“… What I do question is the ability of the United States or any other Western nation to go into a small, alien, undeveloped Asian nation and create stability where there is chaos, the will to fight, where there is defeatism, democracy where there is no tradition of it, and honest government where corruption is almost a way of life. …

Why, we may ask, are they [the Southern Vietnamese] so shockingly ungrateful? … The answer, I think, is that ‘fatal impact’ of the rich and strong on the poor and weak. Dependent on it though the Vietnamese are, American strength is a reproach to their weakness, American wealth a mockery of their poverty, American success a reminder of their failures. What they resent is the disruptive affect of our strong culture upon their fragile one, an effect which we can no more avoid having than a man can help being bigger than a child. What they fear, I think rightly, is that traditional Vietnamese society cannot survive the American economic and cultural impact. …

The cause of our difficulties in Southeast Asia is not a deficiency of power but an excess of the wrong kind of power … We are still acting like Boy Scouts dragging reluctant old ladies across streets they do not want to cross. We are trying to remake Vietnamese society, a task which certainly cannot be accomplished by force and which probably cannot be accomplished by any means available to outsiders. …”

aus: J. William Fulbright: The Arrogance of Power. London: Cape 1967 (Am.Orig.-Ausg.1966), S.15-18.

Abb.: Corita Kent: Yellow submarine, 1967, im Internet.

12/06