The Committed (The Sympathizer #2)

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

The typical American preferred the canned version of philosophy found in how-to manuals, but even average Frenchmen and Vietnamese cherished a love of knowledge.

Your father was a colonizer and a pedophile, which go hand in hand. Colonization is pedophilia. The paternal country rapes and molests its unfortunate pupils, all in the holy and hypocritical name of the civilizing mission!

Americans loathed symbols, except for patriotic, sentimental ones like guns, flags, Mom, and apple pie, all of which the average American proclaimed he would defend to the death. One had to love such a practical, pragmatic people, impatient with interpretation, eager just to get the facts, ma’am.

I mean was I becoming a capitalist, which was a matter of bad morals, especially as the capitalist, unlike the drug dealer, would never recognize his bad morality, or at least admit to it.

But a capitalist was a legalized criminal who targeted thousands, if not millions, and felt no shame for his plunder.

The American Way of Life! Eat too much, work too much, buy too much, read too little, think even less, and die in poverty and insecurity.

Organized religion was the first and greatest protection racket, an economy of perpetual profit built on voluntary fear and coerced guilt.

Jean-Paul Sartre, in his introduction to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, had written this, which I had once underlined and memorized and which I found that the eschatological muscle had also marked: “In order to triumph, the national revolution must be socialist; if its career is cut short, if the native bourgeoisie takes over power, the new State, in spite of its formal sovereignty, remains in the hands of the imperialists.”

Fanon wrote that “decolonization is always a violent phenomenon,”

Fanon’s points: “The colonized is a persecuted person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor.”

Now your only choice is capitalism and its pseudo-democracy, its trickery of false choices. For if communism is bad, then capitalism must be good, yes? No! Capitalists love to point out how tens of millions have died under Stalin and Mao, all while conveniently forgetting how hundreds of millions have died under capitalism.

What were colonialism and slavery but forms of capitalism? What was the genocide of the natives of the Americas but capitalism?

colonizers always think about the colonized, at least when they come face-to-face with them. Under all the pomp and circumstance and rhetoric of la mission civilisatrice, the reality was that they hated us at worst and thought us inferior at best, with our only hopes for equality being to transform ourselves into imitations of them.

but when was the last time music fans had massacred other people at a show’s end?

Federico García Lorca, assassinated by the Spanish fascists, once said, “I will always be on the side of those who have nothing and who are not even allowed to enjoy the nothing they have in peace,”