Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (10 page)

As a subject, the other will resist being forgotten and will demand inclusion in the annals of memory. Like those who control the already established means of memory and who are content to remember only their own, this other will say
always remember
and
never forget
her experiences, her histories, and her memories. She will demand to have her name on the wall, her face on the sculpture, and the story of her people in the book. As something is always being forgotten and strangers are always appearing, this mode of remembering others is a perpetual motion machine, oriented toward inclusion and reconciliation. The ultimate goal of the most common form of this ethics is for the other to be incorporated in citizenship, commemorated in the nation’s rituals, cast in the nation’s epics, and blended into the ethical mode of remembering one’s own, until there is no meaningful difference between the other and the self. The secondary goal of this ethics, especially for those formerly cast as others, is to be empathetic to the ever-new others on the horizon.

If the ethics of remembering one’s own operates in every society, the ethics of remembering others is the refinement of remembering one’s own, at work only in those societies that see themselves as more inclusive, open, and tolerant. But as powerful as such an ethical model can be, it possibly can service war. This willingness to remember others and to allow others to remember themselves justifies the campaigns of open and tolerant societies against others not so ethically refined. America is the embodiment of such an ethics of remembering others, used both to call for greater inclusion of minorities within American borders and to justify war against strangers outside of the country. Southeast Asians were once these strangers and could be again, and those Southeast Asians who made it to America sometimes still feel themselves to be alien in American society. It is not surprising, then, that many Southeast Asian refugees and their descendants, brought to the United States by an American war, have been so willing to join the American military and American society in their War on Terror. As American history has shown, it has been the prospect of newer, more terrifying strangers that has encouraged us to bring familiar others closer, especially through enlisting them on our side in wars against these strangers. Fighting against terrorism and terror, these former others hope to affirm their belonging to America itself, in their own eyes and those of their fellow Americans.

3

On the Inhumanities

WHAT THESE REFUGEES AND THEIR
descendants who wish to become American seek is recognition, which is intimately tied to memory. We remember those we recognize, and we recognize those we remember. Some of us, perhaps most of us, yearn to be remembered and recognized, by our intimates and our colleagues, by society and history. We want individuals whose regard we long for to recognize us, and we want to be seen as a part of the place in which we live or call home, where we claim belonging and where we ask for citizenship. Recognition becomes key to the movements for memory that create memorials, museums, and commemorations for victims, veterans, atrocities, battles, wars, and so on, all of which are tied, implicitly or explicitly, to the identities of interest groups and ethnic groups, cultures and races, nations and states. These ethics of recognizing self and others help to build inclusive societies and to heal wounds, but they also encourage us to overlook our ability to hurt others.

The temptation is always present to deny that we can do unjustified harm; it is the other’s ability to do damage that we tend to see as being unjustified. “If only it were all so simple!” protests Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
¹
Solzhenitsyn implies that while it is ethical and just to remember others and victims, it is also ethical and just to recognize our potential to harm, damage, and kill others, or to allow those actions to happen through complicity or turning a blind eye. Without such a recognition, we can make peace with old enemies only to continue wars with newer enemies not recognized as friends or even human. Identifying
with
the victim and the other in an act of sympathy, or identifying
as
the victim and the other in an act of empathy, has the unexpected, inhuman side effect of perpetuating the conditions for further victimization.
²

Recognizing our potential for inhumanity contrasts with how calls for remembering one’s own and remembering others are based on the urge to think of one’s own as human, and then, ultimately, to think of others as human, too. But even as tolerant, humanistic societies have called for equality and human rights, they have never found a shortage of inhuman others to justify war and violence. Identifying with the human and denying one’s inhumanity, and the inhumanity of one’s own, is the ultimate kind of identity politics. It circulates through nationalism, capitalism, and racism, as well as through the humanities. Reminding ourselves that being human also means being inhuman is important simply because it is so easy to forget our inhumanity or to displace it onto other humans. The project of just memory is thus a work of the inhumanities rather than the humanities, for if the humanities have a hard time remembering the inhuman at the heart of civilization and culture, the inhumanities must remember the human, which is included in its very name.

If we do not recognize our capacity to victimize, then it would be difficult for us to prevent the victimization carried out on our behalf, or which we do ourselves. Likewise, the slogans to
always remember
and
never forget
, while seemingly inarguable on the surface, are sometimes, even often, tainted by piousness, sentimentality, or hypocrisy. When we say
always remember
and
never forget
, we usually mean to always remember and never forget what was done to us or to our friends and allies. Of the terrible things that we have done or condoned, the less said and the less remembered the better. More than this, what we really wish to remember and never forget is our humanity and the inhumanity of others. This model easily incorporates an ethics of remembering one’s own. As for an ethics of remembering others, it often encourages us to see others as human, which seems inarguably good. In contrast, however, an ethics of recognition says that the other is both human and inhuman, as are we. When we recognize our capacity to do harm, we can reconcile with others who we feel have hurt us. This ethics of recognition might be more of an antidote to war and conflict than remembering others, for if we recognize that we can do damage, then perhaps we would go to war less readily and be more open to reconciliation in its aftermath. Refusing to recognize our capacity to inflict damage does not preclude reconciliation with those who might have injured us, but it does encourage us to seek concessions and confessions from these others, who may themselves want the same from us. So it is that historically intractable conflicts continue, both sides seeing themselves as victims, or refusing to see themselves as potential or actual victimizers.
³

Ricoeur’s ethical model, predicated on always identifying with the other and seeing the other as a victim, is powerful for those who see themselves as victims or sympathize and empathize with them. It urges us to see the other as damaged by injustice and compels us to take up the cause of justice for the other. But this ethical model also tempts us into believing that those we think of as others are always going to be so. This misrecognition stems from our refusal to grant the other the same flawed subjectivity we assume for ourselves. As we are not always just, neither is the other. The other can be unjust because even he or she can create others. And yet Ricoeur overlooks this by insisting that the other is a victim, or, as he puts it, “the other victim.” Ricoeur tends to mistake the other as always and ever the victim, and conversely, the victim as the other. This mistake tempts minorities and the Western Left as a whole and reveals two potential problems with the ethics of recalling others—either mistaking oneself as that idealized, innocent other, or idealizing the other as guilt-free while incriminating oneself. Both of these are variations of identity politics. When Rey Chow calls for an “ethics after idealism,” it is this idealization of identity and the other that she rightly speaks of and rejects, although she focuses her criticism on minorities as the ones who engage in identity politics. But nationalism is nothing more than an identity politics so triumphant that it can deny being about identity and politics, as nationalists accept both national identity and national politics as being simply natural.

So far as idealizing the other, the way the global antiwar movement usually saw the Vietnamese—and often still does—is an archetypal case of treating the other as victim and the victim as other, freezing them in perpetual suffering and noble heroism. Thus the antiwar movement elevated Ho Chi Minh to iconic status, waved the flag of the National Liberation Front, praised the communist Vietnamese as heroic revolutionaries defying American imperialism, accepted communist propaganda that the South Vietnamese were traitors or puppets, and was mostly blind to the Stalinist direction of the Vietnamese Communist Party. In the postwar years, the philosophical interventions of Ricoeur and his philosophical allies, Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas, have not completely persuaded some Western artists, critics, and leftists to avoid idealizing the other. Take, for example, the corollary to the discourse of the Gook, its not-so-distant cousin found in the discourse of the raghead, the hajji, and the sand nigger, epithets for the Muslim, the Arab, and the terrorist as the other. The impulse exists today for some to treat the Muslim and the Arab, and to a lesser extent the terrorist, in the same idealized fashion as the antiwar movement treated the Vietnamese.

Some of the work of philosopher Judith Butler after 9/11 illustrates this temptation, although she is not alone in succumbing to it. It is not that Butler is an idealist or not aware that terrorists should be held responsible for their actions. In
Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence
, she stresses the heinousness of the 9/11 attacks on the United States, as well as the viciousness of the American response in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo. But the force of the book is aimed at American accountability and the inability of Americans to grieve for the deaths of others. She demands that we reframe our understanding of war to include the losses of others and to contest the terms of recognition that dictate what we see and whom we recognize. The book concludes with an invocation of Vietnam: “it was the pictures of children burning and dying from napalm that brought the US public to a sense of shock, outrage, remorse, and grief. These were precisely pictures we were not supposed to see.” Without such pictures of Afghans, Iraqis, or Guantanamo detainees, “we will not return to a sense of ethical outrage that is, distinctively, for an Other, in the name of an Other.”
⁴
Butler is right in being outraged at the vastly disproportionate death and suffering inflicted on America’s others by Americans, from the Vietnam War to the War on Terror. But ethical outrage is not enough, even though it may be more than many can allow themselves. The danger of ethical outrage is that it continues to reassert the centrality of the person feeling that emotion, which justifies viewing the other as a perpetual victim—hence the return to the infamous, horrific images of Vietnam, which remains a war rather than a country, and to the napalmed Tran Thi Kim Phuc, the “girl in the picture” as her biographer has called her, her arms forever extended in a pose somewhat like the crucifixion.
⁵
For Americans, Iraq and Afghanistan may also, in the future, remain wars rather than countries for the exact same reasons of guilt, denial, and outrage.

In the urgency and the immediacy of her work, responding to American apathy and to an ongoing war, Butler cannot or will not treat the other as much more than a victim, or at best as an agent with vaguely understood motives and histories. As much as I also feel Butler’s ethical outrage, it appears to me that seeing the other only as a victim treats the other as an object of sympathy or pity, to be idealized or patronized. Existing as the object of or excuse for one’s theory or outrage, the other remains, at worst, unworthy of study, and, at best, beyond criticism. Not criticizing others and theorizing on their behalf further subjugates them by relegating the real work of empathy to ourselves. We are the antiheroes, the guilty ones who deserve criticism, which makes us the center of attention. In the case of Butler, the “we” is the West of which the Western Left is a part of and apart from. While the West may deserve criticism, this judgment need not come at the expense of turning others into (nearly) idealized victims or (almost) unknowable enemies. In her book
Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?
, which focuses on the war in Iraq, Butler is right in demanding the recognition of Western responsibility and Iraqi victimization. But she does not demand the recognition of Iraqis as political subjects, who not only are others but who themselves make others. Correct in pointing to Iraqi losses as lives that the West will not grieve, she nevertheless draws too clear of an opposition between Americans as killers and torturers and Iraqis as victims. Iraqis killed and tortured one another as well, and regardless of American culpability in creating the conditions for such warfare, the responsibility for such killing and torturing falls on those Iraqis who committed the acts. To be a subject, rather than to be an other, means that one can be guilty, and such guilt can be and should be examined as fully as Western guilt.