The University of California, Berkeley, famous for its Free Speech Movement of the 1960s, included the names of 160 faculty, students, and staff in documents it recently turned over to the Trump administration as part of an antisemitism probe. It’s yet another worrying sign in the federal government’s efforts to use allegations of antisemitism to discipline academia and suppress resistance to its agenda, including its support for Israel.

As a graduate of UC Berkeley and as someone who was a student activist there in the 1990s, I was particularly disturbed that the university named names to the government.

Naming names was one of the hallmarks of the paranoid era of the 1950s in the United States, when Americans were hauled before Senator Joe McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee and interrogated about their political beliefs and suspected allegiance to communism. For those under the anti-communist spotlight, naming the names of other people was one way to avoid being blacklisted or otherwise punished for their real or alleged political beliefs. The spectacle of McCarthyist shaming and persecution signaled to the rest of American society to religiously embrace anti-communism, a legacy that is still strong today.

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Many people might dismiss what writers and storytellers do as useless and harmless, but the evidence for our usefulness and power is substantial, especially in this age of growing global authoritarianism and fascism. We deal in narrative, with narrative dominance critical to the struggle for power and ideas. While writing is mostly done individually and should not be legislated, the task of committed writers is to also imagine how their solitary work exists in relation to collective movements for liberation and justice.

From the perspective of the West, it is countries like Russia, China, and North Korea that suppress their writers and artists. Hostility against these countries is justified at least partially through the idea that the West is free and these countries are not, which somehow makes it acceptable to bomb places like Iran at will (the freedom to bomb apparently coming with freedom of speech). But silencing happens within the West, too, sometimes operating through consensus and sometimes through coercion, usually of writers and artists from marginalized populations.

October 7 and the aftermath vividly illustrate how power and narrative operate together in the West through consensus and coercion.

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Many Americans feel that Donald Trump is betraying the country by destroying cherished American principles, while many American allies likewise feel betrayed by Trump’s abandonment of long-term loyalties. As a refugee from Vietnam, where the United States arguably let down its South Vietnamese allies, I do not think that the fickleness of American loyalty, or the consistency of American inconsistency when it comes to principles, is itself a surprise. What is astonishing for some is that the victims of these breaches of trust now include significant amounts of white people.

I grew up in a community of refugees who fled to the United States after the defeat of South Vietnam, and there was a sense among some that the United States had betrayed us. As a condition of its withdrawal from South Vietnam in 1973, the United States promised to come to the aid of South Vietnam, which had been required to build armed forces modeled on those of the United States and to follow military strategies dictated by American generals. When the final invasion by the northern communists happened in 1975, the United States did not send bombers and did not provide the ammunition and fuel that the South Vietnamese military needed for its American planes, tanks, and weapons.

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The United States did rescue 130,000 South Vietnamese people, myself included, which led to the protagonist of my novel, The Sympathizer, saying that American aid would not have been necessary if America hadn’t invaded in the first place. The same sentiment could be said by America’s Afghan allies, or by Palestinians, whose plight could be illustrated by one of the more absurd and tragic scenes during Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza when the United States air-dropped pallets of aid onto a Gazan landscape already laid waste by American-supplied bombs. Part of the fury of the pro-Palestinian, anti-genocide protests that shook American campuses arose from the sense that Palestinians had been treated repeatedly with a bias for decades by a United States that clearly favored Israel. The rhetoric of the United States about advancing freedom and democracy seemed hollow to Palestinians when it supported an Israel that subjected them to occupation and apartheid.

The arrest of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil only reinforces this sense of a failure in American principles. Khalil has so far not been charged with a crime, except for being an outspoken Palestinian. Secretary of State Marco Rubio wants to deport him using an obscure provision – one that's likely unconstitutional – that gives him the expansive authority to expel people on foreign policy grounds. Just as disturbing, Trump is now relying on the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport, without due process, Venezuelan nationals who are alleged gangsters. According to the White House, they are not simply criminals, but terrorists and invaders “conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States.”

A Betrayal that Is Not New

We in the United States should be rightly terrified of the implications that the United States government can deport anyone who it arbitrarily labels as a subversive. But we should also remember that this betrayal of American principles is not new and has been a repetitive part of American history, including the 1919 deportation of Emma Goldman and 249 others deemed as radicals by the government. Throughout the 19th century, mass deportations were carried out on a greater scale against Indigenous peoples, who were forced to move from their land to distant reservations, and in the 20th century against Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the 1930s (300,000 to nearly 2 million people sent to Mexico, many of them American citizens) and Japanese Americans during World War II (120,000 sent to concentration camps).

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Donald Trump does not represent something new in the United States. Instead, he is part of a fundamental contradiction that the United States was born from, a contradiction that has never gone away. On the one hand, the beauty of democracy, opportunity, freedom, and equality (for some). On the other hand, the brutality that made that beauty possible: colonization, genocide, enslavement, occupation, and war. Some willingly embrace the brutality, others are willing to look away from it. That is why the Democratic Party’s loss of its moral compass on Gaza and calling what Israel is doing a genocide was not simply a “single issue,” but a symptom of the rot within a party that hoped that the beauty of multiculturalism and diversity would somehow be enough to overcome the brutality. 

So long as that contradiction between beauty and brutality is not resolved, it will return, and the country – and the world – will be haunted by the original sins that made this country and are still a part of this country. Too many Americans benefit from the contradiction, which has shaped the US into what it is today: a military-industrial complex that is profitable for some, and a global hegemonic power that justifies itself through the narratives of American Exceptionalism and the American Dream.

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Trump and Kamala Harris do not disagree about these narratives, or about the necessity, even divine inevitability, of overwhelmingly dominant American power. As part of the incumbent party in the White House, Harris could hardly be pessimistic about the current state of affairs. Instead, she sought to fine-tune the operations of American power – domestically and globally – and hence turned to the idea of joy, implying that Americans just needed to overcome any gloominess and simply reject Trump’s spectacular politics of demonization and hate. While those politics should be refuted, Democratic legitimacy was undermined by the other spectacles that the Democratic Party helped to perpetuate and had a hand in creating: the obliteration of Gaza and the bombing of Lebanon, as well as the highly visible presence of the unhoused in many American cities, the most direct reminder that the neoliberalism championed by Democrats (and Republicans) had failed too many Americans.    

Trumpian Nostalgia

Trump’s solutions to these complex problems are simplistic but evidently effective, tapping as he did into nostalgia. His campaign slogans “Make America Great Again” and “Take America Back” both gestured at a Golden Age America found somewhere between 1882 and 1942. 1882 marked the year of the Chinese Exclusion Act, whereby Chinese immigrants became the nation’s first illegal immigrants, occurring during the eras of Jim Crow and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. 1942 saw a unified America and the rise of the Greatest Generation, who embarked on the last, uncomplicated Good War even as Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr. signed Executive Order 9066 and mandated the incarceration of Japanese Americans in concentration camps. 

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In between these years, the Gilded Age and its unrestrained power of the rich happened, which many of the billionaires of today clearly long for. And while women had earned the right to vote in 1920, the disruptions of the 1950s and 1960s had not yet arrived: Civil Rights, Black Power, the anti-war movement and the counterculture, and the rise of ever-more vocal feminists, queer and trans people, Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans. In seeking to roll back these gains, Trump expresses a nostalgia for a simpler, more unified, more powerful, more profitable past, with fewer upstarts and fewer critiques of whiteness, maleness, and straightness, along with muted doubts about capitalism and militarism. 

But nostalgia literally means homesickness, a term invented to describe the melancholia of soldiers who had spent too much time away from home. Nostalgia could kill its victims, most likely in a slow manner, and perhaps that is one way to read America’s gradual decline. By “America,” I mean not only the United States but the trademark and sales pitch that the United States has sold to its own people and to the world through its appropriation of the name of America for itself, at the expense of all the other American countries. The value of that American brand has declined, however, with the US finding its global hegemony contested from multiple sides and with Americans themselves pessimistic.

Trump’s nostalgia is an attempt at rebranding, with the implied promise of returning to a 19th-century America where white men were white men. The threats of detention camps and mass deportation are a naked gesture at racially purifying the United States, a fantasy that ignores the economic reality that the United States needs the easily exploitable (most likely poor and working-class immigrants from nonwhite countries) to work its lowest-paid jobs. But this is a capitalist system whose logic is ultimately about the maximum extraction of labor for the most minimal amount of pay, which damages not just economically disadvantaged people of color but also white people, from the poor and working class to the precarious middle class. 

Nostalgia assumes that a return to a more patriarchal white supremacist society is possible, but if it is not, then the slow deaths of a disenfranchised, white working and middle class will continue, addicted as they are to a vision of a beautiful and brutal America. The slow deaths of white people and white dreams are simply the blowback of a system that has already inflicted violence and death at disproportionate rates on the nonwhite. But racism is only one component of the settler colonialism that founded the country, a system whose goal is the maximum extraction of profit, whether that be from exploited bodies or the exploited earth. If being white, male, and straight was some measure of protection from profit extraction in the past, it increasingly no longer is for an ever-larger population of white people, most notably white men. 

Lures and Glamour of Capitalism

Settler colonialism also requires patriarchy and homophobia, which is why Trumpian nostalgia also demands that women know their place, and why queer and trans people are so threatening. The heteronormative family reproduces not just itself but also a cultural system that is hierarchical and which funnels benefits to the patriarchs and their allies, which also includes a share of people of color. The blame or responsibility for a Trump victory mostly goes to these Trump voters and their willingness to dip into the deep and poisoned wells of racism, misogyny, transphobia, and homophobia, not realizing that they, too, will drink from these waters. These waters are also contaminated by the country’s weakness for spectacle, wealth, individualism, and anti-intellectualism, which appeal not only to Trump voters but to the entire population, conditioned by the lures and glamour of capitalism.

In the last few decades, the Democratic Party has offered little resistance to the excesses of capitalism and its basis in the settler colonialism that provided the lands and the labor for American wealth-making. Under the neoliberalism that has been lauded by the Democrats, the party has allowed itself and the country to move ever further right, as the Republican Party has moved the center in its direction. This is a losing proposition for the Democratic Party, whose promises may appear hollow to many Americans who see its leaders as an elite blend of the Ivy League, Hollywood, Wall Street, and the New York Times. How is someone living from paycheck to paycheck supposed to distinguish between a Republican or a Democrat when both will take six-figure honoraria to deliver talks to investment banking firms? 

During these last few decades, the most urgent voices on the left have said intersectionality is what matters, which includes the poor, the working-class, the middle class. Intersectionality is a Black feminist concept from legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, and insisting on intersectionality is important, especially as some in the Democratic Party and among the liberal classes argue that “identity politics” is really to blame for distracting the left from focusing on the real issue of class and the economy. This vision is as white and as nostalgic as Trump’s, which relies heavily on the identity politics of straight white masculinity, which has been unmarked and invisible until the opposition of women, people of color, and queer people made them visible. 

As the theorist Stuart Hall put it, “race is the modality in which class is lived.” That has been true since settlers killed Indigenous people for their land and put enslaved Africans to work on that land. There is no separating class and the economy from race, racism, and white supremacy, just as there is no separating the capitalism of the United States from its violence, conducted against its own minorities and against much of the nonwhite world outside of our borders, realized most vividly at this moment in the genocide in Gaza.

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It is the liberal-to-centrist part of the Democratic Party that has helped to fetishize the military and the wealthy, ignoring both the urgency of demilitarization and the need for, at minimum, economic redistribution. Harris failed because she, but also the entirety of the Democratic Party mainstream, were not capable of articulating how all of these projects have to go forward hand in hand: defending and elevating the economic interests of those who have less; representing the many different peoples of the country and their rights; opposing militarism, conquest, tyranny, and genocide. The left is based on solidarity, and solidarity should have no exceptions, but the Democratic Party has made too many exceptions, from its lack of willingness to more forcefully redirect wealth to those who have less to its inability to defend Palestinians. These exceptions have finally caught up to the party, and the contradiction of beauty and brutality has tightened even further as a result. 

I am disappointed, fearful, numb. But if our dire situation makes me pessimistic, I am also optimistic in knowing that previous American generations and populations of certain kinds have faced much worse, and yet fought through the contradiction to survive. I also find solace in knowing that unlike 2016 to 2020, when I allowed my emotions to be dictated by Trump, I feel more stable, if just as committed to opposing him and everything he represents. Reflecting his rage, cruelty, and pettiness only makes us worse. Feeling lonely, isolated, and defeated is what he wants from us. Get out there and join an organization if you haven’t already. Start one if one doesn’t exist for you. Be visible and vocal, by yourself and with others. Work against Trump and everything he represents from a place of solidarity, love, and justified anger.

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Either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump will soon be the president-elect of the United States. In choosing between the two – which we have often been told is the choice between a lesser evil and a greater evil – the American people will also be making a tactical decision about a strategic issue, which is how to maintain American global hegemony, and whether it will be led, or at least represented, by a Quiet American or an Ugly American.

These characters are Cold War literary tropes, but we are still living in a bipolar world defined as the opposition between freedom and terror, at least from the perspective of the West. The West is a euphemism for colonialism and empire, but most Westerners are not aware of the euphemistic connotations. This is particularly true in the United States, where the invocation of freedom evokes deep mythological feelings. To be American is to be free, and it is the divine obligation of Americans to maintain their freedom at all costs, as well as to export this freedom everywhere.

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But the freedom of Americans has always come with the terror Americans have inflicted on others, beginning with the conquest and colonization of Indigenous peoples and the kidnapping and enslavement of Africans. This original evil, already found in the Garden of Eden that serves as the American New World, is still present in the United States, a fallen country that paradoxically and perpetually believes in its innocence rather than its guilt. This innocence is the emotional mechanism of denial and delusion that allows the American empire to grow.

The Quiet American vs the Ugly American

Graham Greene, an English novelist, understood this. In his 1955 novel The Quiet American, the title character is an articulate, intelligent, sincere, and open-minded CIA agent, in love with a Vietnamese woman. While the CIA agent will eventually pay with his life, his commitment to anticommunism and the freedom of the Vietnamese people leads him to counterinsurgency tactics which kill innocent Vietnamese civilians in a mass bombing. Greene’s parable foreshadows the eventual tragedy: tens of thousands of Americans dying in Viet Nam, Laos, and Cambodia, their names commemorated on a wall, while many of the millions of Southeast Asians who also perish remain anonymous, forever unremembered.

This vast disproportionality – the consequence of freedom and terror converging – goes back to white settlers massacring native peoples, who were only engaged in their own self-defense. While natives killed a certain number of settlers, settlers responded with genocide. The only good Indian was a dead Indian. The only good Vietnamese was a dead Vietnamese. The only good Palestinian is a dead Palestinian. This logic of conquest and colonialism is embedded in the American psyche, where any guilty feelings about the piles of dead are suppressed through the perpetual turn to innocence.

Every presidential election is an opportunity to witness the repetition of innocence. When Barack Obama, the Quiet American, was elected, a surge of innocent joy erupted among those wearing the Democratic face of America. At last, here was the moral America! Then Donald Trump, the Ugly American, was elected, and for those wearing the Republican face of America, there was likewise a wellspring of ecstasy. Finally, the great America!

Both sides were correct. The moral America and the great America, the Quiet American and the Ugly American, are manifestations of the freedom and the terror that have co-existed since the country’s founding. American liberals and the postwar Democratic Party (one might ask which war I am referring to, when the United States has participated in so many wars, but that is for a different essay) are beneficiaries and inheritors of the genocidal policies of the Ugly Americans. The liberals of today prefer to export the terror overseas, where every foreign country can be the frontier in the American imagination, and where the quiet tactics of drone missiles, proxy states, and special ops can do their work. Meanwhile, at home in the settler colonial state, freedom becomes realized as a happy multiculturalism, an inclusive diversity where everyone possesses a share in the equity of the war machine.

But the Ugly American refuses to be pacified. In the 1958 novel of the same title by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer, set in a fictional Southeast Asian country besieged by communism, the writers make clear that the Ugly American is a threat not only to the Southeast Asians but to American interests. Their work is a condemnation of the Ugly American, but not of the right of Americans to lead the world toward freedom. And yet the persistence of the Ugly American’s efforts to maintain control of the war machine, nearly seven decades later, is testimony to how that war machine has its origins in what the poet William Carlos Williams calls the “orgy of blood” from which America sprang. The Quiet American is embarrassed by this orgy and prefers it to be conducted beyond our borders. The Ugly American is not ashamed, and would like to bathe in this blood yet again.

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Even more so, the Ugly American wishes to defend and purify the country by waging a war of freedom against “terrorists” – both perceived “Islamic” ones overseas, but also the implied terrorists at home, who take the form of refugees, undocumented immigrants, or those suspected of being illegal, upstart women who assert their autonomy, queer and trans people who undermine the patriarchy’s necessary gender binaries, criminals and Black people, all of whom are too often seen as one and the same, with everyone subject to incarceration, exile, discipline, and violence.

Am I terrified of living under the regime of the Ugly American? Will many Americans be afflicted under such a regime? Yes. But if such a regime is the greater evil, it is because it is a repetition on American soil of what the United States has already subjected so many to in the making of this country, including through armed insurrection, mass deportation, detention camps, controlling women’s bodies, and the persecution of political enemies. These are similar to policies the United States has supported in many countries it has controlled or influenced. What the Quiet American offers is a bargain, namely that the margin of difference between lesser and greater evil will be inflicted not on Americans – for the most part – but on those outside of our borders.

A Fight Against the Greater and Lesser Evils

Does the knowledge of this weigh on the minds of American voters? Perhaps. But even if such is the case, it is also likely such knowledge is covered with a thin sheet of innocence, so that it does not have to be looked at. The importance of Gaza and Palestine at the moment is that the sheet has been pulled away by Palestinians themselves on social media, and they are demanding that the world in general, and Americans in particular, look upon their dead, hoping that the same outrage generated by the photograph of the mutilated body of Emmett Till will move Americans, the prime supporter of their tormentors.

The Ugly American will not be so moved. The Quiet American promises to be moved, but the history of Quiet Americans in regard to Palestine, from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama and Joe Biden, is not promising. The Quiet American has always been a counterinsurgent, and the Palestinians are the latest and perhaps most urgent insurgency against the Western and colonial order that the United States and Israel represent. The first tactic of counterinsurgency is to isolate the insurgent, which requires not just the demonization, silencing, and erasure of Palestinians, but the denial of genocide and the separation of what is happening to Palestinians from what is happening to everyone else. Hence, genocide becomes a single issue, when it is the repetition of America’s founding genocide now conducted elsewhere, when it is, in fact, the margin of difference between lesser and greater evil. Calling Israel’s genocide of Palestinians a single issue allows many Americans the ability to live with lesser evil.

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As for who you should vote for, why turn to me for the answer? You already know what you need to know, and now it is up to you to face yourself in the privacy of the ballot box, just as the faithful are, in the end, alone with their own conscience. But the problem is that the metaphor of one’s vote as a matter of the lesser or greater evil is, for too many Americans, simply a metaphor. How many Americans will choose the lesser evil and recognize that it is not a metaphor but is, in fact, evil? And will then choose to fight not only the greater evil but the lesser evil as well? Fighting a greater evil provides reassuring moral and political clarity. Fighting the lesser evil would mean recognizing the ultimate unity of the Quiet American and the Ugly American, archetypes of this country from its very origins, when settlers arrived in the Garden of Eden and imagined themselves as Adam and Eve, when they were, in fact, the serpent.

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This is a tale of two spectacles. 

The first one has unfolded with horrific images of the dead, wounded, and dismembered from Gaza, recorded mostly by Palestinian journalists and civilians. Those images have shared space on my news and social media feeds with the second spectacle, an American one ranging from partisan politics to celebrity gossip to the latest television or movie blockbuster. Alternating between these two dramas, the international and the domestic, on a daily, even hourly, basis has been unnerving. That distress, which I share with many, lends urgent meaning to the phrase, “You can’t look away.”

One function of a spectacle is to be so compelling that viewers are distracted from other events happening at their peripheral vision. The spectacle works by keeping our eyes fixed on it, from the historical power struggle depicted in the Emmy-winning FX ​series, ‘Shogun,’​​ to the actual political drama of the US presidential race. The unease we may feel watching a television series, hooked as we are on questions of who will die and who will triumph, is contained by our awareness that it is fiction. The discomfort of watching the American electoral melodrama has added bite, knowing that who Americans elect will have real-world consequences. Politicians, parties, states, PACs, and movements, all knowingly manipulate the narratives of their own spectacles. Entertainment and deadly stakes merge.

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Watching Israel’s war on Gaza, or Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, or the preceding televised Israeli invasions of Gaza, is to realize that as awful as war and massacre are, they also add up to a spectacle. The effects on viewers can be ambiguous. An unfortunate status that Viet Nam shares with Palestine is that the war in Viet Nam was both an actual war and a spectacle for global viewership. “Palestine is this generation’s Vietnam War,” activist Hatem Abudayyeh said as he prepared to bring antiwar protest to the Democratic convention in Chicago. While the wars in Viet Nam and Palestine are not the same, there are parallels – from massive protests to the way the visual images of the wars are received.  

As one of the characters from my novel The Sympathizer, which is about the consequences of the war in Viet Nam, said, “The world watched what happened to our country and most of the world did nothing. Not only that – they also took great pleasure in it.” The complications of watching and making spectacles, as well as being a part of them, were driven home even further for me recently because The Sympathizer itself became an HBO television series that debuted in April, even as the death toll in Gaza reached at least 34,622. Although I was thrilled to see my novel adapted, especially by the director Park Chan-wook, the news from Gaza blunted my happiness. Seeing the spectacles unfold side by side – my personal one, about the horrors of a past war, and the political one, about the horrors of a present war –reminded me of a question I sometimes think about: how did the rest of the world outside of Viet Nam, Laos, and Cambodia experience the war being fought, and as it became the first televised, living room war?

That media-saturated war left the world with indelible moving and still images, from the monk Thich Quang Duc immolating himself to the girl Phan Thi Kim Phuc running naked after being burnt by napalm to the piles of dead in a trench who were among the 504 civilians massacred by American soldiers at My Lai.

But while those images catapulted Viet Nam from a country into a war, another spectacle took place simultaneously, as the photographer Tod Papageorge shows in American Sports, 1970: Or How We Spent the War in Vietnam. In contrast to the stereotypical memories of that era – hippies, counterculture, antiwar protests – Papageorge’s photos document American crowds watching football and baseball games, having fun. The implication is clear: many, perhaps most, Americans went about their lives not thinking about the war, a task aided by the spectacle of sports.

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What, then, to make of a television show such as ‘The Sympathizer,’ in an age of renewed war where the United States again plays a key participant?

Turning the Machinery Against Itself

The show presented a spectacle, with famous actors (Robert Downey, Jr., Sandra Oh), a talented Vietnamese cast (Hoa Xuande, Fred Nguyen Khan, Duy Nguyễn, Toan Le, Kieu Chinh, Nguyễn Cao Kỳ Duyên), and an enormous budget (although not as much as a single F-35, the premiere fighter jet of the United States military). But even if a spectacle entertains, its power to shape a common sense of public opinion should not be underestimated. The spectacle-as-entertainment has long been deployed to justify Israel’s war on Gaza and occupation of Palestine.

As a teenager in the 1980s, I watched the 1960 epic ‘Exodus,’ about the founding of Israel, on videotape. Paul Newman plays a handsome, resolute Jewish officer of the Zionist militia known as the Haganah, determined to rescue a shipload of Jewish refugees from the uncaring, antisemitic British army and deliver them to Palestine. There, they are threatened by Arab “terrorists,” who the Haganah and Irgun – another Zionist militant group – defeat. This was the extent of my education about Israel and Palestine – outside of Western news media – until university. I was not alone. In Orientalism, Edward Said bemoaned how most representations of Muslims and Arabs in late 20th-century Western pop culture depicted them as terrorists, normalizing Islamophobia.     

Spectacles are more easily consumable when they reinforce a society’s dominant thinking, or at least do not threaten it. ‘Exodus’ became popular in the postwar era, when American attitudes towards Jews and Israel were transformed by American guilt over the Holocaust and increasing American geopolitical interest in the Middle East (or West Asia). By the time I watched ‘Exodus,’ mainstream American thinking had become pro-Israel. The template ‘Exodus’ deployed – the pious defense of the underdog against an oppressor in the founding of a new land – resonated with American mythologizations about the United States’ origins and the US role in other lands, like Viet Nam. John Wayne’s 1968 epic of Vietnam War propaganda, ‘The Green Berets,’ likewise positioned the Viet Cong and Vietnamese communists as “terrorists,” with American soldiers helping the South Vietnamese defend their young nation.

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I was thinking of ‘The Green Berets,’ and numerous other Hollywood-made movies of the war when I wrote The Sympathizer. My novel argues that Hollywood is the American military-industrial complex’s unofficial ministry of propaganda. While Hollywood’s spectacular movies depicted the conflict in Viet Nam as a dirty war, the propaganda achieved something more insidious: it continued to centralize Americans in the drama by depicting them as antiheroes and morally ambiguous villains, leaving the Vietnamese mostly as silent extras in the drama of their own war. As a television show, ‘The Sympathizer’ attempts to turn the machinery of the spectacle against itself, first by placing Vietnamese faces, names, viewpoints, and language at the center, and second by foregrounding American imperialism as a major cause of the war, contradicting how many Americans saw the war: a failed effort with noble ambitions.

Given the novel’s critique of American imperialism, the adaptation’s existence remains miraculous. The spectacle of our television show – while entertaining – contests the imperial and colonial mindset, that justified the spectacle happening simultaneously in Gaza. Nearly 50 years after the end of the American war in Viet Nam, Americans still have difficulty understanding the war’s significance, so unsettling is it to American self-conceptions. People mostly want their spectacles to be simple entertainment. They don’t want to look away, but will look away from spectacles that truly provoke.

Unsettling Spectacles

The war in Gaza is one of these unsettling spectacles whose final results remain unknown, but one thing is clear: Israel’s intention is to cow its enemies, not only with actual bombs but with the spectacle of razing Gaza. Gaza has become the most difficult kind of theater (of war and otherwise): where the spectator cannot look, and yet must look.

There are videos of universities, schools, hospitals, homes, and refugee camps being blown up. Of people beheaded. Of dead children. Of mass graves. Of columns of men stripped nearly naked. Of Israeli soldiers destroying and looting for fun. Of Israeli citizens holding up food and medical aid, storming their own military base, attacking Palestinians in the West Bank. Of rape. There is so much visual evidence of atrocity, recorded by Israelis themselves but mostly by Palestinians, that Israel has begun to lose control of the spectacle that has been crucial to its own self-justification as a nation.    

The war in Viet Nam offers a parallel. The US lost that war for numerous military and political reasons, but the fact that the war became spectacular and that the US could not control the narrative of that spectacle, were crucial cultural factors in the American defeat. The real-world spectacles grew inseparable from the cultural spectacles. The Tet Offensive of 1968, which included the Viet Cong and the Northern Vietnamese army committing massacres against civilians in Hue, was a military defeat for the Viet Cong. But the offensive, with its spectacular images of Vietnamese guerillas invading the American embassy and Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing Nguyen Van Lem on a Saigon street in an infamous image captured by Eddie Adams, resulted in an important political victory, revealing the vulnerability of the American military and turning the tide of global public opinion against the American war.

Disrupting the Dominant Narrative

If spectacles can entertain, distract, and pacify, they also have the power to stoke rage and resistance. But the narrative matters. As Rashid Khalidi has argued in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, Israel has exercised great control of its narrative and its spectacle since 1948, so much so that reflexively supporting Israel and rendering Palestine invisible is common sense in the West.

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Palestinian resistance has, therefore, been not only military and political but cultural, with a critical role for writers, artists, and filmmakers in contesting Israeli narratives and foregrounding Palestinian ones. The symbolic battle is arguably as important as the actual combat or, in this case, genocide. This is not to demean human suffering and the loss of lives, but to point to how the symbolic victories justify and perpetuate the military and political victories. Hence, the incredible amount of denial, lying, gaslighting, and hypocrisy on the part of Israel and its supporters, in the face of the overwhelming and spectacular deaths of Palestinians, as well as the systemic efforts of Israel and its supporters to demonize the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement and the student encampments this past spring, which were themselves a spectacle.  

The global antiwar movement against the atrocities of the United States in Viet Nam could not prevent three million Vietnamese deaths, or more than 58,000 American ones, not to mention the hundreds of thousands dead in Laos and Cambodia. But perhaps there would have been even more deaths without that movement and its spectacular images. And in the aftermath of the war, with Democrat Jimmy Carter insisting the “destruction was mutual” (it wasn’t), the urgency of centering Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian perspectives matters, including in the complicated realm of spectacle. Disrupting the dominant spectacle by creating another one ruptures the “common sense” that justifies genocide.   

The current refusal of Palestinian Americans and their supporters in the United States to allow Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party to ignore Gaza, Palestine, the question of genocide, and American complicity should be understood in this framework of narrative struggle. The American presidential election is a gigantic spectacle of global impact, with everyone’s eyes fixed on it. For many who support Democrats, it defies common sense to make the genocide that Israel is committing a fundamental cause in the face of so many other pressing issues. But Palestinians and their allies have a chance to continue redefining that common sense, by leveraging the power of the spectacle that has historically been used to destroy and erase them.

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The violent crackdown on students protesting against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza reveals the stark hypocrisy of political and academic leaders at our colleges and universities, including my own. Instead of first turning to dialogue and debate – the very skills and values universities should promote – school administrators have turned to police, extreme discipline, and complying with a mainstream consensus that seems more interested in suppressing criticism of Israeli and American policy than protecting students.

From Columbia University to my own University of Southern California, peaceful student encampments in common university areas have been dismantled by city police, with hundreds of students arrested. Some have been suspended, evicted from dormitories, and threatened with expulsion and criminal conviction. At UT Austin, state troopers threw a Fox cameraman to the ground and arrested him. At Emory University, the chair of philosophy, Noelle McAfee, was arrested by a police officer wearing a balaclava, as if he were conducting an antiterrorism raid. Another Emory professor, Caroline Fohlin, who sought to protect students being arrested, was wrestled to the ground by two police officers, handcuffed, and charged with battery.

These student protests against a war that has killed over 34,000 Palestinians, at least two-thirds of whom are women and children, are what professors and administrators love to call a “teachable moment.” Unfortunately, most universities and colleges are failing their academic principles, their students, and their faculty. I wish I could say I was surprised, but after three decades in academia, I am not.

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I was arrested twice in college for political protests more than 30 years ago. Along with other Asian Americans and our allies, I participated in sit-ins and occupied the chancellor's office, calling for a more diversified curriculum and faculty that better represented our community. I graduated with four misdemeanors – two each for resisting arrest and trespassing. I was lucky I was not expelled or suspended, but I was also at UC Berkeley at a time when the administration understood that these were not appropriate punishments for young people who were committed to the very principles of truth, justice, debate, and open-mindedness that universities represent. I wish I could say the same for the administrators at universities and colleges today, including my own. But too many administrators have chosen to deploy police clad in riot gear and wielding tear gas, tasers, sniper rifles, and armored vehicles against students.

On my own campus, the USC administration canceled the speech of its valedictorian, Asna Tabassum, after pro-Israel groups on and off campus labeled her antisemitic for including a link on her Instagram to a website that called for the abolition of Israel. Tabassum minored in resistance to genocide, offered through the Advanced Center for Genocide Research. The center’s founding director, Wolf Gruner, called Tabassum one of the most empathetic students he had ever taught. Tabassum said she planned to speak to the commencement audience about hope and human rights. She might or might not have brought up Gaza and Palestine, war and genocide, but even if she did, should that have been a reason to cancel her?

The university administration offered unspecified threats to safety so severe that it felt it could not protect Tabassum or the commencement ceremony, even though former President Barack Obama had attended the commencement the year before and presumably required heightened safety measures. It is difficult not to believe that safety was a pretext for the university to avoid controversy that might antagonize pro-Israel students, family members, and outsiders. But the real consequences of such a controversy would not have been community protest; instead, it would have been political blowback from Congress, donors, and trustees. 

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This strategy of avoidance and appeasement is doomed to failure. Columbia University president Minouche Shafik submitted completely to Republican demands to discipline her faculty and students, but this did not prevent Rep. Elise Stefanik and House Speaker Mike Johnson from demanding her resignation.

Republicans will not be satisfied until students are being clubbed and tear-gassed in a law-and-order spectacle that will please Benjamin Netanyahu and the GOP base. But the right-wing reaction against student protesters is not only about their stance on Israel and Gaza, which includes their willingness to declare the war a genocide and to demand divestment from Israel and the ending of further military aid. Instead, the right wing is stirring a moral panic around antisemitism, using Jewish students and their feelings of being uncomfortable and threatened as a reason to crack down on protesting students.

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Racist and antisemitic threats are wrong and should be treated appropriately, which is to say, through academic disciplinary and legal methods targeted at the individuals who issue such threats, not through the deployment of riot police against masses of peaceful protesters. But a big difference exists between being threatened and being uncomfortable, and critics of the protesters – and the anti-war movement in general – blur the two. 

This happens by conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism, even though many student protesters are themselves Jewish. It’s what some have called a “weaponized antisemitism,” which places more value on how some Jewish students feel uncomfortable than how Palestinians are actually being killed en masse by an Israel whose weapons are supplied by the U.S.

Being uncomfortable is not necessarily a problem, and certainly not enough of a problem to shut down free speech and academic debate. Discomfort can be useful, and is even necessary, for us to argue and question our assumptions and those of others, leading to greater intellectual, moral, and political clarity. These are the things that are supposed to happen on college campuses and what Tabassum’s speech at USC might have provoked. 

The suppression of student protests today should worry all of us, including those who might support Israel but who are otherwise convinced about the need for free speech and the mission of universities. This is because the moral panic over antisemitism being stoked by the right is only the latest manifestation of a decades-long campaign to discipline and possibly capture academia. 

Over the last few decades, American academia has undergone a painful transformation. Tenured faculty have been replaced in ever-greater numbers by faculty without job security. The humanities and social sciences have been depleted. Tuition and loan debt has spiraled rapidly. University presidents – who are increasingly CEOs, politicians, and generals instead of academics – have become ever more beholden to boards of trustees that are often composed of the wealthy and politically connected. Meanwhile, the right has fought to eliminate affirmative action for racial diversity but sought to demand the equivalent of affirmative action for ideological diversity. 

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In universities, the lack of democracy and transparency is more of a norm than an exception. Faculty and students are routinely ignored by university administrations when it comes to the most serious issues, which is to say those that involve money. This is perhaps why students have felt that their only recourse when it comes to demanding divestment and the end of military aid to Israel was through protest, carried out in public spaces, rather than the futile road of privately appealing to administrators. 

The student protesters are on the right side of history, as they were in the 1960s and 1970s, demonstrating against the immoral and racist war the U.S. was waging in Viet Nam, Laos, and Cambodia. The students were right again in the 1980s, campaigning against apartheid and forcing universities to divest from South Africa. 

It is amazing how institutions teach idealism, including these cases of opposition to war and apartheid, and are then astonished that students are idealists. We are now witnessing a student rebellion against the hypocrisy of their elders and the powerful, who tell them they have to accept the lesser of two evils, and who weaponize antisemitism to justify genocide.

Student protesters face real penalties in terms of their reputations and job prospects, as well as their physical and emotional well-being. School administrators who stand up for academic principles and defend their students and faculty may lose their positions, but they would return to the ranks of the faculty, and with tenured security. This is the choice the university leaders face, and it is quite different in consequence to what the students face, which makes their cowardice even more disturbing.

The saying “those who can’t do, teach” seems all too true now in this moment. Instead, it is the students who are teaching their professors and the public at large. Through their actions, the students are showing what idealism and conviction actually look like.

Zeteo contributor Viet Thanh Nguyen is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and a professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. His novel, The Sympathizer, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and numerous other awards. Subscribe to Zeteo to get more from Viet and other Zeteo contributors straight to your inbox.