Americans have always been a people with marked genocidal proclivities: our systematic extermination of the Indian, the casual killing of American blacks during and after slavery, and our indifference to dropping an atomic bomb on a large civilian populace — we are, after all, the only people ever to have used such a weapon — reflect this attitude. We have long had a disturbing tendency to see nonwhites — particularly Orientals — as nonhuman, and to act accordingly. In recent years, this courtesy has been extended to the peoples of Communist nations generally, so that at the present the majority of the earth's population are candidates for extermination on one count or another. But white Communist countries usually enjoy the benefit of our fantasy that the people in those countries are ordinary humans enslaved by evil despots and awaiting liberation. When some event — such as the Bay of Pigs fiasco — disconfirms this fantasy, we are simply bewildered and turn our attention elsewhere. The same disconfirmation in a country like Vietnam tends to activate the genocidal assumptions that never lie far beneath the surface of our attitude toward nonwhite nations.
But if this is true — if Americans have always been genocidal, then the Vietnam conflict does not require any special explanation. Every society that has achieved a position of pre-eminence in the world has shown a remarkable capacity for brutality and violence — you don't get to be the bully of the block without using your fists.
I am arguing that Vietnam is different only because it occurred in the face of a host of what might be considered to be inhibiting factors — practical as well as moral —that have arisen in the past few decades. We know from vast experience, for example, that military force is ineffectual in changing attitudes, that air power is cruel but ineffectual against civilian populations, that colonial expeditionary forces are ineffectual against organized indigenous popular movements of any size and that military dictators cannot broaden their own base of support. . . . We helped to establish international principles in the U.N., at Geneva, and at Nuremberg, which we then violated or ignored. We live in a society in which the cruelties of war can be exposed in every living room through mass media. We discuss and debate constantly the appearance of any instance anywhere in the world of inhumane treatment of one person by another. We stress that every human life is a thing of value. We live, in short, in a modern, secure, civilized world, in which a single isolated act of violence is a calamity, an outrage. Yet we engage in the mass slaughter of innocent persons by the most barbarous means possible and show no qualms about it. . . . Since we are no longer crude frontiersmen or hillbillies what leads us to condone such savagery? When one observes that we devote the lion's share of our national budget to war and destruction, that capable scientists are tied up in biological and chemical warfare research that would make Frankenstein and his science-fiction colleagues look like Doctor Doolittle, we cannot avoid asking the question, do Americans hate life? Has there ever been a people who have destroyed so many living things?

The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point, pp. 33-34
Phillip Slater. Boston, Beacon Press. 1970