LeftWatch
May 2017
Sneering Vietnamese Refugee Ladles on Pulitzer Prize-Winning Existential Guilt
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a North Vietnamese spy who worked with prominent South Vietnamese military officers, then was sent to America to spy on Vietnamese refugees after the fall of Saigon. The author, brought to America by his South Vietnamese parents at the age of four, gave a talk at Arlington Central Library in Virginia on May 3, 2017.
Arlington is a blue pocket and the left-leaning audience lapped it up as this self-described “political writer” beat them over the head with how America is such a horrible, rotten place – it’s racist, an imperial power (“colonialism is rape”), ‘America has never come to terms with slavery’, Hollywood is part of the military-industrial complex, ‘Make America Great Again’ is rooted in racism (insert expected audience cheer here), blah, blah, blah - through the entire litany of left-wing complaints and clichés. Nguyen unconvincingly tried to show how nuanced and complex his views are, but enough real anger and bitterness flashed through to belie any notion he is at all objective about these matters. No one who views himself as the victim of racism could be. He told the audience he is out to score political points, so there really is no doubt that this English professor from USC – radicalized at Berkeley – is taking his revenge.
Here’s the problem: it’s all so mindlessly destructive. What is the point of tearing it all down? What does Nguyen propose to replace it with, exactly? He doesn’t say. If not the Founders’ ideas, whose ideals, exactly? Dead silence. And no part of the conversation was about making America a better place. That would destroy Nguyen’s career path. He is content to ladle on the existential guilt and will keep right on doing so as long as Americans are willing to swallow it.
Basking in the glory of winning the Pulitzer Prize (awarded by - wait for it - leftists, of course), Nguyen is not the first artist – and won’t be the last - to figure out that the quickest route to commercial success is to tilt to the political Left. Many others serving up left-wing drivel – e.g., the singer Bono and the playwright of “Angels in America” – got there before him. How do we know whether such people say what they say because they really believe it or because they’re getting paid to say it?
The maddening part is that Nguyen is under no illusions about the principal alternative on offer: communism. He disparaged the communist reeducation camps in Vietnam and even devoted the last part of his book to describing how the spy was interrogated when he returned to his comrades in Vietnam, showing an understanding of how ‘revolutionaries turn on revolutionaries’. No matter where you look in the history of the Left, the revolution always devours its own. Not exactly a sustainable model of governance.
Nguyen sneers at the very country that give him and his family shelter from the communists, a country that’s been very good to him. We used to call people with his views the ‘Hate America First’ crowd. Who knows, maybe Nguyen will end up writing the Great Anti-American Novel. He’s for hire.
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a North Vietnamese spy who worked with prominent South Vietnamese military officers, then was sent to America to spy on Vietnamese refugees after the fall of Saigon. The author, brought to America by his South Vietnamese parents at the age of four, gave a talk at Arlington Central Library in Virginia on May 3, 2017.
Arlington is a blue pocket and the left-leaning audience lapped it up as this self-described “political writer” beat them over the head with how America is such a horrible, rotten place – it’s racist, an imperial power (“colonialism is rape”), ‘America has never come to terms with slavery’, Hollywood is part of the military-industrial complex, ‘Make America Great Again’ is rooted in racism (insert expected audience cheer here), blah, blah, blah - through the entire litany of left-wing complaints and clichés. Nguyen unconvincingly tried to show how nuanced and complex his views are, but enough real anger and bitterness flashed through to belie any notion he is at all objective about these matters. No one who views himself as the victim of racism could be. He told the audience he is out to score political points, so there really is no doubt that this English professor from USC – radicalized at Berkeley – is taking his revenge.
Here’s the problem: it’s all so mindlessly destructive. What is the point of tearing it all down? What does Nguyen propose to replace it with, exactly? He doesn’t say. If not the Founders’ ideas, whose ideals, exactly? Dead silence. And no part of the conversation was about making America a better place. That would destroy Nguyen’s career path. He is content to ladle on the existential guilt and will keep right on doing so as long as Americans are willing to swallow it.
Basking in the glory of winning the Pulitzer Prize (awarded by - wait for it - leftists, of course), Nguyen is not the first artist – and won’t be the last - to figure out that the quickest route to commercial success is to tilt to the political Left. Many others serving up left-wing drivel – e.g., the singer Bono and the playwright of “Angels in America” – got there before him. How do we know whether such people say what they say because they really believe it or because they’re getting paid to say it?
The maddening part is that Nguyen is under no illusions about the principal alternative on offer: communism. He disparaged the communist reeducation camps in Vietnam and even devoted the last part of his book to describing how the spy was interrogated when he returned to his comrades in Vietnam, showing an understanding of how ‘revolutionaries turn on revolutionaries’. No matter where you look in the history of the Left, the revolution always devours its own. Not exactly a sustainable model of governance.
Nguyen sneers at the very country that give him and his family shelter from the communists, a country that’s been very good to him. We used to call people with his views the ‘Hate America First’ crowd. Who knows, maybe Nguyen will end up writing the Great Anti-American Novel. He’s for hire.