We often choose comfort over the brutal truth.
It’s a human instinct to seek the path of least resistance, especially when the alternative promises pain. But looking at the stars from my wheelchair here in Tirana, I often think about the gravity of the choices we make. Physics teaches us that every action has a reaction, yet in human history, the reaction to speaking truth is often silence—or worse, erasure. I want to tell you about a man who understood this physics of the soul better than anyone. His name was Trần Đức Thảo, and he saw the cracks in our world long before the rest of us even knew the ground was shifting.
You might assume that universal values like "liberty" and "progress" mean the same thing to everyone. You probably believe that philosophy is a high-minded debate that happens in comfortable armchairs, detached from the gritty reality of war. Most of us also think that reaching the peak of Western education is the ultimate success story for someone from the developing world.
Trần Đức Thảo proved all three of these assumptions dead wrong.
He didn't just argue against them; he lived a life that shattered them. Born in a village in what was then the French protectorate of Tonkin, Thảo rose to the very top of the French intellectual elite, studying at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He sat in rooms with Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, debating the nature of existence while the world burned outside. But while his peers were building reputations, Thảo was dismantling the very stage they stood on.
The friction began with a simple, terrifying realization about language. In 1946, while imprisoned by the French for his political activities, Thảo wrote an article titled On Indochina. In this piece, he laid out a concept that still sends shivers down my spine. He argued that when a colonizer and a colonized person speak, they are experiencing a "radical misunderstanding" that no amount of explaining can fix.
Think about the word "liberty." When a French diplomat says it, he means a specific kind of Western freedom, maintained by his government. But when a Vietnamese person hears it, they hear "liberty-inside-the-French-system" . It’s a counterfeit coin. For the colonized, true liberty requires smashing that system entirely. Thảo saw that the language of Western imperialism relies on erasing the people it claims to help. He pointed out that "progress" to the occupier meant "progress-inside-the-system," often enforced by violence . This wasn't just semantics; it was the blueprint for the divide between the West and the rest of the world.
This brings us to the concept of treason. Thảo was a brilliant scholar, a "number two" status student at the ENS because he lacked French citizenship, yet he was fully integrated into the high temples of Parisian thought . He could have stayed there. He could have been the "good immigrant" who adopts the ways of the empire. But Thảo argued that for an intellectual from the oppressed class to accept these privileges was the very definition of treason .
He believed that the colonizer offers these perks as a bribe. They want loyalty in exchange for a seat at the table. To Thảo, accepting that seat meant betraying his own people. He refused to be a native informant. He saw that the only honorable path was resistance, even if it meant throwing away the comfort he had earned.
His integrity eventually drove a wedge between him and the titans of French philosophy. He had five ill-fated conversations with Sartre between 1949 and 1950, intended to reconcile Marxism with existentialism . The project collapsed. Thảo felt Sartre didn't take the philosophical seriousness of Marxism—and the material reality of history—seriously enough . While Sartre was looking for a "third way" between American capitalism and Soviet communism, Thảo saw the Marshall Plan rising and knew there was no middle ground . Faced with imperialist expansion, he chose Marxism, not as a fashion statement, but as a survival mechanism.
He didn't just talk the talk. In 1951, after publishing his masterpiece Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism, he packed his bags and left Paris for the jungles of Vietnam . He went home to help build the revolution he had theorized about.
This is where the story breaks your heart.
You would hope that a man of such principle would be welcomed as a hero. But history is rarely that kind. Upon his return, the very government he supported eventually turned on him. In the late 1950s, during the crackdown known as the Nhân Văn-Giai Phẩm affair, Thảo was punished for his involvement with dissenting journals . The state forced him into a public self-criticism and sent him to a farm for "re-education" .
Imagine the smell of damp earth and the ache in your back as you work the fields, knowing your mind holds the capacity to challenge the greatest thinkers of Europe, yet you are silenced by the very people you sought to liberate. He lived in poverty and obscurity for decades. When he finally returned to Paris in 1991, two years before his death, he was described as ghost-like . One observer said speaking to him felt like a conversation within a dream or a nightmare .
So, why does this matter to us today?
We live in a time where we are constantly told that technology and globalism speak a universal language. We assume that if we just translate the words correctly, we will understand each other. Thảo warns us that this is a lie. As long as there is a power imbalance—between the rich and the poor, the occupier and the occupied—we are speaking different languages.
He forces us to ask ourselves uncomfortable questions. When we speak of "peace" or "security," whose peace are we protecting? Who is paying the price for our stability? Thảo’s life was a tragedy, yes. But it was also a testament to the terrifying power of seeing the world exactly as it is, stripped of all illusions. He refused to distinguish between his philosophy, his politics, and his personal life . He paid for that consistency with his happiness.
I look at the night sky and see the cold indifference of the universe, but down here, our choices matter. Thảo showed us that true understanding requires more than just words; it requires a willingness to dismantle the systems that keep us apart. He was one of the first to map the canyon between the colonizer and the colonized, a map drawn in his own sweat and lost years. We would do well to study it before we get lost again.
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