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The French colonial had come out to Indo-China at a time when white men still deserved to be masters of the world by virtue of their courage, their stamina, their energy, their pride in their own race, their sense of their own strength, their superiority, their lack of scruples.
No...they never did, no more than the settlers of the US "deserved" to take land from the indigenous peoples and put it to a "better" use, no more than you yourself "deserve" to have your own resources taken from you and "put to better use" by someone else. There is an anti colonialist argument cast for you in capitalist terms.
For example, every year, in every Vietminh division, at the end of the rainy season a recollection is held.” “What’s that?” Pinières asked. “It’s a favourite term of the Jesuits. Nothing resembles the Vietminh world as closely as the Jesuits. I know, I was brought up by them. A recollection means a retreat, communal withdrawal, the examination of one’s conscience over the period of a year.” “Go on.” “With the Viets it lasts a fortnight and in some units up to ten per cent of the personnel are sometimes shot because they no longer conform to the model laid down. In this process the guilty are
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The parallels between what they find scary about communism as practiced and religion as I see it practiced are undeniable. Also undeniable is the dehumanization of the Vietnamese people and Asian people generally, at least if they’re communists.
“The Vietminh coolie, soldier, officer and propagandist have always worked relentlessly and with a sense of purpose that is scarcely human. They have built dug-outs, trenches, underground villages . . .” This reminded them all of the operations in the Delta, of the whole of that landscape remodelled and camouflaged by the human termites.
“All the way along the roads and trails which their convoys used, they had rigged up military shelters under the thick foliage of the jungle. At the mere sound of an aircraft everything, trucks and men, disappeared in a matter of minutes, and there was nothing left but an empty trail. That was all our pilots could see on each of their sorties—empty trails. Just think of the work involved! And it was carried out over hundreds, over thousands of miles, and only by coolies who had nothing but picks, shovels and hatchets and who could only work by night. Meanwhile we were idling away in the
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What troubles me most is the worry that larteguy is criticizing “degeneracy” while holding to the position, articulated earlier, that a better sort of French colonial was entitled to all he could exploit.
Souen felt happy; at the bedside of this man whose very name was unknown to her, this man of an alien race, she experienced a feeling of joy of which she had never before suspected the existence.
see the super sexy Frenchman awake "the woman" in her
Dia looked at the girl and was astonished to see that she was no longer an insect, that there was something warm, triumphant emanating from her, that her eyes sparkled and her nostrils quivered. Life was coursing once more through her veins.
“For this infamous contact you were prepared to betray the confidence of your people, and of the Party and the army . . .” “I wouldn’t have betrayed anyone. I love this man; I’m only happy when I’m by his side. If you gave me my freedom I would go back to him. I don’t know what’s happened, but apart from him nothing else exists . . .”
Because this , this alone is what it is to be a woman for this author.
