ABSTRACT
In early 1966, the Council of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, in a discussion of then-current social problems, expressed deep concern over the indifference of the American people to the large-scale torturing of prisoners by the South Vietnamese troops under American supervision and over the large-scale use of napalm by the American planes in the bombing of Vietnamese villages. Council members felt that the American people had closed their minds to these unnecessary cruelties, an attitude not unlike the defensive attitudes of the German people to the existence of the Nazi extermination camps and not unlike similar attitudes held by most Americans toward the systematic suppression of the Negro people over the past century.
