The Vietnam War and the Ethics of Failure

The New Frontier and Its Disintegration

In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad famously articulated that what redeems the violence accompanying the conquest of the earth “is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretense but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea—something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to.”7 Throughout the early years of the Cold War, U.S. “ideas” about democracy and freedom were positioned against the global spread of Communist oppression, inscribing the nation’s interventionism in the nonaligned world with benevolent intentions. As the gruesome materialization of these ideas, the Vietnam War, which wore on for two decades, caused nearly sixty thousand U.S. military deaths and over one million Vietnamese deaths. Leading to massive antiwar demonstrations and widespread opposition to the war at home, Vietnam represented a breaking point in U.S. citizens’ belief that war was a means by which to win hearts and minds. In other words, Vietnam is that failed “idea” behind the U.S. ideological conquest of the free world.

The early Cold War “idea” of what the United States was fighting for abroad was most clearly articulated by, and is perhaps best represented in, John F. Kennedy, whose presidency is remembered as a moment of national promise and arrival on the global stage, the golden days of “Camelot.” Certainly, with Kennedy’s presidency, the U.S. military presence in Vietnam escalated, setting the stage for the war’s future devastation of the Vietnamese nation and its people. Yet Kennedy is not remembered for the war but, rather, for embodying the post–World War II U.S. promise that was later ruined. When accepting the nomination from the Democratic Party for the presidency in 1960, Kennedy outlined his vision for the nation’s role on the global stage. The first principle he affirmed for himself and the United States was that of the Rights of Man—“the civil and economic rights essential to the human dignity of all men.”8 In a purposeful distancing of U.S. interventionism from European imperial worldviews, Kennedy cited the hope of furthering civil rights and capitalist opportunity at home and abroad. The global workings of the U.S. military were thus enfolded into the rhetoric of liberal rights rather than viewed as part of the nation’s imperialistic accumulation of land or wealth in the Third World. Elaborating on this unique U.S. Cold War mission, Kennedy asserted:

We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light the candle that can guide us through that darkness to a safe and sane future. . . . For the world is changing. The old era is ending. The old ways will not do. Abroad, the balance of power is shifting. . . . One-third of the world, it has been said, may be free—but one-third is the victim of cruel repression—and the other one-third is rocked by the pangs of poverty, hunger, and envy. More energy is released by the awakening of these new nations than by the fission of the atom itself.9

Kennedy attributes darkness to European imperial rule that preceded U.S. geopolitical ascendance. In contrast the United States leads by enlightened example, uniting in freedom the three worlds suffering from distinct forms of oppression. Conceiving of European imperialism as a past form of darkness, from which the Third World is “awakening” after World War II, Kennedy further underscores that contemporary darkness is located in communism’s imperial ambitions. He thus calls for an end to “Communist influence [that] has penetrated further into Asia.”10

In spite of Kennedy’s rejection of Old World philosophies through his portrayal of U.S. geopolitical ascendance as constitutive of a nonimperial future based on racial equality and rights, he makes recourse to European conceptions of historical progress to make his point. As Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued, “Imaginations of socially just futures for humans usually take the idea of single, homogeneous, and secular historical time for granted. Modern politics is often justified as a story of human sovereignty acted out in the context of a ceaseless unfolding of unitary historical time.”11 Kennedy conceives of a third of the world, in which the battle between U.S. light and Communist darkness is being fought, as a blank space whose entry into history is yet to be written. With two competing geopolitical conceptions of historical unfolding—the Communist and the U.S. democratic—Kennedy frames the American-led future as the one that is redemptive. This is made explicit in his notion of the new frontier as the theme of his presidential campaign. The frontier has underwritten U.S. narratives about the nation’s uniqueness ever since colonial times. In the supposedly empty expanses of the New World, U.S. democracy was mythologized as developing and distinguishing itself from the spatial confines of the Old World that settlers had left behind. By the late nineteenth century, when the United States extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast, it seemed that, as Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued in 1893, the frontier was closed. However, American national imaginaries have mobilized new frontiers beyond the continental United States as metaphors for the spatial and historical momentum associated with the renewal of U.S. democratic promise. Rejecting the idea that an American frontier no longer exists, Kennedy argued that “the New Frontier is here, whether we seek it or not. Beyond that frontier are the uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus.”12 Similar to the imperial excitement that Marlow, Conrad’s protagonist, feels as a child looking at the vast blank spaces on the European imperial map, Kennedy sees the blankness of the Cold War map in which history has yet to be written as an ideological blankness—one in which the United States can inscribe its values of racial equality, human rights, scientific progress, and peace. Standing “on this frontier,” Kennedy proclaims, “we must prove all over again whether this nation . . . with its freedom of choice, its breadth of opportunity, its range of alternatives—can compete with the single-minded advance of the Communist system.”13

Writing about Kennedy’s New Frontier, Richard Slotkin argues that this midcentury framing of the war on poverty and the war on racism was paradoxically built on the racial violence of the old frontier, in which Native Americans symbolized spiritual darkness that had to be defeated.14 According to Slotkin, throughout U.S. history, the frontier and the idea of America’s Manifest Destiny represented the possibility of spiritual regeneration through violence over and against the figure of the Indian.15 In a chapter evocatively entitled “A Home in the Heart of Darkness,” Slotkin elaborates on the racialization of the Puritans’ spiritual quest for their souls in the wilderness. Reading Indian war narratives, Slotkin argues that the Puritans saw Native Americans as the darkened and inverted mirror image of themselves in the New World. Portraying racial divisions as absolute, Puritans established an analogy between Indian warfare and the struggle between good and evil in man’s soul.16 Indian darkness was thus framed as a spiritual darkness that had to be suppressed in order to affirm the moral character of the Puritan settlers in the New World.17 For Slotkin, even as the Christian eschatological structure of the original frontier myth was subsumed by a more secular narrative of progress and expansion in subsequent eras, the moral justification for racial violence against Native American peoples continued to underlie new borders between good and evil in new frontiers, through which U.S. democratic values were to be defined and enforced through violence.

Although the Cold War was built on the racializing discourses of the frontier, it is worthwhile to emphasize that in the post–World War II era, the memory of the racism that was a part of the “old” frontier signified past times of trouble that the United States had transcended with the advent of civil rights. Certainly, as Slotkin points out, war continued to be the primary mechanism through which the United States spread its values in the second half of the twentieth century. However, the wars of the Cold War’s New Frontier were depicted as saving the lives of racial others from the threat of communism rather than as exterminating them. War was thus reframed as a moral burden that the United States had to assume to promote peace and bring the Third World into the fold of secular history and progress.18 Against this dominant conception of U.S. democracy fighting for the “rights of man,” during the turbulent decade of the 1960s social justice movements agitated for racial and gender revolutions and an end to U.S. imperialism. By 1964, George Ball, the under secretary of state in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, expressed concern that escalating the Vietnam War would give the impression that the United States was fighting a white man’s war.19 In spite of this, the war continued to escalate during the Johnson administration, and by 1967 the United States experienced, in Slotkin’s words, a “disorientation within the frame of history” as Americans had understood it in the early Cold War years. White liberals reacted with surprise when the urban riots erupted so soon after the major legislative victories represented by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Simultaneous with the disruption of the idea that the United States was making racial progress at home was the growing disbelief that the United States was gaining ideological ground against communism abroad. By the time the photos of the My Lai massacre were released in 1969, it became clear that U.S. actions were not saving the Vietnamese people from the horrors of communism; rather, they brought horror to Vietnam.20 The heart of America’s darkness that unfolded in the Vietnamese jungle revealed that the United States was not that different from its European predecessors and their forms of racial imperialism. Along these lines, William Spanos argues that the Vietnam War represented the “self-destruction” of America’s exceptionalist discourses, as the genocidal violence of U.S. militarism exposed the lie behind hegemonic discourses of America’s “planetary promise” to fulfill the moral obligations and ideals that had been betrayed by the Old World.21

It appeared that in what John F. Kennedy called the “New Frontier” of the post–World War II era, the United States had come face-to-face with the violence inherent in its supposed geopolitical acts of benevolence. In order to conceive of Vietnam as an ongoing site of regeneration for U.S. democracy, the nation had to integrate the experience of its own savagery—not to overcome the savagery of the other. In this sense, Vietnam, as the New Frontier, became the site of U.S. imperial disintegration. The frame of Heart of Darkness, which, as James Clifford argues, presents a “record of white men at the frontier, at points of danger and disintegration,” thus became a somewhat uneasy complement through which to subsume the Vietnam experience into the foundational myth of America’s “regeneration through violence” in the frontier.22 Because Vietnam represented a moral regression toward savagery, Heart of Darkness provided a thematic reference through which to understand the irrationality and horrors of Vietnam. Unlike the frontier mythology that depicts, in Turner’s terms, the “meeting point between savagery and civilization” as the historical engine for U.S. democratic development, Heart of Darkness is about European imperial and temporal regression—as much about the horrific encounter with the savagery inherent in civilizational ideas as about the savagery of the racialized other. As a narrative frame for the Vietnam War, not only does Conrad’s novel appear to align U.S. Cold War politics with the brutal racism of Old World imperialism, but it also calls into question national mythologies about the global promises of democratic progress. Yet it is Heart of Darkness’s textual ambiguity regarding the precise content of imperial horror and its embedded truths about human nature, humanitarian action, and the possibility of transcendence that animated postwar cultural fictions about the sacredness of the Vietnam experience and the survival of U.S. ideals.

Heart of Darkness and the Racialization of Humanitarian Feeling

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was originally written between 1898 and 1899, when it was serialized in Blackwood’s Magazine. The novel is concerned with the meaning of moral darkness at the point at which the civilizational ideas behind European imperialism and the brutal realities of imperial rule collide. At the time of its publication, it was credited with influencing British policy and public opinion regarding the atrocities being perpetuated in the Belgian Congo. It thus became a point of orientation for future attempts to formulate enduring cultural statements opposing violence, war, and imperialism. Heart of Darkness includes a powerful insistence that Europeans need to recognize a common and universal humanity against which the excesses of imperial subjugation must be condemned. At the same time, the ambiguity of Conrad’s text, particularly its racialized objectification of Africa as the backdrop for Europe’s self-critique and its upholding of Europe as a space that produces humanitarian feeling, has continued to structure and delimit contemporary Euro-American debates about the morality of military intervention. Because the novel has become a cultural shorthand for denouncing wartime excesses, reexamining Heart of Darkness in relation to how atrocity came to be understood and condemned in post-Vietnam U.S. culture brings to light the imperial origins of humanitarian outrage and moral shock in the contemporary context.

As a call for recognizing the humanity of the other in a space of colonial subjugation, Heart of Darkness exemplifies how the emergence of humanitarian discourses, which affirmed Europe as the space of ethical feeling, was enabled by imperial geopolitics. Published after Conrad’s journey to the Belgian Congo in 1890, the book has often been read as a fictionalization of Belgian brutality that he witnessed during his travels. In 1876, King Leopold II of Belgium convened a geographical meeting in Brussels, forming the International Association for the Exploration and Civilization of Africa. Between 1878 and 1884, a variety of committees and groups, ostensibly formed to advance scientific and civilizational missions in the Congo, solidified Belgium’s supremacy over the rubber and ivory trade in the region. At the 1884 Conference of Berlin, Leopold was awarded the Belgian Free State. By the early 1900s, the Congo Free State came under criticism in Europe for a variety of reasons, including Leopold’s claims to “vacant land,” which compelled native people to contribute their labor and produce, the inhumane treatment and brutal methods of killing and punishing native populations, and the limitation and disregard of free-trade provisions provided by the Berlin Act.23

Heart of Darkness relays the horrors that took place in the Congo for a British audience. The novel begins with an unnamed narrator’s introduction of a story told to him by Marlow, an English sailor and captain, while the two are on a boat anchored on the river Thames. Marlow’s tale is about his past assignment with a Belgian company in Africa, where he was sent to retrieve a company agent, Kurtz. Kurtz was “an exceptional man, of the greatest importance to the Company,” but he had, as the company manager put it to Marlow, fallen “ill” in the deepest reaches of the Continent.24 Throughout his journey, Marlow eagerly awaits meeting the great man, but when he finds him, he discovers the extent of the brutality involved in Kurtz’s “methods” of obtaining ivory and spreading civilization. Kurtz’s moral degeneration is encapsulated in Marlow’s description of rebel heads displayed on stakes facing Kurtz’s compound, natives worshipping Kurtz as a god, and Kurtz’s infamous last words, “the horror, the horror.”

Alan Simmons reads “the horror” in Conrad’s short novel as part of the broader discussions about the atrocities of the Congo in Britain. He focuses on the relationship between Conrad and Roger Casement, the British consul to the Congo who authored the 1904 “The Congo Report,” which caused an outcry in Great Britain regarding Belgian conduct in Africa. Simmons suggests that Casement’s report and Heart of Darkness are twin depictions of imperial brutality: one, a report intended for the British Parliament, which in 1903 passed a resolution to investigate the abuses of the Congo Free State; the other, a fictional account intended for an audience of the broader British public. Posing the question “What is the language of atrocity?” he concludes that

when communicating atrocities, a discourse is required that is capable of conveying the “unspeakable” truth without sounding exaggerated or preposterous. . . . The contribution of “Heart of Darkness” to the reform movement may lie, ultimately, in helping to create the context and the conditions for believing the tales of atrocity coming out of the Congo precisely because the scale of the “horror” to which it alludes cannot be adequately conveyed through facts anyway.25

For Simmons, the importance of Heart of Darkness is its status as an ethical fictional accounting of an otherwise unimaginable atrocity.

Keeping in mind the contributing role of Heart of Darkness in influencing British foreign policy at the time of the book’s publication, it is important to note that Conrad was writing about atrocities that were committed by a competing imperial power in their colonies. His representation of another nation’s savagery conceives of their colonized victim as an object through which the English subject emerged as capable of self-critique, reform, and development. Conrad’s association with the reform movement and his judgment against imperial brutality are haunted by the limits of liberal humanitarian discourses about the Congo Free State in the sense that these discourses instrumentalized the African victim to articulate the European subject’s capacity for humanitarian sentiment and failed to disrupt the foundational belief in the goodness of properly implemented imperial projects. As Adam Hochschild has argued,

Heart of Darkness is one of the most scathing indictments of imperialism in all literature, but its author, curiously, thought himself an ardent imperialist where England was concerned. . . . Conrad’s stand-in, Marlow, muses on how “the conquest of the earth, which mostly means taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.” Yet in almost the same breath, Marlow talks about how the British territories colored red on a world map were “good to see at any time because one knows that some real work is done there.” . . . Conrad felt that “liberty . . . can only be found under the English flag all over the world.”26

Conrad’s indictment of certain forms of imperialism as inhumane seems to have been paradoxically enabled by his belief in the goodness and morality of the British imperial project, thought to free human subjects and facilitate the humanization of the African other. This foundational imperial formulation of humanitarian feeling continues to structure contemporary humanitarianism, which in the postsocialist era perpetuates modes of imperialism deemed to be ethical while justifying the demise of other forms of governance and worldviews.

Constitutive of humanitarianism’s selective and limited opposition to imperial rule is that European conceptions of universal humanity, like Conrad’s, were built on the same racial distinctions as the imperial projects they sought to critique. Indeed, European liberal humanitarianism is perpetually haunted by the very “horror” that it proposes to redress. This was one of Chinua Achebe’s points in the famous essay “An Image of Africa.”27 Though best known for accusing Conrad of racism, Achebe’s critique draws attention to the foundational limits of the liberal notion of common humanity that depends on the reestablishment and stabilization of racial categories. Achebe writes, “The kind of liberalism espoused here by Marlow/Conrad touched all the best minds of the age in England, Europe, and America. It took different forms in the minds of different people but almost always managed to sidestep the ultimate question of equality between white people and black people.”28 For Achebe, it is not imperialism that represents the “horror” in Heart of Darkness but the “lurking hint of kinship, of common ancestry,” between Europe and Africa.29 The European ability to recognize a common humanity actually reinscribes Africa and Africans as objects by conceiving of “Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity.”30 In liberal imperial discourses about dehumanizing conditions in Africa, Europe was able to affirm its humanity through feeling for the African other, who continued to be produced as a racial object of that feeling. Thus though scholars have noted that the enduring legacy of Heart of Darkness is the text’s critique of atrocity and human rights abuses, as Achebe insists, these representations are made possible only through the production of Africa as “a carrier onto whom the master unloads his physical and moral deformities so that he may go forward, erect and immaculate.”31 In other words, liberal reformers, like the ardent imperialists they critiqued, constructed a flattened African space as the setting in which the Western subject could either prove and maintain, or lose, his or her humanity.

Although much has been made of whether Heart of Darkness is a racist portrayal of Africans, the more interesting question might be how Conrad’s novel participates, as a racializing narrative frame, in producing liberal critiques of imperialism and calls for moral action through its temporalizing imaginary of human universality. Heart of Darkness dramatizes the evolution of European humanity in the African “setting and backdrop.” In a 1903 letter to Casement, Conrad wrote, “It is an extraordinary thing that the conscience of Europe which seventy years ago has put down the slave trade on humanitarian grounds tolerates the Congo State today. It is as if the moral clock has been put back many hours.”32 As a metaphor, the “moral clock” suggests that the proof of the imperial subject’s humanity is made manifest in one’s actions toward and encounter with the African other, who is an emblem of otherness frozen in historical time against which European moral progress can be ascertained. The idea of common humanity that structures Heart of Darkness’s condemnation of brutality and atrocity against one’s fellow man is built on a racialized temporal imaginary—a looking back in time that is necessary to understand Africans as human. Marlow’s journey through the African continent is described as “travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world.”33 The deeper one travels into the continent, the further back in time one moves. In Conrad’s critique, Europe’s moral regression, manifest in its atrocities against colonized natives, is racially metaphorized through Africa as a stand-in for European prehistory. Because of the temporalizing relationship that underlies Europe’s discovery of a common humanity across continents and races, the moment of recognition that Africans and Europeans share a common humanity is horrifying since it has the power to destabilize dominant historical narratives of civilization and progress. As Marlow muses,

Well, you know that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman. . . . What thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough, but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you—you so remote from the night of first ages—could comprehend.34

Europeans’ hidden and buried primitive interiority, “the wild and passionate” uproar that is an aspect of the European self, is here equated with Africans’ racialized exteriority, a primitiveness visible on the surface of the skin. This racialized perception of the other, frozen in time, would continue to shadow future liberal formulations of moral responses to violence that made recourse to Conrad’s narrative frame.

The commingling of repulsion and thrill that Marlow ascribes to recognizing common humanity across continents and racial temporalities parallels the novel’s understanding of imperialism as having the simultaneous potential to destroy and to spark enlightenment. Paradoxically, even as Heart of Darkness opposes imperial excesses on the grounds that it turns back the “moral clock” of European civilization, the novel’s opening indicates that imperialism, when properly implemented, can end the brutality of human prehistory, bringing enlightenment in its wake. On the river Thames, Marlow declares, “And this also . . . has been one of the dark places of the earth.”35 He goes on, “I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago. . . . We live in the flicker. . . . But darkness was here yesterday. Imagine the feelings of a [Roman] commander. . . . Imagine him here—the very end of the world.”36 In this historicization, the Roman Empire sparked Great Britain’s emergence from darkness and its entry into the time of historical progress. Yet considering that in Conrad’s novel Africa’s darkness is literal, inscribed on the bodies of its inhabitants rather than symbolizing a pre–enlightenment era as it does in Europe, it remains unclear whether European imperialism is conceived of as capable of bringing enlightenment to Africa, or whether Africa can only ever lead to European racialized regression.

Ultimately, the novel resolves the racial contradiction inherent in the attempt to distinguish good and evil modes of imperialism through the racialization of humanitarian feeling. Before being subsumed by the darkness by “going native,” Kurtz represented the “idea” behind European imperialism in Africa—the “mission” that would justify, in moral terms, Europe’s accumulation of African natural resources and exploitation of native labor. In spite of the fact that Kurtz represents the loss of the European soul and civilized self in the imperial struggle between progress and savagery, it is through Kurtz that Heart of Darkness maintains the importance of a belief in something. Toward the end of the novel, Marlow affirms that Kurtz is a “remarkable man” because

he had something to say. . . . He had summed it up—he had judged. “The horror!” He was a remarkable man. After all, this was the expression of some sort of belief; it had candour, it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper, it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth—the strange commingling of desire and hate. . . . It was a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable sanctions. But it was a victory.37

For Marlow, judging a failed mission and recognizing the horror of imperial brutality when it is unleashed in its encounter with the wilderness represent a moral stance that redeems a failed idea. “The horror” might be read as the appeal of British reform groups that denounced atrocities in the Congo Free State in spite of their own participation in maintaining British imperialism. In this historical context, humanitarianism can be viewed as the moral by-product of imperial excess, the idea that redeems the European soul. Yet if the belief in a common humanity stands in opposition to imperial racial violence brought upon the colonized natives by European savagery, in Conrad’s vision it is paradoxically Europe’s encounter with those others that led to the unleashing of savagery to begin with. Since the African can never be the selfsame as the European, humanitarian feeling inevitably fails to recognize the full humanity of the racial other, leaving the European with only feelings of moral victory. The separation of moral victories from death dealing and violence reemerged powerfully in post-Vietnam humanitarian critiques in the United States.

The Ethics of Representation in Post-Vietnam Culture

As a work that has been hailed as an ethical representation in the face of imperial excess and atrocity, the afterlife of Heart of Darkness in post-Vietnam U.S. culture calls for an analysis of how the emergence of humanitarian feeling in the shadow of wartime horror necessitated the making of new fictions that would frame an emergent humanitarian ethos. Like Conrad’s novel, which grapples with the disintegration of certain imperial ideas about morality and civilizational progress, post-Vietnam cultural texts have participated in questioning and constructing a novel ethics of representation in the face of national fragmentation. Two contemporary works that both reference and reflect on the circulation of Heart of Darkness in post-Vietnam U.S. visual culture, attending to the relationship between cartographies of “darkness” and the making and unmaking of imperial lifeworlds, are Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, a 1991 documentary about the making of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), and Jessica Hagedorn’s 2003 novel, Dream Jungle. Each references Conrad’s novel as the touchstone of post-Vietnam U.S. historical fictions that have contended with national failure and redemption. The 1991 documentary and Hagedorn’s novel are both metacommentaries on the process of making national fictions whose role was to apprehend the tension between order and chaos in the post-Vietnam global landscape. However, where Hearts of Darkness is concerned solely with how American subjects become ethical simply by struggling to portray their nation’s imperial irrationality and violent failure, Dream Jungle foregrounds the interrelatedness of imperial histories and the objectification of colonial space as always already enabling acts of nation making and ethical self-fashioning in the metropole.

Hearts of Darkness uses footage shot by Francis Ford Coppola’s wife, Eleanor Coppola, during the filming of Apocalypse Now in the Philippines. Because of the war’s vast unpopularity on the home front, films about Vietnam were rare in the United States until the success of Apocalypse Now, which garnered the prestigious Palme d’Or Award at the Cannes Film Festival.38 Part of the film’s success was due to the fact that, departing from previous conventions of stylistic realism in the war-film genre, Coppola structured his approach to war through surrealism as a way of getting at the irrationality and futility of U.S. violence in Vietnam. To do so, he used Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as the inspiration. According to Margot Norris, Apocalypse Now’s dialogue with Conrad’s novel resulted in a political critique of the Cold War “hearts and minds” rhetoric, exposing the darkness and colonial inflections inherent in U.S. claims of spreading democracy and defending the free world from Communist infiltration.39 For Norris, Coppola’s transposition of U.S. domestic histories of colonial genocide onto the space of Vietnam echoes Conrad’s attention to narrative transmissibility in its structure of double storytelling. Apocalypse Now, she concludes, is thus able to perform an ethical commentary on colonialism itself as “a movable horror prone to displacement and repetition.”40 Yet like Conrad’s own condemnation of the moral failings of colonial violence and excess, which was limited by existing imperial worldviews, Coppola’s use of Heart of Darkness as the structure for an ethical critique of the Vietnam War relied on previous and ongoing imperial racializing and exploitative economies. The film could not have been made without the structural legacies of U.S. imperialism in the Asia Pacific. As Amy Kaplan writes, Hearts of Darkness simply relocates Conrad’s Africa to Vietnam and the Philippines.41 Kaplan suggests that although Coppola’s aim was not to deny empire but to expose U.S. brutality in Vietnam through an antiwar stance and to connect U.S. imperialism to European imperialism through Conrad’s novel, the documentary “refuses recognition of the film’s complicity with the imperial context that enables its production.”42 For instance, six hundred native workers were paid only one dollar each day. Meanwhile, Coppola paid exorbitant sums to rent bodyguards and helicopters from Ferdinand Marcos’s repressive dictatorship, with which the United States maintained close ties in the 1970s. Noting the filmmaker’s frustration when these helicopters were continually called off the set to repress local political insurrections, Kaplan argues that

the blatant evidence of the surrounding reality of imperialism generates excitement in the voice-over about being in the “thick of the jungle,” about being so close to the battlefield. They find in the Philippines a way of retrieving nostalgically the intensity of the battlefield experience they may have rejected on political grounds. By turning the Philippines [and, by extension, Vietnam] into a timeless “jungle,” like the African “jungle,” . . . the Coppolas deny the imperial history which brings them to the Philippines.43

Hearts of Darkness demonstrates the extent to which the instrumentalization of colonial spaces to dramatize imperial self-reflection reaffirms the United States as the foremost domain of human transcendence. Contending that his film will save lives, Coppola implied that the contemporary moral struggle occurs in the realm of representation. Though, as Norris proposes, Apocalypse Now might succeed in critiquing early Cold War rhetoric, Coppola’s grandiose vision for his film inadvertently parallels the Cold War idea that Americans can go abroad (as he went to the Philippines) to save lives and capture hearts and minds. Ultimately, Hearts of Darkness reduces the struggle over life and death in the making of Apocalypse Now to the figure of Francis Coppola as a filmmaker.44 In spite of the millions of dollars he spent to borrow Marcos’s helicopters, the documentary positions Coppola as an ethical artist and underdog trying to undermine big Hollywood and the sorts of stories they deem marketable. In her footage of the production process, Eleanor Coppola frames the making of the Vietnam epic as a metaphor for her husband’s journey into himself. She notes that though it was difficult for her to watch him confront his innermost fears, such as the fear of the future, of death, and of going insane, one must do a little of each to come out on the other side. Many of Francis Coppola’s fears stem from his feelings of becoming the Kurtz of Conrad’s novel, as the Philippine jungle and its natural and political caprices threaten his sanity. Fearing that he has lost his integrity, Francis Coppola’s chief concern is that Apocalypse Now would be a $20 million disaster—a pompous, bad movie about a very important subject. He seems to ask: Is this film simply another American disaster that started with good intentions? In recorded conversations with his wife, Francis Coppola laments that he constantly dreams about how to achieve his vision for an appropriate ending, but that he cannot translate his dreams into a script. Like American politicians’ nightmare of being unable to find a peace with honor in Vietnam, the finales Francis formulates are, he worries, weak because they lack answers to the moral questions his film asks. Yet, as his wife predicts, the great director’s descent into the darkness ends with the film’s success in Cannes and with American audiences—the only ending that matters in the documentary.45

Through the figure of Francis Ford Coppola, Hearts of Darkness suggests that descent into one’s own place of darkness is the condition of possibility for ethical representation and, consequently, ethical action. In the parallels it draws between Francis Coppola falling to pieces during the making of Apocalypse Now and the U.S. national experience of fragmentation during the Vietnam War, the documentary indicates that America’s moral victory rests in coming face-to-face with its time of darkness in Vietnam. In this formulation, films and photography, as documents of the war, become the tools for reanimating democracy. At the end of the film, Francis expresses his “great hope” for the democratization of representation but stays within the confines of the United States. He muses that with the growing availability of 8 mm video recorders, those who have thus far been unable to make movies will begin to do so. “Suddenly, one day, some little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart, and . . . make a beautiful film with her father’s camera recorder.”46 In his vision, a girl inherits a camera from her father, indicating gender equality as the “great hope” for the future. It is a hope that upholds a liberal progress narrative. Reaffirming America’s creative capacity, the documentary reinstates the nation’s potential for democratic development in spite of the moral failures exhibited in Vietnam.

Hagedorn’s Dream Jungle sketches an alternate history of the making of Apocalypse Now and the politics of culture in the Philippines. Hagedorn reframes Conrad’s conception of empire as a system of representation by foregrounding the way in which both Heart of Darkness and Coppola’s film produced the colonial space as a backdrop, frozen in time, against which to dramatize the possibility for an ethical critique of the American self. Dream Jungle weaves two parallel and seemingly unrelated stories from the 1970s: the “discovery” of the Tabao, a Paleolithic tribe of cave dwellers whose members have ostensibly had no contact with the modern world, and the arrival of an American film crew shooting a Vietnam War epic called Napalm Sunset in the Philippines.47 The Tabao story line focuses on Zamora Lopez de Legazpi Jr., a millionaire man of leisure residing in a prominent Manila mansion, who wishes to bring to the world’s attention the tribe’s existence. Eventually, suspicion mounts that his project is an elaborate hoax meant to procure rain forest lands for the Marcos regime. The novel makes clear that whether or not the Tabao are authentically prehistoric or paid actors, they are a necessary national fiction. As an untouched indigenous people, they embody a prehistory that highlights the lengths traveled by the Philippine nation, spurred by Spanish and American imperialisms, to enter global modernity. Hagedorn emphasizes that as an “ethnological find of the century” and, simultaneously, as one of the century’s most elaborate hoaxes, fictions about one’s own prehistory, written through the racialized other, are essential for conceiving national transcendence.48 Dream Jungle marks these fictions as acts of godly creation. In one instance, Zamora invites Ken Forbes, a photojournalist working in Saigon, to come to the Philippines to document the existence of the Tabao. Forbes describes his first impressions of the Tabao in the mountains: “They were naked except for loincloths fashioned out of leaves and strips of what looked like bark. They carried no weapons or tools. As soon as they set eyes on me, they threw themselves on the ground and began to wail. I aimed my Nikon at them . . . I clicked away at the marvelous, prostrate people. Click, click.”49 In this scene of “discovery and conquest,” as Hagedon titles the first part of the novel, conquest happens through representational technologies—the camera is a weapon. For Forbes, the move from documenting the Vietnam War to documenting a prehistoric tribe is seamless. As prehistory, embodied by the naked Tabao, bows down before modernity, symbolized by the Nikon, the association between the godlike act of creation through representation (“In the beginning there was the word, and the word was God”) and the process of being folded into humanity is solidified. In this scene of first encounter, in which capturing the other through representational technologies is a scene of violence and conquest, Hagedorn thus presents a conflicting perspective on the possibility of ethically representing the other to that of the Coppolas. For her, the act of documentation is also always an act of violation—of violently creating and inserting an “other” into one’s own historical and national narrative about humanitarianism and national transcendence.

Dream Jungle uses the Tabao story line and the story of Tony Pierce and his crew to portray parallel modes of what Hagedorn has called “cultural mythmaking.”50 In the sense that the camera is already understood to be a weapon, the presence of an entire film crew might be read as a full assault on the Philippine landscape. Like Zamora, who is referred to as “Father” by the Tabao, and whose espousal of their cause gives him an almost godlike stature among the tribe, Tony Pierce’s wife, Janet, who is there to film the process of making Napalm Sunset, secretly refers to her husband as “Tony God.” Paz Marlowe, a Filipina American journalist, describes Tony “God” Pierce’s film project as having the simultaneous authority to create and destroy. The crew was “always blowing things up. Building elaborate sets only to blow them all up. Paz had observed two days straight of a simulated Vietcong hamlet’s being bombed, coconut trees on the shoreline of Lake Ramayyah ablaze with fire and smoke. . . . Sometimes the children were tapped for the spontaneous scenes Pierce was fond of creating. They played fallen, bloody corpses or extras in crowd scenes with humor and enthusiasm.”51 Through its portrayal of Tony God’s reduction of the Philippines to nothing more than a set or a backdrop for his creation of a post-Vietnam American epic, Dream Jungle implies that this approach to representation necessarily produces the local inhabitants as “bloody corpses” or “extras” in their own homeland. Later in the novel, during an interview Paz obtains with Pierce, he elaborates on his inspiration for making the film. “The beauty of a location like this is that it offers you everything you need. Beach, ocean, jungle, lake, mountains, waterfalls, cheap labor.”52 Interrupting Pierce’s rumination on the Philippines as putting all of its natural resources, including its people, on offer, Paz comments, “And of course there’s Mayor Fritz, your protector, your fixer, your landlord, your biggest fan.” Pierce ignores her contemporary political commentary, responding instead by quoting Heart of Darkness: “The earth seemed unearthly,” he tells her. “We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember because we were travelling the night of the first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign—and no memories.”

Bypassing contemporary geopolitics, Pierce romanticizes his desire for the natural resources on offer in the Philippines through Heart of Darkness’s journey into prehistory. Fantasizing about the blank spaces of the earth that the American filmmaker can mold through an act of creation necessitates fictions of prehistory, like Conrad’s. After all, a land that has yet to enter history enables history to be written by its conquistadors. Linking back to Dream Jungle’s story line about the Tabao as a necessary fiction in Philippine national modernity, Pierce’s fantasy makes clear how the tribe activates older imperial yearnings for blank spaces and prehistoric people, the yet to be discovered, which enables the fiction of the Euro-American man as creator. These are imperial fictions that, like Conrad’s, reproduce the very racial structures they critique. Immediately after quoting Conrad, Pierce moves into a discussion of how he discovered one of the young black actors for his Vietnam epic. “Isaiah. I discovered him. . . . Playing the guitar. . . . His guitar was out of tune, and his little amp kept feeding back. It was awful.”53 Isaiah, a subject who is “discoverable,” is himself not capable of acts of creation, as he cannot produce good music with his broken amp and out-of-tune guitar. But Pierce likes this. He continues, “I’d been auditioning lots of black actors for the role of Monk. They could do Shakespeare, all that shit. But they were all too old. Too trained. I needed a kid. A raw, vulnerable type.”54 The black actor, like the Philippine prehistoric landscape, must be raw, open to Tony God’s molding and shaping, and someone through whom he can see his own creativity.

Exposing embedded imperial desires and narratives in post-Vietnam fictions of America’s failure, loss, and moral fragmentation, Dream Jungle suggests that the United States reactivated its self-conception as a morally transcendent nation after Vietnam through the divine politics of ethical representation. Hagedorn’s connection between godlikeness and the process of producing necessary national fictions is particularly insightful as a way through which to understand how and why the history of the Vietnam War came to be represented as hallowed, or sacred, after the conclusion of the war. If, as Hagedorn suggests, representation has the power to make certain lifeworlds legible by instrumentalizing, objectifying, and covering over other lifeworlds, then it becomes possible to begin to analyze how U.S. “ideas” were given life anew in post-Vietnam fictions.

Frames of Humanity and Atrocity

The connection that Hagedorn makes in Dream Jungle between representational technologies, war and violence, and temporalizing national fictions helps to elucidate how U.S. cultural representations of the Vietnam War enabled images of wartime brutality to ironically activate the ability of U.S. citizens to “feel” human once again. In post-Vietnam U.S. culture, there is a well-developed national mythology that reporting during the Vietnam War—in particular, photojournalism—was an uncensored representation of U.S. ruthlessness that ruptured dominant early Cold War discourses about U.S. exceptionalism. The idea that during the Vietnam War the freedom of the U.S. press led to an ethical critique of the U.S. nation has, contradictorily, worked to reaffirm the idea of the United States as an exceptional nation that could heal from its irrational descent into savagery in Vietnam. Keeping in mind that there is an inherent violence involved in acts of documentation, it is important to consider the relationship between depictions of Vietnam itself and the broader project of American self-critique.55 Vietnam-era photojournalism and the enduring and iconic images it has produced, particularly those that portray the suffering of the Vietnamese people, have come to embody the nation’s capacity for democratic regeneration. As Sara Ahmed has argued in a different context, the appropriation of the other’s pain into our sadness retains the other as the object of our feeling.56 She suggests that our shame at causing the other pain as part of past wrongdoing is often put into the service of national reconciliation projects. The process of recognizing past failures thus becomes the ground for renewed patriotic love.57 When we feel shame for not living up to an ideal, as the United States felt when early Cold War ideals were ruptured in Vietnam, rather than signaling the inadequacy of those ideals, that shame can work to reaffirm the idea to which the nation has not lived up.58

After the Vietnam War, coming face-to-face with the horrors brought about by the failure of national ideals was seen as important in recuperating the exceptional status of the United States. Whereas the nation lost its sense of moral superiority through the brutality of its military campaign during the war in Vietnam, the images produced during that war became a parallel and oppositional site through which the war was refought and U.S. democracy was reaffirmed. More than any other visual medium, the photographs of the Vietnam War are remembered as having exposed U.S. military atrocities igniting the antiwar movement at home. Yet even as the camera was a tool for documenting U.S. state violence, as Dream Jungle suggests, it is also a weapon of conquest.59 In the case of the Vietnam War, it became a weapon that won the war that America’s military technology could not. In light of the notion that Vietnam-era photojournalism was a democratic medium that exposed the war’s horrors, signaling American potential for feeling outrage on behalf of the other, it is worth remembering that what and who will fall into the realm of humanity at any given moment in time can reveal particular values, morphologies, and power relations that are differentially inhabited.60 As Judith Butler argues, when our humanity is defined by feeling moral horror, we tend to disregard the ways in which social interpretations already determine the subjects for whom we feel and those whose lives and deaths do not touch us.61 What might it mean, then, to rethink Vietnam War–era photojournalism not as simply revealing the horrific acts committed by the United States but also as affirming American humanitarianism?

Peter Davis attempted to address this problem in the 1974 documentary Hearts and Minds, which self-reflexively demonstrates the capacity of the camera to be a weapon that is as powerful as the military technologies that devastated the Vietnamese landscape. To critique U.S. violence, the documentary develops a dialogic structure that juxtaposes scenes of America’s technologized vision of the war in Vietnam and interviews with U.S. policy makers with the suffering and devastation of the Vietnamese people who were bombed on a daily basis, their families callously killed. Following an interview with U.S. pilots, who expressed pride in how they were able to use American advanced weapons systems, the documentary cuts to scenes of Vietnamese peasants walking next to horse-drawn buggies carrying water from a well. The contrast between the high-tech war waged by the Americans and the simplicity of Vietnamese “village people” was a common antiwar representational strategy.62 In Hearts and Minds, the critique of Western modernity is more formally complex, as Davis makes recourse to the temporal mode of photography as the freezing of a moment in time to puncture early Cold War triumphalist ideologies and to capture the grief of the other. In an attempt to apprehend the anguish of people who lost their homes and whose lives were destroyed by the spectacular demonstration of American war technology, the film uses a close-up shot of a Vietnamese man crying, saying, “I’m so unhappy.” There is a lengthy, uncomfortable silence that the long take refuses to break. Like a photograph, it fills the frame with misery and sorrow caused by U.S. violence. As David Grosser points out, in this moment that forces the audience to confront Vietnamese emotions, “time seems to stand still, and no other image comes to the rescue.”63 Unlike a photograph, however, in Davis’s documentary the subjects who suffer speak back to the camera. Two Vietnamese men later in the documentary comment on the filming: “Look, they are focusing on us now. First they bomb as much as they please, then they film.” Davis’s documentary indicates the complicity of the project of documenting the sorrow of the other with the violence inherent in war. At the same time, the nonsubtle antiwar message conveyed through Davis’s purposeful editing and dialogic structure maintains a belief in the ethical possibilities for non-nationalist forms of representation.64

One reason photography is widely regarded as the predominant Vietnam-era mode of critique that caused a rupture in U.S. Cold War ideologies is the medium’s distinct temporality, which stops time. The photojournalism of the Vietnam War captured moments of death and suffering to which U.S. militarism subjected the Vietnamese people. These images thus exposed the brutal miscarriage, if not downright duplicity, of early Cold War ideologies and the New Frontier rhetoric about bringing the Vietnamese a better future and a life safe from Communist oppression. Through their temporal mode, the Vietnam-era photographs appeared to seize and lay bare the breaking point of U.S. narratives about racial and democratic progress. What Roland Barthes called the “punctum” in a photograph, that which exceeds the photograph’s connotation and denotation, was, in Vietnam War photography, the rupture in the idea that the United States was promoting a better life in the Third World. Whereas films narrativize an experience, photographs, as Barthes argued, arrest the coming of the future.65 For Barthes, because of its unique temporality, “the photograph produces death while trying to preserve life.”66 Although he was writing about the effects of an image that has been captured and that endures even as it conjures up the inevitable death of the subject, in a different context, Vietnam War photographs exhibit a similar contradiction, though in a more literal sense. On the one hand, many of the most powerful Vietnam-era photographs captured the moment of death.67 On the other hand, in their circulation, the viewer of the image was made to understand his or her own life through the other’s death.

Not only does the frozen moment of the other’s injury or death highlight our aliveness, but in feeling moral outrage and shock at the pain of others we establish our own humanity. This is, of course, a racialized structure of seeing and feeling. Within the iconic Vietnam War–era photographs, “the race of their subjects is what allows the violence of these images to be shown.”68 In this sense, the humanitarian gaze constructed through these images is itself racializing. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag traces the history of photographic depictions of anguish as providing an invitation to look and serving as a tool for developing a moral feeling in the viewer that is a response to the horror portrayed in an image. Sontag argues that the shame and shock that follow from looking at photographs of suffering and violence lead to a sense that unless action is taken we are nothing more than voyeurs.69 Photos that are seen as raw, taken in the moment, and not set up thus carry a special “moral authority” that, when seen as part of a national or cultural image archive, creates a “modern ethical feeling” formed in relation to the pain of the other.70 Importantly, Sontag points out that in the post–World War II era, the ubiquity of photos that represent suffering and death in the Third World produces a space in which tragedy seems inevitable, as the other is reduced to someone to be seen, not someone who returns the gaze.71

Like Conrad’s Marlow, who comes to a novel understanding of humanity and a critique of imperial violence through his conception of Africans as frozen in a time outside the realm of historical progress, Vietnam War photography created a “modern ethical feeling” in U.S. citizens by freezing Vietnam as a locus of misery in the national imaginary. Later, these same photographs became evidence of U.S. democracy. They are remembered as having sparked mass demonstrations that led to the government’s eventual response to its citizens’ objections to the war. The narrativizing of Vietnam War photography as rekindling America’s democratic potential is the prominent framework of several recent coffee-table books commemorating the famous photojournalists of the era. For instance, the front cover of Eddie Adams: Vietnam reproduces the famous image taken by the photographer of the Vietnamese National Police Force chief, general Nguyen Ngoc Loan, executing a guerilla insurgent in 1968.72 At the time, the photo circulated widely in the U.S. press and on television. Antiwar demonstrators cited the photo as an example of the brutal practices of America’s South Vietnamese allies. Vivian Sobchack writes about the Saigon execution photo as eliciting a “humane gaze”: “the bodily paralysis and inertia it represents” can acknowledge “the inadequacy of action to respond to ‘something intolerable and unbearable.’”73 At the same time, as I am suggesting, the very paralysis produced by the photo in relation to Vietnam that leads to a “humane gaze” opens up a future frame for humanitarian action. In a series of introductions by well-known Vietnam War–era journalists, the book’s cover photo is discussed as exemplifying the ethical dilemmas and universalizing potential of Adams’s photography, as well as the unique place of the Vietnam War in the development of America’s moral futurity. The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist David Halberstam begins by ruminating, “How ironic that Eddie’s most famous photo was also his cruelest. How strange that a man whose extraordinary body of work celebrates the richness and complexity of the human family is best remembered for an image he captured detailing the ultimate act of inhumanity.”74 For Halberstam, however, it is precisely the ability to distinguish between “the most violent impulses and the most generous ones” that allows us to retain our humanity. He suggests that capturing cruelty as a way of distinguishing it from goodness empowers a great combat photographer like Adams to show “the singular humanity that runs through his photos.” Halberstam proposes that through Adams’s work, the history of the Vietnam War is overturned, becoming a mark not of our violent inhumanity but of our enduring humanity, a time when “we did what we were supposed to do, and then, on occasion, we reached out and did even more.”75

While it seems incongruous with the predominant conception of Vietnam as an epistemic break in American exceptionalist rhetoric to analyze the war as essential to the evolution of humanitarian feeling in America, recent remembrances of Vietnam War–era journalistic documentation do just that by framing Vietnam as a space that was made completely transparent by the actions of the press. Well-known reporter Peter Arnett recalls in his reflection on Adams’s work, “The Vietnam War was the last great war for the American Press.”76 For Arnett, Vietnam laid the ground for ethical action because it was accessible to journalists. “In Vietnam the world was open to any of us. We could get on a medevac helicopter and go into the center of action.” Like the longing for the once blank spaces on the earth, that kind of transparency is, for Arnett, no longer possible with today’s media and military relationship in the Middle East. It is only the full accessibility offered by Vietnam that allowed Adams to capture in that famous image “a moment of truth about the war. The picture was a tangible reality that came to characterize the whole conflict.” Television journalist Bob Schieffer confirms this understanding: “There was virtually no censorship, and it is one of the only wars America has fought where there was no censorship.”77 With the journalist and photographer becoming the heroes of the Vietnam War, actions taken by Americans during the war can be remembered nostalgically as being part of an ethical structure of feeling in the United States that is divorced from military actions. As television news correspondent Morley Safer puts it, “Correspondents saw more war than many in the military, more than most generals.”78 Eddie Adams’s picture thus saw what the military could not. It captured “everything that was wrong with that war. The brutality of it, the pointlessness of it; who were the good guys and who were the bad guys of it.”79

Although it is important to remember that culture was the site through which political lies and the brutality of U.S. militarism in Vietnam were exposed, it is equally important to foreground the ways in which antiwar images and texts have been subsumed into an understanding of U.S. democracy as robust. The framing of photojournalism in particular has been used to conceive of the possibility of morality in a post-Vietnam world. For example, in their discussion of iconic images, Robert Hariman and John Lucaites argue that certain photographs become sacred images for a secular society.80 Because they view photojournalism as a “characteristically democratic art,” they argue that the iconic photo “reproduces idealism essential for democratic continuity” and serves as a conversation piece for the “vernacular public sphere.”81 The preponderance of iconic Vietnam War images, including the Eddie Adams photo and Huynh Cong Ut’s Accidental Napalm, highlighted America’s moral fragmentation through the capture of its immoral actions abroad. As Hariman and Lucaites suggest in their reading of Accidental Napalm, the traumatic moment of moral failure, encapsulated in the image of a naked young girl running, her skin burning from a Napalm attack, is stopped in time.82 Yet Americans’ ability to recognize the nation’s moral failing in the suffering of the naked girl symbolizes the overcoming of the moral and social breakdown of the United States in Vietnam, what Halberstam’s introduction to the Eddie Adams book characterizes as the human ability to transcend the breakdown by recognizing right from wrong. As contemporary discourses about photojournalism and the Vietnam War demonstrate, what makes the iconic Vietnam era photos “sacred” in U.S. history is that they ultimately reaffirm the relevance, vibrancy, and moral superiority of U.S. democracy in spite of periodic lapses. In the dominant reading of Vietnam War images, the national outrage at the moral failings of the United States, exposed through transparent journalistic practices, became the foremost symbol of the nation’s ability to recognize and overcome the horrors it had wreaked upon Vietnam and to emerge an ethical and humanitarian actor on the global stage yet again.

From Vietnam to Afghanistan

In a collection of essays on the aftermath of the Vietnam War in U.S. culture, Noam Chomsky proposed that the dual tendency of focusing on human rights and deflecting U.S. self-critique as an empire upon the Soviet Union was part of the political process of recovering from the Vietnam War. He begins his analysis by citing the perspective of Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, regarding the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan: “Soviet policy in Afghanistan is the fourth greatest exercise in social holocaust of our contemporary age: it ranks only after Stalin’s multimillion massacres; after Hitler’s genocide of the European Jews and partially of the Slavs; and after Pol Pot’s decimation of his own people; it is, moreover, happening right now.”83 Brzezinski blames U.S. liberals for critiquing only “unfashionable” imperialisms, namely, that of the United States, and turning a blind eye to the humanitarian horrors of the more dangerous contemporary empire, the U.S.S.R. Chomsky argues that for Carter and his administration to conceive of themselves as the “patron saint[s] of human rights,” who had the moral authority to condemn human rights abuses committed by others, required not the forgetting of Vietnam but, rather, the reframing of what happened in Vietnam.84 Whereas the Soviets’ overwhelming military power in Afghanistan could be conceived of as genocidal and therefore a human rights issue on which the United States should take a stance, Vietnam was reimagined as a war of equals. The equality between the Americans and the Vietnamese became legible through “loss,” where “losses” rather than military power supposedly leveled any discrepancies in technology or manpower. Importantly, the emphasis on the U.S.S.R.’s human rights abuses in Afghanistan throughout the 1980s, addressed in the next chapter, indicates that Ronald Reagan’s policy of remilitarization did not necessarily represent a complete departure from Carter’s interest in human rights as a post-Vietnam War way of conceptualizing the United States’ role in the world. Rather, Reagan-era descriptors of U.S. geopolitical and moral duties built on the lessons of Vietnam, citing human rights abuses as the reason for military aid.

Whereas the images of Vietnamese suffering became the condition of possibility for reviving U.S. humanity in the post-Vietnam War context, in the 1980s Afghanistan became the site through which the morality of U.S. militarism was reaffirmed and past U.S. military methods were condemned. The way in which this critique was staged in political and media discourses reframed the relationship between an idea, imperialism, and violence in Heart of Darkness. In Afghanistan, the United States was able to salvage early Cold War discourses about freedom and democracy by condemning the “methods” it had used to fight the Vietnam War without questioning the ideas that led to the war in the first place. Reagan’s foreign policy refused large-scale military actions, supporting instead guerilla fighters who were opposed to the Soviet Union. It is possible to read discourses about the Reagan Doctrine, which posited that the United States should provide covert aid to anti-Communist guerillas, as well as the doctrine itself, as emergent frames for U.S. militarism reproducing the moment in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness when the company removes Kurtz while continuing to justify its objectives through a critique of Kurtz’s “methods.” In the novel, the company manager claims:

We have done all we could for him—haven’t we. But there is no disguising the fact, Mr. Kurtz has done more harm than good to the Company. He did not see the time was not ripe for vigorous action. . . . I don’t deny there is a remarkable quantity of ivory—mostly fossil. We must save it, at all events—but look how precarious the position is—and why? Because the method is unsound.85

By maintaining the need for accumulating ivory, the manager describes the damage done by Kurtz to the company as a methodological error rather than an error of principles. With the advent of the Reagan era, new forms of U.S. militarism limited the critique of what occurred in Vietnam to that war’s methods, reaffirming the ideals underlying the war and leading to a revival of early Cold War rhetoric.