The Committed (The Sympathizer #2)

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Whoever said the road to Hell was paved with good intentions had gotten it all wrong. If you looked more closely, you could see that the road to Hell was paved with excuses.

If 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.

“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.

What I’m saying is that all revolutions have excesses. It’s in their nature. People are too exuberant, too passionate. They get carried away. Feelings run high. And sometimes the wrong people are damaged.

They were all looking at me as if I had said something deeply problematic like “I love America,” which one should never do among French intellectuals. One should confess to that only in private, as with a liking for pornography.

Like all gangsters, lawyers, and priests, they enjoyed the fear of others.

but no crazier than the first idealistic cavewoman who dreamed of conjuring fire from nothing, whose fate, after she discovered fire, was most likely being burned at the stake by the more cynical cavemen who knew that fire was really something, was power itself,

violence could make us feel like men yet behave like devils, whereas nonviolence could detoxify us and free us from our inferiority complexes, lift us from despair and fear, and restore the self-respect we need for action, and instead of making us mirror images of our colonizers, nonviolence could break the mirror altogether and liberate us from the need to see ourselves in the eyes of our oppressors,