On a recent trip to El Salvador, writer Viet Thanh Nguyen noticed striking parallels between the small Central American nation and his own country of origin, Vietnam. Both endured the atrocities of war, each fueled by anti-communist US intervention. And both conflicts—the Vietnam War and El Salvador’s civil war—triggered refugee and migrant crises whose consequences continue to reverberate today.
The people of Vietnam and El Salvador–and Nguyen himself–have been caught in the crossfire of what he calls “Greater America”: a phenomenon best described as not just a place but a project.
What exactly is Greater America capable of, both abroad and domestically? What are its borders and how will it be remembered, conflict after conflict? Who will be the next victims of its imperial ambitions? We discussed all of that on this episode.
Listen to this podcast from The Nation.
Transcript:
D. D. Guttenplan:
Welcome to The Nation Podcast, where we take you behind the scenes of our biggest stories with the journalists who wrote them. I’m D. D. Guttenplan, editor of The Nation.
On a recent trip to El Salvador, writer Viet Thanh Nguyen noticed striking parallels between the small Central American nation and his own country of origin, Vietnam. Both endured the atrocities of war, each fueled by anti-communist American intervention, and both conflicts, the Vietnam War and El Salvador’s Civil War, triggered refugee and migrant crises whose consequences continue to reverberate today.
The people of Vietnam and El Salvador, and Nguyen himself, have been caught in the crossfire of what he calls Greater America, a phenomenon best described as not just a place, but a project, one predicated on, to borrow the words of Ronald Reagan when justifying intervention in El Salvador, a revolution without frontiers.
Now, with the Trump administration and El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, who proudly calls himself the world’s coolest dictator, detaining migrants and dissidents without due process, we ask what exactly is Greater America? What is it capable of, both abroad and domestically? What are its borders, and how will it be remembered, conflict after conflict? And who will be the next victims of its imperial ambitions?
Viet Thanh Nguyen is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and professor. His feature Greater America Exporting Disunion is in The Nation’s 160th anniversary issue. Viet, it’s a pleasure to welcome you to The Nation podcast.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Hi, Don. Great to talk to you.
D. D. Guttenplan:
It’s great to talk to you, and it was wonderful to get your piece. I’m going to start with the obvious question, which is, what were you doing at El Salvador?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I’ve spent a lot of time over the last 10 or 15 years traveling to Asia to do work on war and memory. That’s my scholarly project, but it also informs a lot of my fiction as well. And that meant that going to Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Korea, Japan, and so on, prevented me from going to a lot of other places. And of course, I’ve always been curious of all the other countries south of the United States.
I got an invitation to go to Cartagena for a literary festival, which I did. And then I was going to go to El Salvador anyway to look at the work of the International Rescue Committee, on whose board I serve. It’s a refugee aid organization and has work in El Salvador. As I was set to go, the federal government eliminated a huge amount of international aid, including a substantial part of the IRC’s budget. But I went anyway.
And I was going to spend a few days just to do research on a history that I had become aware of since the early 1980s when I was a curious little boy in San Jose, California, reading about the United States in El Salvador. So this was the perfect opportunity to do so.
D. D. Guttenplan:
And when you get to El Salvador, what is it that struck you first?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
What struck me first was that El Salvador was using the U.S. dollar. Obviously before I go to a country, I want to find out what kind of currency I have to use and everything. So it was the U.S. dollar. President Bukele had also shifted the country to a Bitcoin economy. By the time I showed up, that Bitcoin endeavor had already failed. So that was the first thing to note.
And the second thing to note was that Rubio was in town on that same day. That was not planned, but as I was heading to Central America, he was on his first trip as Secretary of State going to Panama, and I was in Panama briefly as well. So it just seemed opportune when we both showed up at the same time that he was there to sign the prison deportation agreement with President Bukele, whose consequences we are still seeing. But of course, within a few weeks of that, the United States sent a few hundred immigrants to this prison, which had been used to house criminals, gangsters, and alleged criminals and gangsters under President Bukele’s executive order to suspend the rule of law.
D. D. Guttenplan:
So let’s talk about Nayib Bukele for a minute, because in America we think we have the most colorful authoritarian in the hemisphere, but I could argue that Bukele gives Donald Trump a run for his money. He does call himself the coolest dictator on earth, and he’s of Palestinian origin. So there are so many pieces of this that are just… you couldn’t make them up. If you were screenwriting this, it would be rejected as improbable.
What do people there say about Bukele and about the disappearances and the use of the country as a sort of U.S. detention camp?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I knew nothing about Bukele before I started doing research for this trip. And of course, yes, he’s Palestinian. I learned that Palestinians had been migrating to El Salvador since the early 20th century, that they’re there mostly as business people, and that oftentimes they’re not called Palestinians but Turks. So they occupy an interesting place in the political and economic and cultural landscape of El Salvador.
Politically unpredictable because Bukele obviously has now earned this reputation, self-proclaimed, as the world’s coolest dictator. But there were also Palestinians on the other side of the political spectrum as well. So the fact that they’re Palestinian I think is a little unpredictable about the political choices that they made.
And Bukele rose to acclaim first through local politics, and his original political affiliation was not necessarily with the right-wing side of things, but the left-wing side of things. But he seems to have demonstrated himself to be an opportunist, but also someone really good with social media and public relations. And I think public relations was his first line of work.
So, like Trump, I think he’s sort of naturally become a politician through the image, the politics of images first. And when I got to El Salvador, what I discovered also, of course, was that there had been a very serious gang problem in El Salvador. This was a real issue. And Bukele stepped in and decided that one of his first major acts was to simply put 80,000 people into prison. This was a real problem. A lot of El Salvadorans supported this because the crime problem and random acts of murder and extortion and so on were so prevalent that people were afraid to go out on the streets and on the buses and all of that. So 80,000 people, some of them were probably very definitely gangsters, many were not. So I think there was at least 7,000 people who’ve been released since then. And there are allegations that many more are actually not criminals and gangsters. So it’s perfectly possible that people could be sent to that prison simply on the tips sent in by other people in El Salvador, tips that might not be validated.
So the sense that I got when I was there was that Bukele was very popular. I think his approval rating was as high as in the eighties at the peak of things. So he’s fulfilled a real need on the part of the general public. But by the time I got there, there was also of course some hints that there was trouble brewing beneath the surface, because while he’s been very efficient at bringing down the crime rate, the question of whether he’s good for the economy is still in the air. And there was already… I was hearing reports that perhaps he had come to some kind of arrangement with MS-13, the dominant gang in El Salvador, that he had asked them to commit less murders, for example, or make them less public. Don’t it so publicly and don’t bury the body… or leave the bodies out so publicly, and so on.
And some of those allegations are now making it to the mainstream American media, allegations that he has asked for MS-13 members in the United States to be deported so that he can obviously contain these allegations. And so, the fate of Bukele and his promises remains to be seen.
D. D. Guttenplan:
Well, you talk about the crime problem in El Salvador as, in a sense, a side effect or an effect of American policy in the region. In other words, it’s not that the country generated its own crime problem out of nothing. There was a very violent civil war that went on for a long time that the U.S. was heavily involved in, and I think in a way feeds into this concept that you talk about, Greater America.
So tell us a little bit about what you mean by Greater America and how it relates to the United States of America.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
When we talk about things like gangs and crime, of course we also have to discuss the concepts of law and justice and who has power and who has the authority to define whether something is legal or illegal, whether a crime is something to be celebrated, whether a crime is something to be demonized. And El Salvador is a country… is an oligarchical society and vastly unequal society, economically and politically, in which a very small group of people and their supporters rules over a population of peasants and Indigenous people.
The most infamous incident of the suppression of peasant revolt, what actually occurred in the 1930s when peasants and communist-led political factions led a rebellion against the oligarchy, and the oligarchy responded by massacring tens of thousands of people. The incident is so notorious, it’s known only as La Matanza, the massacre. And it wiped out a large part of the Indigenous population of El Salvador as well.
And so from the 19th century onwards, there’s been this problem of oligarchical rule and class-stratified exploitative society. And the United States obviously comes in on the wrong side of history on this issue, here as in other Central American countries. And what takes place is that the United States supports the El Salvadoran oligarchy, the government, the military, and so on. But the excesses of this regime were so much that by the 1970s, Jimmy Carter wanted to tie the human rights record of El Salvador to U.S. military aid. And the El Salvadoran government decided they’d rather not do that and turn to Israel to supply much of its military aid. I think up to 83% in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
And this is when the Civil War kicks off from 1979 to 1992. Somewhere around 80,000 people died during this war. And documentation says that 90% of the atrocities are committed by the Salvadoran military, a military which is trained and supplied by the 1980s by the United States.
So of course, there is a large refugee outflow from El Salvador. Many of them go to the United States. Some of them do become criminals and gangsters. And in 1992, President Clinton starts deporting some of them to El Salvador. And arguably some of these people become some of the gangsters and feed into the gang problems that Bukele is responding to.
And so we can see a direct connection between all of these layers of politics, economics, and civil war, and the U.S. support for El Salvador becoming an issue of blow back. So the very gangsters that presidents from Clinton to Donald Trump have been concerned with were a direct outcome of a civil war that the United States didn’t help to unleash, but certainly helped to support on one side
D. D. Guttenplan:
To fuel. Yeah, no, it’s a country that’s been wracked by violence, as you said, since the 1930s. So the fact that there are now very violent gangs has a history, which you trace in the piece.
What I found really thrilling reading your piece was when it dawned on me that you were up to something more than just, as it were, geopolitics. I mean, the geopolitics and the history that you convey are of course very economically and eloquently done, but there are a series of doubles in this piece. And when I figured out that you were doing something with these mirrors, it just made it a thrilling read.
So let’s start with the biggest mirror maybe, which is Greater America. And it’s a kind of a dark mirror of the United States, but talk about what you mean by it and how it manifests itself in your travels.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I came as a refugee to the United States in 1975, and my first paying job was at an amusement park called Great America, where I worked in a part of the park called Yankee Harbor. I had to dress up in a tricorn hat and bell-bottom pants and all this kind of stuff. So even from that age, I thought this is an interesting theme for a park. Obviously I was not able to articulate why it’s called Great America, why I, as a Vietnamese refugee, am participating in this. But in looking back, it seems for me as a refugee obviously a symbolic moment that a refugee’s entry into the United States is not through the United States of America per se, but also through an idea of a Great America. That’s part of the mythology of the United States that’s always been a part of this country.
And the idea of Great America obviously then becomes an official part of governing rule with Make America Great Again. So these ideas of America and greatness have always had such tremendous currency, and yet they have to be contrasted against this official entity known as the United States of America. And this is, I think, even more poignant when we think about how the United States has simply taken over the very idea of America itself, that we have a North and a South America with many different nations and so on. But when people say America globally, they really just mean this one country of the United States. And obviously, many people south of the U.S. border resent this idea that they’re a part of Central and South America, but they’re completely overshadowed by this big dominant imperial neighbor to the north.
D. D. Guttenplan:
It’s not just overshadowed. I mean, that’s part of what you do so deftly in the piece is you illustrate that the idea of Greater America is an idea of American hegemony, certainly over the hemisphere, that goes back to the Spanish-American War, or even to manifest destiny and the conquest of territories from Mexico. That it’s an idea of territorial expansion.
And of course, in recent weeks with Donald Trump lusting after Greenland and Canada, that idea, which many of us had thought had been retired, seems to have been dusted off. But it’s also… and I say this because here at The Nation, this is our 160th year, but we’ve been critical of America’s imperial ambitions since the 1890s, since the war in the Philippines. But again, that’s something you talk about in the piece.
So talk about the way in which Greater America is America, not just overshadowing, but directly colonizing, ruling, taking.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, I think the countries that have been subjected to American imperialism certainly are aware that it’s more than overshadowing, that it is not just a symbolic overshadowing or an appropriation of a name of a whole region, but much more serious in terms of power, domination, and so on, which results in things like routine massacres and genocides and civil wars that shape the history of Central American countries, but which for most Americans is invisible or an afterthought or forgotten and so on.
And so this is the ambivalence within the United States of America, which is that the entire country obviously has been founded in conquest and expansion since its very origins. And it’s not a recent issue. It goes all the way through the 20th century, not just with the Philippines, which extended into 1946, but then also obviously Hawaii and Alaska. And we still have territories and the like.
But the issue is that for Americans, there’s this kind of dissonance where we of course know that we’re a country that has been built on expansion, and yet we want to deny it at the same time. And so that trick is, I think, again, that duality between the United States of America and a Greater America. When Americans say that America is great, they want to think explicitly about things like wealth, opportunity, the American dream, rights, free speech, these kinds of things, but greatness is also built upon power and domination, both of white supremacy in the United States, but also then of the extension of American imperial power overseas.
Now, Donald Trump is an interesting figure because he’s made this extremely naked and explicit, whereas for most American presidents, Democratic or Republican, there’s a soft selling of the power and domination that underlies greatness. There’s a necessity for diplomacy, for rhetoric, things like that. Most American presidents are what I’ve called the quiet Americans. Donald Trump is definitely the ugly American who will say what should not be said out loud. And of course, what should not be said out loud is we have taken territories by conquest and simply because we want to, regardless of what international law says. And so his rhetoric about taking Greenland, Canada, Panama and so on are naked expressions of greatness that have always been there within the United States.
D. D. Guttenplan:
When you say that the ugly American and the quiet American, in a way that also gets at something in your piece, which is the generally unacknowledged but made very clear by you connections between America’s actions in our hemisphere and America’s actions in Asia. And I wondered, as someone whose roots go to Asia and who’s now living in America, why do you think we mostly don’t see it that way? I mean, it seems like it would be obvious to the people on the receiving end.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, that’s why I brought up the example of the amusement part of Great America. That’s a celebration of the origins of the country in the late 18th century independence and all of that. But my argument has been that the very origins of the country are found not only in these ideas of independence and freedom and our American Revolution, but are also found on violence and conquest. So Indigenous peoples, enslaved peoples from Africa would not look necessarily upon America as being great in the same sense. So that goes back to the very origins of the country. And that impulse, I think, is what drove the United States not only westward to the Pacific and then to the Philippines, but also to Vietnam as well.
And so going back again to that duality, Americans just cannot articulate to themselves that they have done these things out of an imperial genesis that goes to the very origins of the country, but that these conquests that have made the United States what it is have come about purely by accident.
So William McKinley, 1898 says, “Well, Philippines just fell into our laps. We don’t know how we got the Philippines,” for example. Or when the United States got to Southeast Asia, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, it was like, “Well, we’re just here to defend the freedoms of the peoples of Southeast Asia.”
And so the United States has all these excuses, what I call the perpetual innocence of the United States, built upon amnesia so that every time we acquire a new country or get involved with a new country, it strikes the average American as a complete surprise that we’re here, and there’s no historical connection to things that have happened in the past.
D. D. Guttenplan:
People used to say that Britain acquired an empire in a fit of inadvertence. You might say that the American empire was acquired with even less obvious intention, but perhaps no less obvious determination. What do you think?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
If I was really cynical, I would say that I think there are people in the history of the United States who have been very deliberate about the expansion of the United States, but those are things done behind closed doors. Again, the rhetoric, the diplomacy cannot be for most Americans that we do this with a deliberate strategy to take over large parts of the world or to establish 800 military bases and so on. The rhetoric has to be that we defend freedom and democracy.
So that again, is a part of this ideology of being an American that I think is actually true for many Americans. I think the people in power might be much more cynical and have a strategic plan and everything, but I think for average Americans, the seduction of this idea that we have just accidentally become a global power, and that if there has been a design, it’s simply because we’re a great people. I think that is actually a very persuasive idea.
Now, you go back to someone like Ronald Reagan. You mentioned his speech in 1983. He made the connections very clear between both the rhetoric and diplomacy and the actual power struggles that take place, because he said we failed in Laos. The United States failed in Laos during the so-called Vietnam War. We let the communists take over. We’re not going to do this in Central America. We’ve already lost Nicaragua, but now we’re going to fight in El Salvador, which is going to be the central front of this extended Cold War that has reached from Southeast Asia to Central America. So complete extension of the domino theory. That was the naked politics that he was very clear about talking about.
But at the same time, he was also very clear saying this is also a project of what I’ve called Greater America, that he said that North and South America, North, Central, South America are bonded together by Christianity, by capitalism, by anti-communism. It was a greater hemispheric project for him. That was also part of the rhetoric that was taking place. So it’s a fascinating speech because here’s someone who was doing both things at the same time, acknowledging the geopolitics and not acknowledging. This kind of global struggle over power centered around communism, but also justifying it through this rhetoric of Greater America.
D. D. Guttenplan:
To get to the micro level for a second, one of the other really fascinating doublings in this article is between you and Marco Rubio. Can you talk a little bit about how you came to haunt each other, both on this trip and in your imagination?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, I would say haunting is too strong of a word. I doubt that Marco Rubio knows who I am, and I’m not exactly haunted by Marco Rubio, but of course, I have to be periodically reminded of him because of his presence on the American political landscape. But he comes out of a Cuban American community, and I come out of a Vietnamese American community. Cuban Americans are dominant in Florida and that part of the country. Vietnamese Americans have communities all throughout the country, but our most visible presence is in California. So in some ways, we already have a mirror image. Vietnamese refugees in California, Cuban refugees in Florida, both deeply dominantly anti-communist. Catholic as well, in many ways.
And Marco Rubio played the role of the Cuban American politician who represents Cuban American interests, who presents himself as the descendant of Cuban refugees from Castro, who is himself conservative and anti-communist, and who uses that power base to rise in the national politics of the GOP.
I am someone who did not follow that trajectory. Became a writer instead, am not anti-communist. If anything, the anti-communist Vietnamese community thinks I’m a commie. I’ve heard this many, many times. I have to defend myself by saying the communist government in Vietnam says that I’m an anti-communist. So my true politics are a mystery to so many people. But regardless, I’m certainly a mirror image to Marco Rubio in all those different senses. And so it was just a great coincidence that we both ended up in San Salvador on literally the same day doing very different kinds of projects.
And so Rubio demonstrates one way in which anti-communism, being a refugee, and being of a certain ethnicity or nationality can be very powerful entrees into American culture and American politics. And I think I’ve demonstrated something different, which is that to be critical of the United States fits into a certain other kind of cultural politics in this country as well. What Rubio and Donald Trump and the rest of this particular faction of the United States has caricatured as DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion, which for them is not simply about representation, but is also about undermining the very nature of the United States as well.
Of course, that’s extremely debatable. There’s a whole other strand of thinking around culture and politics and race and inequality and exploitation that I can point to in terms of people like James Baldwin and Martin Luther King Jr., who both said we’re obviously deeply critical of the United States, but we do so in order to help the United States realize its greater self.
D. D. Guttenplan:
And you and Rubio were both in El Salvador on very different missions, as it were. You could argue that Rubio was there on a mission of forgetting, of paying very little heed to America’s own history in the country, its effect on the country, the effect of its interventions in Salvadoran politics. And you were there as part of your work on memory.
I’d like to ask specifically about El Mozote. For listeners who don’t know what it is or what happened there, maybe you can start with that.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
If I said, My Lai, My Lai, I’m sure almost all your listeners would know exactly what I’m talking about, this massacre that the United States committed of killing 500 civilians, men, women, and children in Vietnam.
El Mozote, as you said, might require explanation. This was an atrocity where the Salvadoran military came into this cluster of villages called El Mozote in 1981 and massacred a thousand Salvadoran peasants, definitely all civilians, nobody affiliated with the FMLN, this assortment of leftist guerrillas that was fighting the Salvadoran military. So there were officially no American troops involved with this, although American advisors certainly were in charge of helping to train the Salvadoran military.
For the American media and the United States, the El Mozote massacre was certainly notorious. Some people certainly knew about it. It was part of what led American leftists and leftists all over the world to say that El Salvador was a repetition of the war in Vietnam or that El Salvador was Spanish for Vietnam, as one political slogan went at the time.
But arguably by today, the El Mozote massacre is poorly known in the United States, at least in the mainstream. But it was something that I grew up reading about. I read about it in Newsweek magazine and read about the related massacres that took place, the murder of four American church women, the murder of Archbishop Romero, or his assassination, the assassination or murder of six Jesuit priests in 1989 and their housekeeper and her daughter, all committed by the Salvadoran military.
So yeah, I was in El Salvador to look at this particular history because I felt complicit as a citizen of the United States, and I was deeply interested in this as a scholar of war, memory, communism, the Cold War, and so on. And so, while Marco Rubio’s trip took him to President Bukele’s lakeside house in El Salvador, my trip took me to El Mozote, five hours south of San Salvador.
D. D. Guttenplan:
And as you say, the degree of atrocities led President Carter to attempt to condition military aid at the time. And the Salvadorans decided they didn’t want any conditions, so they said no. At which point Israel stepped in and replaced the U.S. as the main weapons supplier to the Salvadoran military. But then Carter resumes shipments in 1980 and resumes training three weeks after the murder of the American church women. So tell us about that incident and what effect it had.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
If you people have seen Oliver Stone’s movie El Salvador, it is actually a pretty comprehensive movie talking about a lot of things that we discussed, but the murder of the four American church women is dramatized in that particular movie. But what happened, of course, was that there was an American church presence in El Salvador, for obvious reasons. This was also the time period when we see the rise of liberation theology led by Salvadoran and international priests in El Salvador. It was part of the reason why the Salvadoran government deeply distrusted the Catholic Church, or many parts of the Catholic Church, saw these activist Catholics as insurgents, insurrectionaries, people who were affiliated with communism and so on, which allowed for the detention, torture, execution of many Catholic figures, including people of the Jesuits and the Catholic Church in El Salvador by the Salvadoran military.
So these four American church women just were victims of this. They were kidnapped on their way home from the airport by Salvadoran police and military. They were raped, they were murdered, they were buried. And their bodies were recovered shortly after that. And obviously it became an international incident, an embarrassment for the United States. And it was notorious, I think, because it was American church women. But you have to understand that again, something like around 80,000 people died during this war, and many, many, many disappearances, tortures executions like this were inflicted upon the Salvadoran people. Almost none of those incidents received international attention. El Mozote was I think, the one that did receive that kind of attention. But these kinds of military mass murders were happening regularly throughout the Salvadoran landscape. This was the largest number, and then the one that received the most foreign press attention.
By the way, other people were getting murdered as well. I just read the news today that finally some Salvadoran generals were held responsible in court in El Salvador for the murders of four Dutch journalists that occurred in 1984 during this civil war as well.
D. D. Guttenplan:
I want to get to this culture of impunity in a second because I think that’s very important to the story. But of course, the other international incident during that period was the murder of Archbishop Romero, who’s gunned down in church. Has anyone ever been convicted of Romero’s assassination?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
No one has ever been convicted of Romero’s assassination. And you spoke earlier about the culture of impunity. I mean, the culture of impunity was so strong that death threats against Romero were made on air on television by Robert D’Aubuisson, who was a major in the Salvadoran military, had been trained by the United States, became a major political figure. He was a public figure, he was very well known, and he was going around just making these kinds of threats. And when Romero was assassinated, I don’t think anyone doubted who was responsible in general. And over the years, there were investigations, names were named of the gunmen and things like that, but no trials.
D. D. Guttenplan:
One of the things you talk about in terms of the export of Greater America is the material effects of this, the way that you can see it in, for example, the way the military are equipped.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Absolutely. One of the remarkable things in terms of looking at photographs of the Salvadoran military in operation in the 1980s is that they look exactly the same as the South Vietnamese military, as the U.S. military in Vietnam. And parts of the Salvadoran landscape are really lush and green and beautiful, and you see these Huey helicopters supplied by the United States flying over them, and they’re landing, and out jump the Salvadoran military in green army fatigues with M1 steel helmets carrying M16 rifles. This is all American military equipment. It looks almost exactly like the Vietnam War except with Salvadoran troops involved.
And what they’re doing is they’re fighting an insurgency that’s been assembled from five different groups that collectively call themselves the FMLN with various kinds of ideological orientations and things like that. But this leftist insurgency is born out of an organic movement within El Salvador against the various injustices of the oligarchy that go back at least to the 1930s and beyond.
And so the United States comes in and sees this insurgency as something that’s being supplied and led and trained by outside interests like the Soviet Union, and sees this as, again, another flashpoint of global conflict, just like in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, which leads to this apocalyptic idea that this insurgency has to be stopped at all costs, without addressing really in any substantive way the actual root causes of why there’s an insurgency in the first place.
Now, to be fair, there is outside aid coming into the insurgency, the FMLN, and places like Vietnam actually offered inspiration. I interviewed a couple of the high-ranking former guerrillas, and they were very explicit in saying, yes, the Vietnam War and what the Ho Chi Minh and what the Viet Cong were doing, that was actually inspirational for them. So it wasn’t as if this was not a global conflict, but I don’t think there was a sense that this was going to be somehow an attempt to invade the United States coming out of what was happening in El Salvador.
D. D. Guttenplan:
Well, it was a global ideological battle, but the American mistake maybe was to see it as being directed by Moscow or being dependent in some sense on Soviet support. But, of course, seeing it that way licensed the U.S. to intervene on the other side.
Throughout the piece, you develop this doppelganger between the shadow self of the Greater America, which as you say, is feeding on the desire for power and profit, and then the United States of America, a historical country which has this empire, but also has things like the First Amendment and freedom to pursue whatever faith you have and to try and make your material dreams come true. And there’s some kind of conflict, but there’s also some kind of, I don’t know, complicity, I guess is the word I’m trying to avoid here. But it feels like you keep bumping against that. So I guess what I wonder is do you feel that they’re ever separable?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I don’t think they’re ever separable. I think the United States is obviously a vast and diverse country, and reducing it to this binary or duality can be complicated because there’s many, many, many different viewpoints and histories and so on. But I think in terms of a narrative of the United States, we have on the one hand this sort of vast multiplicity that people like Walt Whitman represent, but that politically, in terms of what is offered to the people of the United States through political rhetoric and mythology, the duality and the binary between the best and the worst of the United States is to me really true.
And again, I go back to the very foundations and origins of our country, that this was a project that became the United States of America, which have offered real privileges and benefits around democracy, liberty, equality, opportunity, and the like. But to me, the fact that the country was also built on enslavement, genocide, colonization, and perpetual war is not an accident. It’s not something that can be separated out from all the beautiful and wonderful things, but that in fact, those horrible things around enslavement and genocide and colonization and perpetual war, they made the beautiful things possible. I don’t think things like free speech and liberty and the vote and all of that would’ve been possible without clearing the land of Indigenous peoples, without bringing in enslaved peoples and the like.
Now, this idea that the duality is actually mutually constituted, that you can’t separate the beauty and the brutality, that is hard for many Americans to get their minds around. I think many Americans will be like, “Okay, yes, we have done problematic things, terrible things, things that are hard to accommodate, but those are sort of accidents of our good nature and our good character. We made mistakes.”
And that’s what allows the innocence, the perpetual innocence to keep on recycling itself. The idea that all these terrible things are mistakes rather than fundamental to the United States.
And so that fundamental contradiction is what is problematic, is what creates things like that shadow self, this other that many Americans just cannot reconcile themselves with. So instead of acknowledging a fundamental contradiction, instead Americans think of themselves as perpetual innocents regularly making mistakes.
D. D. Guttenplan:
Well, or as Ronald Reagan put it, mistakes were made. It’s that great passive construction.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Or they made us do it. Sorry, they made us do it. If the Indians hadn’t fought back, we wouldn’t have wiped them out. I mean, that’s the core of it.
D. D. Guttenplan:
So I would say one of the enduring pleasures of your writing is watching or experiencing or being alongside a mind figuring things out. And I want to know if there’s anything particular that you felt that you’d figured out in the writing of this piece.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I think for me, I am someone who’s always trying to work things out. My genesis is in the Vietnam War, but I refuse to allow myself to talk only about the Vietnam War as defined by the United States, to be stuck on that particular history. Because when I look at it, I see, again, all these connections that go back to the beginnings of the United States, and I see these connections that go to Central America and to our present.
I think what I learned in writing this piece was not only intellectual and political. Certainly I learned a lot about Israel, for example. I had very little sense of Israel’s important role in Central America, not just in El Salvador, but in places like Guatemala, where there was a real genocide committed in the early 1980s that was done in many ways with Israeli support as an outcome of what Israel was doing in Palestine.
So I learned certain things like that. But the human encounter was really important for me. Like I went to El Mozote. I interviewed three survivors of the El Mozote massacre. Two of whom were my age. So that meant when I was reading about the El Mozote massacre as a 10-year-old, these were nine and 10-year-old boys running from the Salvadoran military and with members of their family murdered by the Salvadoran military.
So that personal contact, that emotional revelation was very powerful for me. I saw the El Mozote memorial that many tourists might be able to see if they go to El Mozote. But one of the survivors, Senor Martinez, wanted me to go see his private memorial 30 minutes outside of El Mozote, which would not have been possible without a private car. And I went and saw his modest home where he runs basically a convenience store out of his living room. And 10 feet away behind a chain-link fence, he had his own wall that he had built with the names of hundreds of the dead, including 24 of his relatives and his mother. And buried underneath that wall were the remains of 40 people. I just thought that was so moving and powerful for me to encounter that, that here was this man outside of the government, outside of the official spaces, doing his best to keep memory alive, memory of his family members, the memory of so many of his neighbors.
And of course, there are so many massacres that have been committed throughout El Salvador, Central America, much of the world that are uncommemorated unmarked. So even with the El Mozote memorial and this memorial of Senor Martinez, there are so many other of the dead who have not had these memorials devoted to them.
This is, for me, such a powerful history, and I do feel complicit as a member of the United States. I can’t just dwell on what the United States did to Vietnam. I have to dwell on what the United States has done in other places, for which I bear some responsibility as a citizen and as an American whose work must be around not forgetting, as you said about Marco Rubio and the interests of the United States, but around shared remembering and shared grief.
So with Senor Martinez, I was able to tell him, the Vietnamese have a saying, we like to [foreign language 00:40:01]. We like to share sorrow when something sorrowful has happened. And I extended those sentiments of [foreign language 00:40:08] to Senor Martinez. I think it’s such an important thing that he’s doing, and I think it’s an important thing for us as Americans to learn from and that we shouldn’t… the idea of gratitude to a Greater America that is so dominant in the United States, this idea that people like Senor Martinez and Salvadorans should be grateful to the United States for everything that the United States has done for them, really needs to be reversed. We need to be grateful to people like Senor Martinez who are keeping memories alive that most Americans would rather forget.
D. D. Guttenplan:
I think that’s a great place to end. Viet Thanh Nguyen, it’s been a pleasure talking to you and an honor to publish you in The Nation.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Don, I’m grateful for our conversation and for the opportunity to be published by The Nation.
