I'd also like to recommend the Ken Burns "The Vietnam War," which can be found on PBS. It is amazingly well done and the depth of it is beyond most documentaries. For example, there is one episode (1.5+ hours) that covers a six month period from 1967 to '68.
I was a small child during the war (10 in '68) and (to be truthful) only somewhat remember watching the coverage on TV. My mother said I used to ask her if I was going to have to go fight there and that I didn't want to. Thankfully, I didn't. The war ended in '75. I had just turned 17.
Strangely, the My Lai massacre is not covered until a later episode. They slotted it in the time line where it was first reported --not when it actually happened. But be patient, they do get to it eventually.
The sobering part about the series is that it absolutely captures the stupidity, futility, and mismanagement of the war over such a long period of time. The huge waste on both sides. The scale of it was staggering.
Myself, I am always drawn to the jungle patrols and the combat portions, which are fierce, terrifying and totally engulfing. I can see why certain people are drawn to war. It's the ultimate video game. Everything is on the line. You have no idea what the enemy will do and (really, in the end) no idea what you will do when faced with that visceral terror and excitement. What a rush it must be! And how horrible too. I am in inveterate coward. I don't believe I would have gone if called, but my 17 year old self is someone I don't really know anymore.
Anyway, the series is great and I highly recommend it.
Seconded. I just made it through the whole 20 hour series and it was sobering. I never learned very much about this significant war in American history (I am American).
To think that we started this war to help an ally (France) maintain their colonial power over people who wanted to be free, and then stayed in it because it would look bad, is horrific. Nixon even interfered with peace talks before he was elected to make sure he’d have a better chance of being elected, and that fact was seen as so damaging that those in power decided to keep it the American people in the dark. A presidential candidate interfered with the peace process to get elected and the American people weren’t even told about it.
And then the massacres. So much humanity was lost. Not just in the massacres but in the battles for a war that didn’t need to be fought.
The Vietnam war is such a dark part of human history, and yet we barely talk about it. Or when we do, many people to this day believe the government lines they were being fed at the time of the war. That this was necessary, etc.
And now we have a president that threatens war and people support him in it. Hell Obama pushed war too and advanced many war efforts.
I wish we could stop all this killing. I mean - we could. I wish we would.
"The North Vietnamese government and the Viet Cong were fighting to reunify Vietnam. They viewed the conflict as a colonial war and a continuation of the First Indochina War against forces from France and later on the United States. The U.S. government viewed its involvement in the war as a way to prevent a communist takeover of South Vietnam."
The Ken Burns doc is informational in some ways and a joke in others, particularly in the way it frames America's involvement from the outset as one of having been "sucked into" an unwanted war, a framing which is unsupported by historical evidence.
The reality is that the US systematically executed tens of thousands of unarmed civilians and committed countless atrocities along the way including regularly torturing and raping civilians, as was documented by the American government. But this contrasts the the image of America as most people see it, which is why Burns saw it fit to exclude the full extent of US war crimes from his documentary.
I'm a little younger than you, born after the war ended. In the 80s, there was a weekly dramatized series called Tour of Duty that ran for a bit on one of the networks. Paint it Black was the shows theme song. Anyways, I was too young to watch it critically or remember if it had a message to it. Does it ring any bells?
Also, I read your comment after suggesting a video in a separate comment below. You might like it. Re how the press uncovered the event.
Seconded as well. I've yet to see the final episode, but so far it has been very good. As a non-US'an the Vietnam War was dealt with by a few paragraphs in the high school history books. Oh, and of course by watching movies like apocalypse now, full metal jacket, and, yes, Rambo 2. So it has certainly been very interesting to learn about the background, politics and the higher level military situation.
I don't know. It just bugs me when someone famous rehashes old material and gets credit for it.
As for My Lai, war atrocities are part of war, and that one wasn't anything special. It was actually the South Koreans (in Vietnam) who were the masters at it, though pointing that out does nothing to help the media's overarching agenda.
I was surprised by how much war footage and gut-wrenching videos I could find online. More people should be exposed to those documents as a form of shock therapy. It gives weight and meaning to words so effortlessly spoken by our leaders. It might also help young people have a little more empathy for actual individuals, as opposed to abstract demographics.
The article reminds me of War against War!. It's a 1924 anti-war photobook (180 images) designed by German pacifist Ernst Friedrich. It's a sobering read. http://craigritchie.co.uk/archives/2581 [WARNING: 18+ NSFL]
EDIT: I added a few quotes describing the War against War! photobook.
> Outraged by the unprecedented barbarism and massive destruction of the First World War, Ernst Friedrich complied and published a collection of pictures and other visual material which attempted to illustrate not only the tragic human consequences of war, but also the lies and hypocrisy of the social, political, and economic forces that produced and promoted it. Aimed at an international audience with multi-lingual supporting text and captions, it was one of the first concerted photographic expressions of protest against the barbarism of modern warfare in all its tragic folly.
> Friedrich’s strategy was to present shocking images of the atrocities of war and then juxtapose the official German patriotic and military propaganda and rhetoric of the time with graphic illustrations of what this discourse actually produced.
> The horrific imagery builds gradually, commencing with illustrations of children’s toys and propaganda posters, followed by photographs of the soldier’s march to war, the privilege of the elites orchestrating the violence, the devastated and then forgotten battlefields [...] and the graveyards of the dead.
> The most unbearable pages are in a section called ‘The Face of War’, twenty-four close-ups of military and non-military survivors with huge facial wounds.
> Never before had the people there been subjected to such horrendous images of the savagery and the senseless destruction of the First World War. During WW1, most European governments forbade the publication of war photographs and few images of the war had appeared before the publication of Friedrich’s book.
Most of the big wars were/are ultimately started (or allowed to start) by politicians.
The word 'politician' can be thought of as a portmanteau: political technician. So the responsibility is on us to enforce this distinction: who among our political technicians is actually qualified to lead?
Heinlein's Starship Troopers had the right idea. I wish just one nation in the world would implement it. Maybe it would lead to a cascade of rationality, and future wars would become impossible as a result.
> Heinlein's Starship Troopers had the right idea.
I'm pretty unconvinced that limiting voters to volunteer military veterans would prevent war. I think it would instead lead to a government which is more able to successfully pander to those with a value-system that leads them to volunteer for the military.
It is ironic how that is a mirror image of fascist beliefs about military virtue. They wanted to give power to veterans so that wars could be started and won! They wanted to suppress the influence of weak willed peacniks. It is ironic that this could be reversed to imply that rationality means peace.
Heinlein had some pretty fascist ideas, and books like starship troopers project that in a comfortable form. It is easy to attach our own ideas of what is rational, but that is very subjective. To a fascist war is rational.
Heinlein's point was that one's vote is a huge responsibility, and that privilege must be earned: by demonstrably placing the needs of one's country above individual wellbeing. Thus only military veterans could participate in governance. Militarism doesn't automatically equate to fascism.
There are further ideas in this: that, having experienced a war, a (typical) person would never again allow such a thing to happen. That's sound thinking, in my opinion.
> Heinlein's point was that one's vote is a huge responsibility, and that privilege must be earned: by demonstrably placing the needs of one's country above individual wellbeing.
I find the unspoken assumption that the "needs of one's country" always mean going to war and killing other people curious. Is that the only thing that countries need? What about jobs, infrastructure, health care, pensions, education, social insurance, good laws, and competent government among many other things.
But none of that explains why the actual results would be better. You could make the same argument about other kinds of virtue like religion, property ownership, wealth, or ancestry. That may seem irrational to us, but it made sense to some people historically.
And the choice of service is completely subjective. Maybe only parents should be we to vote? Because only they can truly understand. And they have sacrificed so much for their children. So many sleepless nights!
But you did not pick any of those things, you picked military service. And military service is virtuous because of war! It would be very difficult to create a culture that glorifies military service, but treats war itself as repugnant. People are just not that nuanced. The realities of war are just too unimaginable for a person in a peaceful nation to really understand. That is why it is risky to glorify service in this way.
I agree that war will make people less enthusiastic about future conflict. But surely you need a constant supply of wars to allow you to recruit these rational voters. If you have 100 years of peace then the system fails.
The irony is that we have had many periods in our history when a huge number of voters and politicians had direct expert of war. Did it improve the prospects of peace? Who knows.
But of course, by allowing only people who have ties to one particular organization, you give too much advantage to that organization.
Only soldiers interests will be represented, nobody elses. And this matters crutially a lot. Moreover army spends a lot of time indonctrinating people - training, military discipline and so on. It changes them and their opinions.
Germany before WWII gave government jobs to ex-soldiers. Veterans being the ones who defined culture of those institutions had (according to historians) an impact on ease with which those institutions could be taken over and used for authoritarian purposes.
Except for the fact that its pandering to the survivors fallacy. Of course, the ones who don't want to fight wars won't be around - they'll have been dead. The ones who survived war, are more likely to want more war - especially when they emerge as the victor nation. Just look at how blood-thirsty the 5-eyes nations are, currently: none of them have truly 'lost wars' (i.e. fought on their own territory), only troops. Yet, here today, don't ask your average Aussie to ever criticise their nations war-making; they'll think you need psychiatric help for just questioning the Australian Defence Forces' heinous crimes...
Yes. Historically the more direct your experience of war, the less likely you are to survive. There are lots of WWII veterans who spent the war washing clothes and driving trucks miles from the front line. That is worthy of massive respect and gratitude. But it is not a passport to wisdom.
Ah yes. The kind of rational society that fights giant insects with lightly armoured infantry soldiers despite being highly technologically advanced.
A lot of problems are complex and require competing demands to be balanced. There is no single objectively correct solution to those problems. Rational intelligent people come to different conclusions. That is why we have politics, to deal with the messy complexity of the real world.
Treating rationality as a moral virtue just disturbs me. It is just a kind of moralistic discrimination based on things that may or may not indicate actual quality.
Sure, but they could have just thrown rocks from space, or nukes from orbit. A culture that can fly across the galaxy does not need to use infantry any more than a US marine needs to throw a spear. It is a very common thread in this kind of sci-fi. It is just more glorious to shoot the insect from close up. There is more opportunity for pointless sacrifice.
> If you wanted to teach a baby a lesson, would you cut its head off? Of course not. You'd paddle it. There can be circumstances when it's just as foolish to hit an enemy city with an H-bomb as it would be to spank a baby with an axe. War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your government's decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him...but to make him do what you want to do. Not killing...but controlled and purposeful violence. But it's not your business or mine to decide the purpose of the control. It's never a soldier's business to decide when or where or how—or why—he fights; that belongs to the statesmen and the generals. The statesmen decide why and how much; the generals take it from there and tell us where and when and how. We supply the violence; other people—'older and wiser heads,' as they say—supply the control. Which is as it should be.
Anyway, one thing I got from the book, even if Heinlein never explicitly made this point, is that public officials need to perform some service or somehow show that they merit being our leaders. People who did poorly in intro uni economics should perhaps not be determining national economic policy, for example.
I agree, so someone who did poorly at communism and socialism studies in the former ussr should not become a factory leader or economics minister- because if a university is good at something it is determinating people who are great knowledge repeaters and aggregators, but not determinating who is a good ad-hoc manager of completely knew scenarios.
I would rather prefer pure luck to that intelectual slaughterhouse suggested by the parent, with all the fency problems a goverment would inherit in academia. I can only imagine, what would happen, if some Aspi driven towards perfectionism regarding roadtolls, would do to a transportation-ministry- to compose the perfect system.
I rather have non government then this government.
In a society where politicians rely on a broad coalition of supporters in order to stay in power, I think it is an error to place all of the blame for misleadership on those same politicians. I think you have to first look at what incentives those politicians operate under and then look at which ones swim with or against those incentives.
I went to a First World War museum near the Italian Front as a kid. I will never forget this photo of soldiers who survived the war missing half their face.
I would argue that shocking young children or even teenagers may not necessarily help empathy. Empathy is a cognitive skill whose capacity is greatly reduced in children simply because of the way the brain develops. I would argue what is instead best is to acknowledge that and have lessons be based on helping children empathize with the great tragedy that occurred, in personal ways, or even help them wrap their heads around the sheer horror of it. It is unlikely they are fully capable but if they can develop their own ideas about the horrific events that occurred and why they are bad, then as they grow older they may be able to develop empathy from there about those events. Unfortunately, I fear this is becoming more and more difficult with the recent rise of nationalism in many countries...
Sadly, similar massacres are happening almost daily in this world. One day you see someone start a twitter campaing like #iamstillalive, the other you see a reports of him being killed in an airstrike with countless other people. People are daily begging on twitter for their lives, to be spared, to someone help them. You can easily find similar images from what you see in this article, from yesterday, day prior, almost any day of the week. Dead people, burned people, living people who have their arms baked to the bone, hacked off extremities... plenty of orhpaned children. Just yesterday ~61 people were burned to death in incendiary air strike in the middle of the city with many others injured.
What is worrying though how much propaganda there is these days, which says that this is all made up, staged, people are doing it to themselves, and how many people seemingly take this shit seriously. How much effort there is to justify such attrocities. That's seriously deranged, and I still don't know what to think of it.
Weird to say but now you know why people in China treasures peace a little bit more than freedom.
Massacres are common during Japanese invasion[0], and nobody stood up for civilians. The result of that was people got murdered village after village and then burned or lefted there for animals.
That collective experience in some degree shaped the political landscape of China today.
Occasionally, a few people (foreigners) did stand up for civilians, although in the scale of events, it did not have large impact. Perhaps the most peculiar of them is the story of John Rabe, "a Nazi hero".
Persons are always kind. It is people that do horrible things.
Whether it’s the angry mob ready to stone Mary Magdalene or US soldiers wasting civilians at My Lai the principle is the same.
The idea that because someone is on the other team in a war he is a monster is wartime propaganda used to justify and convince good persons to commit atrocities.
There is another comment to this story where someone applies exactly this kind of thinking to the North Vietnamese.
Rabe is one of the most famous. When book "Rabe Dairy" was published in China years ago there were memorial ceremonies. There were few if not no mentions of Nazi background though.
Chinese people remember those foreigners who help them during difficult time in the war against Japanese invasion. There was a movie about an India doctor. There are statues a Canadian doctor in a lot of famous medical schools for memory of him. His home town attracted many Chinese tourists every year.
> people in China treasures peace a little bit more than freedom
That's the narrative of the Chinese authoritarian dictatorship, a convenient one for them, but I've never seen data to back it up, there's plenty of evidence to contradict it, and it's based on a false premise.
The false premise is that freedom is a threat to peace. In fact, it's only a threat to peace of mind of dictators. The most peaceful places in the world are the most free, and as freedom has spread around the world, the levels of violence worldwide has dropped to historic lows. Again, the "peace" they speak of their own peace, not for people the government doesn't like; the people of Tibet, Xinjiang, and elsewhere suffer a lot of violence, perpetrated by the government. The poor have no freedom and are therefore driven from their homes; where is their peace? If people are so happy with the peace the Communist dictatorship provides, why not hold an election - the Communists are sure to win!
Freedom begets peace in part because people with rights live under less threat (their rights protect them; they can protect their property in court; etc.), and people with freedom of speech and voting rights can express their needs verbally and at the ballot box. Cut off those avenues and their needs don't just go away; they turn to guns, insurgencies, civil wars, riots, etc.
That people in China - unlike most other places in the world - would not desire freedom is also plainly false. In the only parts of China where people have the option of freedom, Taiwan and Hong Kong, they value their freedom very much. They also have a much higher standard of living than the non-free parts of China, and freedom from want is also important.
My parents are Vietnamese. My dad actually fought in the war with the South Vietnamese army alongside US troops. He's a lifelong Republican, as were all of his brothers who also fought, as well as the vast majority of his friends and their families who arrived as refugees.
They supported the war. They saw the US as liberators against the communists who wanted to murder them and take over their country. They love America and despise communist Vietnam. They wish the US had finished the job.
Promoting things like the link above and conveniently omitting the pure savagery of the Viet Cong, Ho Chi Minh, and the communists from the North is pure propaganda. It's always puzzling to me what types of topics journalists choose to run.
Instead of listening to journalists reporting on Vietnam from half a world away, you should visit Little Saigon in Southern California and Northern California and ask them how they feel about America and the Vietnam War.
EDIT: Since I have a post limit and I can't reply below, I'll reply here.
quan: I didn't say My Lai was propaganda. I said emphasizing My Lai over the several atrocities committed by the communists, including the systematic murders of those who opposed communism, is propaganda.
Same as your dad, five of my uncles fought in the war on the U.S. side, my grandfather and granduncle served in the South Vietnamese government in high positions. My family was persecuted after the war, many fled, the ones that stayed spent time in prison and fled after.
In college, I read a lot on the Vietnam war and learned about the Tet Offensive with the Hue massacre by the Vietcong, the Land Reform prior to that. But I don't see how the photos at My Lai is "pure propaganda." If you spend some time to learn about the tragic event you will find that there were a big cover up and for over 500 human lives lost, only one man was charged and subsequently pardoned.
The U.S. committed to a war when it didn't understand the people or history of Vietnam. Vietnam has a long history of fighting foreign invaders, and most people perceive the U.S. as such as they are just replacing the French when they withdrew after Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Till this day, most Vietnamese people consider China to be their biggest enemy even though the two countries share the same political ideology.
To be fair, the Vietnamese communities in Southern California are stuck in a time bubble. Vietnam has changed dramatically since the Vietnam War (or War of American Aggression as it's called in Vietnam), but the Vietnamese diaspora's image of the country has not. It's not the same place, and the government - while nowhere near perfect - is not the same as it was 50 years ago. The country still has many problems, but it is getting better, and the country's youth have a very healthy skepticism of government (unlike mainland China).
Also, let's not try to paint the former South leadership as noble. Buddhists weren't self-immolating in the streets of Saigon because of the communists, and the victim in the infamous photo being shot at point blank in the head was a Viet Cong.
You're using two data points when hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese civilians were systematically slaughtered by Ho Chi Minh and his comrades. The propaganda is strong when the general public knows more about the head shot photo than the mass murders committed by communist Vietnamese regime.
You're setting up a straw man to an argument I never made. All I'm telling you is how my dad, his brothers, and the vast majority of his first generation Vietnamese friends (who arrived as refugees) feel about America and the Vietnam War. Despite what you may think, they wholeheartedly support America.
If you don't believe me, you should try visiting Little Saigon on Bolsa Avenue in Orange Country and ask them what they think of the USA. Look at the flags they use (South Vietnam and the USA). If you want to get assaulted (I highly don't recommend this), try bringing Vietnam's current flag and parade it around.
EDIT:
to andrepd: Again, you keep setting up straw man arguments. It's very easy to attack someone if you misrepresent their views. I never said anything about excusing massacres.
I think you didn't mean it, from your later comments, but you came across as saying we shouldn't only talk about My Lai because the other side did bad things too. Yes, they did bad things, but it doesn't excuse us. We claim we are better. Just like in the Iraq War 2 and our prisons where we treated people horribly, it doesn't excuse it just because someone else also did bad things. I think that's a core principal.
It doesn't lessen the horror of atrocities if the other side did it.
That's exactly the point made. The US IS better. Better than the Nazis, better than North Vietnam/Vietnam, better than China (and frankly better than all European states during and immediately after WWI/II at least). Better than North Korea. Better than South Africa.
With better I mean "how people are treated", in the human rights, in general, and only as part of government policy.
And yes, I agree. The US has it's downsides. The US has made mistakes. The difference between a mistake and a government policy is the number of times and the scale at which it happens, and the intent. The US has made mistakes, some of which lead to the death of hundreds, even thousands of people. Some of those mistakes involved the military. It was NOT the intent of any significant fraction of the US to make these events happen.
China, Vietnam, and Germany had a widely supported-by-the-people government policy of massacre. Every organisation in those countries is focused and involved in oppressing and massacring people for some reason. Vietnam's CURRENT government made children watch their own parents getting raped, slowly, and killed, then used them as insane soldier-killers sending them into defenseless villages where they brutally murdered everyone they could. This is NOT a one-off. They did this to children for decades.
The difference is indescribable and it is absurd to even compare the two. They are not on the same moral level, they just aren't. We are better than that, it's just that simple.
That's objectively so, and for some reason a lot of people feel the need to destroy historical views like this.
It may not lessen atrocities on the other side, but we should acknowledge the difference between mistakes and popular government-supported genocide.
Equating them does nothing, other than provide cover for these massacres. Hell, the amount of people talking up Chinese policy seems to be mounting every day. And, of course, the situation of people in China gets worse everytime some high up in the Chinese government thinks censorship is good enough that they can get away with something more.
It pains me to point out the obvious: "anti-racism" has become the leading excuse for racism, inequality and state-based massacres.
Ive looked carefully through he comments here and nobody is making any false equivalency In the terms you describe, or denying what you say about the US overall.
I don’t see why an article or subsequent discussion about a horrible crime committed by US soldiers, subject to an attempted coverup by the US army and limply prosecuted afterwards needs to also say how nice the US is otherwise. It doesn’t matter how nice it is otherwise. It’s got nothing to do with the issue at hand, any more than if it had happened in any other country.
I'm not saying there is an equivalence between the nazis and modern day us. I am just pointing out that when we do horrible things, we have to not deny it, not say it's not a big deal because someone else did something worse. We aren't equivalent, but we do make mistakes.
> try visiting Little Saigon on Bolsa Avenue in Orange Country
> If you want to get assaulted [..] try bringing Vietnam's current flag and parade it around
What a bizarre argument. Of course you're going to find pro-USA sentiment in the very people who decided to move to the USA. I hope you realise that the opinions of a few immigrants in the states are going to be pretty unrepresentative of those who actually live in, you know, Vietnam.
Speak to actual vietnamese people from actual vietnam and I don't think you'll find they are overwhelmingly pro-USA, nor at all interested in the flag of south vietnam. I'm no expert, but my experience is that they're mildly positive in attitude, mostly due to pop culture. The war was a long time ago and most people are just getting on with their lives.
Many immigrant communities foster a kind of "nostalgic nationalism" as a coping strategy when adapting to a profoundly different environment. It dates pretty rapidly. I very much doubt many of the 90+ million people in Vietnam even know of "Little Saigon", nor care overmuch about the opinions of a bunch of old-timers sitting in a mall in California.
Actually, Vietnam is one of the most pro-American countries in the world. There was a survey a while and over 90% view the US favorably. You can find it with a google search.
Some of it is, but some of it is that many VIetnamese went to the US after the at and so their family is there and they can see firsthand the benefits of living in the US.
Also Vietnamese are fiercely capitalistic. I've never seen a more go-getter attitude in any other country. That also colors their perception of the US.
> many Vietnamese went to the US [..] they can see firsthand the benefits of living in the US
This applies to many countries. Why does it specifically influence Vietnamese perceptions more?
> Vietnamese are fiercely capitalistic
This is true, but again, they're hardly alone. Chinese are fiercely capitalistic as well - and in the same context as the Vietnamese, within the framework of a nominally communist society. Why doesn't your theory apply there, too?
I think the situation is much more nuanced than these too-obvious theories, or that can be surfaced in superficial "attitude" surveys. As mentioned in other comments, Vietnamese are deeply (and IMO rightfully) suspicious of China, despite the state's theoretical status as an ally. The USA, despite its history of botched and ham-handed interventions, is ultimately seen as a friend. There's a love/hate aspect to that attitude too, similar to Filipino attitudes to some extent. The absence of military bases in-country helps by keeping the notion theoretical, rather than the often-negative daily experience of having foreign soldiers around a la Korea and Japan.
Anyway, without getting too much into the weeds of theorising and speculation, my point was that it's complex - more complex than the OP suggested. Nostalgia for the South Vietnamese flag is a niche sentiment at best, and attitudes to the USA are a complicated product of history and pragmatism. "90% positive" does not capture the nuance, in my opinion.
It's probably too late but it would have been good to hear from some non-emigrant Vietnamese.
"The US" no longer uses anti-personnel mines outside the Korean DMZ (which is actually managed by the South Koreans). The US does not deploy them anywhere, and hasn't for years.
Maybe its India and Pakistan we're thinking of, hm?
Did you really think she/he was suggesting that the US is setting up landmines in Vietnam 50 years after the war?
Landmines can kill people a very long time after being deployed you know...
Do you really think the US government bears no responsibility for the actions of the US government 50 years ago and the consequences today? Would you extend that to other governments too? In what circumstances would you not? What Cut off period do you think is right generally?
For example do you think the US has no responsibility towards Pacific Islanders whose islands are now lethally radioactive due to nuclear tests 50 years ago, and can reasonably wash its hands of any problems arising from that today?
I can't claim to be directly responsible for the actions of my countrymen fifty years ago, but not doing anything about their misdeeds today gives my tacit approval to those past actions and to their ongoing costs so unfairly burdening present-day Vietnamese. Plus, I think it would be a nice bit of diplomacy for the U.S. to fund mine clearing efforts in Vietnam.
Just one point: there is no, “The US” as I’ve learned over time. The US is geographically vast, and full of hundreds of millions of people from wildly different backgrounds. Those poeple have politics ranging from Ghengis Khan, to Ghandi. They seem to agree, as a nation, on very little.
Have you ever been to Iceland? Sweden is remarkably united in their politics as well. Japan is much less politically and culturally diverse than most US states. Few countries are as geographically large and populous as the US either, even before you work in hundreds of years of immigration.
I have lived in Germany and the US each for years and for months in several other countries. From the outside or on a short visit all countries look homogeneous. Only after a while you see the subtleties. From that perspective I don't think the US is any different from other countries. Maybe other countries are in agreement on things that are contentious in the US but then they have other issues that never get discussed in the US. In short, the US is nothing special. It's a country like every other country and should be treated as such.
I disagree, but I can’t see the value in pitting anecdote against anecdote. If you want to believe that the US’ history, geography, and demographics make it essentially the same as (to use my examples) Iceland, Japan, and Sweden, I doubt that I could change your mind.
Look at where this discussion started. It started from someone talking about the Viet Cong and the US. Then you said there is no such thing as the US because it's so big and diverse. In this context the US has to be seen as one unit or how else can you describe a war?
As far as Sweden goes I bet the people living north of the Arctic circle have little in common with people living in Stockholm.
Then never talk about any other group like "the Chinese", "the Russians" or "the Nazis" again either. Because these are also millions of diverse people too.
Then never talk about any other group like "the Chinese", "the Russians" or "the Nazis" again either. Because these are also millions of diverse people too.
One of those things is not like the other, two of those things are kinda the same. Nazism is an ideology, a movement, so I’m going to move past that red herring.
The rest though, good advice that I try very hard to live by. I’m not sure at what point you decided that I was arguing in favor of something else. It would be downright stupid to assume that the lives and views of someone raising ducks and pigs on a small farm in an outer province of Chins bears much resemblance to the life of a high-level beaurocrat in Beijing. Some teenager with no future or hope in the outskirts of Moscow isn’t like a grandmother in Novasibirsk, or an oligarch in a penthouse.
By the same token, don’t assume that the US is some magically homogeneous group of people who don’t care if a Vietnamese child is blown away by a 50 year old mine.
Edit: Because apparently it must be said, The US Governmemt != “The US” in the same way that the Chinese Communist Pary isn’t “China” and Putin isn’t “Russia”.
You're suggesting there isn't an ideology moving the US government? Every country has an ideology, a doctrine or something like that, and independently of the sheer number and diversity of its population, what's ALWAYS discussed when someone mentions a country is its government and its policies, including foreign policies. You're bringing a no true Scotsman to the table, which is a fallacy. From its foreign policy on Vietnam, the US does not seem to "give a shit" as the OP said.
Maybe we should ask what Soviets think of their regime (most of them supported it, and still more people prefer the Soviet Union to Putin right now). That doesn't make their regime any more or less good.
And how does the "other side" committing atrocities excuse your own atrocities?? That's an appalling way to attempt to self justify.
Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese who opposed communism had their lives slaughtered. What is even remotely equivalent committed by the "other side"?
EDIT to andrepd, since I can't reply to you because of post limit: You're using straw man arguments and I can't keep up. I don't know anything about East Timor but by "other side", I meant the US and South Vietnam. We're obviously discussing the Vietnam War and the participants involved and you're going off on a tangent that makes it impossible to have any debate with you.
US financed, supported, armed and gave the okay for the decimation of over 1/4 of the population of East Timor. Their crime? They were looking dangerously close to electing a left-wing government... Oh, and some mining companies may have lobbied Congress to stay on Indonesia's good side, since they had mining interests there (but this, I admit, is more speculative).
How about Guatemala? How about Iran for Christ's sake? How many thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people's blood is on the hands of US imperialism?
Ken Burn's recent series on Vietnam is very well made and speaks with participants and stakeholders from across the ideological spectrum. Highly recommended: https://www.netflix.com/title/70202579
I know it's a popular series, and I haven't gotten my dad's response to it because he hasn't watched it, but many war veterans and South Vietnamese military members say it's not a very balanced documentary.
You have a lot of informed opinions because of course you were close to the war and your family was. I hope to see you continue to share your ideas, even if you are suffering some criticism.
Oh come on. Look at the series. You can say what you want but it is extremely biased. It takes about 30 seconds for it to call the war a mistake, and it doesn't get better from there.
I’m sorry, but this is blatant whataboutism. The crimes of the Vietnamese Communists are inexcusable, but so was My Lai. The linked article was simply an American media article about something the American military did. We should be able to discuss it purely in those terms.
What another army did somewhere else to other people simply isn’t pertinent in that context, even if in the same war, unless it directly relates to the circumstances at My Lai and the reasons for it happening. You aren’t saying VC atrocities excuse My Lai, or that they caused My a Lai, so how are they relevant? What context do they add to the decisions made by those American soldiers or the army cover up or subsequent investigation? I just don’t see how it would have helped the article other than to muddy and obscure the issues of discipline and accountability in the US military the massacre raises and which the article discusses.
The responsibility of the VC for their actions just isn’t a necessary part of that dialogue and is an important and necessary subject, but for another time and place. At time and place in which massacres carried out elsewhere by Americans also simply wouldn’t be relevant, nor excuse anything done by the VC. And no I’m not making any false equivalency. That’s the point.
Wow had no idea the Vietnam was this bad (bad as in how bad the Americans were). Almost makes the invasion of Iraq look noble. I went through the US educational system and while we know about the Vietnam war, the protesters, this is definitely not the picture of the war that we were given. It's basically propaganda and history rewriting what they are doing here, even though the US didn't even technically win the war. We were taught that the Vietnam war protesters were just pacifist hippies.
No wonder why China is fiercely anti-American (in terms of influence, policy, etc).
>I went through the US educational system and while we know about the Vietnam war, the protesters, this is definitely not the picture of the war that we were given.
I just want to be one anecdotal voice to disagree with this statement. I went to a city university and my American history class 1945-present included a curriculum with media such as:
A People's History of the United States
The Fog of War (documentary)
Hearts and Minds (documentary)
Last Night I Dreamed of Peace: The Diary of Dang Thuy Tram
Gary R. Hess, Vietnam: Explaining America's Lost War.
Nick Turse. Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam.
I know some of my friends took courses where the Vietnam War was referred to pejoratively as the American War. We learned about My Lai in high school even. Where did you go to school that the Vietnam War was glossed over in such a pro-American way? Maybe it's a regional thing? I was educated on the east coast.
I think a college class would have to delve into the topic a bit more.
But given a high school history curriculum being limited they'd have to pick and choose what to cover, and the majority of American kids would end up with the highly distilled, pro-American leaning retelling. I went to high school in the mid-west (Michigan) in a probably center-left leaning (though in the last election probably Trump-leaning) area.
> It was necessary to rearrange those bad thoughts and to restore some form of sanity, namely, a recognition that whatever we do is noble and right. If we’re bombing South Vietnam, that’s because we’re defending South Vietnam against somebody, namely, the South Vietnamese, since nobody else was there. It’s what the Kennedy intellectuals called defense against "internal aggression" in South Vietnam. That was the phrase used by Adlai Stevenson and others. It was necessary to make that the official and well understood picture. That’s worked pretty well. When you have total control over the media and the educational system and scholarship is conformist, you can get that across. One indication of it was revealed in a study done at the University of Massachusetts on attitudes toward the current Gulf crisis-a study of beliefs and attitudes in television watching. One of the questions asked in that study was, How many Vietnamese casualties would you estimate that there were during the Vietnam war? The average response on the part of Americans today is about 100,000. The official figure is about two million. The actual figure is probably three to four million. The people who conducted the study raised an appropriate question: What would we think about German political culture if, when you asked people today how many Jews died in the Holocaust, they estimated about 300,000? What would that tell us about German political culture? They leave the question unanswered, but you can pursue it.
AFAIK it's significantly more nuanced. Actually China did support Vietnam in the war - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War#People's_Republic_... - but invaded Vietnam shortly thereafter, as China was annoyed Vietnam de-throned their darling regime the Khmer Rouge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War (Meanwhile, the US bombed the shit out of Laos, who barely had any literacy and were essentially bystanders). Vietnam kicked their ass (the Chinese made basically zero progress in taking land, though later declared themselves "victorious", having "taught the Vietnamese a lesson"), but at a cost: many deaths and a legacy of landmines along the remote and mountainous border. The border was only fully demarcated about ten years ago. These days it is better known for people smuggling (mostly young women from Vietnam to China) and drug smuggling (heroin and meth). Factories are moving from China to Vietnam to obtain cheaper labour, and Vietnam's infrastructure has developed substantially, though it is still behind China.
In the 1940s the US and Nationalist China were allies - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hump ... later, the Nationalists fled and and AFAIK Communist China's only major military engagement with the US was in Korea, where US agents descended from McCarthyism tortured Communists on what is now conveniently remade as a holidaying destination. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War#Chinese_POWs
Then there's the French being kicked out, the fact that Ho Chi Minh was French educated himself, evolution in US-French relations and the US takeover of France's former most favoured foreign nation status in Thailand, which was used as a strategic regional base for US military supply.
Possible conclusion: It's all a mess, things are never simple in war, humans are sick greedy bastards, and getting over old hatreds stemming from nationalism and past events could be the best thing for the world.
This is a good summary, but it's even more nuanced than that.
For example, while China did lose the Sino-Vietnamese War, they did achieve two important objectives.
First, they proved to be a trustworthy ally to Cambodia. This is why those other SEA countries like Cambodia, Laos, and others that were bullied by Vietnam are much more pro-China right now.
Secondly, they showed that while the USSR was a Vietnamese ally, it would not interfere with China.
What gives you this idea? I don't think Chinese policy is particularly anti-American. Sure, they're not a lap-dog like Japan, but I don't see their policy being informed by any particular animosity towards the USA.
Well, exactly. Their motivations are independence, security and self-determination - exactly what one might expect and qualities I'm sure most Americans would understand.
Like most Powers, China doesn't have friends, it has interests. If cooperation furthers those interests, it will cooperate; if not, it won't. Attempts to cast these behaviours into "country A hates country B for reason C" are usually agenda-driven, simplistic attempts at populism, or both[1].
[1] The obvious exception to this is in the case of historical or otherwise wrongdoing. China still genuinely resents Japan for its behaviour around WWII; many middle eastern states resent the USA for its meddling and violence in the last half-century over there. These are legitimate complaints. Even so, when a country is run by a bureaucracy, it will still generally act according to its current interests, rhetoric notwithstanding.
People in China talk about it all the time. But you do have to speak Mandarin or the local dialect to hear it. Many don't want to talk about it in English because it gets annoying to hear expats and tourists preaching to them.
It's all over the literature too. Hell, half of Three Body Problem, the darling of a few years ago, is actually about the Cultural Revolution. No spoilers but suffice to say that the poisoned seeds sown during the ruinous waste of the Cultural Revolution precipitate everything in the story.
Every nation will try to hide the atrocities its own forces inflict on the 'enemy'. There's nothing unique about America in this regard; China is just as guilty.
"Every nation will try to hide the atrocities its own forces inflict on the 'enemy'."
An the other way around, which could be even worse. From 1991 to 2009 US TV stations were barred from showing coffins returning from war zones, so that the public was disconnected from the atrocities of war, no matter who would commit them. On one side we (though I'm not an US citizen the principle applies globally) have action war movies where badass heroes save the world - those are characters finely crafted in a way every teen would like to impersonate in real life - and on the other side there can be regulations preventing media from showing what really war is (not to mention the growing use of drones). This is the worst kind of propaganda, the one that makes you want to kill or be killed and be also excited or even proud of it.
The textbooks and the mainstream media in all places tend to play the "nationalism" card; that's self-serving in all sorts of ways, after all. And no one articulated the 'nationalism' caricature better than George Orwell: "The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."
This varies by textbook. The textbook went to High School with (The American Pageant & New York State in 2003-2008) definitely talked about this and they had a photograph[1] from the massacre.
Your point about the influence of textbooks is rather important though. Putting aside the fact that many people just don't pay attention in history class, the default narrative that is being taught is quite varying. If I owned a house rather than just renting one, I would be starting a collection of High School history textbooks for this reason.
I am not sure that one massacre, no matter how bad it is, defines a whole war. The Vietnam war was meant to block the expansion of communism which at that time had a fair amount of blood on its hand.
I'm not sure the blocking of communism is as noble as a cause it was proclaimed to be.
Most of the anti-communist fear in the US was pointless, and arbitrary. Communism only served as a threat to the US in so as much as it was on paper not what the US adopted, and therefore the US had to be against it to maintain its own legitimacy. But in the end there's not much difference between the US and China (a so called communist country) except that China is less developed and the market is more tightly controlled than the US market. But as you can see China has trended to the mix of market freedom and control similar to that of the US and the world didn't end.
In practice, communist countries were more authoritarian military dictatorships more than anything and if the country did bad things it was more or less due to the regime rather than communism. And the US would have been fine with such regimes at the time so long as it wasn't communist. For example, South Korea was a dictatorship until the 90s.
Right, but not hundreds of thousands killed by US troops. Hundreds of thousands killed by Iraqi (or other non US parties) in a civil/ethnic war.
We can go into the debate of whether Iraq would have been better off left under Saddam Hussein, and that may be the case, but it is not comparable to US troops deliberately killing civilians.
And I am sure there has been others. But you don't get to 100,000 civilians with US killings. There has been 100+ dead terrorist attacks almost on a weekly basis for years in Iraq to the point where they don't get reported in western media anymore.
How do people manage to condemn this type of thing but not the 100,000s murdered in Iraq because of the US invasion? I can't work out how Americans think being proud of their soldiers - both left and right wing people are. Is there something I don't know?
During the Vietnam war that is what happened. Soldiers were treated like baby killers upon returning to the US.
There was a sort of rebranding of the American solider after that catastrophe. The American citizen is now supposed to see the American solider as a utilitarian third party cog in a system where soldiers don't make decisions they just execute them. So if you're unhappy with the war you take out your disapproval on the government not the lowly soldier who is "just doing their job/just following orders" etc.
Obviously this is very ethically questionable but I'd say it's the standard attitude towards the American soldier in my experience (in group social settings with ex-military people). The military is simply the hammer, the will of the people and politics. The hammer only acts when the hand picks it up hence we're supposed to hold the hand (government) accountable not the hammer (military).
Don't know why people are downvoting you. Your description of the perception towards the government and soldiers is completely correct. You're just stating it as it is, not justifying it or saying you agree with it.
Wait, so a attack on a soldier is wrong- and attacking the government (aka the people in a democracy) is right? So the whole of the people view themselves as a sort of warlord?
When the solider is out on the sharp end, they're goin g to make whatever policy is most likely to keep them alive modulo broad mission objectives. This had been true somewhere have been humans fighting.
The time to consider the impact of this is before you deploy the solider. Ergo, to affect change, we must look at the government and not the solider.
But didnt he/she volunteer. Shouldnt then there be some conditional clauses to service- aka, i m only a soldier to this democracy, as long as it is acting in my missions in true self-defense against a unprovoked attack.
Else- in theory, couldnt your goverment just rent you out to the highest bidder as mercenary and you would still have to do whatever this entity demands of you. This cart blanche of action, combined with the chance to loose your life- that is strange.
> but not the 100,000s murdered in Iraq because of the US invasion? I
Maybe not by the mainstream media, as they were getting pretty reluctant to point out things like Obama, the Nobel Prize recipient, dropping over 20k bombs in countries we were not even at war with in just 2016. Some did report though ex: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/09/americ.... Was there someone's mom or baby killed by those bombs? Was that more humane than landing a helicopter and shooting them in the head?
As for general Iraq war criticism, you can still follow Democracy Now, Amy Goodman and others did a good job there. There was a video they did with drone operators who describe how they did the killing. They also currently have retrospective on My Lai as well https://www.democracynow.org/2018/3/16/50_years_after_my_lai... (it' s a shorter interview not a full piece like the article we are discussing).
You bring up a possible reason - negligent killing (drone mistakes) vs bloodlust (My Lai). Maybe that's the key? They didn't intend to destroy Iraq and Syria and spawn Isis, so they're not really to blame even though they did it?
Of course they are to blame. People often times go to prison if they kill someone on the road even if they didn't intend to.
The people you're talking about are more to blame, given how much they were war profiteers themselves and were intertwined with war profiteering firms.
Also it can't seriously be called negligent killing if there's no serious effort to reduce or let alone count the dead and find what the "mistakes" were. Probably because there are no mistakes, it's calculated acceptable "colateral damage" (I hate this euphemism). Just like after Trump changed the rules and US related killing rate rised by some 400% or so right after that.
I agree with you, but why don't at least left-wing Americans agree too? Even HN posters are keen to show proper respect to soldiers and get angry if you don't do the same.
I don't know. I'm not an american. World is a mess though, and if people try to make sense of it by the use of some very large highlevel abstractions like left/right/democracy/islamism/etc. they're likely to fail.
I'm sure if someone tried, they can find good sounding justification for a lot of things within any of these highlevel thought systems. For example my mind boggles at the fact, that part of american left is pro-Assad (which is basically a horryfying middle-eastern dictator). If what he does would be happening in America, they'd be horrified. Currently there's some pushback against a new proposed CIA chiefess, because of overseeing torture. Yet Assad is acceptable despite running horrendous prisons like Adra, Sednaya, etc. (read some HRW reports, see "Caesar" photos).
To me it's more interesting to look at behavior/stated motivations of individual people, which leads to a more realistic view of the world. Yet it will cover very little, almost nothing, because it's hard to generalize from that.
The US left is generally anti-Assad, both due to his atrocities and the perception that the Russian government is propping him up. There is a wing of the left who support him due to a belief that the US are trying to destabilize his regime and install a puppet by funding violent rebel groups. They're not exactly wrong, but they're blinded by ideology and in some cases conspiracy theory thinking like the chemical attacks being fake or his atrocities all being US propaganda. I would say this is only a small minority on the left, though. Most of the left hates Assad and his regime. The right at the moment seem to be more sympathetic to him.
Not sure, I've wondered this myself. At a certain level, there's the fact that the US is simply a very patriotic place. Similarly, in Russia it's also not socially accepted to publicly criticize military service members. That said, there are many other "patriotic" countries in the world, and not all of them impose this social reverence on the military, so some other factor is at play.
Common knowledge says that the US was probably not always like this. I'm not old enough to remember the Vietnam era, but the stereotype goes that returning soldiers / military were treated with disdain by the civilian population. I have to admit I've wondered at how widespread this mistreatment was, but it is probably safe to say that the military of the time didn't enjoy all the unequivocal support, standing ovations and endless TYFYS that permeate American culture these days.
I do know that after 9/11 and at the outset of the GWOT it was universally taboo to do anything but loudly praise the military. Where this sentiment came from, how it was disseminated, why it persists to this day : all are frankly mysteries to me. It didn't make sense then, and it doesn't make sense now.
The US has been at war, somewhere in the world, since its inception as a nation.
It has dropped one bomb every twenty minutes, mostly on innocent people, for the last 3 decades.
The US currently has the world ensnared in its remote military bases, and is a number one cause of trouble in the world. It regularly defeats real democracies using covert means, installing its own puppets to function as feudal lords. When covert means fail, the USA goes overt - and has practiced and refined its presentation of these actions such that the rest of the world is helpless to do anything about it. Nobody wants to believe it, but the USA is a wholesale exporter of death, destruction and mayhem.
Yet, the American people are ignorant of all of this, because of the luxuries afforded them by their state.
Until we deal with the decadence problem, we will not be able to deal with the militarism.
For some of you. For a majority of Americans, however, living in poverty - not so. Its very much an imperialist scenario. Sure, you have your bread and circuses. But don't look behind the curtain in any of your major metropolitan cities. The sight of 80,000 people, families, living on the streets in LA won't make you proud.
Even HN posters are keen to show proper respect to soldiers and get angry if you don't do the same.
In a Western democracy soldiers are volunteers to enact the will of The People as expressed by a democratically elected government. If the representatives of The People, chosen by The People, decide that a war is necessary then they go - it's rare for soldiers to be eager to rush into war. Well apart from Colin Powell who sat there and lied to the UN with a straight face. It's usually chickenhawks like Bliar and Obama who are eager to strut about on the world stage.
The US invasion jostled that mix, and the resulting friction directly caused those deaths. So, to be more accurate (but possibly oversimplified), the US was a witless catalyst, and the fragmentation of Islam was the fuel.
That's what I meant by "because of". If the police and army in America suddenly vanished, you can bet a lot of deaths would ensue too. People depend on the structure of government services to protect them from each other. Taking that away is like taking away food or water.
Let's be clear what we mean by "the police and army vanishing". This is not common thugs committing crimes. Saddam Hussein was keeping a lead through tyranny (and massacres in the past) on the shia-sunni-kurd ethnic tensions which blew out when Saddam felt. Add to that mix a rise of islamism and you get a murderous civil war. None of these ingredients are really the making of the US. The US certainly ignited the war by removing the tyranny but do we really want to go the route "these guys deserve a good dictator to keep them from killing each others"?
I think we do want to go that route. As opposed to supporting and arming dictatorships that suite our supposed interests at a given time. Then turning against them, or arming their enemies when they don’t.
If the US consistently practiced being a good global citizen, maybe one could make a case for “humanitarianism military intervention” in limited cases.
What we have now is apparently open ended military activity, around the globe, for an indefinite timeframe.
Most of the conflicts we are party to are civil wars, and by definition these are not “winnable.”
As far as I can see, the US continues to wreak havoc on innocent civilians around the world to this day, with total impunity. This serves only the interests of the corporate military political complex. The fiasco of the US response to 9/11 beggars disbelief.
It’s sickening how the propaganda apartatus in the US has shutdown virtually all reporting on what our armed forces are actually doing.
Perhaps the worst of the US conduct is the continual supply of arms to States and factions in conflicts around the world, thereby radically increasing the lethality of the conflict.
Of course, the US is not alone in this arms dealing, but this is something where we could unilaterally make a dramatic action towards world peace. Withdraw from current wars, end arms dealing, and work towards negotiated outcomes, where possible.
"Not only will America go to your country and kill all your people, but they'll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad." ~ Frankie Boyle.
100,000s were murdered in Vietnam as well. That the US played a role in further mass murders in Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and so on, is the legacy of the US never having the honesty to own up to its actions. It should all be condemned.
The problem is that the political elite in the US doesn't see it that way. Military leaders from Vietnam who committed mass murder were awarded commendations. Soldiers who raped and tortured women and children were given awards for kill counts. A Secretary of State whose actions led to the genocide of millions of people still enjoys political celebrity. And a President who killed tens of thousands of civilians by remote control was given a Peace Prize. This is America.
"I can't work out how Americans think being proud of their soldiers - both left and right wing people are. Is there something I don't know?"
I believe one of the key points is that it's not the foot soldier who makes the decision to start a war. When the soldier was drafted into the military, they had absolutely NO control whatsoever. In times without the draft (volunteer forces), one may say that individuals have some control by NOT volunteering (enlisting). But even that argument is incomplete.
People enlist in the military for different reasons, and it's not as simple as pro-war vs anti-war sentiment. Some of the reasons why some enlist: economic (to support themselves and their family), learn trade/skills, carry on family legacy, sense of duty to country, to see the world, physical and mental challenge/discipline, become a fighter, coercion by others, etc. Even if a person enlists because they desire combat, that person still doesn't have any authority or ability to start a conflict. Once in combat, there's still a chain of command and accountability.
When a country engages in military conflict, it is due to the decision of politicians. And once the conflict begins, it is the foot soldiers who pay the highest price.
To give a counter-example to the Vietnam war, what would have happened if all of the Allied military forces rebelled and refused to participate in the D-Day invasion of Normandy in WW2? Or even if the US decided to not fight in WW2, despite Pearl Harbor attack?
The officer who gave the command to massacre civilians in My Lai was wrong. Other individuals throughout the conflict inevitably did wrong. I believe that the vast majority of those who fought did so admirably and honorably. And I believe that I can have this opinion and still not be pro-war.
I think you'd be hard-pressed to find an American who believes that the invasion of Iraq, either in conception (many believed and many now believe we should never have invaded) or in execution (Even among those who believed that the US should have overthrown Saddam, it is a pretty common opinion that the post-war occupation was bungled tragically). The reason you don't see more condemnations of it in the American media in 2018 is that at this point, an opinion like "our involvement in Iraq was a disaster" is pretty uncontroversial and therefore boring and therefore does not result in ad revenue or re-shares.
But that was largely a result of the decisions made by the civilian leaders in the Bush administration. What does that have to do with the quality or respectability of the soldiers?
At the time, the Iraq war enjoyed broad public support particularly on the right. That support persisted for over a decade, and to this day you'll still find people justifying the whole mess, arguing for the existence of "WMDs", contrasting Saddams atrocities and of course roundly blaming Obama for creating ISIS by disengaging.
I’ll point out that your list consists of separate arguments. Some people point to the evidence Saddam had chemical weapons because they believe we found stocks of chemical weapons he’d kept even after using some on the Kurds, not because they think we should have overthrown him. Those are two separate statements—-one is a question of fact and one an opinion.
Still other Americans initially opposed the invasion but believed that, having overthrown the government, we had a moral obligation to stay, develop the istitutions of the country, and prevent sectarian violence from breaking out again. I was in this camp back in 2006.
A slaves spirit has to be like this, a nice, shiny face to those carrying the whip, a raging redirected hatred, to those stripped of all rights by his master.
Of course I remember Kuwait, slant-drilling under the Iraqi border. And the apparent, later denied, US tolerance or at least indifference when the Iraqi ambassador stated that Iraq would take direct action if Kuwait was not called into order.
Remember Saddam being just a-okay for the US as an ally in the 1980s, during and after all sorts of atrocities he did to Iraqis and Iranians? Remember the theater when former friend was suddenly the next Hitler? Such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony ?
But the individuals are doing the work for the institution. If they'd just refuse (for example, don't sign up to be a soldier working on behalf of an institution you ostensibly don't support), then it wouldn't get done.
People who don't support the military won't sign up at all. People who do sign up don't have full information on all of the operations they'll be involved in at the time they sign up, and by the time they do have that information they generally cannot legally dissent.
My opinion has changed after you've marginalized a tragedy and treated it like an either or event in history. Thank you for showing that neither is important by what about ing.
I don't really understand you. I want to know why Americans on both political wings aggressively support their soldiers. I can understand if it's a country being attacked and their own soldiers defend it. But nobody is attacking America. What good did its soldiers do by fighting wars instead of just waiting to defend?
In the US, support for soldiers is often completely orthogonal to support for the government or war plans. Soldiers are effectively considered brave men and women selflessly serving their country, even if they're fighting an unjust war. The rationalization is usually that politicians and other elites are to blame for the wars, while the soldiers are mere pawns who bear no culpability (or at least that's the perception for the ones who aren't torturing people or committing Abu Ghraib-like atrocities; those individuals are seen as a tiny minority of soldiers). They're "just following orders".
As for the actual justification behind that, it's highly up for debate. But regardless, you'll generally find the vast majority of the US left in the somewhat paradoxical position of unilateral praise for soldiers with simultaneous hatred towards the government's military decisions and actions.
Two reasons: they chose to take the job (which can result in your own death and being ordered to do very difficult things in service to your country) and they are our children, brothers and sisters. Once they chose to serve, they are subject to the orders of our civilian government and so we separate the decision to go to war made by politicians from the decision to potentially die in service to our country made by soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen.
Finally, most wars the US gets involved with are sold to the people as defense. We we sold that Iraq was behind the attack on the World Trade center and the removal of Sadam Hussein would make our country safe.
But didn't people learn from the Vietnam and Korean wars that they might be unnecessary for defense even if the government says so? Is it that a new generation forgets the lessons from the previous one? In that case, why not blame the soldiers - if there was little popular support for them and it was seen as a shameful or failure of a job then maybe fewer would be sucked into it.
I heard that in WWI, soldiers were naive and didn't understand what they were getting into. Now though, there's no excuse. Everyone learns history at school and can use Google. So the decision to join should be fairly obviously likely to lead to doing bad things. The US has been nearly continuously at war since WWII, it's not going to suddenly stop when your son joins the army.
Also, how do Americans reconcile that "my family" attitude with the fact that the people they're fighting are also somebody's sons and brothers? It's not seen as equally noble to be an Isis soldier as a US one. What makes the US special other than "my country"?
For firsthand testimony by American soldiers involved in similar operations — I cannot recommend Winter Soldier, the 1972 documentary film, highly enough.
It's something that every American adult deserves to see.
In short: The film records a 1971 Vietnam Veterans Against the War event in Detroit, where dozens of veterans spoke in public, to the media and on the record, for the first time, about war crimes that they had seen and taken part in, just months or years before.
> Duc was eight years old in March 1968, and as Haeberle spoke with him, through an interpreter, he realized with a jolt that the woman he had photographed dead behind a rock 43 years earlier was Duc’s mother, Nguyen Thi Tau.
It was hard not to cry reading that.
It is terrifying to think about all the other massacres where a photographer wasn't there to document it or someone like the helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson to intervene.
Fucking horrific. What war does to men, and what men do in war.
This can hardly be confined to Americans in Vietnam, and that doesn’t justify it, but rather provides an opportunity for pause and reflection.
I’m left wondering if we’re just a bunch of dumb animals. Being capable of having that thought gives me some hope. But, what can we be when we’re surrounded by our own savagery?
While My Lai was horrible, evidence collected since then such as in Nick Turse's book "Kill Anything That Moves" [1] and at the Winter Soldier hearings [2] show that Mai Lai was hardly an aberration. Horrible atrocities committed by US soldiers were widespread in Vietnam, much more so than most people digesting the Ken Burns narrative realize.
What's important to learn about My Lai isn't just that it happened - that Americans are indeed as capable of horrible atrocities as anyone - but that almost no consequences resulted. In fact, as Turse discovers, Army officials who were aware of what was happening in Vietnam later moved to take control of the Criminal Investigation Division in order to suppress investigation and prosecution of the innumerable war crimes that took place. The most significant prosecution that took place was of Lt. William Calley, who ultimately received 3 1/2 years of house arrest after being convicted of hundreds of murders. The message that this sends to the rest of the world is that we are imperialist killers of the highest order, and we are above the law.
Without looking at these atrocities in the eye, we are doomed to repeat them. And so we have.
The My Lai massacre is an important event because what happened to the soldiers who committed the atrocities (nothing) echoes through history. Nobody is still being punished for what happened in Haditha, Abu Ghraib or Gitmo.
During the 1940s the US prosecuted Japanese and German war criminals by adhering to the Yamashita principle and disqualifying the Nuremberg defense; basically, commanders are always responsible for crimes that their soldiers commit if they aren't actively combating it themselves (this is what convicted Yamashita, who occupied the Philippines) and you can't blame your CO when you commit war crimes (which convicted a lot of people in Nuremberg).
But, after the My Lai massacre, the soldiers could successfully use the Nuremberg defense themselves. Their CO was also not under the Yamashita principle because he only served three years of a commuted sentence.
The My Lai massacre should not be forgotten because it's a reminder that it's been more than 50 years now, when is America going to start measuring up to the moral standards it claims it has?
For many, this incident is a metaphor for the U.S. involvement in Viet Nam: thuggish U.S. soldiers came to a country they didn't understand and killed everyone. This view lacks the context of the war. The U.S. and its allies were fighting the Cold War, a war against Communist Bloc hegemony. We were fighting against the expansion of Communism in South Viet Nam, trying to prevent The Domino Effect.
The primary reason we lost the war was micro-managing by Washington bureaucrats, and overly-limited rules of engagement. Keep in mind, our mission was to assist the South Koreans in defending a guerrilla war. For this reason, we never invaded North Vietnam, and initially refrained from going in to neighboring countries to attack the Viet Cong revolutionaries staging there. Nixon started bombing these countries, but by then, it was too little, too late, and he ended the war.
I believe this view also does not consider economic and government system hegemony as a good reason to end lives. Many of the people who lived those massacres, from Vietnam to Iraq seem to agree with this view. Since I come from a country that has also been victim to American interventionism I tend to agree, our lives are more important than capitalism, communism, war on terror or whatever it is the excuse of the times for invading sovereign nations and slaughtering its people.
I believe we who see that "metaphor" rather see it as the truth: US soldiers go to countries they know nothing about and kill everyone. I do not fancy being murdered. Killing people is wrong, plain and simple.
So, just finished reading the article... I guess everyone should, just for the sense of thoughtfulness it should provoke.
The thing is, the perpetrators started out as ordinary young American men. What tipped the balance, to turn them into stone-cold killers? It's not unique to this situation: this is what soldiers eventually tend to do. The ultimate modern example of pure, large scale monstrosity is the Red Army, at the close of WWII. But - make no mistake - many (most?) males are capable of such acts.
Some serious psychological tools need to be thrown at this problem.
My friend participated in local war in 00s. They did not see much, generally sitting in trenches, but heard stories from spetsnaz guys. How anyone, including women and children could (and did) shoot at them or throw grenades after trading, smiling and handwaving. I’m not justifying orders they got there, but that definitely ruined their belief in humanity and peace, if any pre-existed. All these civilians were perceived as a real potential threat to their lives, not to some high political forces – that’s where violence grows from.
This is not a single story of war: my granddad took part in famous caribbean crisis (he cold-opposed to reds for a whole life). While cuban people were mostly on ‘our’ side, he told that leaving their dislocation at night or unarmed was strictly prohibited, since chances of returning in a box were too high. When people have no power, they figure out own ways to fight and these ways can do horrific things to their and your minds.
“But - make no mistake - many (most?) males are capable of such acts.”
This thing is not their natural trait, it is an adaptation to not lose their minds in a new reality that they don’t actually support or understand. I blame those who throw them at it sitting in their soft chairs. It is their psychological problem, they are real psychopats.
The same survival instinct was also shown by German soldiers returning home on leave from the Eastern Front in WW2. Many of them instinctively shot any dog they saw in the street, as they had learned to do on the front to protect themselves from dog-borne bombs.
Anyone could turn into a monster. Even you, even I. It's like the old myth of the Sirens and Ulysses. We have to be vigilant and protect human rights beforehand, lest we are lured by bloodlust in the worst times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petar_Brzica#cite_ref-2
I prefer to think that I could never turn into a monster. Solzhenitsyn managed to hold on to his humanity, through some of the worst atrocities imaginable.
"The little daughter's on the mattress,
Dead. How many have been on it
A platoon, a company perhaps?
A girl's been turned into a woman,
A woman turned into a corpse.
It's all come down to simple phrases:
Do not forget! Do not forgive!
Blood for blood! A tooth for a tooth!"
-Prussian Nights by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_Nights)
You would be surprised. Some of the most terrible people in the Nazi concentration camps were fellow prisoners tasked with being Kapos (prisoner overseers). The Kapos were spared some of the worst labor but in exchange had to show extreme brutality to the prisoners they oversaw so the Nazis wouldn't question their effectiveness.
This isn't the only example: Stanford prison experiment and the Milgram experiment. I'm sure there are others. When you value being alive many people will do anything to survive.
Stone cold killers is not the right description here. These soldiers, conscripts, were put into the most bizarre, dangerous, depraved situation you could imagine. The stress must have been unreal, in the jungles. They suffered a situational insanity.
Well said. From my reading of many non-fiction accounts of the Vietnam War, this view is reinforced with each account. I think it's also unfair for Monday-morning quarterbacking of "well, if i were there, i would have just ...".
Vietnam was never meant to be won, it just continued the Korea and WW2 bleed out strategy. (With a side of MICC profits and deep state drug running black profits) Read up on Robert G Thompson for more on the bleed out comment if you are genuinely curious. All these wars we get into, people need to focus on the "advisors" influencing policy. What ends up happening is people debate about the trees and miss the forest.
I think the savage is in the human nature. Maybe in the future wars can be fought virtually. With the advance of VR we fight it out in "Quake" rather in real life.
I'd also like to recommend the Ken Burns "The Vietnam War," which can be found on PBS. It is amazingly well done and the depth of it is beyond most documentaries. For example, there is one episode (1.5+ hours) that covers a six month period from 1967 to '68.
I was a small child during the war (10 in '68) and (to be truthful) only somewhat remember watching the coverage on TV. My mother said I used to ask her if I was going to have to go fight there and that I didn't want to. Thankfully, I didn't. The war ended in '75. I had just turned 17.
Strangely, the My Lai massacre is not covered until a later episode. They slotted it in the time line where it was first reported --not when it actually happened. But be patient, they do get to it eventually.
The sobering part about the series is that it absolutely captures the stupidity, futility, and mismanagement of the war over such a long period of time. The huge waste on both sides. The scale of it was staggering.
Myself, I am always drawn to the jungle patrols and the combat portions, which are fierce, terrifying and totally engulfing. I can see why certain people are drawn to war. It's the ultimate video game. Everything is on the line. You have no idea what the enemy will do and (really, in the end) no idea what you will do when faced with that visceral terror and excitement. What a rush it must be! And how horrible too. I am in inveterate coward. I don't believe I would have gone if called, but my 17 year old self is someone I don't really know anymore.
Anyway, the series is great and I highly recommend it.
Seconded. I just made it through the whole 20 hour series and it was sobering. I never learned very much about this significant war in American history (I am American).
To think that we started this war to help an ally (France) maintain their colonial power over people who wanted to be free, and then stayed in it because it would look bad, is horrific. Nixon even interfered with peace talks before he was elected to make sure he’d have a better chance of being elected, and that fact was seen as so damaging that those in power decided to keep it the American people in the dark. A presidential candidate interfered with the peace process to get elected and the American people weren’t even told about it.
And then the massacres. So much humanity was lost. Not just in the massacres but in the battles for a war that didn’t need to be fought.
The Vietnam war is such a dark part of human history, and yet we barely talk about it. Or when we do, many people to this day believe the government lines they were being fed at the time of the war. That this was necessary, etc.
And now we have a president that threatens war and people support him in it. Hell Obama pushed war too and advanced many war efforts.
I wish we could stop all this killing. I mean - we could. I wish we would.
From Wikipedia:
"The North Vietnamese government and the Viet Cong were fighting to reunify Vietnam. They viewed the conflict as a colonial war and a continuation of the First Indochina War against forces from France and later on the United States. The U.S. government viewed its involvement in the war as a way to prevent a communist takeover of South Vietnam."
“the stupidity, futility, and mismanagement of the war over such a long period of time. The huge waste on both sides. The scale of it was staggering.“
History is repeating itself in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Ken Burns doc is informational in some ways and a joke in others, particularly in the way it frames America's involvement from the outset as one of having been "sucked into" an unwanted war, a framing which is unsupported by historical evidence.
The reality is that the US systematically executed tens of thousands of unarmed civilians and committed countless atrocities along the way including regularly torturing and raping civilians, as was documented by the American government. But this contrasts the the image of America as most people see it, which is why Burns saw it fit to exclude the full extent of US war crimes from his documentary.
I'm a little younger than you, born after the war ended. In the 80s, there was a weekly dramatized series called Tour of Duty that ran for a bit on one of the networks. Paint it Black was the shows theme song. Anyways, I was too young to watch it critically or remember if it had a message to it. Does it ring any bells?
Also, I read your comment after suggesting a video in a separate comment below. You might like it. Re how the press uncovered the event.
https://investigatingpower.org/vietnam-war/
Seconded as well. I've yet to see the final episode, but so far it has been very good. As a non-US'an the Vietnam War was dealt with by a few paragraphs in the high school history books. Oh, and of course by watching movies like apocalypse now, full metal jacket, and, yes, Rambo 2. So it has certainly been very interesting to learn about the background, politics and the higher level military situation.
Not that it matters much, but I couldn't really get through the Burns documentary because it had basically nothing to add to the 1983 PBS documentary
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam:_A_Television_History
I don't know. It just bugs me when someone famous rehashes old material and gets credit for it.
As for My Lai, war atrocities are part of war, and that one wasn't anything special. It was actually the South Koreans (in Vietnam) who were the masters at it, though pointing that out does nothing to help the media's overarching agenda.
I was surprised by how much war footage and gut-wrenching videos I could find online. More people should be exposed to those documents as a form of shock therapy. It gives weight and meaning to words so effortlessly spoken by our leaders. It might also help young people have a little more empathy for actual individuals, as opposed to abstract demographics.
The article reminds me of War against War!. It's a 1924 anti-war photobook (180 images) designed by German pacifist Ernst Friedrich. It's a sobering read. http://craigritchie.co.uk/archives/2581 [WARNING: 18+ NSFL]
EDIT: I added a few quotes describing the War against War! photobook.
> Outraged by the unprecedented barbarism and massive destruction of the First World War, Ernst Friedrich complied and published a collection of pictures and other visual material which attempted to illustrate not only the tragic human consequences of war, but also the lies and hypocrisy of the social, political, and economic forces that produced and promoted it. Aimed at an international audience with multi-lingual supporting text and captions, it was one of the first concerted photographic expressions of protest against the barbarism of modern warfare in all its tragic folly.
> Friedrich’s strategy was to present shocking images of the atrocities of war and then juxtapose the official German patriotic and military propaganda and rhetoric of the time with graphic illustrations of what this discourse actually produced.
> The horrific imagery builds gradually, commencing with illustrations of children’s toys and propaganda posters, followed by photographs of the soldier’s march to war, the privilege of the elites orchestrating the violence, the devastated and then forgotten battlefields [...] and the graveyards of the dead.
> The most unbearable pages are in a section called ‘The Face of War’, twenty-four close-ups of military and non-military survivors with huge facial wounds.
> Never before had the people there been subjected to such horrendous images of the savagery and the senseless destruction of the First World War. During WW1, most European governments forbade the publication of war photographs and few images of the war had appeared before the publication of Friedrich’s book.
Most of the big wars were/are ultimately started (or allowed to start) by politicians.
The word 'politician' can be thought of as a portmanteau: political technician. So the responsibility is on us to enforce this distinction: who among our political technicians is actually qualified to lead?
Heinlein's Starship Troopers had the right idea. I wish just one nation in the world would implement it. Maybe it would lead to a cascade of rationality, and future wars would become impossible as a result.
> Heinlein's Starship Troopers had the right idea.
I'm pretty unconvinced that limiting voters to volunteer military veterans would prevent war. I think it would instead lead to a government which is more able to successfully pander to those with a value-system that leads them to volunteer for the military.
It is ironic how that is a mirror image of fascist beliefs about military virtue. They wanted to give power to veterans so that wars could be started and won! They wanted to suppress the influence of weak willed peacniks. It is ironic that this could be reversed to imply that rationality means peace.
Heinlein had some pretty fascist ideas, and books like starship troopers project that in a comfortable form. It is easy to attach our own ideas of what is rational, but that is very subjective. To a fascist war is rational.
Heinlein's point was that one's vote is a huge responsibility, and that privilege must be earned: by demonstrably placing the needs of one's country above individual wellbeing. Thus only military veterans could participate in governance. Militarism doesn't automatically equate to fascism.
There are further ideas in this: that, having experienced a war, a (typical) person would never again allow such a thing to happen. That's sound thinking, in my opinion.
> Heinlein's point was that one's vote is a huge responsibility, and that privilege must be earned: by demonstrably placing the needs of one's country above individual wellbeing.
I find the unspoken assumption that the "needs of one's country" always mean going to war and killing other people curious. Is that the only thing that countries need? What about jobs, infrastructure, health care, pensions, education, social insurance, good laws, and competent government among many other things.
But none of that explains why the actual results would be better. You could make the same argument about other kinds of virtue like religion, property ownership, wealth, or ancestry. That may seem irrational to us, but it made sense to some people historically.
And the choice of service is completely subjective. Maybe only parents should be we to vote? Because only they can truly understand. And they have sacrificed so much for their children. So many sleepless nights!
But you did not pick any of those things, you picked military service. And military service is virtuous because of war! It would be very difficult to create a culture that glorifies military service, but treats war itself as repugnant. People are just not that nuanced. The realities of war are just too unimaginable for a person in a peaceful nation to really understand. That is why it is risky to glorify service in this way.
I agree that war will make people less enthusiastic about future conflict. But surely you need a constant supply of wars to allow you to recruit these rational voters. If you have 100 years of peace then the system fails.
The irony is that we have had many periods in our history when a huge number of voters and politicians had direct expert of war. Did it improve the prospects of peace? Who knows.
> It would be very difficult to create a culture that glorifies military service, but treats war itself as repugnant.
There are large sections of the American left which hold this sort of perspective.
But of course, by allowing only people who have ties to one particular organization, you give too much advantage to that organization.
Only soldiers interests will be represented, nobody elses. And this matters crutially a lot. Moreover army spends a lot of time indonctrinating people - training, military discipline and so on. It changes them and their opinions.
Germany before WWII gave government jobs to ex-soldiers. Veterans being the ones who defined culture of those institutions had (according to historians) an impact on ease with which those institutions could be taken over and used for authoritarian purposes.
>That's sound thinking, in my opinion.
Except for the fact that its pandering to the survivors fallacy. Of course, the ones who don't want to fight wars won't be around - they'll have been dead. The ones who survived war, are more likely to want more war - especially when they emerge as the victor nation. Just look at how blood-thirsty the 5-eyes nations are, currently: none of them have truly 'lost wars' (i.e. fought on their own territory), only troops. Yet, here today, don't ask your average Aussie to ever criticise their nations war-making; they'll think you need psychiatric help for just questioning the Australian Defence Forces' heinous crimes...
Yes. Historically the more direct your experience of war, the less likely you are to survive. There are lots of WWII veterans who spent the war washing clothes and driving trucks miles from the front line. That is worthy of massive respect and gratitude. But it is not a passport to wisdom.
Maybe have a look at the voting patterns of veterans. Their voting patterns don’t lead me to think they are anti war.
if that works as intended then as time passes the voter base becomes smaller and smaller. That doesn’t sound very good.
Ah yes. The kind of rational society that fights giant insects with lightly armoured infantry soldiers despite being highly technologically advanced.
A lot of problems are complex and require competing demands to be balanced. There is no single objectively correct solution to those problems. Rational intelligent people come to different conclusions. That is why we have politics, to deal with the messy complexity of the real world.
Treating rationality as a moral virtue just disturbs me. It is just a kind of moralistic discrimination based on things that may or may not indicate actual quality.
The kind of rational society that fights giant insects with lightly armoured infantry soldiers
In the movie. In the book the MI wear power armour.
Sure, but they could have just thrown rocks from space, or nukes from orbit. A culture that can fly across the galaxy does not need to use infantry any more than a US marine needs to throw a spear. It is a very common thread in this kind of sci-fi. It is just more glorious to shoot the insect from close up. There is more opportunity for pointless sacrifice.
Heinlein actually addresses that point:
> If you wanted to teach a baby a lesson, would you cut its head off? Of course not. You'd paddle it. There can be circumstances when it's just as foolish to hit an enemy city with an H-bomb as it would be to spank a baby with an axe. War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your government's decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him...but to make him do what you want to do. Not killing...but controlled and purposeful violence. But it's not your business or mine to decide the purpose of the control. It's never a soldier's business to decide when or where or how—or why—he fights; that belongs to the statesmen and the generals. The statesmen decide why and how much; the generals take it from there and tell us where and when and how. We supply the violence; other people—'older and wiser heads,' as they say—supply the control. Which is as it should be.
Written by a guy who never saw combat.
Anyway, one thing I got from the book, even if Heinlein never explicitly made this point, is that public officials need to perform some service or somehow show that they merit being our leaders. People who did poorly in intro uni economics should perhaps not be determining national economic policy, for example.
I agree, so someone who did poorly at communism and socialism studies in the former ussr should not become a factory leader or economics minister- because if a university is good at something it is determinating people who are great knowledge repeaters and aggregators, but not determinating who is a good ad-hoc manager of completely knew scenarios.
I would rather prefer pure luck to that intelectual slaughterhouse suggested by the parent, with all the fency problems a goverment would inherit in academia. I can only imagine, what would happen, if some Aspi driven towards perfectionism regarding roadtolls, would do to a transportation-ministry- to compose the perfect system.
I rather have non government then this government.
Where do you think politicians come from? People who started WWII were WWI veterans. They were not born career politicians either.
Also, soldiers tend to be more pro-war, statistically speaking. Pacifists tend not to join armies.
In a society where politicians rely on a broad coalition of supporters in order to stay in power, I think it is an error to place all of the blame for misleadership on those same politicians. I think you have to first look at what incentives those politicians operate under and then look at which ones swim with or against those incentives.
As CGP Grey says, Take the throne to act, and the throne acts upon you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
> So the responsibility is on us to enforce this distinction: who among our political technicians is actually qualified to lead?
None. Each of us, however, is responsible to participate, and therefore make "experts in how we should live together" pointless.
I went to a First World War museum near the Italian Front as a kid. I will never forget this photo of soldiers who survived the war missing half their face.
https://www.tripadvisor.ie/LocationPhotoDirectLink-g319788-d...
I would argue that shocking young children or even teenagers may not necessarily help empathy. Empathy is a cognitive skill whose capacity is greatly reduced in children simply because of the way the brain develops. I would argue what is instead best is to acknowledge that and have lessons be based on helping children empathize with the great tragedy that occurred, in personal ways, or even help them wrap their heads around the sheer horror of it. It is unlikely they are fully capable but if they can develop their own ideas about the horrific events that occurred and why they are bad, then as they grow older they may be able to develop empathy from there about those events. Unfortunately, I fear this is becoming more and more difficult with the recent rise of nationalism in many countries...
Sadly, similar massacres are happening almost daily in this world. One day you see someone start a twitter campaing like #iamstillalive, the other you see a reports of him being killed in an airstrike with countless other people. People are daily begging on twitter for their lives, to be spared, to someone help them. You can easily find similar images from what you see in this article, from yesterday, day prior, almost any day of the week. Dead people, burned people, living people who have their arms baked to the bone, hacked off extremities... plenty of orhpaned children. Just yesterday ~61 people were burned to death in incendiary air strike in the middle of the city with many others injured.
What is worrying though how much propaganda there is these days, which says that this is all made up, staged, people are doing it to themselves, and how many people seemingly take this shit seriously. How much effort there is to justify such attrocities. That's seriously deranged, and I still don't know what to think of it.
Link: https://twitter.com/NYDailyNews/status/974073948299284481
Weird to say but now you know why people in China treasures peace a little bit more than freedom.
Massacres are common during Japanese invasion[0], and nobody stood up for civilians. The result of that was people got murdered village after village and then burned or lefted there for animals.
That collective experience in some degree shaped the political landscape of China today.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Alls_Policy
Occasionally, a few people (foreigners) did stand up for civilians, although in the scale of events, it did not have large impact. Perhaps the most peculiar of them is the story of John Rabe, "a Nazi hero".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rabe
> “Nazi hero”
Persons are always kind. It is people that do horrible things.
Whether it’s the angry mob ready to stone Mary Magdalene or US soldiers wasting civilians at My Lai the principle is the same.
The idea that because someone is on the other team in a war he is a monster is wartime propaganda used to justify and convince good persons to commit atrocities.
There is another comment to this story where someone applies exactly this kind of thinking to the North Vietnamese.
Rabe is one of the most famous. When book "Rabe Dairy" was published in China years ago there were memorial ceremonies. There were few if not no mentions of Nazi background though. Chinese people remember those foreigners who help them during difficult time in the war against Japanese invasion. There was a movie about an India doctor. There are statues a Canadian doctor in a lot of famous medical schools for memory of him. His home town attracted many Chinese tourists every year.
> people in China treasures peace a little bit more than freedom
That's the narrative of the Chinese authoritarian dictatorship, a convenient one for them, but I've never seen data to back it up, there's plenty of evidence to contradict it, and it's based on a false premise.
The false premise is that freedom is a threat to peace. In fact, it's only a threat to peace of mind of dictators. The most peaceful places in the world are the most free, and as freedom has spread around the world, the levels of violence worldwide has dropped to historic lows. Again, the "peace" they speak of their own peace, not for people the government doesn't like; the people of Tibet, Xinjiang, and elsewhere suffer a lot of violence, perpetrated by the government. The poor have no freedom and are therefore driven from their homes; where is their peace? If people are so happy with the peace the Communist dictatorship provides, why not hold an election - the Communists are sure to win!
Freedom begets peace in part because people with rights live under less threat (their rights protect them; they can protect their property in court; etc.), and people with freedom of speech and voting rights can express their needs verbally and at the ballot box. Cut off those avenues and their needs don't just go away; they turn to guns, insurgencies, civil wars, riots, etc.
That people in China - unlike most other places in the world - would not desire freedom is also plainly false. In the only parts of China where people have the option of freedom, Taiwan and Hong Kong, they value their freedom very much. They also have a much higher standard of living than the non-free parts of China, and freedom from want is also important.
My parents are Vietnamese. My dad actually fought in the war with the South Vietnamese army alongside US troops. He's a lifelong Republican, as were all of his brothers who also fought, as well as the vast majority of his friends and their families who arrived as refugees.
They supported the war. They saw the US as liberators against the communists who wanted to murder them and take over their country. They love America and despise communist Vietnam. They wish the US had finished the job.
Promoting things like the link above and conveniently omitting the pure savagery of the Viet Cong, Ho Chi Minh, and the communists from the North is pure propaganda. It's always puzzling to me what types of topics journalists choose to run.
Instead of listening to journalists reporting on Vietnam from half a world away, you should visit Little Saigon in Southern California and Northern California and ask them how they feel about America and the Vietnam War.
EDIT: Since I have a post limit and I can't reply below, I'll reply here.
quan: I didn't say My Lai was propaganda. I said emphasizing My Lai over the several atrocities committed by the communists, including the systematic murders of those who opposed communism, is propaganda.
Same as your dad, five of my uncles fought in the war on the U.S. side, my grandfather and granduncle served in the South Vietnamese government in high positions. My family was persecuted after the war, many fled, the ones that stayed spent time in prison and fled after.
In college, I read a lot on the Vietnam war and learned about the Tet Offensive with the Hue massacre by the Vietcong, the Land Reform prior to that. But I don't see how the photos at My Lai is "pure propaganda." If you spend some time to learn about the tragic event you will find that there were a big cover up and for over 500 human lives lost, only one man was charged and subsequently pardoned.
The U.S. committed to a war when it didn't understand the people or history of Vietnam. Vietnam has a long history of fighting foreign invaders, and most people perceive the U.S. as such as they are just replacing the French when they withdrew after Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Till this day, most Vietnamese people consider China to be their biggest enemy even though the two countries share the same political ideology.
To be fair, the Vietnamese communities in Southern California are stuck in a time bubble. Vietnam has changed dramatically since the Vietnam War (or War of American Aggression as it's called in Vietnam), but the Vietnamese diaspora's image of the country has not. It's not the same place, and the government - while nowhere near perfect - is not the same as it was 50 years ago. The country still has many problems, but it is getting better, and the country's youth have a very healthy skepticism of government (unlike mainland China).
Also, let's not try to paint the former South leadership as noble. Buddhists weren't self-immolating in the streets of Saigon because of the communists, and the victim in the infamous photo being shot at point blank in the head was a Viet Cong.
You're using two data points when hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese civilians were systematically slaughtered by Ho Chi Minh and his comrades. The propaganda is strong when the general public knows more about the head shot photo than the mass murders committed by communist Vietnamese regime.
To the victims the political colour of one murderous child rapist probably doesn’t matter that much.
A more neutral viewpoint could see the whole war as a series of gross violations and crimes.
I'm sorry but the actions of the Viet Cong do not excuse the crimes committed the US, and neither does the nationality of your parents.
To this day, many are maimed and killed by US land mines in the region, and the US does not give a shit.
You're setting up a straw man to an argument I never made. All I'm telling you is how my dad, his brothers, and the vast majority of his first generation Vietnamese friends (who arrived as refugees) feel about America and the Vietnam War. Despite what you may think, they wholeheartedly support America.
If you don't believe me, you should try visiting Little Saigon on Bolsa Avenue in Orange Country and ask them what they think of the USA. Look at the flags they use (South Vietnam and the USA). If you want to get assaulted (I highly don't recommend this), try bringing Vietnam's current flag and parade it around.
EDIT:
to andrepd: Again, you keep setting up straw man arguments. It's very easy to attack someone if you misrepresent their views. I never said anything about excusing massacres.
I think you didn't mean it, from your later comments, but you came across as saying we shouldn't only talk about My Lai because the other side did bad things too. Yes, they did bad things, but it doesn't excuse us. We claim we are better. Just like in the Iraq War 2 and our prisons where we treated people horribly, it doesn't excuse it just because someone else also did bad things. I think that's a core principal.
It doesn't lessen the horror of atrocities if the other side did it.
> We claim we are better.
That's exactly the point made. The US IS better. Better than the Nazis, better than North Vietnam/Vietnam, better than China (and frankly better than all European states during and immediately after WWI/II at least). Better than North Korea. Better than South Africa.
With better I mean "how people are treated", in the human rights, in general, and only as part of government policy.
And yes, I agree. The US has it's downsides. The US has made mistakes. The difference between a mistake and a government policy is the number of times and the scale at which it happens, and the intent. The US has made mistakes, some of which lead to the death of hundreds, even thousands of people. Some of those mistakes involved the military. It was NOT the intent of any significant fraction of the US to make these events happen.
China, Vietnam, and Germany had a widely supported-by-the-people government policy of massacre. Every organisation in those countries is focused and involved in oppressing and massacring people for some reason. Vietnam's CURRENT government made children watch their own parents getting raped, slowly, and killed, then used them as insane soldier-killers sending them into defenseless villages where they brutally murdered everyone they could. This is NOT a one-off. They did this to children for decades.
The difference is indescribable and it is absurd to even compare the two. They are not on the same moral level, they just aren't. We are better than that, it's just that simple.
That's objectively so, and for some reason a lot of people feel the need to destroy historical views like this.
It may not lessen atrocities on the other side, but we should acknowledge the difference between mistakes and popular government-supported genocide.
Equating them does nothing, other than provide cover for these massacres. Hell, the amount of people talking up Chinese policy seems to be mounting every day. And, of course, the situation of people in China gets worse everytime some high up in the Chinese government thinks censorship is good enough that they can get away with something more.
It pains me to point out the obvious: "anti-racism" has become the leading excuse for racism, inequality and state-based massacres.
Ive looked carefully through he comments here and nobody is making any false equivalency In the terms you describe, or denying what you say about the US overall.
I don’t see why an article or subsequent discussion about a horrible crime committed by US soldiers, subject to an attempted coverup by the US army and limply prosecuted afterwards needs to also say how nice the US is otherwise. It doesn’t matter how nice it is otherwise. It’s got nothing to do with the issue at hand, any more than if it had happened in any other country.
Really ? I get that message very strongly just looking at the very post above me (and the other comments by the same user in the same thread).
I'm not saying there is an equivalence between the nazis and modern day us. I am just pointing out that when we do horrible things, we have to not deny it, not say it's not a big deal because someone else did something worse. We aren't equivalent, but we do make mistakes.
> try visiting Little Saigon on Bolsa Avenue in Orange Country
> If you want to get assaulted [..] try bringing Vietnam's current flag and parade it around
What a bizarre argument. Of course you're going to find pro-USA sentiment in the very people who decided to move to the USA. I hope you realise that the opinions of a few immigrants in the states are going to be pretty unrepresentative of those who actually live in, you know, Vietnam.
Speak to actual vietnamese people from actual vietnam and I don't think you'll find they are overwhelmingly pro-USA, nor at all interested in the flag of south vietnam. I'm no expert, but my experience is that they're mildly positive in attitude, mostly due to pop culture. The war was a long time ago and most people are just getting on with their lives.
Many immigrant communities foster a kind of "nostalgic nationalism" as a coping strategy when adapting to a profoundly different environment. It dates pretty rapidly. I very much doubt many of the 90+ million people in Vietnam even know of "Little Saigon", nor care overmuch about the opinions of a bunch of old-timers sitting in a mall in California.
Actually, Vietnam is one of the most pro-American countries in the world. There was a survey a while and over 90% view the US favorably. You can find it with a google search.
That is more to do with China than America though
Some of it is, but some of it is that many VIetnamese went to the US after the at and so their family is there and they can see firsthand the benefits of living in the US.
Also Vietnamese are fiercely capitalistic. I've never seen a more go-getter attitude in any other country. That also colors their perception of the US.
> many Vietnamese went to the US [..] they can see firsthand the benefits of living in the US
This applies to many countries. Why does it specifically influence Vietnamese perceptions more?
> Vietnamese are fiercely capitalistic
This is true, but again, they're hardly alone. Chinese are fiercely capitalistic as well - and in the same context as the Vietnamese, within the framework of a nominally communist society. Why doesn't your theory apply there, too?
I think the situation is much more nuanced than these too-obvious theories, or that can be surfaced in superficial "attitude" surveys. As mentioned in other comments, Vietnamese are deeply (and IMO rightfully) suspicious of China, despite the state's theoretical status as an ally. The USA, despite its history of botched and ham-handed interventions, is ultimately seen as a friend. There's a love/hate aspect to that attitude too, similar to Filipino attitudes to some extent. The absence of military bases in-country helps by keeping the notion theoretical, rather than the often-negative daily experience of having foreign soldiers around a la Korea and Japan.
Anyway, without getting too much into the weeds of theorising and speculation, my point was that it's complex - more complex than the OP suggested. Nostalgia for the South Vietnamese flag is a niche sentiment at best, and attitudes to the USA are a complicated product of history and pragmatism. "90% positive" does not capture the nuance, in my opinion.
It's probably too late but it would have been good to hear from some non-emigrant Vietnamese.
Well thank you for that comprehensive study. I guess we shouldn't worry about the massacre anymore -.-
"The US" no longer uses anti-personnel mines outside the Korean DMZ (which is actually managed by the South Koreans). The US does not deploy them anywhere, and hasn't for years.
Maybe its India and Pakistan we're thinking of, hm?
Did you really think she/he was suggesting that the US is setting up landmines in Vietnam 50 years after the war? Landmines can kill people a very long time after being deployed you know...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/sep/18/vietnam-unexpl...
So you really think people 50 years ago are 'the US'? That was my point. Thus the highlight.
Do you really think the US government bears no responsibility for the actions of the US government 50 years ago and the consequences today? Would you extend that to other governments too? In what circumstances would you not? What Cut off period do you think is right generally?
For example do you think the US has no responsibility towards Pacific Islanders whose islands are now lethally radioactive due to nuclear tests 50 years ago, and can reasonably wash its hands of any problems arising from that today?
The ones that were deployed during the Vietnam war are still there and hurting people
The comment was about mines left behind from the Vietnam war, not present day.
Actually the comment was about present-day 'the US'.
Present-day US should care, and they should do something about it. The mines they layed 50 years ago still kill people today.
I can't claim to be directly responsible for the actions of my countrymen fifty years ago, but not doing anything about their misdeeds today gives my tacit approval to those past actions and to their ongoing costs so unfairly burdening present-day Vietnamese. Plus, I think it would be a nice bit of diplomacy for the U.S. to fund mine clearing efforts in Vietnam.
Just one point: there is no, “The US” as I’ve learned over time. The US is geographically vast, and full of hundreds of millions of people from wildly different backgrounds. Those poeple have politics ranging from Ghengis Khan, to Ghandi. They seem to agree, as a nation, on very little.
That is true for every country so it doesn't add anything to the discussion.
Have you ever been to Iceland? Sweden is remarkably united in their politics as well. Japan is much less politically and culturally diverse than most US states. Few countries are as geographically large and populous as the US either, even before you work in hundreds of years of immigration.
I don’t appreciate your shallow dismissal.
I have lived in Germany and the US each for years and for months in several other countries. From the outside or on a short visit all countries look homogeneous. Only after a while you see the subtleties. From that perspective I don't think the US is any different from other countries. Maybe other countries are in agreement on things that are contentious in the US but then they have other issues that never get discussed in the US. In short, the US is nothing special. It's a country like every other country and should be treated as such.
I disagree, but I can’t see the value in pitting anecdote against anecdote. If you want to believe that the US’ history, geography, and demographics make it essentially the same as (to use my examples) Iceland, Japan, and Sweden, I doubt that I could change your mind.
Look at where this discussion started. It started from someone talking about the Viet Cong and the US. Then you said there is no such thing as the US because it's so big and diverse. In this context the US has to be seen as one unit or how else can you describe a war?
As far as Sweden goes I bet the people living north of the Arctic circle have little in common with people living in Stockholm.
To this day, many are maimed and killed by US land mines in the region, and the US does not give a shit.
My point is that’s it’s incorrect to speak of 330 million diverse people as collectively not giving a shit. I stand by that.
Then never talk about any other group like "the Chinese", "the Russians" or "the Nazis" again either. Because these are also millions of diverse people too.
Then never talk about any other group like "the Chinese", "the Russians" or "the Nazis" again either. Because these are also millions of diverse people too.
One of those things is not like the other, two of those things are kinda the same. Nazism is an ideology, a movement, so I’m going to move past that red herring.
The rest though, good advice that I try very hard to live by. I’m not sure at what point you decided that I was arguing in favor of something else. It would be downright stupid to assume that the lives and views of someone raising ducks and pigs on a small farm in an outer province of Chins bears much resemblance to the life of a high-level beaurocrat in Beijing. Some teenager with no future or hope in the outskirts of Moscow isn’t like a grandmother in Novasibirsk, or an oligarch in a penthouse.
By the same token, don’t assume that the US is some magically homogeneous group of people who don’t care if a Vietnamese child is blown away by a 50 year old mine.
Edit: Because apparently it must be said, The US Governmemt != “The US” in the same way that the Chinese Communist Pary isn’t “China” and Putin isn’t “Russia”.
You're suggesting there isn't an ideology moving the US government? Every country has an ideology, a doctrine or something like that, and independently of the sheer number and diversity of its population, what's ALWAYS discussed when someone mentions a country is its government and its policies, including foreign policies. You're bringing a no true Scotsman to the table, which is a fallacy. From its foreign policy on Vietnam, the US does not seem to "give a shit" as the OP said.
Maybe we should ask what Soviets think of their regime (most of them supported it, and still more people prefer the Soviet Union to Putin right now). That doesn't make their regime any more or less good.
And how does the "other side" committing atrocities excuse your own atrocities?? That's an appalling way to attempt to self justify.
Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese who opposed communism had their lives slaughtered. What is even remotely equivalent committed by the "other side"?
EDIT to andrepd, since I can't reply to you because of post limit: You're using straw man arguments and I can't keep up. I don't know anything about East Timor but by "other side", I meant the US and South Vietnam. We're obviously discussing the Vietnam War and the participants involved and you're going off on a tangent that makes it impossible to have any debate with you.
Are you serious right now? Do you want me to pick an example, any example? How about this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Timor_genocide
US financed, supported, armed and gave the okay for the decimation of over 1/4 of the population of East Timor. Their crime? They were looking dangerously close to electing a left-wing government... Oh, and some mining companies may have lobbied Congress to stay on Indonesia's good side, since they had mining interests there (but this, I admit, is more speculative).
How about Guatemala? How about Iran for Christ's sake? How many thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people's blood is on the hands of US imperialism?
Ken Burn's recent series on Vietnam is very well made and speaks with participants and stakeholders from across the ideological spectrum. Highly recommended: https://www.netflix.com/title/70202579
I know it's a popular series, and I haven't gotten my dad's response to it because he hasn't watched it, but many war veterans and South Vietnamese military members say it's not a very balanced documentary.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/09/29/veterans-angry-disapp...
https://www.military.com/off-duty/television/2017/10/02/vete...
It’s almost like the veterans have a difficult time being objective. I’ll wait for your dad’s review before getting too critical though.
Are you sure? I've watched a bit of it and it seems to approach the war with 20/20 hindsight. "Oh of course it was wrong to be there".
It ignores some of the mindset that got us there in the first place.
It would be interesting to compare the views of those conscripted versus those that voluntarily signed up.
You have a lot of informed opinions because of course you were close to the war and your family was. I hope to see you continue to share your ideas, even if you are suffering some criticism.
Oh come on. Look at the series. You can say what you want but it is extremely biased. It takes about 30 seconds for it to call the war a mistake, and it doesn't get better from there.
I’m sorry, but this is blatant whataboutism. The crimes of the Vietnamese Communists are inexcusable, but so was My Lai. The linked article was simply an American media article about something the American military did. We should be able to discuss it purely in those terms.
What another army did somewhere else to other people simply isn’t pertinent in that context, even if in the same war, unless it directly relates to the circumstances at My Lai and the reasons for it happening. You aren’t saying VC atrocities excuse My Lai, or that they caused My a Lai, so how are they relevant? What context do they add to the decisions made by those American soldiers or the army cover up or subsequent investigation? I just don’t see how it would have helped the article other than to muddy and obscure the issues of discipline and accountability in the US military the massacre raises and which the article discusses.
The responsibility of the VC for their actions just isn’t a necessary part of that dialogue and is an important and necessary subject, but for another time and place. At time and place in which massacres carried out elsewhere by Americans also simply wouldn’t be relevant, nor excuse anything done by the VC. And no I’m not making any false equivalency. That’s the point.
Wow had no idea the Vietnam was this bad (bad as in how bad the Americans were). Almost makes the invasion of Iraq look noble. I went through the US educational system and while we know about the Vietnam war, the protesters, this is definitely not the picture of the war that we were given. It's basically propaganda and history rewriting what they are doing here, even though the US didn't even technically win the war. We were taught that the Vietnam war protesters were just pacifist hippies.
No wonder why China is fiercely anti-American (in terms of influence, policy, etc).
>I went through the US educational system and while we know about the Vietnam war, the protesters, this is definitely not the picture of the war that we were given.
I just want to be one anecdotal voice to disagree with this statement. I went to a city university and my American history class 1945-present included a curriculum with media such as:
A People's History of the United States
The Fog of War (documentary)
Hearts and Minds (documentary)
Last Night I Dreamed of Peace: The Diary of Dang Thuy Tram
Gary R. Hess, Vietnam: Explaining America's Lost War.
Nick Turse. Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam.
I know some of my friends took courses where the Vietnam War was referred to pejoratively as the American War. We learned about My Lai in high school even. Where did you go to school that the Vietnam War was glossed over in such a pro-American way? Maybe it's a regional thing? I was educated on the east coast.
I think a college class would have to delve into the topic a bit more.
But given a high school history curriculum being limited they'd have to pick and choose what to cover, and the majority of American kids would end up with the highly distilled, pro-American leaning retelling. I went to high school in the mid-west (Michigan) in a probably center-left leaning (though in the last election probably Trump-leaning) area.
> It was necessary to rearrange those bad thoughts and to restore some form of sanity, namely, a recognition that whatever we do is noble and right. If we’re bombing South Vietnam, that’s because we’re defending South Vietnam against somebody, namely, the South Vietnamese, since nobody else was there. It’s what the Kennedy intellectuals called defense against "internal aggression" in South Vietnam. That was the phrase used by Adlai Stevenson and others. It was necessary to make that the official and well understood picture. That’s worked pretty well. When you have total control over the media and the educational system and scholarship is conformist, you can get that across. One indication of it was revealed in a study done at the University of Massachusetts on attitudes toward the current Gulf crisis-a study of beliefs and attitudes in television watching. One of the questions asked in that study was, How many Vietnamese casualties would you estimate that there were during the Vietnam war? The average response on the part of Americans today is about 100,000. The official figure is about two million. The actual figure is probably three to four million. The people who conducted the study raised an appropriate question: What would we think about German political culture if, when you asked people today how many Jews died in the Holocaust, they estimated about 300,000? What would that tell us about German political culture? They leave the question unanswered, but you can pursue it.
-- Noam Chomsky, "Media Control", 2002 ( https://chomsky.info/mediacontrol01/ )
AFAIK it's significantly more nuanced. Actually China did support Vietnam in the war - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War#People's_Republic_... - but invaded Vietnam shortly thereafter, as China was annoyed Vietnam de-throned their darling regime the Khmer Rouge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War (Meanwhile, the US bombed the shit out of Laos, who barely had any literacy and were essentially bystanders). Vietnam kicked their ass (the Chinese made basically zero progress in taking land, though later declared themselves "victorious", having "taught the Vietnamese a lesson"), but at a cost: many deaths and a legacy of landmines along the remote and mountainous border. The border was only fully demarcated about ten years ago. These days it is better known for people smuggling (mostly young women from Vietnam to China) and drug smuggling (heroin and meth). Factories are moving from China to Vietnam to obtain cheaper labour, and Vietnam's infrastructure has developed substantially, though it is still behind China.
In the 1940s the US and Nationalist China were allies - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hump ... later, the Nationalists fled and and AFAIK Communist China's only major military engagement with the US was in Korea, where US agents descended from McCarthyism tortured Communists on what is now conveniently remade as a holidaying destination. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War#Chinese_POWs
Then there's the French being kicked out, the fact that Ho Chi Minh was French educated himself, evolution in US-French relations and the US takeover of France's former most favoured foreign nation status in Thailand, which was used as a strategic regional base for US military supply.
Possible conclusion: It's all a mess, things are never simple in war, humans are sick greedy bastards, and getting over old hatreds stemming from nationalism and past events could be the best thing for the world.
This is a good summary, but it's even more nuanced than that.
For example, while China did lose the Sino-Vietnamese War, they did achieve two important objectives.
First, they proved to be a trustworthy ally to Cambodia. This is why those other SEA countries like Cambodia, Laos, and others that were bullied by Vietnam are much more pro-China right now.
Secondly, they showed that while the USSR was a Vietnamese ally, it would not interfere with China.
> No wonder why China is fiercely anti-American
What gives you this idea? I don't think Chinese policy is particularly anti-American. Sure, they're not a lap-dog like Japan, but I don't see their policy being informed by any particular animosity towards the USA.
They are rivals. They'll smile and nod and but will no way be pushed around by foreign influence.
It's not specific to American imperialism, but to foreign imperialism in the past.
Well, exactly. Their motivations are independence, security and self-determination - exactly what one might expect and qualities I'm sure most Americans would understand.
Like most Powers, China doesn't have friends, it has interests. If cooperation furthers those interests, it will cooperate; if not, it won't. Attempts to cast these behaviours into "country A hates country B for reason C" are usually agenda-driven, simplistic attempts at populism, or both[1].
[1] The obvious exception to this is in the case of historical or otherwise wrongdoing. China still genuinely resents Japan for its behaviour around WWII; many middle eastern states resent the USA for its meddling and violence in the last half-century over there. These are legitimate complaints. Even so, when a country is run by a bureaucracy, it will still generally act according to its current interests, rhetoric notwithstanding.
> No wonder why China is fiercely anti-American
You know what happened during the Cultural Revolution in China right? Yet hardly anyone is talking about it.
People in China talk about it all the time. But you do have to speak Mandarin or the local dialect to hear it. Many don't want to talk about it in English because it gets annoying to hear expats and tourists preaching to them.
It's all over the literature too. Hell, half of Three Body Problem, the darling of a few years ago, is actually about the Cultural Revolution. No spoilers but suffice to say that the poisoned seeds sown during the ruinous waste of the Cultural Revolution precipitate everything in the story.
Every nation will try to hide the atrocities its own forces inflict on the 'enemy'. There's nothing unique about America in this regard; China is just as guilty.
"Every nation will try to hide the atrocities its own forces inflict on the 'enemy'."
An the other way around, which could be even worse. From 1991 to 2009 US TV stations were barred from showing coffins returning from war zones, so that the public was disconnected from the atrocities of war, no matter who would commit them. On one side we (though I'm not an US citizen the principle applies globally) have action war movies where badass heroes save the world - those are characters finely crafted in a way every teen would like to impersonate in real life - and on the other side there can be regulations preventing media from showing what really war is (not to mention the growing use of drones). This is the worst kind of propaganda, the one that makes you want to kill or be killed and be also excited or even proud of it.
Except people only believe the other side hides these things.
The textbooks and the mainstream media in all places tend to play the "nationalism" card; that's self-serving in all sorts of ways, after all. And no one articulated the 'nationalism' caricature better than George Orwell: "The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."
This varies by textbook. The textbook went to High School with (The American Pageant & New York State in 2003-2008) definitely talked about this and they had a photograph[1] from the massacre.
Your point about the influence of textbooks is rather important though. Putting aside the fact that many people just don't pay attention in history class, the default narrative that is being taught is quite varying. If I owned a house rather than just renting one, I would be starting a collection of High School history textbooks for this reason.
[1] https://robertjprince.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/ut-vietnam...
I am not sure that one massacre, no matter how bad it is, defines a whole war. The Vietnam war was meant to block the expansion of communism which at that time had a fair amount of blood on its hand.
I'm not sure the blocking of communism is as noble as a cause it was proclaimed to be.
Most of the anti-communist fear in the US was pointless, and arbitrary. Communism only served as a threat to the US in so as much as it was on paper not what the US adopted, and therefore the US had to be against it to maintain its own legitimacy. But in the end there's not much difference between the US and China (a so called communist country) except that China is less developed and the market is more tightly controlled than the US market. But as you can see China has trended to the mix of market freedom and control similar to that of the US and the world didn't end.
In practice, communist countries were more authoritarian military dictatorships more than anything and if the country did bad things it was more or less due to the regime rather than communism. And the US would have been fine with such regimes at the time so long as it wasn't communist. For example, South Korea was a dictatorship until the 90s.
> I am not sure that one massacre, no matter how bad it is, defines a whole war.
Considering that millions of vietnamese were massacred during the whole war, you are right. My Lai was just a microcosm of an even greater atrocity.
> The Vietnam war was meant to block the expansion of communism which at that time had a fair amount of blood on its hand.
So using that logic, vietnam could invade the US because we have a fair amount of blood on our hands?
Why didn't we invade australia which was wiping out the aborigines?
It just seems like rationalizations just for the sake of rationalization. Like we invaded iraq to bring freedom.
Iraq civilian body count is in the hundreds of thousands, nothing noble.
Right, but not hundreds of thousands killed by US troops. Hundreds of thousands killed by Iraqi (or other non US parties) in a civil/ethnic war.
We can go into the debate of whether Iraq would have been better off left under Saddam Hussein, and that may be the case, but it is not comparable to US troops deliberately killing civilians.
Maybe an apt time to mention the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haditha_massacre
And I am sure there has been others. But you don't get to 100,000 civilians with US killings. There has been 100+ dead terrorist attacks almost on a weekly basis for years in Iraq to the point where they don't get reported in western media anymore.
You might get to 100,000 - it’s been a lot of years, a lot of drones and some huge bombardments.
How do people manage to condemn this type of thing but not the 100,000s murdered in Iraq because of the US invasion? I can't work out how Americans think being proud of their soldiers - both left and right wing people are. Is there something I don't know?
During the Vietnam war that is what happened. Soldiers were treated like baby killers upon returning to the US.
There was a sort of rebranding of the American solider after that catastrophe. The American citizen is now supposed to see the American solider as a utilitarian third party cog in a system where soldiers don't make decisions they just execute them. So if you're unhappy with the war you take out your disapproval on the government not the lowly soldier who is "just doing their job/just following orders" etc.
Obviously this is very ethically questionable but I'd say it's the standard attitude towards the American soldier in my experience (in group social settings with ex-military people). The military is simply the hammer, the will of the people and politics. The hammer only acts when the hand picks it up hence we're supposed to hold the hand (government) accountable not the hammer (military).
Don't know why people are downvoting you. Your description of the perception towards the government and soldiers is completely correct. You're just stating it as it is, not justifying it or saying you agree with it.
Wait, so a attack on a soldier is wrong- and attacking the government (aka the people in a democracy) is right? So the whole of the people view themselves as a sort of warlord?
When the solider is out on the sharp end, they're goin g to make whatever policy is most likely to keep them alive modulo broad mission objectives. This had been true somewhere have been humans fighting.
The time to consider the impact of this is before you deploy the solider. Ergo, to affect change, we must look at the government and not the solider.
But didnt he/she volunteer. Shouldnt then there be some conditional clauses to service- aka, i m only a soldier to this democracy, as long as it is acting in my missions in true self-defense against a unprovoked attack.
Else- in theory, couldnt your goverment just rent you out to the highest bidder as mercenary and you would still have to do whatever this entity demands of you. This cart blanche of action, combined with the chance to loose your life- that is strange.
> But didnt he/she volunteer.
The draft saw 2,215,000 conscripted. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_the_United_S...
> but not the 100,000s murdered in Iraq because of the US invasion? I
Maybe not by the mainstream media, as they were getting pretty reluctant to point out things like Obama, the Nobel Prize recipient, dropping over 20k bombs in countries we were not even at war with in just 2016. Some did report though ex: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/09/americ.... Was there someone's mom or baby killed by those bombs? Was that more humane than landing a helicopter and shooting them in the head?
As for general Iraq war criticism, you can still follow Democracy Now, Amy Goodman and others did a good job there. There was a video they did with drone operators who describe how they did the killing. They also currently have retrospective on My Lai as well https://www.democracynow.org/2018/3/16/50_years_after_my_lai... (it' s a shorter interview not a full piece like the article we are discussing).
You bring up a possible reason - negligent killing (drone mistakes) vs bloodlust (My Lai). Maybe that's the key? They didn't intend to destroy Iraq and Syria and spawn Isis, so they're not really to blame even though they did it?
Of course they are to blame. People often times go to prison if they kill someone on the road even if they didn't intend to.
The people you're talking about are more to blame, given how much they were war profiteers themselves and were intertwined with war profiteering firms.
Also it can't seriously be called negligent killing if there's no serious effort to reduce or let alone count the dead and find what the "mistakes" were. Probably because there are no mistakes, it's calculated acceptable "colateral damage" (I hate this euphemism). Just like after Trump changed the rules and US related killing rate rised by some 400% or so right after that.
I agree with you, but why don't at least left-wing Americans agree too? Even HN posters are keen to show proper respect to soldiers and get angry if you don't do the same.
I don't know. I'm not an american. World is a mess though, and if people try to make sense of it by the use of some very large highlevel abstractions like left/right/democracy/islamism/etc. they're likely to fail.
I'm sure if someone tried, they can find good sounding justification for a lot of things within any of these highlevel thought systems. For example my mind boggles at the fact, that part of american left is pro-Assad (which is basically a horryfying middle-eastern dictator). If what he does would be happening in America, they'd be horrified. Currently there's some pushback against a new proposed CIA chiefess, because of overseeing torture. Yet Assad is acceptable despite running horrendous prisons like Adra, Sednaya, etc. (read some HRW reports, see "Caesar" photos).
To me it's more interesting to look at behavior/stated motivations of individual people, which leads to a more realistic view of the world. Yet it will cover very little, almost nothing, because it's hard to generalize from that.
The US left is generally anti-Assad, both due to his atrocities and the perception that the Russian government is propping him up. There is a wing of the left who support him due to a belief that the US are trying to destabilize his regime and install a puppet by funding violent rebel groups. They're not exactly wrong, but they're blinded by ideology and in some cases conspiracy theory thinking like the chemical attacks being fake or his atrocities all being US propaganda. I would say this is only a small minority on the left, though. Most of the left hates Assad and his regime. The right at the moment seem to be more sympathetic to him.
Not sure, I've wondered this myself. At a certain level, there's the fact that the US is simply a very patriotic place. Similarly, in Russia it's also not socially accepted to publicly criticize military service members. That said, there are many other "patriotic" countries in the world, and not all of them impose this social reverence on the military, so some other factor is at play.
Common knowledge says that the US was probably not always like this. I'm not old enough to remember the Vietnam era, but the stereotype goes that returning soldiers / military were treated with disdain by the civilian population. I have to admit I've wondered at how widespread this mistreatment was, but it is probably safe to say that the military of the time didn't enjoy all the unequivocal support, standing ovations and endless TYFYS that permeate American culture these days.
I do know that after 9/11 and at the outset of the GWOT it was universally taboo to do anything but loudly praise the military. Where this sentiment came from, how it was disseminated, why it persists to this day : all are frankly mysteries to me. It didn't make sense then, and it doesn't make sense now.
The US has been at war, somewhere in the world, since its inception as a nation.
It has dropped one bomb every twenty minutes, mostly on innocent people, for the last 3 decades.
The US currently has the world ensnared in its remote military bases, and is a number one cause of trouble in the world. It regularly defeats real democracies using covert means, installing its own puppets to function as feudal lords. When covert means fail, the USA goes overt - and has practiced and refined its presentation of these actions such that the rest of the world is helpless to do anything about it. Nobody wants to believe it, but the USA is a wholesale exporter of death, destruction and mayhem.
Yet, the American people are ignorant of all of this, because of the luxuries afforded them by their state.
Until we deal with the decadence problem, we will not be able to deal with the militarism.
What you say may be true...but it has worked out pretty well for us.
For some of you. For a majority of Americans, however, living in poverty - not so. Its very much an imperialist scenario. Sure, you have your bread and circuses. But don't look behind the curtain in any of your major metropolitan cities. The sight of 80,000 people, families, living on the streets in LA won't make you proud.
Even HN posters are keen to show proper respect to soldiers and get angry if you don't do the same.
In a Western democracy soldiers are volunteers to enact the will of The People as expressed by a democratically elected government. If the representatives of The People, chosen by The People, decide that a war is necessary then they go - it's rare for soldiers to be eager to rush into war. Well apart from Colin Powell who sat there and lied to the UN with a straight face. It's usually chickenhawks like Bliar and Obama who are eager to strut about on the world stage.
Groupthink is an ultimate political power, and it has been weaponised.
Wait a moment - did US soldiers really murder hundreds of thousands? You can't just throw around statements like that.
Iraq is an unstable conglomeration of religious and ethnic groups. The blame for this goes back to 1916: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-the-curse-of-sy...
The US invasion jostled that mix, and the resulting friction directly caused those deaths. So, to be more accurate (but possibly oversimplified), the US was a witless catalyst, and the fragmentation of Islam was the fuel.
That's what I meant by "because of". If the police and army in America suddenly vanished, you can bet a lot of deaths would ensue too. People depend on the structure of government services to protect them from each other. Taking that away is like taking away food or water.
Let's be clear what we mean by "the police and army vanishing". This is not common thugs committing crimes. Saddam Hussein was keeping a lead through tyranny (and massacres in the past) on the shia-sunni-kurd ethnic tensions which blew out when Saddam felt. Add to that mix a rise of islamism and you get a murderous civil war. None of these ingredients are really the making of the US. The US certainly ignited the war by removing the tyranny but do we really want to go the route "these guys deserve a good dictator to keep them from killing each others"?
I think we do want to go that route. As opposed to supporting and arming dictatorships that suite our supposed interests at a given time. Then turning against them, or arming their enemies when they don’t.
If the US consistently practiced being a good global citizen, maybe one could make a case for “humanitarianism military intervention” in limited cases.
What we have now is apparently open ended military activity, around the globe, for an indefinite timeframe.
Most of the conflicts we are party to are civil wars, and by definition these are not “winnable.”
As far as I can see, the US continues to wreak havoc on innocent civilians around the world to this day, with total impunity. This serves only the interests of the corporate military political complex. The fiasco of the US response to 9/11 beggars disbelief.
It’s sickening how the propaganda apartatus in the US has shutdown virtually all reporting on what our armed forces are actually doing.
Perhaps the worst of the US conduct is the continual supply of arms to States and factions in conflicts around the world, thereby radically increasing the lethality of the conflict.
Of course, the US is not alone in this arms dealing, but this is something where we could unilaterally make a dramatic action towards world peace. Withdraw from current wars, end arms dealing, and work towards negotiated outcomes, where possible.
"Not only will America go to your country and kill all your people, but they'll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad." ~ Frankie Boyle.
100,000s were murdered in Vietnam as well. That the US played a role in further mass murders in Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and so on, is the legacy of the US never having the honesty to own up to its actions. It should all be condemned.
The problem is that the political elite in the US doesn't see it that way. Military leaders from Vietnam who committed mass murder were awarded commendations. Soldiers who raped and tortured women and children were given awards for kill counts. A Secretary of State whose actions led to the genocide of millions of people still enjoys political celebrity. And a President who killed tens of thousands of civilians by remote control was given a Peace Prize. This is America.
"I can't work out how Americans think being proud of their soldiers - both left and right wing people are. Is there something I don't know?"
I believe one of the key points is that it's not the foot soldier who makes the decision to start a war. When the soldier was drafted into the military, they had absolutely NO control whatsoever. In times without the draft (volunteer forces), one may say that individuals have some control by NOT volunteering (enlisting). But even that argument is incomplete.
People enlist in the military for different reasons, and it's not as simple as pro-war vs anti-war sentiment. Some of the reasons why some enlist: economic (to support themselves and their family), learn trade/skills, carry on family legacy, sense of duty to country, to see the world, physical and mental challenge/discipline, become a fighter, coercion by others, etc. Even if a person enlists because they desire combat, that person still doesn't have any authority or ability to start a conflict. Once in combat, there's still a chain of command and accountability.
When a country engages in military conflict, it is due to the decision of politicians. And once the conflict begins, it is the foot soldiers who pay the highest price.
To give a counter-example to the Vietnam war, what would have happened if all of the Allied military forces rebelled and refused to participate in the D-Day invasion of Normandy in WW2? Or even if the US decided to not fight in WW2, despite Pearl Harbor attack?
The officer who gave the command to massacre civilians in My Lai was wrong. Other individuals throughout the conflict inevitably did wrong. I believe that the vast majority of those who fought did so admirably and honorably. And I believe that I can have this opinion and still not be pro-war.
I think you'd be hard-pressed to find an American who believes that the invasion of Iraq, either in conception (many believed and many now believe we should never have invaded) or in execution (Even among those who believed that the US should have overthrown Saddam, it is a pretty common opinion that the post-war occupation was bungled tragically). The reason you don't see more condemnations of it in the American media in 2018 is that at this point, an opinion like "our involvement in Iraq was a disaster" is pretty uncontroversial and therefore boring and therefore does not result in ad revenue or re-shares.
But that was largely a result of the decisions made by the civilian leaders in the Bush administration. What does that have to do with the quality or respectability of the soldiers?
At the time, the Iraq war enjoyed broad public support particularly on the right. That support persisted for over a decade, and to this day you'll still find people justifying the whole mess, arguing for the existence of "WMDs", contrasting Saddams atrocities and of course roundly blaming Obama for creating ISIS by disengaging.
I’ll point out that your list consists of separate arguments. Some people point to the evidence Saddam had chemical weapons because they believe we found stocks of chemical weapons he’d kept even after using some on the Kurds, not because they think we should have overthrown him. Those are two separate statements—-one is a question of fact and one an opinion.
Still other Americans initially opposed the invasion but believed that, having overthrown the government, we had a moral obligation to stay, develop the istitutions of the country, and prevent sectarian violence from breaking out again. I was in this camp back in 2006.
Even with waning religious views the US is still a fairly religious and mostly christian country.
I don't understand the pride at all. Pride is a sin.
A slaves spirit has to be like this, a nice, shiny face to those carrying the whip, a raging redirected hatred, to those stripped of all rights by his master.
Yeah, the Iraqis were just sittin' around, doing nothin', having a Bud.
Does anyone remember Kuwait?
Of course I remember Kuwait, slant-drilling under the Iraqi border. And the apparent, later denied, US tolerance or at least indifference when the Iraqi ambassador stated that Iraq would take direct action if Kuwait was not called into order.
Remember Saddam being just a-okay for the US as an ally in the 1980s, during and after all sorts of atrocities he did to Iraqis and Iranians? Remember the theater when former friend was suddenly the next Hitler? Such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony ?
The support is for individuals, not necessarily the institution.
But the individuals are doing the work for the institution. If they'd just refuse (for example, don't sign up to be a soldier working on behalf of an institution you ostensibly don't support), then it wouldn't get done.
People who don't support the military won't sign up at all. People who do sign up don't have full information on all of the operations they'll be involved in at the time they sign up, and by the time they do have that information they generally cannot legally dissent.
I suppose it's better to murder some foreigners than to illegally dissent.
My opinion has changed after you've marginalized a tragedy and treated it like an either or event in history. Thank you for showing that neither is important by what about ing.
I don't really understand you. I want to know why Americans on both political wings aggressively support their soldiers. I can understand if it's a country being attacked and their own soldiers defend it. But nobody is attacking America. What good did its soldiers do by fighting wars instead of just waiting to defend?
In the US, support for soldiers is often completely orthogonal to support for the government or war plans. Soldiers are effectively considered brave men and women selflessly serving their country, even if they're fighting an unjust war. The rationalization is usually that politicians and other elites are to blame for the wars, while the soldiers are mere pawns who bear no culpability (or at least that's the perception for the ones who aren't torturing people or committing Abu Ghraib-like atrocities; those individuals are seen as a tiny minority of soldiers). They're "just following orders".
As for the actual justification behind that, it's highly up for debate. But regardless, you'll generally find the vast majority of the US left in the somewhat paradoxical position of unilateral praise for soldiers with simultaneous hatred towards the government's military decisions and actions.
Two reasons: they chose to take the job (which can result in your own death and being ordered to do very difficult things in service to your country) and they are our children, brothers and sisters. Once they chose to serve, they are subject to the orders of our civilian government and so we separate the decision to go to war made by politicians from the decision to potentially die in service to our country made by soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen.
Finally, most wars the US gets involved with are sold to the people as defense. We we sold that Iraq was behind the attack on the World Trade center and the removal of Sadam Hussein would make our country safe.
But didn't people learn from the Vietnam and Korean wars that they might be unnecessary for defense even if the government says so? Is it that a new generation forgets the lessons from the previous one? In that case, why not blame the soldiers - if there was little popular support for them and it was seen as a shameful or failure of a job then maybe fewer would be sucked into it.
I heard that in WWI, soldiers were naive and didn't understand what they were getting into. Now though, there's no excuse. Everyone learns history at school and can use Google. So the decision to join should be fairly obviously likely to lead to doing bad things. The US has been nearly continuously at war since WWII, it's not going to suddenly stop when your son joins the army.
Also, how do Americans reconcile that "my family" attitude with the fact that the people they're fighting are also somebody's sons and brothers? It's not seen as equally noble to be an Isis soldier as a US one. What makes the US special other than "my country"?
For firsthand testimony by American soldiers involved in similar operations — I cannot recommend Winter Soldier, the 1972 documentary film, highly enough.
It's something that every American adult deserves to see.
Part 1: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x67rpbi
Part 2: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x681bui
In short: The film records a 1971 Vietnam Veterans Against the War event in Detroit, where dozens of veterans spoke in public, to the media and on the record, for the first time, about war crimes that they had seen and taken part in, just months or years before.
> Duc was eight years old in March 1968, and as Haeberle spoke with him, through an interpreter, he realized with a jolt that the woman he had photographed dead behind a rock 43 years earlier was Duc’s mother, Nguyen Thi Tau.
It was hard not to cry reading that.
It is terrifying to think about all the other massacres where a photographer wasn't there to document it or someone like the helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson to intervene.
Fucking horrific. What war does to men, and what men do in war.
This can hardly be confined to Americans in Vietnam, and that doesn’t justify it, but rather provides an opportunity for pause and reflection.
I’m left wondering if we’re just a bunch of dumb animals. Being capable of having that thought gives me some hope. But, what can we be when we’re surrounded by our own savagery?
While My Lai was horrible, evidence collected since then such as in Nick Turse's book "Kill Anything That Moves" [1] and at the Winter Soldier hearings [2] show that Mai Lai was hardly an aberration. Horrible atrocities committed by US soldiers were widespread in Vietnam, much more so than most people digesting the Ken Burns narrative realize.
What's important to learn about My Lai isn't just that it happened - that Americans are indeed as capable of horrible atrocities as anyone - but that almost no consequences resulted. In fact, as Turse discovers, Army officials who were aware of what was happening in Vietnam later moved to take control of the Criminal Investigation Division in order to suppress investigation and prosecution of the innumerable war crimes that took place. The most significant prosecution that took place was of Lt. William Calley, who ultimately received 3 1/2 years of house arrest after being convicted of hundreds of murders. The message that this sends to the rest of the world is that we are imperialist killers of the highest order, and we are above the law.
Without looking at these atrocities in the eye, we are doomed to repeat them. And so we have.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Kill-Anything-That-Moves-American/dp/...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_Soldier_Investigation
There's a good short video here with Seymour Hersh telling how he broke the story and brought it all to public attention:
https://investigatingpower.org/vietnam-war/
(Disclosure: We designed and developed the site.)
The My Lai massacre is an important event because what happened to the soldiers who committed the atrocities (nothing) echoes through history. Nobody is still being punished for what happened in Haditha, Abu Ghraib or Gitmo.
During the 1940s the US prosecuted Japanese and German war criminals by adhering to the Yamashita principle and disqualifying the Nuremberg defense; basically, commanders are always responsible for crimes that their soldiers commit if they aren't actively combating it themselves (this is what convicted Yamashita, who occupied the Philippines) and you can't blame your CO when you commit war crimes (which convicted a lot of people in Nuremberg).
But, after the My Lai massacre, the soldiers could successfully use the Nuremberg defense themselves. Their CO was also not under the Yamashita principle because he only served three years of a commuted sentence. The My Lai massacre should not be forgotten because it's a reminder that it's been more than 50 years now, when is America going to start measuring up to the moral standards it claims it has?
For many, this incident is a metaphor for the U.S. involvement in Viet Nam: thuggish U.S. soldiers came to a country they didn't understand and killed everyone. This view lacks the context of the war. The U.S. and its allies were fighting the Cold War, a war against Communist Bloc hegemony. We were fighting against the expansion of Communism in South Viet Nam, trying to prevent The Domino Effect.
The primary reason we lost the war was micro-managing by Washington bureaucrats, and overly-limited rules of engagement. Keep in mind, our mission was to assist the South Koreans in defending a guerrilla war. For this reason, we never invaded North Vietnam, and initially refrained from going in to neighboring countries to attack the Viet Cong revolutionaries staging there. Nixon started bombing these countries, but by then, it was too little, too late, and he ended the war.
I believe this view also does not consider economic and government system hegemony as a good reason to end lives. Many of the people who lived those massacres, from Vietnam to Iraq seem to agree with this view. Since I come from a country that has also been victim to American interventionism I tend to agree, our lives are more important than capitalism, communism, war on terror or whatever it is the excuse of the times for invading sovereign nations and slaughtering its people.
I believe we who see that "metaphor" rather see it as the truth: US soldiers go to countries they know nothing about and kill everyone. I do not fancy being murdered. Killing people is wrong, plain and simple.
So, just finished reading the article... I guess everyone should, just for the sense of thoughtfulness it should provoke.
The thing is, the perpetrators started out as ordinary young American men. What tipped the balance, to turn them into stone-cold killers? It's not unique to this situation: this is what soldiers eventually tend to do. The ultimate modern example of pure, large scale monstrosity is the Red Army, at the close of WWII. But - make no mistake - many (most?) males are capable of such acts.
Some serious psychological tools need to be thrown at this problem.
My friend participated in local war in 00s. They did not see much, generally sitting in trenches, but heard stories from spetsnaz guys. How anyone, including women and children could (and did) shoot at them or throw grenades after trading, smiling and handwaving. I’m not justifying orders they got there, but that definitely ruined their belief in humanity and peace, if any pre-existed. All these civilians were perceived as a real potential threat to their lives, not to some high political forces – that’s where violence grows from.
This is not a single story of war: my granddad took part in famous caribbean crisis (he cold-opposed to reds for a whole life). While cuban people were mostly on ‘our’ side, he told that leaving their dislocation at night or unarmed was strictly prohibited, since chances of returning in a box were too high. When people have no power, they figure out own ways to fight and these ways can do horrific things to their and your minds.
“But - make no mistake - many (most?) males are capable of such acts.” This thing is not their natural trait, it is an adaptation to not lose their minds in a new reality that they don’t actually support or understand. I blame those who throw them at it sitting in their soft chairs. It is their psychological problem, they are real psychopats.
The same survival instinct was also shown by German soldiers returning home on leave from the Eastern Front in WW2. Many of them instinctively shot any dog they saw in the street, as they had learned to do on the front to protect themselves from dog-borne bombs.
Anyone could turn into a monster. Even you, even I. It's like the old myth of the Sirens and Ulysses. We have to be vigilant and protect human rights beforehand, lest we are lured by bloodlust in the worst times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petar_Brzica#cite_ref-2
I prefer to think that I could never turn into a monster. Solzhenitsyn managed to hold on to his humanity, through some of the worst atrocities imaginable.
"The little daughter's on the mattress, Dead. How many have been on it A platoon, a company perhaps? A girl's been turned into a woman, A woman turned into a corpse. It's all come down to simple phrases: Do not forget! Do not forgive! Blood for blood! A tooth for a tooth!" -Prussian Nights by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_Nights)
You would be surprised. Some of the most terrible people in the Nazi concentration camps were fellow prisoners tasked with being Kapos (prisoner overseers). The Kapos were spared some of the worst labor but in exchange had to show extreme brutality to the prisoners they oversaw so the Nazis wouldn't question their effectiveness.
This isn't the only example: Stanford prison experiment and the Milgram experiment. I'm sure there are others. When you value being alive many people will do anything to survive.
Stone cold killers is not the right description here. These soldiers, conscripts, were put into the most bizarre, dangerous, depraved situation you could imagine. The stress must have been unreal, in the jungles. They suffered a situational insanity.
Well said. From my reading of many non-fiction accounts of the Vietnam War, this view is reinforced with each account. I think it's also unfair for Monday-morning quarterbacking of "well, if i were there, i would have just ...".
Vietnam was never meant to be won, it just continued the Korea and WW2 bleed out strategy. (With a side of MICC profits and deep state drug running black profits) Read up on Robert G Thompson for more on the bleed out comment if you are genuinely curious. All these wars we get into, people need to focus on the "advisors" influencing policy. What ends up happening is people debate about the trees and miss the forest.
I think the savage is in the human nature. Maybe in the future wars can be fought virtually. With the advance of VR we fight it out in "Quake" rather in real life.
There is a Frontline or other PBS special about My Lai from about 5 years ago. I think I saw it on netflix, but it should be on the PBS website, too.
iam vietnamese