A Shared Sorrow: Reckoning with War, Memory, and Greater America w/ Viet Thanh Nguyen

🎙️ 4TH OF JULY SPECIAL

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On this edition of Parallax Views, acclaimed author and Pulitzer Prize–winner Viet Thanh Nguyen, author fo the hit novel The Sympathizer, joins us to discuss his powerful new essay in The Nation, “Greater America Has Been Exporting Disunion for Decades.” We explore how U.S. foreign policy—past and present—continues to shape not only global politics but domestic disunion.

Nguyen draws on his recent trip to El Salvador to examine the enduring legacies of U.S.-backed wars, the violence of counterinsurgency, and how authoritarian leaders like Nayib Bukele are now being embraced by American officials like Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Donald Trump himself.

We unpack the idea of “Greater America” as a project of imperial ambition, mass incarceration, and historical amnesia—from the El Mozote massacre to the Phoenix Program, COINTELPRO, and modern immigration policy. Nguyen also reflects on what it means to be a refugee in a country responsible for your displacement, and why genuine patriotism requires memory, grief, and dissent, not myth or denial.

This wide-ranging conversation delves into empire, memory, war crimes, refugee identity, authoritarianism, and the feedback loop between U.S. intervention abroad and repression at home.

NOTE: Views of guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect all the views of J.G. Michael or the Parallax Views w/ J.G. Michael program