On this edition of Parallax Views, acclaimed author and Pulitzer Prize–winner Viet Thanh Nguyen, author for the hit novel The Sympathizer, joins us to discuss his powerful new essay in The Nation, “Greater America Has Been Exporting Disunion for Decades.” We explore how U.S. foreign policy—past and present—continues to shape not only global politics but domestic disunion.
Nguyen draws on his recent trip to El Salvador to examine the enduring legacies of U.S.-backed wars, the violence of counterinsurgency, and how authoritarian leaders like Nayib Bukele are now being embraced by American officials like Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Donald Trump himself.
We unpack the idea of “Greater America” as a project of imperial ambition, mass incarceration, and historical amnesia—from the El Mozote massacre to the Phoenix Program, COINTELPRO, and modern immigration policy. Nguyen also reflects on what it means to be a refugee in a country responsible for your displacement, and why genuine patriotism requires memory, grief, and dissent, not myth or denial.
This wide-ranging conversation delves into empire, memory, war crimes, refugee identity, authoritarianism, and the feedback loop between U.S. intervention abroad and repression at home.
NOTE: Views of guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect all the views of J.G. Michael or the Parallax Views w/ J.G. Michael program
Transcript:
J.G. Michael:
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Hey there, Parallax Views listeners. On this special 4th of July edition of Parallax Views, we’ll be hearing from Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Viet Thanh Nguyen. You may know him for his hit novel, The Sympathizer, but today he joins us to discuss the nature of war, memory, forgetting, dissent, patriotism versus nationalism, the travails of America’s present, and the need to reckon with America’s past.
The basis for this conversation is his essay in the 160th Anniversary edition of The Nation entitled Greater America Has Been Exporting Disunion for Decades. It’s a piece that starts with Viet’s recent visit to El Salvador, but it goes in so many different directions and there’s so much to chew on. I could have spoken with him about this piece for hours. There’s so much to it, but at the heart of it is a desire to reckon with the dark history of American imperial ambitions abroad, and how now those ambitions are coming home. With that being said, let’s get to the conversation with Viet Thanh Nguyen.
Welcome to Parallax Views. A guest that I’m very happy to have on the show, Viet Thanh Nguyen is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Sympathizer, and the author of a piece in the 160th Anniversary edition of The Nation entitled Greater America Has Been Exporting Disunion for Decades. How are you doing?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Good, how are you doing J.G.?
J.G. Michael:
I’m doing good. These are dark times we’re in and I thought your article was really interesting in light of, we’re recording this on July 3rd and tomorrow is the 4th of July, a big holiday for America. I thought your article was interesting for a number of reasons, but one that stuck in my mind was the way in which, even though you don’t mention the word patriotism necessarily, I think patriotism haunts this article. Because you draw a distinction between the United States of America and this idea of a Greater America, and I think you engage in a maybe critical form of patriotism. Am I off base there or?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
No, not at all. For the readers who haven’t read the article, the distinction and draw is between this idea of a United States of America, the country of official documents, the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, all the great ideas, the mythologies and so on, all those things that comprise this mythology of the American dream. There are some beautiful things in the United States of America that I have benefited from as a refugee and as a citizen of this country.
And Greater America is what I call the Trump Project, a project that is actually not unique to Donald Trump and Make America Great Again, but certainly has been a long part of American history. This idea of Greater America was triggered by the fact that soon after Trump came into office for the second time, he started talking about taking Greenland and Canada and Panama, and people started to freak out.
Of course it’s undiplomatic to say those things, but it has been a tradition, an American tradition to take other people’s lands whenever we’ve wanted to. And so I think Make America Great Again is about a Greater America, an expansive imperial America, that was the project which brought the United States into being. So, there’s a huge tension between the official ideas that we like to celebrate and this Trumpian idea of a Greater America.
Now, people who support Trump at this moment basically engage in a love it or leave it nationalism. Either you agree with everything we say or you’re a traitor or a communist and you need to leave and so on. That’s nationalism. I really don’t agree with nationalism in almost any form.
Patriotism is perhaps more noble. It is this idea that there are ideas and ideals about a country that we believe in, and those ideals come before any principle of the nation itself. The great patriots we have had in this country have tried to stand up for that. Some of those great patriots of the more recent years have been people like Martin Luther King Jr. and James Baldwin who have said, they both said very explicitly, “We love this country. That’s what gives us the right to criticize it.”
J.G. Michael:
I just wanted to add to that and we’ll get into the meat and potatoes of the article itself. But I think people should remember dissent itself can be a form of patriotism and acknowledging the past and acknowledging what we’ve done wrong as a country, I think is a form of patriotism in a strange way.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
The country is born from dissent. The United States will not exist without a revolution and without this idea that we are a country that is separate from England, and that it is patriotic to dissent and form a new union. The idea of dissent is built into our very notions of democracy, which is now of course why we are in such a state of peril. At least for some portion of the country it feels as if democracy itself is under attack.
The most pernicious forms of nationalism bring democracy into danger, because in the most pernicious forms, it is very binaristic. Either you are with us or you are against us. This idea has periodically resurfaced in this country, usually during times of real or manufactured crisis when we feel like we’re being attacked or invaded in some way. Sometimes this is a real form of invasion, Pearl Harbor, World War II, for example, or 9/11.
But oftentimes the consequences of reacting in this way, this binaristic us or them fashion, can be disastrous, not only for the enemies that we attack, but also for ourselves as well. I think we are at a moment in this country where there has been a manufactured crisis around immigration, posing immigrants and their advocates as invaders, and therefore justifying non-democratic responses.
J.G. Michael:
Now you begin the essay by discussing a visit you made to El Salvador, and the timing was very interesting because you arrived on the same day as Marco Rubio. Maybe you can compare and contrast why you were there and why Rubio was there. I think it was a very interesting way to open the article.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I’m a scholar of war and memory, which means I’ve spent a lot of time visiting war-torn countries. It’s usually it’s been Southeast Asia, because I came out of the Vietnam War as a refugee. But I’d always also been curious about Central America, because growing up as a refugee in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, I was reading newspapers and magazines, and I was becoming aware of things that were happening in Honduras and El Salvador and Nicaragua and so on.
There were horrible, terrible things that were happening in the ’70s and ’80s. There was a civil war in El Salvador and the United States of course came in on the side of the oligarchs and the state and the military and helped train the military, which conducted a really abusive civil war. About 80,000 people were killed. Most of them were innocent and were peasants, and most of the atrocities were committed by the Salvadoran US-trained military.
Some of the people who paid the price most heavily were the Catholics, including Archbishop Romero and six Jesuit priests, all of whom were assassinated at different points in the 1980s, and for American church women who were raped and murdered in 1981. And so myself as a Catholic also, I was also very concerned about this history.
I have not had the opportunity to go any further south in our Greater America than Mexico. So, this was a great opportunity to see El Salvador in February. I arrived on the same day as Marco Rubio. He was on his first trip as the Secretary of State, and he was there to sign the deportation agreement with President Bukele, whose consequences we are still dealing with today.
The initial consequence of that was around 200 Venezuelans who were alleged gangsters who were sent to Bukele’s prison in El Salvador. I was there to investigate this history of American sponsored massacre. So, these are really two different versions of Greater America.
Marco Rubio, obviously as a descendant of Cuban refugees, is on the Trump side, and I’m on the other side. My interest in a great or Greater America is to open the doors of the United States to welcome more people, and Trump and Rubio are there to close doors down and to kick as many people out as they can.
J.G. Michael:
It’s really interesting to me. How do you interpret the contradiction between Rubio’s background and his support for carceral and exclusionary immigration policies? Perhaps a better question is you mentioned that there’s this good versus bad refugees in the eyes of Greater America. I was wondering if you could elaborate on how this moral sorting plays out in policymaking, and really even more importantly in our public narratives about ourself as a country?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, I think those distinctions between nationalism and patriotism come back again. Nationalism obviously is not unique to the United States. You’ll find a lot of nationalisms all over the world wherever there is a nation state. Cubans and Vietnamese who come as refugees to the United States have brought with them strong versions of their native nationalisms. And those have been tied up with anti-communist politics for fairly obvious reasons, because of the revolutions in Cuba and in Vietnam.
The refugees who have come to the United States have tended to be anti-communist refugees. What that means is that their nationalism has oftentimes intersected very productively for them with America’s anti-communist nationalism. That means that someone like Marco Rubio can come as a Cuban refugee and be an anti-communist, be a nationalist, be perfectly in tune with the Trump administration and its politics, which includes shutting the door on new immigrants and new refugees.
Arguably it’s been only the undocumented ones that the Trump administration has been interested in, but those of us who have a more critical view really do think that the Trump administration is intent on shutting down all kinds of immigration, legal or undocumented. This tradition of refugees and immigrants who have come into the country and then turning their backs on further immigrants and refugees coming in, that’s widespread.
Trump comes from this inheritance, of course, his grandfather was a German immigrant, and Stephen Miller is the descendant of Jewish refugees. Both have become very anti-immigrant, anti-refugee. There are Vietnamese Americans I know who say, “We were the good refugees, these Muslims, these brown people coming from south of the border, these are the bad refugees, we should keep them out.”
So, the good and bad refugee distinction fits in very easily with the us or them distinction of nationalism. Those nationalists who believe this country right or wrong, love it or leave it, only want the refugees and immigrants who are going to come in and support that version of nationalism. And there is a good number of people who are willing to do that.
J.G. Michael:
Throughout the essay, I feel that this is an essay haunted by the ghosts of murdered Jesuits, of villages destroyed, Salvadoran children deported refugees. Can you talk about the need to remember those who have been oppressed or repressed? And how we don’t just have to remember the victims, but also the perpetrators, including those of us that participated, the country, America, this Greater America project?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
All nation states are built on this dynamic of remembering and forgetting, and all of us as individuals are built on that same dynamic. We can’t remember everything, so we have to forget. The question is do we forget selectively or do we forget accidentally? And both things are happening for individuals and for nations, and I think the United States is not unique at all in being very selective about what it chooses to remember.
So, oftentimes we’re a very amnesiac nation, as are so many others, because we want to forget the things that contradict the ideals of this country. There are so many contradictions, there are so many things that have happened in the history of this country from the very origins that are completely contradictory to the mythologies of the American dream, and to democracy and equality and liberty and on and on and on.
And so this dynamic of selective remembering and forgetting is always easy to see in someone else’s country. We look at China, Russia, North Korea and we’re like, “Those people, they only want to remember what’s beneficial to them.” Well, we do the same thing. I come from Vietnam and growing up in the United States, I was extremely aware of this selective process, because Americans have chosen to remember the Vietnam War in a very self-serving way, which involves the erasure or the forgetting of Vietnamese people of all kinds.
And so I took that very personally and the consequence of that is usually two options. One, you can insist always remember what was done to me. So, when people say always remember, never forget, oftentimes that’s what they mean. They don’t mean the principle always remember, never forget. They mean always remember, never forget what you did to me or what someone else did to me. But they always also mean you should always forget what we’ve done to others.
Again, the United States has done that as well. We want to remember what was done to us on 9/11, for example, but we definitely want to forget what we did in Iraq and Afghanistan and everything that we did beforehand, that made someone want to attack us on 9/11. And so this is the case too with El Salvador and really Central America and Latin America in the history of the United States.
We’ve done terrible things south of the border for a very long time going back to the 19th century, because we see everything south of the border as part of our American empire. That obviously is counter to American democracy, we want to forget all of that. And so when things happen like immigration waves coming in to the United States, we tend to be extremely ahistorical as a country thinking about this.
Like all of a sudden El Salvador, or Salvadorans, or Venezuelans are in our country, and then a certain part of the country freaks out. When in reality of course, they wouldn’t be here without this long history of American intervention that has taken place. And that long history of American intervention is not just economic or political. It’s oftentimes extremely bloody because we’ve almost always come down on the side of military dictatorships and authoritarian societies in Central and Latin America.
We’ve fostered those kinds of regimes, we’ve supported them, we’ve trained them, we’ve given them weapons, and they’ve killed their own people, and people flee from that situation as refugees. And of course, as a refugee, I’m extremely empathetic. And a refugee from a war situation that the United States was partly responsible for, I am very deeply empathetic to Central American refugees.
J.G. Michael:
It really struck me the end of the essay, you get very personal in this closing scene where you offer your cash to a survivor’s homemade memorial. I don’t think that’s just symbolic, I think it becomes a small personal act of reparative justice. I hope I’m not overstating it. But as you put it in the article, you’re sharing sorrow. Maybe you can talk about what that means, because you really hone in on that idea of sharing sorrow? I wanted you to talk about that and the final scene you close out on in the essay.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Yeah. I came to El Salvador at least partly because I’m a board member for the International Rescue Committee, which works with refugees globally and in the United States. And that is partly my way of paying back my own experience as a refugee, and having benefited from refugee aid organizations in the United States and elsewhere.
Besides looking at El Salvador and what we do there in terms of our refugee aid and the IRC, I also wanted to visit massacre sites. Unfortunately, my research takes me to massacre sites. It’s depressing, but also invigorating or rewarding in some ways. Because I did speak to the head of Central American University, which is the Jesuit University where the six Jesuit priests were killed. And I said, “Given this history, do you have any hope?” And he said, “Well, part of the hope that I have is that all over this country, people have not forgotten. People have tried to remember in their own ways.”
So, there’s this civil society effort to remember against the erasure of a state. One of the places where the people have tried to remember is El Mazote. El Mazote is the village where the Salvadoran military in 1981, murdered 1,000 civilians, none of whom were actually revolutionaries or guerrillas. And this was a Salvadoran army again, trained by the United States. There’s a major memorial there I wanted to visit.
I went there and I talked to three of the survivors. Two of them were men my age, which meant when I was reading about this massacre when I was 10 years of age, these were little boys running away as their own family members were being massacred by the Salvadoran military. So, it was very moving for me to talk to these survivors.
El Mazote is on the tourist track in El Salvador, but outside of it, one of the survivors said, “Well, in my house,” which is in a village outside of El Mazote, “I have my own private memorial and I want you to see it.” And so I agreed to go and it’s 30 minutes outside. This man, my age, lives in this one room house that he uses as a convenience store to sell things to the neighborhood, and right next to his house is the memorial.
If you can imagine living on your plot of land and right next to it is a memorial with the remains of about 40 people buried underneath the memorial, and hundreds of people commemorated on the walls of the memorial, including 24 of his own relatives, including his mother.
So, I did find that project of his own effort to remember so moving. In the Vietnamese custom, when someone has experienced a loss of great magnitude, we like to say [foreign language 00:19:41], with them, we share sorrow with them. It’s not enough, but it’s the beginning. And me giving him the $100 or whatever I had in my pocket for his memorial, obviously not enough, but it was symbolic, I think.
That is symbolic of all the work that I think I have to do individually, but I think the work that we as a nation, the United States, has to do as well. And so giving assistance and sharing sorrow are these ethically, politically, morally complicated projects each of us has to undertake individually and as a nation as well.
The Trump administration has destroyed basically USAID, which itself is a complicated project, because USAID was American soft power projected, which is there to service American power. And yet at the same time, it did help millions of people and millions of people are going to pay a very significant price that we’ve cut off aid. So, that’s the part of, again, these ethical, moral, political problems and contradictions that we all have to weigh as we think about our culpability and our responsibility as individuals and as citizens to Greater America.
J.G. Michael:
Since you mentioned the term contradictions there, I smiled when you referenced the great book, Catch-22. I thought it was interesting that you made allusions to that book, given that it’s a book about bureaucratic absurdity and the nature of war and the absurdity of war.
I think there’s a parallel there with the cruelty faced by refugees and deportees. In Catch-22, it’s funny the absurdity, in the case of refugees and deportees, it’s horrific, but it’s still absurd. Can you speak to that?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, I think there’s a lot of humor to be found in anything. Now the problem is, of course, the classic construction is that a joke is tragedy plus time. So, you read in Heller’s book, there’s a lot of tragedy. People die, there are bomber pilots and bomber crews and terrible, terrible things happen to them. And yet he’s able to make all these jokes out of these horrifying experiences.
Of course, part of what he points out is that war itself is absurd and hypocritical. There are real tragedies that are happening, real combat that’s taking place. But war isn’t possible without bureaucracy, the state, paper pushers, absurd regulations, things like this, all of which have fatal consequences both for the military and for civilians, and we have to be able to laugh in order to survive. Obviously it’s easier 20 or 30 years later or 50 years later, but sometimes you can make a joke in the moment. And that’s why soldiers themselves have gallows humor.
Likewise with refugees and immigrants, I think they do undergo terrible things. I think they probably do have a sense of humor about this stuff that is dark. I’m trying to find my sense of humor about it and I have written about the Vietnam War and about Vietnamese refugees, hopefully with a sense of humor about the absurdities and the tragedies. In terms of coping with abusive regimes, people have always made jokes and satires and so on. That’s partly a survival tactic, but it’s also a political tactic.
People in power do not like to be made fun of, which is why writers and comedians oftentimes end up in jail for crimes against the state. I think the Trump administration is no less vulnerable in that regard. So, I’m trying to hang on to this idea that we do have to pay attention to the human tragedies that are a result of our policies, and yet we also have to try to find the humor in these experiences, because they allow us to engage in satire survival and political critique.
J.G. Michael:
Just one or two more questions. I wanted to ask you about, I was impressed that you mentioned the Phoenix Program and COINTELPRO targeting of the Black Panthers. For people that don’t know, the Phoenix Program was just a campaign of terror that the US did in Vietnam. It was very interesting to me that you’re drawing a line between those type of incidents, the imperialism abroad and how maybe now it’s coming home. Can you speak to that? We brought the empire home in a way.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, it is an old idea. I think it was probably Aimé Césaire that articulated it first, this idea of the imperial boomerang, and he had a very pungent critique in discourse on colonialism. This was, I think the 1950s when he wrote that, early 1950s. But he basically said that everything that Hitler did in Europe, the Europeans and the Americans had already done in their colonies.
What made Hitler’s project so horrifying besides murdering 6 million Jews and other people as well, is that his applications were turned internally within Europe. Whereas, the colonial project of genocide had been applied to non-white people. So, that idea that what happens in the colonies or in the places outside of the border will eventually come back to the Imperial Center has been around for quite a while. If we look at the United States, we’ve already seen that happening. Look at our police, for example.
Our police is heavily militarized. They look paramilitary now that we see these kidnappings that are taking place on the streets because of supposed ICE agents or maybe other kinds of people. They look like military people snatching people off the streets or breaking down people’s doors in violent ways that we have seen happening in Gaza, in Palestine, in the West Bank, but also that we have seen happening in Afghanistan and in Iraq due to the US military as well.
And so this military apparatus that we have built to conduct our forever war has definitely returned to the United States, and it’s been applied with increasing pressure. First on criminals or alleged criminals, and now against all kinds of immigrants who are being conflated with criminals in the eyes of the Trump administration.
It’s not a far-fetched idea to think that this mechanism of militarized power that is inextricable from what we’ve done overseas, will be applied to journalists, to dissidents, to oppositional politicians in this country. I do not think this is a dystopian fantasy. I think we’re right on the edge of that possibly taking place. And the only way to prevent it from taking place is to realize it could take place, and to speak out as strongly as possible.
J.G. Michael:
One of the most interesting aspects of this essay, and I really hope people read the entire essay in The Nation. One of the most interesting aspects for me was the way in which you talk about all of this that has led to this moment with Trump, with this Greater America Project. It didn’t happen in a vacuum.
We had deportations, as you point out, in the Clinton era. You also confront intra-diaspora tensions, Vietnamese Americans who view themselves as aligned with MAGA, waving South Vietnamese flags on January 6th. You talk about the moral complicity of all of us in some ways, and I was wondering if you could speak to that more?
I was specifically interested in hearing about why you thought it was important to talk about how there were predecessors to Trump when it came to deportations?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, I think it is important to point out there’s a whole genealogy to everything that’s happening today, because part of the shock that has been articulated in the last few months, mostly among Democrats and those to the left of the Democrats, has been that this is a whole new situation that we find ourselves in, in terms of the attack on constitutional principles of this country, the attack on immigrants and so on.
In some ways I think, yes, this is new, this idea that certain amendments, for example, will be heavily criticized, or that even the idea of birthright citizenship might be put into question. Or now this idea that we can denaturalize people because of crimes that they may or may not have committed. So, these are new, but most of the things that the Trump administration are doing have actually been done before.
And because we’re an amnesiac nation, maybe we have forgotten some of these things. So, you mentioned some of those issues. Clinton administration was deporting people in the early 1990s. Who were they deporting? They were deporting Salvadoran gangsters or alleged gangsters back to El Salvador, who then fomented this horrible gang and crime problem that President Bukele responded to by throwing 80,000 people in jail without due process, many of whom are innocent.
That model is part of what inspires Trump’s model in the present circumstances. But you go back further. You go back further to the fact that Japanese Americans were incarcerated in what FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, called concentration camps in the 1940s. Or that 2 million Mexicans and Mexican Americans, including citizens, were deported forcibly in the 1930s. And you go further back to the forcible so-called removal of indigenous populations from their homelands, and them being sent to reservations, basically camps.
And those camps being used to oftentimes be the territory where the Japanese Americans were then put into prison. And now in Florida, you see the so-called Alligator Alcatraz being built in the middle of a swamp, bunks behind cages in the middle of an inhospitable climate on indigenous lands. This is essentially a repetition of everything that happened to indigenous peoples and to Japanese Americans.
So, we have to understand there’s a long history of this in the United States that goes back again, to the very origins of this country. And because these things go back to the very origins and the foundation of the country, none of us are actually not complicit. As American citizens, all of us have benefited, or not all of us, some of us, many of us have benefited from these contradictions in ways that we may not even understand.
And to be shocked at this moment is simply another moment of the traditional American reliance on innocence. We can’t believe this is happening. We can’t believe we’re doing this. This has never happened before. Yes, it has happened before.
J.G. Michael:
I was going to say it’s a combination I think of innocence and what Gore Vidal used to call the United States of amnesia.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
No, absolutely. But again, we’re not unique. We are not unique, but every nation’s amnesia is probably undoubtedly very specific to the crimes it has committed in its past.
J.G. Michael:
Before closing out here, I had listeners that wanted to know about the brave stance you took speaking out about what is happening in Gaza. I would call it a genocide what’s happening now, and you’ve taken a stance on this. Could you speak about that? How important was it for you to speak out about the crisis?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I don’t think I even thought about it twice really. I think when October 7th happened, of course it was a tragedy, but it was a tragedy that was rapidly turned into a propaganda narrative by Israel and the United States that overrode the complexities of what had happened to Palestinians and what Palestinians had been doing.
The rhetoric immediately from Israeli officials, plus the history of what Israel had already done to Palestinians for many decades, including in the decades after the siege of Gaza began, made it immediately evident that horrible, horrible things were going to happen. Of course, what I was also thinking about was after 9/11, horrible things happened as well.
United States learned exactly the wrong lessons from 9/11, did all the wrong things, and the people who mostly paid the price were Iraqis and Afghans. I was pretty sure that in the consequence, in the aftermath of October 7th, it would be Palestinians who would pay most of the price.
And so it was not hard to stand up and say something in public, to sign a letter with 750 other writers and artists that you can find on the London Review of Books. I think by October 17th to re-declare my support of BDS, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, a non-violent movement that should be preferable to violent revolt. But in every way that the Palestinians have tried to resist, whether it’s through violence or non-violence, they have always been violently put down.
And so it was not hard at all to stand up and to say, I think it was October 17th on Instagram, that I stand with the human animals, because that is what an Israeli official had called Palestinians at that moment. And in the discourse of colonialism, you know that when someone says human animals, they mean we are going to kill these people without regard to whether they’re civilians or military, whether they’re innocent or culpable.
That is a clear warning sign of mass murder at the very least, atrocity definitely, probably genocide. And I think the almost two years that have elapsed since then have proven those of us who are extremely worried about the situation to have been correct.
J.G. Michael:
That leads to the closing note I wanted to go on, which is I know there are people that are very afraid right now. I know people that are afraid about speaking out about, for instance, Gaza. What if I get in trouble or what if I get yelled at? Or what if I get called anti-Semitic? Or what if it jeopardizes my career?
I even know people that are afraid to confront what we’re seeing with Trump now, because they’re like, “Well, he’s going after everyone it seems like.” What do you say to people that are afraid at this time? What’s your words of wisdom that you would give them?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
It’s hard because if we look at this situation, it’s not as if we can say, “Well, if you have something to lose, it’s harder for you to speak up.” Because in fact, we see plenty of people with something to lose who have spoken up, who have been fired for their convictions and so on, who have not gotten awards, who have lost opportunities and the like.
But we’ve also seen people who have nothing stand up and say things as well. So, you look back to the spring 2024 encampment movement on college campuses led by students. Theoretically, they have nothing to lose, and they stood up and said something, but theoretically they have a lot to lose, their entire futures as well.
So, it really boils down, I think, not really to what you have to lose. It really boils down to your sense of conviction and your confidence in what you believe in and your willingness to stand up for what you believe in. All of us have different prices that we can pay and that we’re willing to pay.
In my own situation, I would say that I think I’ve always been a loud mouth. So, there’s something in me that just makes me naturally want to speak out and protest. I think that a lot of that is actually due both to my Catholic upbringing, my belief in a certain version of Jesus Christ as a radical social justice warrior. But also my training as a writer and my conviction that writers should stand up for what they believe in.
And also, because I think I’m insulated to a certain extent by my awards and recognition and things like that, but there’s still a lot that I could lose. I know that I can look out there in the world and see that there’s a lot of people who are insulated by their privileges and these people are not speaking out. So, it really is not a matter of how much you have or how little you have. Everybody can find excuses not to speak up.
And so if you’re making those excuses, hopefully you understand that you are, and hopefully you understand that there must be a red line for you somewhere. Because in the current situation, every time we imagine that nothing worse could happen, whether it’s in Gaza or the United States, something worse happens. So, there has to be a moment where you must speak out.
J.G. Michael:
I know I have to let you get going, but I just wanted to say here, and I’ll give you the final word and we’ll wrap on this. I’m very drawn to what you’ve been writing, both with your work, The Sympathizer, and also with this essay, because I don’t think enough people think about the need for reckoning with trauma and memory.
I was just curious, you said earlier that remembering is only a start, it’s only a beginning. But maybe you could talk about why it’s so important to have the reckoning with memory and trauma and basically confronting these realities?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Collectively as a nation, we can’t take action on certain issues unless we actually remember. So, if we want to do things, for example, like redress the inequities in the contradictions of our past, in our history, which manifest themselves in the present around things like racial inequity, for example, just to pick one. Unless we remember what we’ve actually done as a country and who we’ve done it to, we’re not going to be able to actually reach a more just version of our society.
So, there is that. By addressing our past, we are trying to cope with these traumatic histories. Traumatic histories in the sense that the people who’ve been victimized have been traumatized and their descendants. But the people who’ve done these terrible things have been traumatized by what they’ve done too. That’s the claim of people like Tony Morrison and James Baldwin as they look at white people.
They discuss white supremacy as something that actually transforms white people for the worst as well. So, it’s not that simply it’s something like enslavement does terrible things to enslave people, it does some terrible things to white people as well. So, there is that crucial element of remembering that we do not just for our victims, but for ourselves as well.
J.G. Michael:
I know I said I would let you go, but can you explain what you mean by that? How is the perpetrator also affected in all of this?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Because in order to dehumanize another person, to the extent that you can abuse them, exploit them, even murder them, you have to dehumanize a part of yourself as well. You cannot remain fully human while you treat someone else as less than human. I think it’s a very basic lesson.
Now here’s the thing. When we see, if we are parents, for example, we go to a playground, we see one child beating up another child. We know the child who’s being beat up is being hurt, but we know that the bully is not a very good person either. But whatever drives that bully has been manifest in their psyche, they’ve been damaged in some ways, and they’re going to perpetuate that damage, not just on other people, but on themselves as well.
So, very simple playground lessons that somehow we cannot as collectively as adults manifest in our own society. Another layer of hypocrisy and absurdity that Joseph Heller would appreciate. But going to that very personal example of that bully, for example, and those children. Here’s another way in which memory and trauma becomes important to each of us individually.
Outside of these big political, national historical questions that we’ve been discussing, many of us have been traumatized in more local ways within our families, within our history as individuals, within the schoolyard, and within our childhoods. Many of us bear the marks of these traumas, whether they’re major or minor. That’s what constitutes part of our individual history and subjectivity.
I have had to recognize that I myself have been traumatized in ways that I don’t understand by my own childhood, and by my experiences as a refugee who came to the United States at the age of four, and was separated from his parents. I’ve become a very functional, successful on the outside, human being, but nevertheless emotionally damaged in various ways by this history.
There’s so many of us carrying the brunt of emotional damage. And if we don’t understand how that has happened, if we don’t understand how we’ve been traumatized, what that trauma is, what’s going to happen is that we will repeat in ways that we don’t understand our own damaged histories on to others.
And when I say others, of course, it means others who are far away like undocumented immigrants, but others who are right next to us as well, within our family, within our community. And these people will also pay the consequences of our unrecognized trauma.
J.G. Michael:
It’s almost as if, if we don’t get to that point of understanding we ourselves cannot heal, and we end up repeating the cycle.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
That is true for individuals, it is true for nations. If we can recognize that process, then we can begin the work of the recognition of that history, the recognition of that damage. And then that recognition allows us to see ourselves better, to see our others better, and then to enact programs of reparation, both between individuals, but also collectively as a nation as well.
J.G. Michael:
I think that’s a great note to end on. I thank you for staying a few minutes over. I really appreciate it. How can my listeners keep up with your work?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
They can find me on my website, www.V-I-E-T-N-G-U-Y-E-N.info, or on Instagram @Viet_T_N-G-U-Y-E-N. Thanks so much, J.G. for your time.
J.G. Michael:
This edition of Parallax Views brought to you by the $10 and above tier supporters of Parallax Views on Patreon. So, with that in mind, producers credit shout-outs to Galen, Matt, Gunnar, Mark, Simon, Alexander, Catherine, G, Kilo, Emilia, Jeremy, Jeff, W.V., John, Burt, Brian Elliot, Darco, Michael, Brace, James, Nick, Mark. M, Merasham, Galen, Gareth, Arlen, Bo, Christopher, Michael, Geekadelic Media, Will, Chance, Chase, Dan, Big Bob, David. H, Y. Kellerman, Sade13, Kathleen, David, Ava, Bob, The West Bank Robbery Podcast, Jamie, Enoch, Gary, Max, Ishtopher, James, Martin, Matthew Ho, Brian, Nobody, Thomas, and Dano.
Well, that does it for this edition of Parallax Views. As always, please consider supporting me on Patreon at patreon.com/parallaxviews. One more time, that’s patreon.com/parallaxviews. With that being said, until next time, you’ve been listening to Parallax Views with J.G. Michael.
Voice Over:
The way out is not simply to say, “Don’t do it, just to prohibit.” If nothing else, if we don’t do it, others will be doing this that great. So, we have to confront the problem. But no, basically I know of the great anxiety problems, new forms of control, but it’s also new forms of freedom.
This is why I always emphasize that internet and all this new digital stuff, it’s a very ambiguous phenomenon, but it’s the field of travel. New forms of enslavement, but at the same time, new incredible forms of freedom. We have to accept the fight with no nostalgia for old, allegedly more authentic community or whatever. I’m not afraid.
