Visit Beautiful Vietnam

by Gunther Anders, translated by Nicolas Briand

Book cover: Visit Beautiful Vietnam

Extent: 360 pages

Publisher: Les Belles Lettres

Subjects: Social Sciences 

Language: French

Paperback (Published)

(October 2024)

ISBN: 9782251455754

4.69 x 7.52 inches

Price: $31.00

In stock

Gunther Anders ecrit en 1968 Visit beautiful Vietnam, une charge aceree contre la langue et la morale qui justifient toute guerre d’agression, qu’elle soit exterieure ou interieure. L’une des idees fortes qu’Anders tente de faire passer est que la guerre du Vietnam inaugure une serie de guerres d’un type nouveau, qu’il ne faut surtout pas confondre avec les precedentes, dans laquelle la superiorite de la force armee de l’agresseur est telle que l’issue du conflit apparait d’emblee sans espoir pour l’agresse. Sans doute l’ouvrage le plus sous-estime du philosophe, Visit Beautiful Vietnam n’avait jamais connu de traduction francaise. Cette monumentale erreur est enfin reparee.


A juror at the Russell Tribunal, armed with firsthand knowledge of events in Vietnam and American politics, Gunther Anders wrote Visit Beautiful Vietnam in 1968 , a scathing attack on the language and morality that justify any war of aggression, whether external or internal. One of the key ideas Anders tries to convey is that the Vietnam War inaugurates a series of wars of a new type, which should not be confused with previous ones. This new type of war is a war in which the superiority of the aggressor’s armed force is such that the outcome of the conflict immediately appears hopeless for the aggressed. But it is not a question of integrating a new province into the empire; the formal sovereignty of the vassal must be maintained. The aim of aggression is to force the attacked to recognize a form of moral tutelage, that is to say, to agree to enter the aggressor’s zone of political influence and, consequently, to accept the rules of the game governing economic exchanges within this zone, which naturally favor the dominant power: the attacked people are deemed to be defending themselves against an external enemy or freeing themselves from a dictatorship, moving towards democracy under the wise advice of… their aggressor. Visit beautiful Vietnam , which had never been translated into French, is undoubtedly the most underestimated work of its author, which is a great shame because it is one of his best, one of the most finely crafted, beneath the exterior of apparent disorder; the nastiest certainly, and it is often wickedly funny.

  • By (author) Gunther Anders
  • Translated by Nicolas Briand