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The father of one of the dead children cried, My God, why are You doing this to us? And it struck us all then, the answer to humanity’s eternal question of Why? It was, and is, simply this: Why not?
What Bon did know, he said, was that a confession extracted under torture was nothing but lies. Like most people, he believed that lies, no matter how often you told them, never became truth. Like my father, the priest, I was the kind who believed quite the opposite.
The Americans owned Hollywood with its loudness and swagger, its generous brassieres and cowboy hats, but the French waged the charm campaign.
One might try marijuana in Asia, but in the Orient, one smoked hashish.
I was not an enemy to communism, merely someone with a near-fatal weakness in being able to sympathize with communism’s actual enemies, including Americans. What reeducation had taught me was that dedicated communists were like dedicated capitalists, incapable of nuance.
He looked again at my aunt with something like regret, the closest he might ever come to actual regret. It’s not personal. Politics is always personal, my dear, she said. That’s what makes it deadly.
But while we shared the same elements that made us human, they were clearly filet mignon, rare and perfectly seared, while I was boiled organ meat, most likely intestine.
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.
No, no, no! Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom—I mean, independence and freedom are more precious than nothing, not the other way around!
“Now that we are the powerful, we don’t need the French or the Americans to fuck us over—” “We can fuck ourselves just fine,” she said.
The police are not there to protect us, the citizens, but to protect the state and its rule of law.
The Vietnamese were revolting against the monopoly of violence that was colonization!
The reeducation camp’s task was to turn the inmates into people who would swear that they were free even if they were enslaved, proclaim that they had been remade when they had only been broken.
But three million people dead for this revolution? We had simply traded one Repressive State Apparatus for another one, and the only difference was that it was our own.
Perhaps my problem was that I thought we Vietnamese had hit bottom, under the French, and then saw there was another bottom beneath that with the Americans, when in reality, there was yet another bottom to discover—our own.
What made each of those leaves of paper nearly as powerful as a human being, and what made them, together, more valuable than a human being? After all, I would no more harm one of those bills than I would harm a human being.
Money
I look at me all the time, and because I do not like what I see, I must turn to whiskey, which is so much better at improving one’s eyesight than any pair of glasses.
It was a great racket to be both the source of fear and the protection against that fear, not that the Boss was an original in this regard. Organized religion was the first and greatest protection racket, an economy of perpetual profit built on voluntary fear and coerced guilt.
Truth
we believed in collective guilt for the French, the Americans, the Japanese, and the Chinese, who had all in one way or another flagellated our country—if we believed so fervently that you committed violence on us—then we had to believe in our own collective guilt as well. Guilt, indeed, was a bitch.
In our Indochinese case, the teacher extolled liberté, égalité, fraternité, while the teacher’s people enslaved the student’s people.
The Khmer Rouge had so much to prove to us, their colonizers, and to the French, the colonizers of their colonizers. They wanted to show that no one was more committed to revolution than they were, the reddest of the red. But in the end, Pol Pot may have just proven another of Fanon’s points: “The colonized is a persecuted person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor.”
Those who believe in revolutions are the ones who haven’t lived through one yet.
No, this was a ruthless, Germanic, clip-fed, rapid-fire nine-millimeter Walther P38.
As a sympathizer par excellence, I could see not just any issue from both sides but any person from both sides. That was how I knew that many of our most important world leaders have also been gangsters, drug dealers, pimps, and killers, although they prefer to call themselves presidents, kings, diplomats, and statesmen.
What were any of us, once dead, but refugees fleeing the wretched earth for the refuge of eternal life? What was the entire earth but a Third World compared with the Second World of purgatory and the First World of Heaven?
Just between you and me, it’s the CIA’s unofficial motto: FUCK THEM BEFORE THEY FUCK US
Bon helped me get dressed and slid me into the back seat of the Ronin’s Aryan automobile, where the thick, textured, luxurious hide of a once sentient animal cradled me.
What prose!!
Being tortured was, in that sense, like going to church. After a while, neither taught anything new.
I learned this at least about church.
Or, to put it another way, me and myself were together the answer to that most important of all questions, that most universal of questions, that question that we all, at one time or another, have asked ourselves, or have asked of others, at least in our own minds: WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?
I would not be addicted like all the billions of zealots for whom religion was the opiate of the masses—or was it that opium was the religion of the masses?—so
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.
The ambassador likewise proceeded to torture his audience with a bilingual soufflé of clichés, topped with the whipped cream of excessive compliments slathered onto French culture. Real talent was required to use so many words in two languages to say nothing.
Has anyone ever been found innocent in absentia? Those trials aren’t about justice. They’re morality shows.
did two women talking to each other without a man present actually make any sound?—BFD
🤣🤣🤣
Then I applied my chapped lips to the edge of the cup and chased down my morsel of the body of Christ with a sip of His blood, making me both cannibal and vampire.
My sponge of a professor had actually dripped some lukewarm wisdom on my brow, for what he had once proclaimed to our class was true, that books meant something different when we returned to them later, leavened by life.
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.
They must simply relate differently to excrement, which was already proven by their laissez-faire treatment of canine crap. Shit was the secret of every society, and how a society treated its shit told a stranger a great deal, to which a skeptic such as the luscious secretary might say, What a crock of shit. But what she actually said when you tried to close the door behind you was: Keep it open.
For a moment, you forgot reality, which was that the people who most hated Vietnamese people were other Vietnamese people.
Everything sounded better in French, including rape, murder, and pillage!
the Dynamic Duo of capitalism and communism, both of which white people invented and which were contagious, like smallpox and syphilis.
On the one hand, his oath to me, his blood brother. On the other hand, his oath to killing his enemies. And there I stood before him, both in one, blood brother and mortal enemy.
