The Committed (The Sympathizer #2)

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

As I would discover over the coming months, my aunt’s apartment hosted a veritable salon for writers, editors, and critics, a crowd of intellectuals so leftist that I was always surprised to see that almost all of them ate with their right hands.

I imitated God and said nothing.

One can get away with mass murder and wholesale looting of countries and continents if one handles oneself with a splash of élan, a dash of finesse, and gallons of hypocrisy and selective amnesia. Just ask the French (or the English or the Dutch or the Portuguese or the Belgians or the Spanish or the Germans or the Americans or the Chinese or the Japanese or even us Vietnamese, but not the Italians, who were not very good at colonization, having forgotten what their Roman ancestors had done so well).

If Hitler had triumphed, he might have won the Nobel Peace Prize, too, since nothing brought peace more effectively than exterminating as many of one’s enemies as possible.

While the best situation for an anti-imperialist was to live in an imperial country where one could benefit from imperialism while righteously opposed to it, as happened quite often in the United States, the French had the second-best situation: being anti-imperialist in a formerly imperialist country.