| Summary/Abstract |
In July 1967, Hannah Arendt wrote to the editor of the New Yorker, William Shawn, to praise Jonathan Schell’s recently published report on Ben Suc, a village of several thousand people along the Saigon River that the American military had recently encircled, bombed, occupied, searched, evacuated, burned, bulldozed, and bombed again. Most of the surviving villagers had been trucked to a hastily constructed relocation camp. Under a ‘long nylon canopy over the bare earth, without floors or walls’, ringed by barbed wire, ‘each family was assigned a place about ten feet square’ to inhabit, along with their pigs and chickens; a sign under the canopy welcomed them to ‘the reception center for refugees fleeing communism’ (Schell, 1967: 69, 74). ‘Nothing else I read has the same immediacy’, she told Shawn, adding that ‘compared with this nylon-concentration camp’, the French internment camp where she had been imprisoned in 1940 ‘was sheer luxury’.
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