Source: CounterPunch
by John Kendall Hawkins
“In the classic Cold War film The Ugly American, Marlon Brando plays an American ambassador neck-deep in the kind of covert operations that would later get tens of thousands of Vietnamese killed. The film gave us a phrase, but most people forgot what it actually meant. Burdick and Lederer’s novel portrays the ‘ugly American’ as Homer Atkins, a straightforward engineer who genuinely cared about the locals and actively listened to their perspectives. The real ugliness came from the polished diplomats who saw Southeast Asians as pieces on a chessboard. Sixty years on, we’ve become exactly what we pretended to oppose. Only worse.” (02/19/26)