How our memory of war can shape the future
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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I used to think it was my re-memory. You know, some things you forget, other things you never do. But it's not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it's gone. But the place, the picture of it stays. And not just in my re-memory. but out there in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there, outside my head. I mean, even if I don't think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did or knew or saw is still out there. Toni Morrison, 11.
My own memories began very concretely in a refugee camp a few weeks after the fall of Saigon. We were actually boat lifted out of Saigon and then airlifted from Guam to Pennsylvania and ended up, you know, in a military base, Fort Indiantown Gap in Harrisburg. And that's where my memories begin.
Viet Thanh Nguyen was four years old when his family escaped from the Vietnam War, boatlifted out of Vietnam, then airlifted to a new life in the United States. The war fundamentally defined his life, even though his memories of it are hazy.
Before the end of the war, all I remember, because I was four years old, are just these fragmentary images, which I don't even know whether they really happened. For example, being on a boat... and seeing sailors shooting at a smaller boat approaching us. My brother, who was seven years older, said, never happened. So I have to trust that his memory is right and my memory is wrong.
How does memory of war shape individual experiences?
He has to trust it, even though what his brother says contradicts Fiat's own memories. And that tension has animated his writing.
I am a professor, a scholar, and a writer of fiction and nonfiction, probably best known for my novel The Sympathizer, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2016, as well as its sequel, The Committed, a collection of short stories called The Refugees, and a nonfiction book called Nothing Ever Dies, Vietnam and the Memory of War.
Viet also calls himself a scholar of memory, someone who studies how we remember events of the past, both as people and as nations, and how those memories affect how we face the future. And no narratives are more contested than those of war.
The UN's refugee agency estimates over 3 million people have already been internally displaced in Iran, an additional million in Lebanon.
Today, the world is watching as the U.S. and Iran attempt to broker a peace deal after tensions erupted into a U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. A preliminary assessment by the Pentagon has determined the U.S. is at fault for a missile strike on a school in Iran on the first day of the war. The conflict has claimed the lives of thousands and shut down the Strait of Hormuz, creating a supply chokepoint that's caused oil prices to skyrocket.
The war in Iran has caused the biggest disruption to oil supplies in history.
It also resulted in another conflict between Israel and Lebanon. The further we go, the more destruction from Israeli air and drone strikes we see. That is currently under a shaky ceasefire. How do you end a war when one of the warring parties shows no interest in ending it? And there's no end in sight for the war in Ukraine, which is ongoing after four years of fighting.
I'm talking about the war in Ukraine and about the Kremlin's consistent position that victory is inevitable, that it can keep throwing men and money at the fight, that Russia is in it for as long as it takes.
Depending on where you are in the world and where you're getting news about a war, you're very likely getting a different narrative, sometimes a polar opposite narrative, than someone else, somewhere else, about the very same conflict. And these differing narratives influence how that war will be perceived now and later on.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–2:23
2
How does memory of war shape individual experiences?
2:23–7:25
3
What personal memories does Viet Thanh Nguyen share about his childhood?
7:25–17:18
4
How do differing narratives influence perceptions of war?
17:18–24:34
5
What is the significance of collective memory in shaping national identity?
24:34–31:06
6
How does trauma affect personal and collective memory?
31:06–49:07