Word: westerns
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...important to remember that the U.S. in Viet Nam faces an unusually brutal enemy who uses terror deliberately (see box, page 29). But that certainly is no excuse for American behavior at My Lai. It is also small comfort to the U.S. that other Western nations have been guilty of wartime atrocities. The French executed some 15,000 Moslems in the long Algerian war of the 1950s. At Amritsar in India's Punjab, British Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer marched 50 of his soldiers toward a menacing mob of Indians in 1919 and, without warning, they killed 379 people with rifle...
America's Puritan sense tends to regard evil in stark terms of black and white. It has been pointed out endlessly, and correctly, that the western, with its crude division of good guys and bad guys, is the nation's archetypal art form. Evil has thus been transmogrified, whenever possible, into the definable, detestable enemy-like Hitler, say-who could always be defeated by the forces of justice. The national instinct to juxtapose good and evil is summed up with only a touch of irony by W. H. Auden's nostalgic reference to simpler times...
...world wars changed all that. The Nurnberg Trial of 22 Nazi leaders after World War II revived one of the great tenets of Western thought: that a higher law sometimes requires men to give their primary allegiance to humanity rather than the State. Although the Nazi defendants pleaded "state orders," 19 were convicted and ten were hanged. To skeptics, Nurnberg proved mainly that losing a war had become a crime under international law. Nevertheless, the supremacy of civilized rules of behavior was enunciated in a U.N. report: "The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his government...
Ominous Forecast. In instances where Western specialists could check the veracity of the Chronicle reports, they have proved to be accurate. That only makes the newsletter's prediction about Stalin seem more significant. Issue No. 10, which has just begun to circulate in Russia, reports that the Soviet leaders are planning a major campaign to "rehabilitate" Stalin on the occasion of the 90th anniversary of his birth next Dec. 21. Major articles in Pravda and Izvestia are in preparation, together with a four-volume edition of his works. Posters and a statue are also being made ready...
...Georges Pompidou has just decided to build atomic power stations based on American technology. The government will ask for bids from interested companies and make its decision this spring. The new plants will burn enriched uranium, which is highly fissionable and relatively cheap to use. Almost all of the Western world's enriched uranium is produced in gaseous-diffusion plants owned by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. For a time, at least, France would become dependent on U.S. fuel. The government announcement angered French atomic workers, who face the loss of 2,600 jobs because of cutbacks. Last week...