"If you see an Indian and a cobra, strangle the Indian first," the saying goes in Indo-China. Javanese peasants say, "When you meet a snake and a slit-eye [Chinese], first kill the slit-eye, then the snake." Among Punjabis the proverb is, "If you spy a serpent and a Sindhi, get the Sindhi first."
VARIATIONS of this ugly axiom are heard the length of Asia and are as universal as the antagonisms they express. The continent's greatest single cause of turmoil is not the struggle for food or political power but simple—and not so simple—hatred among peoples, classes, races. The U.S. is deeply and rightly troubled by its own problems of racial discrimination. They are mild compared with Asia's endemic and murderous grudges, and America's problems are subject to a system of social and legal redress that, tragically, most of Asia lacks. The Asian paradox is haunting: on the one hand the brooding, jewel-eyed idols from which flows a spirit of contemplation and moral nobility, and on the other hand swirling violence and blind prejudice. These are some of the passions that years ago were described by André Malraux as "troubled shapes which in the evening swarm up from the rice fields and hide behind the roofs of the pagodas."
Such passions are not unknown elsewhere, from Cyprus to the Arab-Israeli frontier to the Congo. But in intensity and in the numbers of people they embroil, Asia's hostilities are the world's most serious and in many ways most troubling to the U.S., which now must consider Asia its foremost foreign-policy problem. These quarrels sadly refute the Gandhian view that Asian spiritualism is superior to the rationalism of the West. Gandhi liked to call for spiritual tranquillity. "Virtue," he preached, "lies in being absorbed in one's prayers in the presence of din and noise." Spirituality has proved powerless to return rioting mobs to their prayers, while Western rationalism in Asia has been equally unable to mute the "din and noise" of communal clashes.
Geography of Enmity
∙VIET NAM, LAOS AND CAMBODIA, the former states of Indo-China, would be locked in a vicious cycle of nationalistic enmity even if Communist aggression disappeared overnight. Vietnamese armies have harried Laos for centuries, earning the Laotians' hate and dread. North and South Vietnamese alike look down on Cambodia, which they helped France rule. Cambodia's dyspeptic Prince Sihanouk snubs Laos, hates neighboring Thailand (a Thai premier once called him publicly "a pig"), and gibes disdainfully that "all Vietnamese are married to women with black teeth."