My Lai from Abroad

IN most countries friendly to the United States, the initial horror and revulsion over news of the My Lai massacre had by last week turned to more quiet dismay and introspection. Editorial and public response, while not forgiving, was philosophical. Typical was Milan's Corriere delta Sera, which sadly noted: "Every country on the old continent has a fine collection of skeletons in the cupboard."

In West Germany, the magazine Der Stern asked Nuernberg War Crimes Prosecutor Robert Kempner. a naturalized American citizen, how My Lai would have been judged. Had there been such evidence in 1945, he said, the guilty would have been tried--no matter which parties had been involved.

The fact that the U.S. Government was finally--and firmly--coming to grips with the crime impressed many. At the NATO ministerial conference in Brussels, Secretary of State William Rogers acknowledged the Administration's shock and expressed hope that justice would be served.

British press and politicians had reacted immediately, and emotionally, to the massacre. The editor of the liberal, antiwar New Statesman wrote that "responsibility for the Pinkville massacre --and for how many others?--lies squarely with the American nation as a whole." By contrast, The Economist rationalized that whenever a country goes to war, "it is statistically almost inevitable that some of its men will do something atrocious."

The vociferous left wing of Prime Minister Wilson's Labor Party is trying to pressure him into dissociating Britain from U.S. policy in Viet Nam. Public reaction was relatively mild. The American embassy received only about 50 letters.

The Communist world was predictably condemnatory. In Moscow, a statement was signed by 24 Soviet intellectuals, including Composer Dmitri Shostakovich and Nobel Physicist Nikolai Semenov. The words chosen by these brilliant men were singularly shrill: "The U.S. military followed in the tracks of the Nazi criminals." In East Germany, about 50,000 youths gathered to protest the American presence in Viet Nam. The Peking press made do with reprinting the official Hanoi government line berating the U.S. for killing "suckling babies and disemboweling pregnant women."

In the end, if any reaction to the massacre of My Lai was shared by honest men, it was that the world expects the worst from warriors--even American warriors. "We have had our share of atrocities," declared the Japan Times. My Lai was yet another "grisly example of the brutalization that overtakes men in war."

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