Viet Thanh Nguyen

Myself, I still have this tendency to think of the country through the lens of the war.

What we're seeing is at least partly a battle of narratives.

Who gets to control the social media narrative?

Who gets to control the global moral narrative about what's going on?

And it's my role as an author to try to make the stories more nuanced and get us to think about how, you know, we also have been involved in Afghanistan and created lots of refugees and have abandoned a lot of our Afghan allies.

And all of that has been swept under the rug in this moral fervor around Ukraine.

I can't imagine many traumatic events that end simply because the history books say, well, the war ended on such and such a date.

Wars continue in people's feelings, emotions, politics, and so on.

We carry our wars with us and their consequences.

And the refugee experience and the experiences of displacement and loss are part of the war experience.

So that leads us to the next question of how do we...

achieve what the philosopher Paul Ricoeur calls happy forgetting.

And he says it's possible to have happy forgetting versus unhappy forgetting, which is what we have now in the United States.

Happy forgetting, Ricoeur argues, is possible through justice.

And through working through the past, through all these kinds of things that a lot of people don't want to do, because then we have to confront the past.

Then we have to figure out, you know, what constitutes justice for the past.

Is it reparations?

Is it memorials?

Is it certain kinds of narratives?

All these things are on the table.