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Linh Dinh's avatar

Hi all,

Since Heart of Darkness is mentioned, I want to draw your attention to Chihua Achebe's "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'," as published in the Massachussetts Review in 1977: http://kirbyk.net/hod/image.of.africa.html

Also, to use an 1899 novel about the Congo to describe South Vietnam in the 1960's, then declare that "it is not about Vietnam, but Vietnam itself" is the height of madness, but what do I know, I am only Vietnamese!

As for the arm chopping episode, imagine if there's a Chinese film that claims Chinese soldiers went to some town in Alabama to vaccinate a bunch of white kids, then just after they left, an old white guy ran after them to say local white men had just chopped all these kids' vaccinated arms off, would you find that believable for even a second? Not only that, a Chinese soldier was so distraught, he felt like tearing his teeth out, so this Chinese soldier cared more about the white kids than local white men, and I'm stressing local because in Apocalypse Now, the arm chopping happened before the American soldiers could get far away. They were close enough for an old man to run after them.

If the point of the arm chopping was to terrify Vietnamese from associating with Americans, then why did the old man run after these Americans?! Because they didn't just represent charity and science, as embodied by the vaccines, but justice. The old man ran after these foreigners to report a crime committed by his own people!

Again, none of this happened, but was dreamt up by a Jew, John Milius, and let us not forget that Jews are fantastic at conjuring up unimaginable atrocities, but only as committed by other races, of course, so we have Jewish skin lampshades, Jewish fat soap and, of course, six million Jews gassed to death. If you point out that the Israeli Army is as savage as they come, then you're a hardcore Nazi!!!

Linh

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Freelance_Philosopher's avatar

The only way that soliloquy ever made sense to me was if the Viet Cong had been acting on suspicion that the "inoculations" were a poison or sterilant.

The dumb grunt American soldiers, Kurtz included, may very well have thought they were doing "good" by force-injecting "medicine" into the native kids. But, unbeknownst to the grunts, it was actually military-grade bioweaponry. In all likelihood, this same dynamic may have been at work during the Indian Wars of North America, as the soldiers on the field may very well have believed they were doing humanitarian work by handing out blankets to the poor slobs they were driving out of their ancestral lands...when really the blankets were weaponized with smallpox by the frontier equivalent of DARPA.

In the context of Kurtz's story, the native cadres had the cajones to hack off the poisoned arms, as necessary to prevent the toxin from reaching the heart, brain, or gonads, where the real "tikkun olam magic" happens. While Kurtz and his boys wept that their humanitarian efforts had been thwarted, the brass above them were merely irked that the rising generation of Viets wound up merely maimed, rather than genocided once and for all.

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