If you'd read it, you'd have found that the blindness is not there. But I don't think it's the piece you would have wanted either way. Willful zealotry is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose. I see it in your comment, fwiw.
This is a first person recollection of a nine year old girl's experience surviving two revolutionary civil wars and a genocide. Not incidentally, the sentiments you express were the precise sentiments weaponised to fuel and justify this bloodbath.
Stopping at paragraph one to "yeah but she's a bouge...." is a mark of zealotry.
As to "sightedness," which I take as meaning obligatory mentions of class issues, imperialism and foreign cultural influences... it's sprinkled liberally throughout the piece. Even the title. The "softness" she's talking about is bourgeois softness, compared to peasants who had been living almost as hard before.
Here's one passage: "It would be tempting to affect a survivor’s bravado, as if I had achieved my continued existence through will and wit. But my chief survival advantage was being born to a family that could afford to fly to Saigon. We used our dwindling gold to flee to a place where wearing eyeglasses did not put our lives in immediate danger."
I suspect this does not suffice, given my first paragraph. This is not an essay about how capitalist greed and imperialist arrogance are the ultimate culprits. This is a story where ideological zealots play the roles of crusader, conquistador and slaver.
The willful element is turning the story around. Capitalism and Imperialism the root cause, even if the actual atrocities were committed by anticapitalist anti-imperialists. This is always true and if it isn't, just "dig deeper" and find that it is true. That sounds like willful zealotry to me.
It's equivalent to blaming the caliphate for the inquisition, berating a muslim or jewish victim for blindness to the true underlying cause... Also, refusing to read something because it doesn't start with a declaration that ideologically conforms to your position is willful.
"This is not an essay about how capitalist greed and imperialist arrogance are the ultimate culprits."
My contention is that this is a problem, given what we know about the history of Capitalism and Western imperialist arrogance and its direct and deleterious effects on many (most) of the 3rd world countries these principles touched during the 19th and 20th centuries, and the ways in which those effects (predictably) hardened the hearts and ways of dissenters. Even in, as an adult, remarking on one's experience as a nine-year-old girl suffering at the hands of anti-Capitalist regimes. Maybe especially so, in an essay about survival being predicated on the weathering away of comfort(able biases). Maybe even more so, if the goal is to not have anti-Capitalist backlash repeat itself.
With that in mind, if you came away from my comment with the impression that I believe that a violent class purge, let alone the institution of capital-C Communism, is the answer, I have to think that you did not read very carefully.
I know, and that is precisely the problem. The zealot perspective is that every story is the same story. It's always a story about capitalist greed or always story about moral impurity or always a story about market interventions going awry. It's beyond bias. It's total tunnel vision.
In any case, this is her story, her perspective. Write your own story, and it'll be the story you want.
Meanwhile, how dare you, who wrote what you wrote demand that others read your comment carefully and generously for nuance... especially when you are taking the position of the kmer rouge yourself.
There is a reason that my issue with the essay is presented as one that maps to rhetorical phenomena similar to the one specifically in question. It's because the central issue is the repetition - the ubiquity - of Capitalism and Western imperialism's apparent innocence in regards to suffering in the world that it largely shaped. No story that perpetuates this falsehood can be called beautiful; it can't be called truth, or even helpful. Every story like this recreates it's own cruel circumstances for posterity. And to say so is the opposite of tunnel vision; it's to acknowledge on multiple levels that meaning is half-formed without consideration of context, even if that context damns one's sentiments.
>Meanwhile, how dare you, who wrote what you wrote demand that others read your comment carefully and generously for nuance...
Because.
I may be a hypocrite, but I'm not wrong.
And in any case, our circumstances are different: I'm not misrepresenting her words; you're misrepresenting mine.
What apparent innocence? No one has argued anything like this. Not the author. Not me. The thing you are objecting to isn't apparent innocence of western imperialism. The thing you are objecting to is the existence of a story that is about something else... to the point of historical denialism in all but the most technical sense.
It also happens to be true that the particular atrocities this story was about were committed by anti-western, anti-capitalists. The events she is describing really did happen... to her. That is the context. Preceding these events were other events. The story isn't about those.
Your comments are whataboutism.
And yes, it is tunnel vision. It is essentialism and it is zealotry. It is having one story in your mind that explains anything and everything. Everything boils down to capitalism and western colonialism. Any telling of events that doesn't conform to your one and only allowable story is rejected without inspection. As you said, you can't get past the first paragraph is it's not a simple anti capitalism/colonialism narrative. Who here is the one avoiding challenges to their comfortable biases? Who is the reactionary here?
In this case, it happens to be particularly awful, given that the perpetrators shared your specific tunnel vision. Even if the atrocities are committed by anticapitalists, an author has exactly one paragraph to clarify that colonialism that is the true culprit. It's like telling responding to a victim of fascism with a "but what about communism." There are parallels to every argument you bring up.
> My contention is that this is a problem, given what we know about the history of Capitalism and Western imperialist arrogance and its direct and deleterious effects on many (most) of the 3rd world countries these principles touched during the 19th and 20th centuries, and the ways in which those effects (predictably) hardened the hearts and ways of dissenters. Even in, as an adult, remarking on one's experience as a nine-year-old girl suffering at the hands of anti-Capitalist regimes.
This argument doesn't make any sense: "$FOO is bad because the anti-$FOO people are violent madmen"
You can't always shift blame away from the violent madmen.
$FOO is bad because $FOO's faults have tended to create anti-$FOO people.
Further: these faults also tend to drive anti-$FOO people to violence - often not even simply as a matter of course, but as an explicit strategy. In almost every case, the first to violence is $FOO. $FOO then encourages violence from the other side, to legitimize a crackdown. When anti-$FOO survives this crackdown, their behavior has been altered forever by their initial experience with $FOO.
