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Published online: 19 December 2022
© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2022
In 1965, the American television network, CBS, broadcast a report on an incident in the Vietnam War. The reporter, Morley Safer - a Canadian and American citizen - had gone with the U.S. Marine Corps to the village of Cam Ne in South Vietnam. His report chronicled marines destroying the village: several people were wounded, buildings torched, and a baby killed, despite desperate pleas from older villagers. There were no Vietnamese fighters to be found. After the broadcast CBS was overwhelmed by outraged American viewers who refused to believe the veracity of the item while a clear majority of Americans supported the war at this time. After all, in the collective white memory, it was the indigenous other - like Native American ‘Indians’ - who tortured women and children and burnt down settlements. And the cavalry would arrive, eventually, to protect good, God-fearing folk. President Lyndon B. Johnson, justly, in the majority opinion, declared that Morley Safer must be no real American at all, to propound such mischief. Clearly, ‘truth’ threatened the feelings of ‘distinction’ over others embodied in American exceptionalism.
In 1896, the Italian government - in the middle of a major domestic political crisis - sent a large military force against Ethiopia, but the imperial army was defeated. The defeat challenged a European self-conception of military superiority in relation to ‘backward’, inferior, black natives. The consequent political crisis evoked some reconsideration over the nature of this enemy. Maybe, it was suggested, they were more like us, Europeans, than primitive Africans, given their military prowess. Maybe their skin was lighter than had been imagined. In 1897, the British Army suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Zulus in the Boer War. What was foregrounded, however, in contemporary British accounts - largely unchallenged well into the s