>I don't know Gordon's age, so I don't know what direct experience, if
>any, he has had with the "war for the hearts & minds" of Americans
>during the Vietnam War. It was fairly obvious in the '60s that perhaps
>the biggest barrier we faced was that of breaking through the almost
>spontaneous assumption that the Vietnamese simply didn't count on the
>one hand, on the other hand that they were almost certainly barbarians
>indifferent to human pain. (Some big shot in Washington claimed that we
>had to remember that death simply wasn't the same to "asians-in-general"
>as it was to "us."
***** Is Each Individual Life Precious?
Distinguishing between "us and them"
by Edward S. Herman
Z magazine, October 2000
...In a remarkable process of self-deception and transference, it has long been part of the ethos of the killers and their ideologues that it is the victims who fail to value human life as we do, and perhaps feel pain less. During the Vietnam War, critical U.S. observers spoke sardonically of the "mere gook rule" that prevailed in Saigon courts, differentiating penalties for killing U.S. citizens and "mere gooks" (Philip Shabecoff, "Murder Verdict Eased," NYT, March 31, 1970). In his book The Limits of Intervention (1970), former Pentagon official and noted "dove" Townsend Hoopes contended that the Vietnamese did not "love life, and fear pain," as we do, and that "happiness" is "beyond the emotional comprehension of the Asian poor." The Vietnamese are not "reasonable" and "defy us by a readiness to struggle, suffer, and die on a scale that seems to us beyond the bounds of humanity." They virtually invite us to "carry our strategic logic, to its conclusion,...which is genocide." But we are unwilling to do this, which would "contradict our own value system."
Hoopes's assertion that the Vietnamese loved life less than we do is based on no evidence and is straightforward racist prejudice. He is also unable to entertain even the possibility that the desire for freedom from colonial rule might weigh heavily in the Vietnamese culture and value system. It never seems to have struck him that, with the U. S. actually doing the killing "on a scale...beyond the bounds of humanity," what was being demonstrated most clearly was that Vietnamese lives were rated at zero in "our own value system." Hoopes never challenged the morality of the "strategic logic" of threatening to kill almost without limit to achieve the political objective of imposing our chosen rule on a distant society. That imperial logic and goal are givens for a spokesman for imperial violence -- so that it is not the country that issues an ultimatum and then kills on a vast scale that does not value life, it is the victims who refuse to surrender....
<http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Global_Secrets_Lies/IsEachLifePrecious.html> *****
Yoshie