Someone Is Out to Get Us by Brian Brown

Author:Brian Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2019-11-04T16:00:00+00:00

In 1955, Graham Greene published The Quiet American. It would have improved the world’s future had it expanded Dwight Eisenhower’s thinking. Greene’s anti-imperialist novel is about a U.S. official in Vietnam so blinded by American exceptionalism that he can’t see its destructive consequences. “The Americans are prosperous and spiritually blank-eyed,” wrote Arthur Miller of The Quiet American, “they walk with the best of intentions in the impenetrable delusion that theirs is the only civilized way to live; in this book they walk in a closed circle outside of which the alien millions of the world, especially the poor, lead a life unknown and unknowable to them, and they are forced, the Americans are in the book, finally to rely upon devious policies of political opportunism and terroristic force.”

The novel was inspired by Greene’s experience as a newspaper correspondent in French Indochina, where he met an American CIA agent working undercover who lectured him about finding a “third force” in Vietnam—neither communism nor colonialism, but a combination of traditions. It is believed that Greene’s central character, Alden Pyle, was based on actual CIA agent Edward Lansdale. Greene’s fictional version of Lansdale is a Harvard graduate who is thoughtful, soft-spoken, intellectual, serious, and idealistic. He has had no real experience in Southeast Asia and bases his foreign policy opinions on books and periodicals. Justifying his actions, Pyle—the quiet American of the novel—offers the domino theory.

“If Indochina goes—” he says. Thomas Fowler, the stand-in for Greene, interrupts:

“I know that record. Siam goes. Malaya goes. Indonesia goes. What does ‘go’ mean?”

“They’ll be forced to believe what they’re told, they won’t be allowed to think for themselves.”

Fowler responds, “Do you think the peasant thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night? I know the harm liberals do.… I’ve no particular desire to see you win.”

When The Quiet American was made into a film, in 1958, director Joseph L. Mankiewicz turned the cautionary tale about American foreign intervention into American anticommunist propaganda. “Working with the American Friends of Vietnam, a lobby group connected to the CIA,” Stephen Kinzer explained, “Mankiewicz bought the screen rights to The Quiet American. He told friends he would completely change the book’s message and he did. His film starred the war hero Audie Murphy as the American in Vietnam, now portrayed as the selfless defender of freedom rather than a deluded imperialist. Lansdale, who helped write the screenplay, praised it as ‘an excellent change from Mr. Greene’s novel of despair.’ Greene was appalled.”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.