The Morally Virtuous

 

The Morally Virtuous

Peter Schultz

 

                  Here are two passages from Frances Fitzgerald’s Fire in the Lake, that reward some attention.

 

“To admit that the war was excessive, destructive or that it was not being won was to admit to personal as well as institutional failure….” [457]

 

“’Don’t you realize that everything the Americans do in Vietnam is founded on a hatred of the Vietnamese?’” An embassy official.

 

                  The first passage points to the fact that Americans in Vietnam did not differentiate institutional and personal virtue. There was a “sense of righteous mission that led the United States deeper and deeper into Vietnam. So, the Americans in Vietnam saw themselves as possessing a moral infallibility that justified their actions, their killing and destruction.

 

                  But what if the second passage is correct? What if what the Americans were doing in Vietnam was, in fact, fueled by “a hatred of the Vietnamese?” Insofar as the passage is correct, it means that those who saw themselves as on a righteous mission were delusion. If their moral virtue were fueled by hatred, then the status of that virtue is called into question. Somehow, some way, the moral virtue of the Americans was fueled by a hatred of the Vietnamese.

 

                  “What had looked like an attempt to ‘save Vietnam from the Communists’ was rather an attempt to save American ‘prestige’ around the world.” [472] And American prestige needed “saving” because America’s virtues covered over American hatred, of the Communists and of the Vietnamese. At bottom, it was hatred that drove American foreign policies during the Cold War.