Colonialism and Taking Sides: A reflection on 'The Quiet American' by Graham Greene.  By Kevin Patrick Fitzgerald.  First published at www.medium.com/@kfitz.music and www.substack.com/@kevinpfitzgerald on 28 November 2025.  Published by Mnoty Press 9 October 2026.

The center of this paper is a discussion of a novel titled 'The Quiet American' by Graham Greene. I see that it was made into a movie, and I have not seen the movie. The book written from the perspective of a British journalist in Vietnam in the early 1950s; during a shift from French US colonial warfare.

[Spoiler alert: I will discuss the end of the book]

Greene addresses much of the psychology of colonialism in this book, and brilliantly so. My basic interpretation here is that the colonizers try to deny responsibility, and that this alienates them from themselves.

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The journalist has been in Vietnam for a long time, has his ear to the street, and has a good awareness of what is going on. He often reduces the Vietnamese to stereotypes; indeed, he has lots to say about 'Asiatics' in general. Yet, he does not tune out from the humanity of the Vietnamese, except for the one with whom he shares a bed.

The woman with whom he shares a bed gets security. She has an overbearing sister who wants her to find a foreign husband to get her out of Vietnam, and the journalist said he can't because he's married. The woman sticks by the journalist's side, but is eventually lured away by the American, who promises to take her to the US and marry her.

The American is a spy; claiming to be part of an economic development project while sneaking in the technology to make hidden bombs and supporting a rogue general who his bosses think can be used against the insurgency in the north. These bombs are used in a busy market in Saigon, killing a bunch of civilians, and the spy shrugs and acknowledges that people die in war.

Another character relevant to my discussion here is the French soldier. He shows from a military veteran's perspective the dehumanization of the war. While journalists are generally given only the information the military wants them to have, this guy gets into a plane and experiences it's use to napalm and fire a bunch of bullets into a village in a valley that is challenging to get to even with the airplane.

There is no opportunity to decipher whether the people being killed have anything to do with the resistance, which the French are trying to pretend is losing ground. They got intelligence saying the village was controlled by the enemy, and they struck.

The soldier is jaded. He invites the journalist to an opium den; while the soldier does not use opium, he finds it relaxing to be among people who do. In this scene, the soldier tells the journalist that eventually, everyone takes sides. The journalist had been milking his belief that he would not take sides in the war. The soldier was right. The journalist took a side against the spy.

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There's a lot here. The journalist tries to avoid responsibility with sex and drugs, with a detached attitude toward his work, and at one point he argues with the spy to let him die. The spy does not let him die; he saves the journalist's life.

When the journalist is saved, as he was about to lose consciousness from his wounds, he tried to tell the people to save a young Vietnamese soldier who had been hurt nearby. Indeed, when the help arrived, the journalist had been trying to crawl toward the wounded Vietnamese soldier to help him.

The humanity shows through in this scene. The spy risks his own life to save the journalist, and the journalist risks his own life to save a Vietnamese soldier. In this sense, the journalist had already taken sides, as had the spy.

More deeply, it reminds us that the people in the trenches of colonialism are still people. Even the French soldier's humanity is apparent. It's not that he did not care about the people he was killing, it's that he had taken the side of the colonizers, and his soul was riddled with guilt.

The spy did not seem to have that kind of guilt. According to the journalist's interpretation, the spy believed so purely and absolutely in his intellectual training, which informed the spy of his mission.

The absolute belief in the rightness of the plan to arm the rogue general against the insurgency fit with the spy's larger view of humanity, which the journalist interpreted as quaint and naive.

The spy made comments such as 'when you trust a man, he becomes trustworthy', and voiced opposition to any demeaning comments the journalist made about the women they were fighting over. The spy was also a faithful friend who saved the journalist's life.

And yet, he was able to justify bombing civilians, and even look at blood on his shoes from such a bombing, and mumble about having to get them cleaned. This is not because he was a callous man who did not care. He was also intending to bring the woman home, marry her, have children with her, and then go back to Vietnam to continue his work; even while his work was to facilitate the bombing of innocent civilians.

The spy justified his belief by arguing that he was on the side of democracy, and that the fight was against communism. The journalist tried to argue that the Vietnamese people don't care about these things; that they simply want to go on farming without being shot.

As such, the journalist was making assumptions about what a whole country of people want. He did not speak the language. He found that enough of the Vietnamese people spoke French that he could do his job well enough to stay in Saigon and continue getting paid, and so he could have his woman and his opium and his illusion that he did not take sides.

Eventually he sided with the Vietnamese people to an extent, but when he got a letter from his wife accepting a divorce, and the woman got all excited and started planning for their move to London, he started to wallow in guilt. He had not had the intention to marry her and bring her to London. He had brought it up as a way to keep her from leaving and going off with the spy.

The French soldier avoided responsibility by choosing a side and sticking with it. The spy avoided responsibility by believing that he was on the side of righteousness and that the ends justify the means. The journalist avoided responsibility by mixing comfort with guilt.

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An important part of the backdrop of this story, I think, and part of what makes it so compelling, is the transition between a European based colonial order to a US based colonial order. The American spy had been indoctrinated with crystal clear ideology that he was unwilling, and perhaps unable, to question.

French and British colonialism seemed tired by comparison. After the second World War, they got more violent, yet they seem to have believed in their colonial projects less. The US, and the Soviets for that matter, went the other route and became more venomous in their justification of colonialism.

And the early 1950s are important as to how the Cold War would develop. The US backed a coup in Iran, against a democratic government, in order to install a monarch with good ties with the British. The US took over the war in Vietnam from the French, gradually, by military advisors. The US led a UN force to carpet bomb Korea in order to maintain military posts in East Asia.

Meanwhile, international news agencies got comfortable and avoided responsibility. They, largely, chose their sides in the Cold War, and their side was in line with the new colonial order according to which the US would provide the ideology and the means of violence while Western European investors gained more advantageous positions through their closer relations with US investors.

Meanwhile, the international media avoided responsibility by expressing a kind of comfortable guilt. Yes, they collectively lament, it's unfortunate that so many civilians have been killed, but it's part of a larger campaign that we should not question.

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Zooming out a bit further, there's sort of an old piece of wisdom that a journalist, or a historian, should not take sides. That our job is to report what happened and let people decide what to do with that information.

I think that's incorrect. Our voice is too valuable for us to avoid our humanity: our basic and innate understanding of right and wrong, while using it. We have a responsibility to stand up to injustice. And not just the kind that directly interferes with our comfort. We have a responsibility to seek it, call it out, and challenge it in public space.

The US, British, and French were wrong in Vietnam. They were wrong in Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Malaysia.

Colonialism is wrong, and the violence these three countries especially, but others as well, have perpetrated against the people of this region and beyond should not be justified as part of a larger campaign to defend democracy against communism. It was not. It was an effort to control resources, property, and people.

And it's still going on. Some of the players are shifting sides, and the investors are better and have more connections, but the overall practice of colonial exploitation is still the same and it's still wrong, and we can and should work together in order to fight it.

Many are already doing so, and I applaud such efforts. We have a lot of work to do. Go team go.

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Anyway, thank you for reading. I really appreciate your time and attention. I hope you have a beautiful day full of some kind of contribution you believe in. And I hope your contribution bears wholesome and healthy fruit. Please take good care.

Power to the People

Freedom of the Soul