University of Virginia Library

Building A Democracy

The Vietnamese, the ARVN -
those skinny, dirty, ugly, parasitic,
deceitful treacherous species whose
language is like the chatter of
monkeys - these "gooks" are
supposed to be our Allies, people
who are supposedly capable of
building a democracy in Asia, a
people whose military and political
efforts are supposed to be worthy
of the lives of 40,000 American
soldiers. The very words are so
monstrous they stick in the throat.

But these poor people, for
whom Americans must be killed,
are themselves so easy to kill.

For if Konrad Lorenz is to be
believed, our moral sense - or
whatever it is that which makes it
easy to "kill" a cabbage, a little
harder to kill a rat, harder still to
kill a dog and hardest of all to kill a
human being - that moral sense
places the "gooks" too often above
the level of dog but beneath that of
human being.