Nothing Ever Dies

Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War is a work of historical criticism and ethical theory by Vietnamese-American ethnic studies scholar and author Viet Thanh Nguyen. The book is primarily a treatise on the ethics of creating and preserving public memories, particularly those of mass atrocities such as war. Nguyen analyzes the Vietnam War and its long wake of memories to explain different ways in which people remember war. In place of the many common methods of creating memories, which he believes invite bias and erasure, he proposes his own ethical model. Nguyen’s thesis is that wars are not merely enacted physically; on a battlefield or in the air: they are reenacted in memory, driving the beliefs, decisions, and attitudes of those who remember them. He believes that developing an improved ethical model of memory will help prevent future wars.

Nguyen begins Nothing Ever Dies by listing a few common ethical models for understanding war, models that he rejects because he believes that they perpetuate injustice. First, he introduces the ethical stance of “remembering one’s own”; that is, the practice of representing one’s own side of the battle as the heroic and just one, while representing one’s opposition as evil. This practice engenders a tendency to promote violent nationalism by dehumanizing outside groups.

Nguyen contends that “industries of memory” formed by social, political, and economic institutions that seek to capitalize on the memories people create – are responsible for these injustices. He argues that every nation has an industry of memory, one that generally promotes the interests of the elite class. He takes the example of the United States, claiming that its industry of memory is championed by Hollywood, which glorifies war and applies a biased American morality to war stories. He compares this memory industry to the American army; while the army uses force and threat to dominate others, Hollywood uses the power of images and words. The Vietnamese memory industry, in contrast, tries to exploit the minds of visiting tourists, utilizing small-scale memorials and museums to subtly spread propaganda.



Next, Nguyen departs from his explanation of traditional usages of memory and traditional ethical attitudes towards war. He introduces his own idea of ethical memory based on what he calls “ethical forgetting.” Ethical forgetting is a principle that proactively affirms the gradual failure and disappearance of memory and its central position in human life. Once one accepts memory’s ambiguities and failures, Nguyen believes, he is better equipped to notice where memory is being abused to motivate people. He asserts that the process of forgetting should be managed in order to prevent the further marginalization of people who suffer through war.

Nguyen also argues that ethical memory demands that we affirm that all humans contain a propensity for both good and evil. Traditional narratives of war always set up a false dichotomy of good versus evil. As a result, our conceptions of humanity and inhumanity become decoupled from each other, and we forget that we, too, have hurt people or otherwise demonstrated our evil.

Nguyen ends his book with the claim that we might start to improve our ethics of memory by installing more cosmopolitan systems of education. The education systems of the United States and abroad promote regressive nationalist impulses that teach students to be blind to their own propensity for evil. Nothing Ever Dies is an argument about the future of liberal arts education as much as it is an ethical treatise.