In “Gunfighters and Green Berets”, Richard Slotkin astutely draws upon historical examples of U.S foreign policy and national ideology during the Vietnam War and compares these to the ethos and narrative of John Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven, arguing that the latter serves as an allegory for the former. While Slotkin generally presents this assertion well, his argument is based upon the premise that the Cold War was fought by America as part of a project of modernisation and of “caring for the poor of the Third World”, a belief the author compares to the practice of civilising the Old West, a narrative convention of the classical Western movie. Later in the article, Slotkin links this to the attitude of the seven gunfighters in The Magnificent Seven, remarking that “the seven are magnificent because they follow the imperatives of pride and honour rather than the ethic of rational self-interest”. However, the author’s comparison between this ethos and the United States’ motivation for pursuing the Cold War is flawed. To the detriment…show more content… was instead motivated by self-interest. Indeed, if the former were true, U.S. forces would surely not have used napalm so extensively in close proximity to civilians during the Vietnam War. Similarly, although the My Lai Massacre was a freak event that did not reflect American military policy, the brutal rape, murder and mutilation of Vietnamese non-combatants is at least indicative of the attitudes of some U.S. soldiers towards those who they were supposedly trying to save. As such, a revisionist approach that America entered into the Cold War to protect its own interests, such as global free markets and military supremacy, is more appropriate than the simplistic and naive view that the U.S. fought the war for moral reasons against a regime that were unequivocally
