At My Lai: The Photographer Who Captured the Massacre • Hacker News Board

Re: At My Lai: The Photographer Who Captured the Massacre

#61

Post by Joeboy » Sat, Mar 17, 2018, 11:22 AM UTC

cm2187 wrote: post #42

bufferoverflow wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Re: At My Lai: The Photographer Who Captured the Massacre

#62

Post by b1daly » Sat, Mar 17, 2018, 11:24 AM UTC

cm2187 wrote: post #48

lopmotr wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: At My Lai: The Photographer Who Captured the Massacre

#63

Post by cm2187 » Sat, Mar 17, 2018, 11:26 AM UTC

Joeboy wrote: post #61

cm2187 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: At My Lai: The Photographer Who Captured the Massacre

#64

Post by taneq » Sat, Mar 17, 2018, 11:28 AM UTC

lopmotr wrote: post #3

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?

The support is for individuals, not necessarily the institution.

Re: At My Lai: The Photographer Who Captured the Massacre

#65

Post by gaius » Sat, Mar 17, 2018, 11:29 AM UTC

lopmotr wrote: post #23

megous wrote: post #15

Earlier 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.

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.

Re: At My Lai: The Photographer Who Captured the Massacre

#66

Post by jstanley » Sat, Mar 17, 2018, 11:34 AM UTC

taneq wrote: post #64

lopmotr wrote: post #3

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?

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.

Re: At My Lai: The Photographer Who Captured the Massacre

#67

Post by b1daly » Sat, Mar 17, 2018, 11:35 AM UTC

fractallyte wrote: post #9

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…

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.

Re: At My Lai: The Photographer Who Captured the Massacre

#68

Post by musage » Sat, Mar 17, 2018, 11:38 AM UTC

verylittlemeat wrote: post #32

chrischen wrote: post #7

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.…

>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) He…

> 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/ )

Re: At My Lai: The Photographer Who Captured the Massacre

#69

Post by vnjp » Sat, Mar 17, 2018, 11:43 AM UTC

iam vietnamese

Re: At My Lai: The Photographer Who Captured the Massacre

#70

Post by 7952 » Sat, Mar 17, 2018, 11:52 AM UTC

fractallyte wrote: post #59

7952 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eas…

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…

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.