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.
At My Lai: The Photographer Who Captured the Massacre
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Re: At My Lai: The Photographer Who Captured the Massacre
#42Wow 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.…
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.
Re: At My Lai: The Photographer Who Captured the Massacre
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 "mista…
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.
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.
Re: At My Lai: The Photographer Who Captured the Massacre
#44Sadly, 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, almo…
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.
Re: At My Lai: The Photographer Who Captured the Massacre
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: At My Lai: The Photographer Who Captured the Massacre
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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 t…
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Re: At My Lai: The Photographer Who Captured the Massacre
#47How 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?
Yeah, the Iraqis were just sittin' around, doing nothin', having a Bud.
Does anyone remember Kuwait?
Re: At My Lai: The Photographer Who Captured the Massacre
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ove…
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"?
Re: At My Lai: The Photographer Who Captured the Massacre
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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.
Re: At My Lai: The Photographer Who Captured the Massacre
#50How 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?
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 med…
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.