fled from communism. So naturally they were very anti-communist, some of them very fervently anti-communist to the extent that they were willing to violently suppress any indication of reconciliation or anything like that. And so the violence of the war continued to percolate within the Vietnamese American community where the regime of anti-communism was very strong, and you really took your life in your own hands, or at least your reputation if you wanted to speak out against it.
Now, with the passage of the decades and the aging of the population, that fervor has diminished a bit, but I think it’s been repackaged in some ways with the fact that there is a very strong conservative element of the Vietnamese American community has always been pro-Republican because of the alignment of being pro-Republican with anti-communism. But since the Republican Party has gone towards the MAGA direction, I think Vietnamese Americans have not been immune to that, as with every other population in this country. So the MAGA version that is found in the Vietnamese community is also deeply entwined with anti-communism, pro-capitalism, latent forms racism, I would argue and support for white supremacy in which a certain population of Vietnamese Americans align themselves with. So that made Vietnamese Americans very susceptible to the Donald Trump MAGA message. There’s a lot of pain within the Vietnamese American community across the generations, because a lot of younger Vietnamese Americans do not support MAGA, do not support Donald Trump, but they’re deeply pained by what they see as the transformation in their uncles and aunts and parents and grandparents and their deep support for Donald Trump and MAGA.
But there’s a language barrier, there’s a cultural barrier. There’s been a generational shift. And so it’s not just an ideological division within the Vietnamese American community as it is elsewhere throughout the United States, but it’s also a very painful generational and cultural problem as well. And I think the fervor that some Vietnamese Americans have for Donald Trump and MAGA is deeply tied to an anti-communism that they have not let go. Also, deeply tied to a nostalgia for a nationalism for South Vietnam that merges very well with this sense of a nostalgic nationalism in the United States for a country that was once better when it was more repressive and more unified according to some people’s point of view. And so the old alliance between the United States and South Vietnam is replicated here in this alliance between MAGA and a certain part of the Vietnamese American population.
Mitch Jeserich:
Do you think this is a similar dynamic that you see with other immigrant communities that in which people come from communist nations, obviously Cubans who have been supportive of the Republican Party, traditionally, Marco Rubio’s parents are from Cuba?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think there’s many reasons why people can align with MAGA, but if you are coming from a country that has been lost from your point of view to communism, then yes, that anti-communism and that sense of a lost nation that needs to be recovered fits very well with MAGA narratives too. And Marco Rubio, very interesting figure for me because we were born the same year, 1971, we’ve taken very different directions, but we’re also a part of two communities that are in some ways parallel or mirror images of each other. The Cubans in Florida and the Vietnamese throughout the country, but our dominant presence, most visible presence is in California. The Cuban American population in Florida has been very conservative, but also really effective at using the electoral politics of the United States to assert their own position and to influence national politics. Vietnamese Americans have not been as effective at the electoral stage, but the anti-communist politics are just as strong.
And what Marco Rubio demonstrates is that there is a kind of immigrant or refugee nationalism that merges very well with American nationalism, and one can ride that narrative of being the immigrant or the refugee from communism and ride that narrative straight to the highest echelons of power in the United States. And that immigrant and refugee nationalism is ironically also anti-immigrant and anti-refugee. So Rubio’s position where he seems to be completely in tune with the government’s deportation policies, and its rhetoric against immigrants, that might be ironic, that might strike some people as ironic, given his own background, his own family background. But in the Vietnamese-American community, I’ve seen it as well that there are some Vietnamese-Americans who say, we were the good refugees, these new people south of the border, brown people, Muslims, these are the bad refugees. We shouldn’t let them in.
And so that distinction between good and bad refugees and immigrants is something that is not exercised only by white Americans or by American citizens, but also by immigrants, refugees, and their descendants as well. And that narrative of letting the good in, but keeping the bad out, or if you are an immigrant or refugee, shutting the door behind you, that’s a classically American narrative as well that Marco Rubio participates in.
Mitch Jeserich:
Viet Thanh Nguyen is a Pulitzer Prize winning author, and he has joined us to talk about his piece in the latest Nations Magazine. It’s called “Greater America Has Been Exporting Disunion for Decades. So why are we still surprised when the tide of blood reaches our own shores?”
Viet Thanh Nguyen, I thank you very much for taking this time to join us today.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Thanks for having me, Mitch.
