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Fowler's Fallacies In Foreigners: An Analysis

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Fowler Finds Fallacies in Foreigners Following World War II, new global powers of communist Soviet Union and capitalist United States emerged and fought to impose their ideologies on one another and the rest of the world in the Cold War. One instance of the United States’ determination to win this war was the violent chaos of the 1950’s in Vietnam. Vietnam was overrun with conflict during the French Indochina War between the French, who were occupying Vietnam, and the Vietminh, a communist group fighting for autonomy. The United States, under the policy of containment, or stopping communism before it spread any further, joined the conflict against the Vietminh, paranoid that a communist victory would lead to the dire consequences of …show more content…

Pyle supports American intervention in Vietnam, possessing strong anti-communist beliefs and a drive to save the Vietnamese with democracy, while Fowler favors a more isolationist perspective. In the novel, Fowler’s perspective is more justified than Pyle’s because Fowler recognizes the harm caused by American arrogance and ignorance and acknowledges the nationalist views of the Vietnamese.
Even though the United States believes it is providing necessary aid to Vietnam, Fowler recognizes that the arrogance behind the Americans’ actions does more harm than good for the Vietnamese people. Following a failed bombing attempt in which Pyle mistakenly killed civilians instead of the originally targeted communist leaders, Pyle comments that the Vietnamese “aren’t complicated,” and Fowler replies, “Is that what you’ve learned in a few months? You’ll be calling them childlike next,” to which Pyle awkwardly agrees, “Well—in a way” (Greene 168). Pyle truly believes that the Vietnamese people are inferior and need protection against what he perceives to be the dangers of a totalitarian communist regime. Pyle dismisses Vietnamese society as unimportant despite a limited knowledge of it, while Fowler instead correctly

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