Reading · Postcards from the End

[Vũng Tàu, 8/21/26]

Those we can’t see or hear are already dead. Daily, then, you’re sitting among the dead, work, sort of, with them, then lie, if you’re lucky, next to a stinking corpse each night. Unlike real cadavers, yours keep rotting without turning into odorless bones, so each minute, your world stinks worse, you’re convinced, without realizing much of that stench, if not all of it, comes from you.

Habits always override preferences, basic good taste or just common sense. Though enraged by all these noisy corpses, you still need to feel their stinking presence, if only to imagine, with appropriate smugness, you’re not quite dead. Hell can’t be worse than this, you conclude with giddy self-congratulation. Your hell, though, is only the tamest variety. Compared with what’s to come, it might as well be the highest heaven. The deeper you sink, the more vivid God will appear, and heavier, too, bloated and emanating gas. To your childish surprise, he stinks worse than anything imaginable. After all, God created shit to anchor you, yes, you, specifically, to his shittiness, not just yours. Without shit, you’ll undoubtedly think you’re a billionaire, or even God.

Each human encounter is a face off, if not duel, with all concealed weapons, including nuke, ready to be drawn. Just now, a woman came out to move her drying blanket into the sun. “Greetings, uncle,” she said, so I replied, “Greetings, miss.” Minutes later, a man half my age appeared. Though staring at me, he said nothing, so I nodded. He nodded back. I will never forgive myself for blinking first. Since he’s a dead faced and slack bodied whatever, I can console myself by thinking, what I did was no different than petting some hideous dog on the head, though he’ll laugh, I’m sure, each time he remembers my capitulation. Laughing so hard, he’ll fart at my imagined face. Since I’m cowering in fright when confronted with the weakest pussies, what’s left of my life might as well be over. God, please grant me immediate and total amnesia!

After this preamble (or preambulance) that must feel like late Coltrane to those who hate even his “My Favorite Things,” I steer you, finally, towards Orwell’s 1939 observations about Marrakech, which, like everything he’s ever written, is eternally relevant. There, he talks about “undifferentiated brown stuff” or nonwhite people, Jews and whites.

Arriving in Morocco, Orwell was immediately “infuriated” by the sight of overloaded donkeys, with their “galled back[s],” yet it took him weeks to notice brown people treated no better. This is Orwell we’re talking about, one who noticed everything. He’s betraying not just his blindness or prejudice, but the entire white world’s. What they chose not see.

His feeding a gazelle astonished an Arab navvy, who finally said, “I could eat some of that bread.”

Each afternoon for weeks, a file of very old women, “mummified with age and the sun,” trudged by Orwell’s house. Each was weighed down by a load of firewood. Though they had “registered themselves on [his] eyeballs,” Orwell couldn’t quite see them. “Firewood was passing—that was how I saw it.”

Then, “One day a poor old creature who could not have been more than four feet tall crept past me under a vast load of wood. I stopped her and put a five-sou piece (a little more than a farthing) into her hand. She answered with a shrill wail, almost a scream, which was partly gratitude but mainly surprise. I suppose that from her point of view, by taking any notice of her, I seemed almost to be violating a law of nature.”

Orwell didn’t dress up these accounts to make himself seem perspicacious right from the beginning, or unusually humane. With unmatched integrity, Orwell tracked what he felt and saw. The mistreatment of old women was an indictment of Morocco itself, “When a family is travelling it is quite usual to see a father and a grown-up son riding ahead on donkeys, and an old woman following on foot, carrying the baggage.”

With evil Jews such as Netanyahu, Miriam Alderson, Jeffrey Epstein, Albert Bourla, Rochelle Wallensky, Jared Kushner, Stephen Miller, Larry Fink and many others so visible, we tend to forget about crapped on Jews, but they’re the ones being sent to kill or be killed in Occupied Palestine, as better off Jews flee to Cyprus, Greece, Germany, Thailand and the Philippines, etc. Tasked with committing evil, Jewish foot soldiers aren’t unlike American ones. They’re just as brainwashed, and just as expendable.

In 1939 Marrakech, Orwell saw thousands of dismal Jews, “I was just passing the coppersmiths’ booths when somebody noticed that I was lighting a cigarette. Instantly, from the dark holes all round, there was a frenzied rush of Jews, many of them old grandfathers with flowing grey beards, all clamouring for a cigarette. Even a blind man somewhere at the back of one of the booths heard a rumour of cigarettes and came crawling out, groping in the air with his hand.”

A Moroccan, though, insisted, “They’re all moneylenders really. They’re cunning, the Jews.” Stereotypes that span dozens of countries over thousands of miles, over many centuries, are but pattern recognition.

In every society that has harbored Jews, there were monsters like Bernie Madoff to stain each Jew. Madoff even preyed on Jews. A Noam Chomsky or Woody Allen is more than enough. Benjamin Disraeli’s ethnic hubris, too. Just now, some Israeli rabbi insisted Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson must be assassinated so that “Americans learn to fear Jewish people.” It all comes down their arrogant, contemptuous mindset. Vietnamese or Albanians don’t want anyone dead so others can fear them. Even a rising power like China isn’t like that.

Though Orwell quoted a Moroccan’s take on Jews to dismiss it, we can draw our own conclusion, from what we can’t help but see, more clearly than ever, today.

In 1939, Orwell, like Jack London before him, realized the “undifferentiated brown stuff,” what we now call the Global South, would stop being cowed by the white man and fight back. Led by Iran, with backing from Russia and China, the Axis of Resistance is doing just that. It’s a sea change.

Orwell on a column of Senegalese soldiers, serving their French masters, “As they went past a tall, very young negro turned and caught my eye. But the look he gave me was not in the least the kind of look you might expect. Not hostile, not contemptuous, not sullen, not even inquisitive. It was the shy, wide-eyed negro look, which actually is a look of profound respect. I saw how it was. This wretched boy, who is a French citizen and has therefore been dragged from the forest to scrub floors and catch syphilis in garrison towns, actually has feelings of reverence before a white skin.”

Astounded by that meekness, Orwell had to ask, “How much longer can we go on kidding these people? How long before they turn their guns in the other direction?”

Sadly in Vũng Tàu, or Vietnam in general, that “reverence before a white skin” is still too evident. Daily, it saddens and infuriates me, but thankfully, there’s Iran. If only I could be there right now. So close in 2020, I went twice to its embassy in Beirut. I even called a contact in Tehran. Trump had just assassinated General Soleimani, however, so I, as an American, couldn’t get in.

In Jordan last year, I met a man who had a cousin named after general Võ Nguyên Giáp. Weaving through Beirut’s Sabra, a Palestinian neighborhood, I identified myself as a Vietnamese. Symbolism matters. Vietnam defeated France and the USA. That it was infected with Communism, a Jewish virus, is overlooked. Like China, Vietnam is recovering. For Jews also, Jewish thinking is a deadly disease.