QUOTE
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/opinion/21iht-edcohen.html
There remains the mystery of Vietnamese forgiveness. Of course, a victor can always be magnanimous. But that’s not enough of an explanation — at least not for someone more familiar with Balkan and Middle Eastern memory, whose capacity to generate new violence from past wounds is fathomless.
Nor is the youth of Vietnam’s population, more than 70 percent of them born after the war, sufficient reason for the relegation of the past. The young can also be full of a thirst for vengeance, as some are in Gaza.
No, only culture, that inadequate word, can explain Vietnam’s ability to look forward. In Buddhism and Confucianism, which suffuse Vietnamese life, the present and future are prized.
Ancestor worship is also near universal, with small shrines to a family’s forbears adorning many homes. I asked Kenneth Fairfax, the U.S. consul general whose office is on the site of the desperate rooftop American evacuation of April 1975, how an ancestor is viewed, perhaps one killed by a foreign enemy?
“When your photo’s up there 50 years from now, you want to be remembered for making the generation after you, and the one after that, more prosperous,” Fairfax said.
I don’t know how to transplant that notion to the Middle East. I do know Obama has to reject Pyle — “They don’t want Communism” — for Fowler — “They want enough rice” — to advance his vision of a more peaceful world.
There remains the mystery of Vietnamese forgiveness. Of course, a victor can always be magnanimous. But that’s not enough of an explanation — at least not for someone more familiar with Balkan and Middle Eastern memory, whose capacity to generate new violence from past wounds is fathomless.
Nor is the youth of Vietnam’s population, more than 70 percent of them born after the war, sufficient reason for the relegation of the past. The young can also be full of a thirst for vengeance, as some are in Gaza.
No, only culture, that inadequate word, can explain Vietnam’s ability to look forward. In Buddhism and Confucianism, which suffuse Vietnamese life, the present and future are prized.
Ancestor worship is also near universal, with small shrines to a family’s forbears adorning many homes. I asked Kenneth Fairfax, the U.S. consul general whose office is on the site of the desperate rooftop American evacuation of April 1975, how an ancestor is viewed, perhaps one killed by a foreign enemy?
“When your photo’s up there 50 years from now, you want to be remembered for making the generation after you, and the one after that, more prosperous,” Fairfax said.
I don’t know how to transplant that notion to the Middle East. I do know Obama has to reject Pyle — “They don’t want Communism” — for Fowler — “They want enough rice” — to advance his vision of a more peaceful world.
