Viet Thanh Nguyen

And that's why it's really, really hard for the United States or Vietnam to recognize their own ethnocentric and nationalist preoccupations and their blind spots to other nations and other cultures.

She conceived of two joined walls of dark reflective stone set into the ground.

and engraved with the names of the more than 58,000 Americans who died in that war.

And so when you visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, what you see there is a beautiful commemoration of 58,000 plus American dead.

And a total erasure or refusal to remember that millions of Southeast Asians of all sides, including hundreds of thousands of America's allies, also died during the war.

So by not remembering those people, it allows Americans to think of their own soldiers and through their soldiers themselves, Americans themselves, as victims of this terrible war.

And with all those names carved so permanently into stone, there is no way any of us can ever forget the sacrifice of those who served.

Now, if you go to Vietnam, it's exactly the same thing.

If you go to the major historical museums, war memorials in Vietnam, what you'll discover is a very consistent narrative, which is that the Vietnamese were the victims of foreign aggression, whether that was the French or whether it's the Americans.

And that this narrative of victimization is what allows and justifies the communist revolution and the current communist government by implication.

So when Americans go visit these museums, oftentimes they're totally shocked because Americans have existed in their own ecosystem of propaganda that they never realized was propaganda, which is that when Americans think about the war in Vietnam, they think of themselves as the victims.

Then they go to Vietnam and see these memorials and museums where they're being depicted as the people who committed atrocities.

And for a lot of Americans, it's a complete short-circuiting.

They just don't know how to deal with this.

Half of the Americans who write things down say, this is just communist propaganda.

What about all the atrocities that the communists committed?

And it's true, the communists did commit atrocities.

But so did the Americans.

Both of these things can exist at the same time.

But in an either-or universe, they don't.