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UID:Indybay-18661368
SEQUENCE:18735083
CREATED:20101014T210500Z
DESCRIPTION:Ken Knabb will be reading and discussing:\n\nIN THE CROSSFIRE\nAdventures 
 of a Vietnamese Revolutionary\n\nBy Ngo Van, Edited by Ken Knabb and 
 Hélène Fleury\n\n“History is written by the victors.” The most 
 radical revolts are not only physically crushed, they are falsified, 
 trivialized, and buried under a constant barrage of superficial and 
 ephemeral bits of “information,” to the point that most people do not 
 even know they happened. Ngo Van’s In the Crossfire is among the most 
 illuminating revelations of this repressed and hidden history. It is also a 
 very moving human document: dramatic political events are interwoven with 
 intimate personal concerns, just as they always are in reality.\n\nThe 
 two-stage Vietnam war against French and then American occupation 
 (1945–1975) is still fairly well known; but almost no one knows anything 
 about the long and complex struggles that preceded it. Van’s account 
 gives us a sense of the political climate and the players that set the 
 stage for the war—nationalists and Buddhists, Trotkyists and Stalinists, 
 as well as spontaneous popular revolts that often bypassed them all. These 
 proved to be some of the most broad-based and persevering revolutionary 
 movements of the twentieth century.\n\nNgo Van took part in these movements 
 as a young man in Saigon; attending clandestine meetings; establishing 
 underground networks; disseminating radical publications; organizing 
 strikes and protests; taking part in insurrections and partisan warfare; 
 being jailed and tortured by the French; and being one of the few survivors 
 of the murderous campaign of the Stalinists, who systematically liquidated 
 the Trotskyists and all the other oppositional movements in the aftermath 
 of World War II.\n\nConstantly harassed by the French colonial police in 
 Saigon and risking assassination by the Stalinists if he ventured into the 
 countryside, Van emigrated to France in 1948. His encounters with 
 anarchists, councilists and libertarian Marxists reaffirmed the most 
 radical aspects of his previous experiences while verifying his increasing 
 suspicions that there were significant problems with Trotskyism as well as 
 Stalinism. From that point on, Van carried out his activities as an 
 independent radical.\n\nIn the Crossfire: Adventures of a Vietnamese 
 Revolutionary is an English translation of Ngo Van’s fascinating and 
 gripping autobiography, originally published in two volumes in France in 
 2000 and 2005. Co-edited by Van’s close friend and collaborator, Hélène 
 Fleury, and acclaimed situationist author and translator Ken Knabb, the 
 book includes 70 color and black and white illustrations, reproducing many 
 of Van’s paintings as well as numerous documentary photographs. In the 
 Crossfire belongs on the shelf of every serious scholar of Vietnamese 
 history, and is sure to be a compelling read for anyone interested in the 
 revolutionary history of the twentieth century and beyond.\n\nNgo Van was 
 born in a peasant village in Vietnam in 1912. As a young man he moved to 
 Saigon and became involved in underground struggles against the French 
 colonial regime. In the aftermath of World War II, as most of his comrades 
 were being murdered by Ho Chi Minh’s Communist Party, Van escaped to 
 France, where he became a factory worker, a painter, and a historical 
 scholar. Following his retirement in 1978, he devoted the remainder of his 
 life to researching and writing a series of books on the history of modern 
 Vietnam. He died in 2005 at the age of 92.\n\n“The future of human 
 societies depends on our capacity to wrest the past from the cold grip of 
 the present masters. Voices have been lost. We must try to bring them back 
 to life; to rediscover the living traces of the relay of rebellion that 
 traverses time; to restore them and to pass them on.”\n\n—Ngo Van, from 
 the preface \n https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2010/10/14/18661368.php
SUMMARY:Ngo Van, Vietnamese Revolutionary book event
LOCATION:Bound Together Bookstore\n1369 Haight St., San Francisco
URL:https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2010/10/14/18661368.php
DTSTART:20101027T020000Z
DTEND:20101027T040000Z
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