The Committed is a 2021 novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen. It is his second novel and the sequel to his debut novel The Sympathizer, which sold over one million copies and was awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The Committed was published by Grove Press on March 2, 2021. Wikipedia
Author: Viet Thanh Nguyen
Genres: Thriller, Historical Fiction, Crime fiction, Suspense, Psychological Fiction, Urban fiction
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Dialectic, also known as the dialectical method, is a discourse between two or more people holding different points of view about a subject but wishing to establish the truth through reasoned argumentation. Dialectic resembles debate, but the concept excludes subjective elements such as emotional appeal and rhetoric. Wikipedia
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QUOTES from The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen
“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,”
“[I]t was not just capitalism that created fantasies through these Ideological State Apparatus and enforced them through Repressive State Apparatuses–so did communism.”
“Seeing the failures of both comunism and anticomunism, I chose nothing, a synthesis that neither capitalists nor communists could understand. You may think that I’m being a nihilist, but you could not be more wrong. While nihilists thought life was meaningless and rejected all religious and moral principles, I still believed in the principle of revolution. I also believed that nothing was full of meaning – in short, that nothing was actually something. Wasn’t that a kind of revolution in itself?”
“But the only revolution you can commit to is the one that lets you laugh and laugh and laugh, because the downfall of every revolution is when it loses its sense of absurdity. 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. That is why the people, if they wish to survive and to dodge those bullets, must be nameless.”
“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.”
“Politics is always personal, my dear, she said. That’s what makes it deadly.”
What reeducation had taught me was that dedicated communists were like dedicated capitalists, incapable of nuance.
“…you, yourself, human and inhuman, are demented enough to believe that if the human species does not self-destruct – an IF that should be capitalized, it is so big – then one day the nobodies of the world with nothing to lose will finally have enough of not having enough and realize that they have more in common with the nobodies on the other side of the world, or just the other side of the nearest border, than they do with the somebodies of their own kind, who care nothing about them, and when these nobodies with nothing finally unite, stand up, take to the streets, and claim their voices and their power, the only thing that the somebodies with something must do is nothing, realizing that their Ideological State Apparatus cannot stop all these people, because for all of its might their Repressive State Apparatus cannot kill them all. Can it?”
“Those who believe in revolutions are the ones who haven’t lived through one yet.”
“We wanted love, peace, and justice, except for our enemies, whom we wanted to burn in Hell, preferably for eternity.”
“We were the unwanted, the unneeded, and the unseen, invisible to all but ourselves.
“Yes, I am flawed, we are all flawed, even you, but I blame my flaws on the fact that all my life I only ever aspired to one thing—to be human. That was my first mistake, since I was already human, a fact not always recognized by others.”
“There was no need for the French to condemn us. So long as we spoke in their language, we condemned ourselves.”
“WHAT IS TO BE DONE ABOUT WHAT NEEDS DOING?”
“human beings can make: an excuse. 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.”
“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, thank you. Don’t you see that’s how Americans take over the world? Not just through their army and their CIA and their World Bank., but through this infectious disease called the American Dream?”
“Neither my homeland nor America could ever be described as charming. It was too moderate of an adjective for a country and a people as hot and hot-blooded as mine (Insert: Viet Nam). We repulsed or seduced, but we never charmed. As for America, just think of Coca-Cola. That elixir is really something, embodying as it does the addictive, teeth-decaying sweetness of a capitalism that was no good for you no matter how it fizzled on the tongue.”
“The American Dream was so simple and so optimistic that it required no psychoanalysis, no deep sea-diving. It was as shallow, boring, and sentimental as a bad television show that had somehow become a hit.”
“… even if staging a culture show was really an acknowledgement of one’s cultural inferiority. The truly powerful rarely needed to put on a show, since their culture was always everywhere. Americans knew their culture was ubiquitous, whether burgers or bombs.”
“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.”
“In order to triumph, the national revolution must be socialist; if its career is cut short, if the native bourgeoisie takes over power, the new State, in spite of its formal sovereignty, remains in the hands of the imperialists.”
“And sometimes a Pearl of the Orient could be a Paris of the Orient as well. The Parisians and the French and just about everyone meant that as a compliment, but it was a backhanded compliment, the only kind a colonizer could give to the colonized.”
“the word of Sartre, writing on Fanon, is:
“With us,
to be a man is to be an accomplice of colonialism, since all of us without exception have profited by colonial exploitation.”
Or to put it in my own words: Whitewashing the blood-soaked profits of colonization was the only kind of laundering white men did with their own hands.”
“Organized religion was the first and greatest protection racket, an economy of perpetual profit built on voluntary fear and coerced guilt. Donating money to churches, temples, mosques, synagogues, cults, et cetera, to help ensure a spot for one’s soul in the express elevator to that penthouse in the sky known as the afterlife was marketing genius! Had Sleepy paid his spiritual insurance? If so, had it done him any good? According to Shorty, whose memory had been beaten into the consistency of oatmeal by a length of pipe, or so said Bon, a quartet of Arab youth had set on them.”
“If Jesus Christ, child of refugees, born poor in a stable, a colonized person, a hick from the backwaters, despised by his society’s leaders and by the rulers of his leaders, a humble carpenter—if this Jesus Christ became universal—then so can I, motherfucker!”
“The colonized is a persecuted person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor.”
“while the northerners (Viet Nam) offered a utopia that could be found nowhere, the southerners (Viet Nam) had created a Fantasia that could be experienced everywhere”
“Che Guevera and the Maoist PhD saw the Vietnamese revolution only from afar, with all its glamorous makeup, whereas I had seen it close up, denuded. Three million people dead for a revolution was, arguably, worth it, although that was always easier for the living! 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.”
“The typical American preferred the canned version of philosophy found in how-to manuals, but even average Frenchmen and Vietnamese cherished a love of knowledge.”
“You are upset because I made you see yourself. You like to think of yourself as just a man, not a white man, unless you call yourself white, with a certain kind of self-aware irony. But for me to call you a white man is unacceptable, downright racist, even if you yourself and all white people routinely say of someone “an Asiatic woman” or “a black man,” as if a black man were not just a man as you are just a man. So what if I noticed your whiteness—how unforgivable!”
“Nations, without exception, disposed of body parts all the time. How could we bear ourselves otherwise if not for the mass graves of our forgetting?”
“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?”
“Like most people, he believed that lies, no matter how often you told them, never became truth.”
“Why should I worry about deviating from the masses when I am also me and myself? Am I not a mass? Am I not already a collective? Do I not contain multitudes? Am I not a universe unto myself? Am I not always infinitely dialectical as I synthesize the thesis of me and the antithesis of myself?”
“And even if we are inscrutable, what does that make white people? Are white people ever referred to as inscrutable? No, you would say that a white person who is hard to read has a poker face, which has a positive connotation, a strategic one, suggesting a careful withholding of information, whereas we are just inscrutable because you white people believe that we always have something to hide”
“He was attired like an asshole, which is to say that he wore the long black tails, gray slacks, and top hat of an English gentleman or a nineteenth-century European nobleman, their refined manners and exquisite fashions suiting them perfectly for overseeing genocidal empires that looted nonwhite countries, enslaving and/or massacring their inhabitants, and sanctifying the results with the name “civilization.”
“Nothing to do with black markets, or blackface, or how the French, in a really wonderful turn of phrase, call ghostwriters nègres—niggers!—the sheer bravado of it taking your breath away when you heard it for the first time. But why take offense over a playful use of words, when it really was the case that ghostwriters were just slaves, minus the whipping, raping, lynching, lifetime servitude, and free labor? Still—what the hell?—if words are just words, then let’s call it a white comedy, shall we? It’s just a joke, take it easy, a bad joke, sure, but so was the Unholy Trinity of colonialism, slavery, and genocide, not to mention the Dynamic Duo of capitalism and communism, both of which white people invented and which were contagious, like smallpox and syphilis.”
“[W]e watched the three policeman do what men have undoubtedly been doing to women since Adam blamed Eve for listening to the serpent. It had not occurred to me until now, blind man that I was and surely still am, that the serpent was Adam’s own uncontrollable penis, which the writer of the Book of Genesis had detached from Adam and flung into the grass. From there it could rear its head and talk Eve into eating the forbidden fruit, as if Adam had nothing to do with it. And how does one eat forbidden fruit? By asking permission? Or by taking it, which, for all we know, Adam might have done and then blamed Eve? If prostitution was the world’s oldest profession, then rape was the world’s original crime.”
“There was only one solution to this alienation that was created not by the Negro or the bastard, but by the real bastards, the racists and colonizers who blamed the victim for the conditions that the victimizer created. And that solution was “to rise above this absurd drama that others have staged around me, to reject the two terms that are equally unacceptable, and, through one human being, to reach out for the universal.”
(p 269) Do you know what I’m saying? The Boss demanded.
I know what you’re saying , you said, mouth completely dry, the bile of fear slathered on your tongue. But do you know what I’m getting at? I have chosen to do . . . nothing. (the Boss had ordered him to smash in the brains of an enemy.)
And at this you could not help yourself even though you desperately needed to help yourself (to prevent the Boss from killing you) — you burst out laughing, again, at this gag by a god who did not exist. God had never asked anything to be done , since He had ever and only said nothing – – – what a howler! What was really a screamer, though, was how so many massacred millions could have been saved if everybody who killed them had just done . . . nothing. If enough people had stood up, or laid down as the case may be, and simply said no, even at the price of their lives, through a mundane act of heroism within everybody’s grasp –
Don’t you get it? you cried to the Boss, whose lack of a sense of humor would always prevent him from getting the joke. Wasn’t the lack of a sense of humor the greatest lack of all? If only everyone possessed a sense of the absurd, then the world would not be such an absurd place! To the Boss, you said, Don’t you see how much harder it is to do nothing rather than something? But if everybody just did nothing, then nothing would happen.
(p. 329) Do you know my greatest talent?
To see any issue from both sides?
Any normal person would have begged for his life, pleading with Bon to remember our childhood, our blood brotherhood, our oath, sacrificing all dignity and self-consciousness, as if life were the most important thing of all. But life is not the most important thing. Principles are.
. . . Now came his greatest test, the one that happens for all of us, when our thesis and antithesis collide. Our actions then reveal us for who we truly are.
And there I stood before him, both in one, blood brother and mortal enemy. How would he resolve this contradiction between love and hate, friendship and betrayal? I believed the answer was simple. I believed there was only one solution. How I misjudged!
“Forced,” of course, is a euphemism with the exact opposite meaning, like “pacification,” which usually involved a great degree of homicidal force on rambunctious natives.”
“Ah contradiction! The perpetual body odor of humanity!”
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