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nage ee OUTRAGE AT MY "AI, NOT AT THE GREATER “VIL— U.S. Another ‘Respectable Murderer’? By Colman McCarthy AY TASHINGSTC? 0 C.~—Cre of the MMe Co L- pte-en altace at Y th: Ms Lai mocderc pv thet the cutrage is cirectec a: ti: smal evil, not tne laree ore Go @e O21. WE Sas. an“ courtmartial the priveres anc hevtenants who pumpec bullets ip:. the noncembatant pessanis. Ect apoaverc. ois no: good form to be oureged at the men in power whe got us inte the larger horrors o’ Vietram. ; Nev should aryone be esneciz’. an gered at the civil and military offizials whe, will detachment anc often 100K mijes fre. the war zones. established a i EE Caiman Aiclerthy is @ meme oc the editorial page siaif of the Wasntagton Post. ~ the policy of “search and destroy.” or the policy of bombing civilian sites. or hate.ming cr defoliation. or moving refugees like cattle. These latter policies. carefully planned with computers, charts and maps, are the portrait of the larger evil of Viet- nam, of which My Lai is only a minor brush stroke. The mora! problem of this killing is that many more than the ac- cused soldiers are involved. Implicated in a deeper way is the society which either actively supported their presence in Vietnam or passively approved of it _ , by silence. ‘Respectable Murderers’ In a brilliant book, “The Respectable Murderers,” sociologist Pau! Hanly Fur- fey wrote: “‘It is an infinitely tragic fact that the greatest crimes of history are committed with the co-operation or at least with the passive consent of the solid citizens who constitute the stable backbone of the community.” The sporadic crimes tha‘ soi! the front pages, the daily robberies, assaults, Tapes and murders, are the work of individuals and small gangs. They are committed by manifest criminals whom __ the community despises and punishes. But the great evils, the persecutions, the unjust wars of conquest, the mass slaughters of the innocent, the ex- ploitations of whole social classes — these crimes are committed by the or- ganized community under the leadership af “respectable citizens.” History's list of “respectable mur- derers” is long and well-known: Herod and the holy innocents, Nero and the early Christians, the Crusaders and the “infidels,” the Spanish Inquisition, the American pioneers who slaughtered In- dians, to name a few of the more glam- orous. The “‘murderers" were made ce- spectable not only by themselves. but Behrend:, He: Pa7en, Amsterdam “There’s blood on YOUR hands?” Courtmectia! the pripcies . . . whe pumped bullets info the peasants .. . but .. . Hf is nol good form ix be oulraged at the men m power who go: us into the larger horrors of Vietnam. What alarms many who oppose the Vietnam war and who march or Morato- rium days or flee to Canada or Sweden to demonstrate their alarm, is the belief that the United States is a “respectable murderer” in Vietnam. As our in volvement became greater it became clearer that we would be knowingly committing many awful acts and assum- ing many kinds of guilt. Even Lyndon Johnson knew this; quot- ing Thomas Jefferson, Mr. Johnson said in his 1967 State of the Union speech that societies are “‘compelied sometimes to choose a great evi! in order to war off a greater fevil].” .- : Great-Greater Theory of Evil This is precisely the trouble; many whose conscience says ‘“‘no” to Vietnam do so because they believe the moral law is firm: It is never permissible, under any circumstances, to directly will evil that good may follow from it. It is wrong to do the great evil of napalming a village to destroy the sup- posedly greater evil of a few suspected Viet Cong; it is wrong to defollate farm- land to keep the V.C. from perhaps growing food on it; it is wrong to de- stroy another people’s country and cul- ture becaus2 perhaps the greater evil of Communism may be stopped that way. The great-greater theory of evil means that any leader of any country can say that he must murder the people of another nation because, being a true humanitarian, he is striving to bring about a greater good. Thus, the Spanish jnonisitare fartirad and murdoend ha Jewish murders because the Jews were plotting to take over the world. A-Bomb ‘Saved Lives’ Long before Vietnam, Harry Truman justified the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, insisting that the horror real- ly ‘saved lives” and “ended the war,” even though Some postwar surveys sug- gest that Japan’s will had been crushed months before. : Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist who was concerned about the individual's Survival in mass society, wrote about the way we wage war: “Look at the devilish means of destruction thai are invented by perfectly harmiess gentle Men, reasonable, respectable citizens, being al? we hope to be. And when the whole thing blows up and causes an indescribable inferno of devastation, no- body seems to be responsible. It simply occurs, yet it is all man-made.” How does the moral person get away from the madness? He can't, physically. If he heads for a desert island or the northern woods, he may find a MIRV base already there. All he can do is to be certain his own life is free from any form of “respectable murder,” and then cast his fot in some effective way with those on whom the bombs fal! and the bullets spray. Reprinted by permission from The Washington Post