Colonial interests actively erase precolonial Vietnamese cultural achievement.

Evidence

Before the arrival of the French in their country, the Vietnamese were people of an old culture, exquisite and refined. To recall this fact upsets the digestion of the Banque d’Indochine. Start the forgetting machine! — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 117

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘forgetting machine’ is a mechanism that will map onto how postcolonial studies describe the manufactured amnesia that Orientalism and Islamophobia rely on. — connects to: Colonial domination distorts the colonized’s relationship with their own culture and traditions — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 421; Colonial administrators used assimilated natives as agents to erode national culture — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 244
• DEFINE: Introduces the ‘forgetting machine’ as the colonial apparatus that manufactures historical amnesia.

Related

• Colonial powers replaced native scripts to sever colonies from their heritage and elite. (similarity 0.79)
• Language’s irreducible privacy, rooted in mortality, fuels colonial rage at the colonized (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Colonial domination distorts the colonized’s relationship with their own culture and traditions #corroborates (0.85) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 421
• Colonial administrators used assimilated natives as agents to erode national culture #expands (0.72) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 244