A Spy Among Us: The Sympathizer in the Media

[Meredith Quill]

Your Media Topic!

[BetterButter]

 

[BetterButter]

 

[aghst]

I am able to read this WaPo article on the show and the history of US involvement in the war without being a subscriber.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/2024/04/14/sympathizer-vietnam-war-history-context/

 

Quote

The war theoretically spanned 1955-1975, but only from an American point of view. For the Vietnamese, the conflict was a much more significant sprawl. They had already been fighting the French for a decade when the Americans showed up, went on to fight the Cambodians immediately afterward, then continued to sporadically lock horns with the Chinese for over a decade to come. For all practical purposes, Vietnam was at war from 1946 until 1991, and that’s just within the country itself.

This mind-set of seemingly perpetual war was carried to the United States by Vietnamese refugees following the Fall of Saigon, who fled the reprisals and “reeducation” programs of the communist victors. Among them was 4-year-old Viet Thanh Nguyen, for whom “the war continued very vividly through the ’70s and the ’80s” while his family settled into the Vietnamese diaspora in the United States. Forty years later, Nguyen’s acclaimed novel would tell the story of a communist double agent who infiltrates this exiled community to maintain the war on U.S. soil, where defeated Vietnamese officers plot the reconquest of their homeland.