At My Lai: The Photographer Who Captured the Massacre
foto.gettyimages.com
foto.gettyimages.com
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.
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."
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://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.
History is repeating itself in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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.
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.
https://www.tripadvisor.ie/LocationPhotoDirectLink-g319788-d...
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.
As CGP Grey says, Take the throne to act, and the throne acts upon you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are large sections of the American left which hold this sort of perspective.
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...
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.
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.
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.
In the movie. In the book the MI wear power armour.
> 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 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.
Also, soldiers tend to be more pro-war, statistically speaking. Pacifists tend not to join armies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To this day, many are maimed and killed by US land mines in the region, and the US does not give a shit.
I don’t appreciate your shallow dismissal.
As far as Sweden goes I bet the people living north of the Arctic circle have little in common with people living in Stockholm.
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.
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”.
Maybe its India and Pakistan we're thinking of, hm?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/sep/18/vietnam-unexpl...
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/09/29/veterans-angry-disapp...
https://www.military.com/off-duty/television/2017/10/02/vete...
It ignores some of the mindset that got us there in the first place.
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.
A more neutral viewpoint could see the whole war as a series of gross violations and crimes.
And how does the "other side" committing atrocities excuse your own atrocities?? That's an appalling way to attempt to self justify.
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?
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.
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.
No wonder why China is fiercely anti-American (in terms of influence, policy, etc).
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
You know what happened during the Cultural Revolution in China right? Yet hardly anyone is talking about it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not specific to American imperialism, but to foreign imperialism in the past.
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.
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.
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.
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"?
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).
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
The draft saw 2,215,000 conscripted. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_the_United_S...
Does anyone remember Kuwait?
I don't understand the pride at all. Pride is a sin.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
https://investigatingpower.org/vietnam-war/
(Disclosure: We designed and developed the site.)
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?
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 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.
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.
"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)
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.
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.