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Linh Dinh is one of America’s best writers. He is now living in Dak Lak, Vietnam, working as a foreman in his brother-in-law’s plastics recycling plant. Read about life in Dak Lak, among other things, in Linh’s new article “Endless Culture War.”
How did Linh get unofficially expelled from the American literary scene? “It happened step by step. I didn’t support Obama live everybody else. I’m not a Democrat, not a Republican—I’m neither. So it started there. And then I’d talk about 9/11. And I wrote articles about the Bin Laden assassination. I thought it was nonsense. There was no proof that anything happened…at that point I hadn’t discussed the Holocaust, because I didn’t know much about it. But still the invitations (to speak at campuses) dried up.”
In this interview we discuss Wikipedia’s lies (for example, they falsely claim Linh is a regular contributor to Russia Today, when in fact he has never even appeared on that channel); the rise of internet censorship; the ubiquity of tribalism including among the two tribes that pretend to oppose tribalism, Jews and liberals/leftists; the destruction of human sociability and society and the rise of techno-dystopia; the naturalness of voluntary gender segregation.
Linh Dinh: Vietnam “may be grim on some level. But American slums are the worst, in my experience, because of the desolation. It’s not because of the material deprivation. It’s that people are isolated. They’re deprived of human contacts and spiritual solace. Even American suburbs are very desolate. I’ve been to thirty countries, but I’ve never seen a society organize itself as badly as the United States, as far as taking care of basic social needs.”
As a follow-up to Linh’s observations and comments, I will say : The real poverty is the poverty of the heart and spirit, not the poverty of the wallet. Just like when the Quran states that the real blindness is the blindness of the heart, not the blindness of the eyes (Quran [022:46]).