The Committed (The Sympathizer #2)

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Ah, contradiction! The perpetual body odor of humanity!

Although he was a CIA agent who saw interrogation and assassination as his trade, he could be sentimental about some things, such as our friendship and high-quality men’s furnishings.

Besides, the French and the Vietnamese shared a love for melancholy and philosophy that the manically optimistic Americans could never understand.

All right, he said, hashish, wine, and exhaustion blunting his murderous instincts.

She could squat for hours, forced to stay in a pose that most Westerners could not maintain for more than a minute.

Truly, my knees want to explode just thinking of it.

To expect capitalists to critique themselves was like asking the police to police themselves—

Capitalism has to win globally and become the worst version of itself before communism can subvert it. The workers of the world have to see that capitalism is only interested in profit, not them, and that it will inevitably reduce them to slave labor as it maximizes profit. See Marx, Capital, volume one.

That baton made real what Benjamin—Walter Benjamin—argued in “Critique of Violence”—that what makes the state legitimate is not the law but violence. The state wants to monopolize violence, the monopoly of violence is named the law, and the law legitimates itself. The police are not there to protect us, the citizens, but to protect the state and its rule of law. That is why one proper response to the blow of the baton is revolution in the streets!

Amateurs can do a lot of damage, even if they damage without finesse. But finesse is key. 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).

Baptizing myself as ANONYMOUS was my little joke on French bureaucracy, because if one could not level a joke at the bureaucracy, one would keel over and die of ennui, which would be endlessly preferable to how I was about to die.

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.

If the rubber in that condom came from a French rubber plantation, then the French had fucked you yet again.

The problem with having holes in your head is that everything leaks out!

But what of the French with Vietnamese ancestry, many of whom feel they are not oppressed? One answer is that there is no better way to demonstrate one’s Frenchness than by demonstrating, especially on the side of the oppressed.

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,”

This, too, is the dialectic, to take the revolution seriously but not to take the revolutionaries seriously, for when revolutionaries take themselves too seriously, they cock their guns at the crack of a joke. Once that happens, it’s all over, the revolutionaries have become the state, the state has become repressive, and the bullets, once used against the oppressor in the name of the people, will be used against the people in their own name.