See Quietly Charitable or Quietly Murderous But Always Quietly American for my take on the topic of one important aspect of American moral character. Solzhenitsyn had a similar take and summarized the situation as: Americans are a uniquely evil people. He was speaking of large-scale American crimes against Russian POWs and refugee peoples in the two or so years after World War II. See Operation Keelhaul for a description of those crimes, which apparently devastated a number of young American soldiers who had to carry out these crimes against civilians including children and then returned to the US to be told, “Shut up, we’re celebrating how wonderful we Americans are and don’t want to hear about it.” I’ve listened sympathetically over the years to men only a few years older than me who had tried without success to speak of crimes they had committed in a war, that on the peoples of Vietnam, which was rudderless in Washington except for some guidance from McNamara’s computers and was often—though there were honorable exceptions—poorly commanded on the ground. Those returning veterans had too often heard, “Shut up! It’s in the past, so learn to live with it.” And so it was that we’ve not healed ourselves from the Vietnam Syndrome so much as we’ve repeated mistakes and crimes we refuse to even acknowledge.
And now for a take on the situation by a brave and honorable soldier who was a Green Beret combat officer in Vietnam and has served since then in various ways, including high-level work in military intelligence and in mixed roles (combat/intelligence) as a military attache. Col Pat Lang, US Army (ret) describes himself as a rough boy, a man who can fight and kill with detachment so long as he thinks it morally proper to do so. Read a very brief biographical sketch here: W Patrick Lang; Col Lang deserves a lot more than that and the United States, and all our victims around the world, would have been well-served if Col Lang had received the respect and hearing he deserved on various matters of national security, especially in matters having to do with Southwest Asia and contiguous regions. (But he has wise and insightful things to say about various situations in the world, including the dangerous mess we Americans have made in Ukraine.)
So it isn’t too surprising that, in a recent essay, The US as Shiva, Lord of Destruction and Renewal, Col Lang took the American people, as a nation and as individuals, to task for… Well, his concluding line is: “In pursuit of perfection in human society, we are making deserts so that we can call them Peace.” Some of those deserts were once filled with human beings and some were even on their way to being prosperous societies with some serious possibility of peace and good moral order.
But read the entire essay. It’s short and packs a punch, at least to someone who knows even a little about history and about the American activities in recent decades. It’s a horrible story of a country once promising though always dangerous in its self-righteousness but, more recently, gone horribly bad, a country once well-liked and admired throughout much of the world and now a country increasingly feared, hated, and distrusted.
For those who like to examine the roots of a problem, I can recommend one of my own essays in which I point to bad signs which showed themselves right from the early decades of the New England colonies: see The Need for Abstractions in Moral Self-understanding. In that essay, I explore the attitudes of New Englanders toward the native Americans. Many critics have seen the problem of American bigotry toward other people and peoples and the hatred we show toward them when they don’t act as we think they should. Usually, people think the problem is best solved by concrete means, including allowing radically different peoples into the United States to live and by replacing soldiers by medical or religious missionaries. Against this view, I argue that even the very intelligent and well-educated Puritan elite showed an all-too American incapacity to engage in an inadequate abstraction of moral and other understandings of the world. As Melville and Hawthorne and others have pointed out, we Americans don’t approve of the real world which was created by God; we prefer the one which floated around inside the communal mind of the Puritans of New England in those days and now floats (in somewhat different form) inside the communal mind of nearly all American citizens in this year of 2015.