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In late 1973, in the twilight of the long and devastating war in Vietnam, the Hanoi doctor, intellectual, and communist propagandist Nguyá»...n Khắc Viá»[Dagger]n interviewed dozens of former inmates of Saigon's prisons. He argued that their stories of incarceration revealed an essential truth about the Saigon regime then at war with Vietnamese communists. "By and by," he wrote in the French newspaper Le Monde, "I don't distinguish the faces any more and don't remember the names, I mix up the stories; before me isn't this or that person any more - there is the South, that martyred land" of "barbed wire ... watch towers ... police dogs" and "American advisers instructing the torturers of Saigon." For Nguyá»...n Khắc Viá»[Dagger]n, these prisoners' experiences evoked another brutal regime whose violence he had witnessed as a young man decades before: "1945. The end of the Second World War. I had lived in Europe during these war years, and, like my European friends, I hardly suspected what was going on in Hitler's concentration camps.... I was far from imagining that millions of people had endured the extremities of suffering ... that a doomed regime could sink to the depths of barbarism." "Vietnamese," he promised, "I will not forget."1
Twenty years later, in 1992, Nguyá»...n Khắc Viá»[Dagger]n was once again in Europe to receive France's Grand Prix de la Francophonie for his long career as a historian, translator, editor, and publisher. The decision elicited criticism from members of France's Vietnamese community, some of whom were barred from Vietnam because of their anti-communist politics. One of them, the scholar Dặng Phaong Nghi, offered a very different story about Nguyá»...n Khắc Viá»[Dagger]n's life in wartime Europe. "In crowning Nguyá»...n Khắc Viá»[Dagger]n," she wrote, "does the Académie Française know that it is weaving a crown of laurels not only for a notorious Stalinist but for a sycophant of Nazi ideology?" Dặng Phaong Nghi revealed episodes in the honoree's past that he had never publicly acknowledged: not only had he studied in Nazi Germany, he had written articles defending the Nazi regime. "In passing from Nazism to Communism," she wrote, "Nguyá»...n Khắc Viá»[Dagger]n in fact only remained true to himself, a wayward intellectual fascinated by totalitarian power" (Dặng Phaong Nghi 1992).
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