Vietnam: The American nightmare on the road

David Lee

Viet Thanh Nguyen on Spike Lee's Da 5 Bloods:

...Many American visitors to Vietnam remark in amazement that the Vietnamese have seemed to let the past go. This is true. We have no time to hate Americans because we hate each other more, given that our war was actually a civil war (plus, the Vietnamese really hate the Chinese the most). The Americans and the French, our former colonizers, are seen as walking wallets, not to be offended...

...In putting Black subjectivity at the center, Lee also continues to put American subjectivity at the center. If one can’t disentangle Black subjectivity from dominant American (white) subjectivity, it’s impossible to apply a genuine anti-imperialist critique. Hence the marginalized Vietnamese continuing to serve their role as excuses for a Black drama staged against America’s Black-white divide.

This is not an argument for more Vietnamese inclusion. It’s a demand that we recognize how decolonization and anti-imperialism are impossible if we keep reiterating the imperial country’s point of view, even from the minority perspective...

...The fact that most Americans know [King's]“I Have a Dream” but not his “Beyond Vietnam” is testimony to the depth of American propaganda, the willingness of Americans to want to feel good about the American Dream and their reluctance to confront the American Nightmare. 

In the American Nightmare, the severity of anti-Black racism is inseparable from the endurance of American imperialism. As King said, Black Americans were sent to “guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.” 

He condemned not just racism, but also capitalism, militarism, American imperialism, and the American war machine, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” In another speech, he demanded that we question our “whole society,” which means “ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together”...

...for Vietnamese people, we are often only heard by Americans when we are apologetic for our existence and grateful for our rescue by Americans. 

It is bad manners to point out, as I have done, that we wouldn’t have needed rescuing by Americans if we hadn’t been invaded by Americans in the first place. The reality, however, is that it is up to us to tell our own stories and create our own narrative plenitude. Other Americans won’t do it for us, even those Black Americans like Lee who understand too well the pain of narrative scarcity...

Rob's comment:
During the height of the Cold War, the US took over the war in Vietnam from the French after Dien Bien Phu and rebranded it as an anti-communist war, ignoring the reality that the French were trying unsuccessfully to subdue their former colony after World War II.