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Apologies, Anger, and Apathy
My Lai and Lockerbie Reconsidered
When Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Libyan sentenced in 2001 to 27 years in prison for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, was released from incarceration by the Scottish government on "compassionate grounds," a furor erupted. On August 22nd, ABC World News with Charles Gibson featured a segment on outrage over the Libyan's release. It was aired shortly before a report on an apology offered by William Calley, who, in 1971 as a young lieutenant, was sentenced to life in prison for the massacre of civilians in the Vietnamese village of My Lai.
After al-Megrahi, who served eight years in prison, arrived home to a hero's welcome in Libya, officials in Washington expressed their dismay. To White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, it was "outrageous and disgusting"; to President Barack Obama, "highly objectionable." Calley, who admitted at trial to killing Vietnamese civilians personally, but served only three years of house arrest following an intervention by President Richard Nixon, received a standing ovation from the Kiwanis Club of Greater Columbus, Georgia, the city where he lived for years following the war. (He now resides in Atlanta.) For him, there was no such uproar, and no one, apparently, thought to ask either Gibbs or the president for comment, despite the eerie confluence of the two men and their fates.
Part of the difference in treatment was certainly the passage of time and Calley's contrition, however many decades delayed, regarding the infamous massacre of more than 500 civilians. "There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai," the Vietnam veteran told his audience. "I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry." For his part, al-Megrahi, now dying of cancer, accepted that relatives of the 270 victims of the Lockerbie bombing "have hatred for me. It's natural to behave like this... They believe I'm guilty, which in reality I'm not. One day the truth won't be hiding as it is now. We have an Arab saying: 'The truth never dies.'"
American Exceptionalism
Calley was charged in the deaths of more than 100 civilians and convicted in the murder of 22 in one village, while al-Megrahi was convicted of the murder of 270 civilians aboard one airplane. Almost everyone, it seems, found it perverse, outrageous, or "gross and callous" that the Scottish government allowed a convicted mass murderer to return to a homeland where he was greeted with open arms. No one seemingly thought it odd that another mass murderer had lived freely in his home country for so long. The families of the Lockerbie victims were widely interviewed. As the Calley story broke, no American reporter apparently thought it worth the bother to look for the families of the My Lai victims, let alone ask them what they thought of the apology of the long-free officer who had presided over, and personally taken part in the killing of, their loved ones.
Whatever the official response to al-Megrahi, the lack of comment on Calley underscores a longstanding American aversion to facing what the U.S. did to Vietnam and its people during a war that ended more than 30 years ago. Since then, one cover-up of mass murder after another has unraveled and bubbled into view. These have included the mass killing of civilians in the Mekong Delta village of Thanh Phong by future senator Bob Kerrey and the SEAL team he led (exposed by the New York Times Magazine and CBS News in 2001); a long series of atrocities (including murders, torture, and mutilations) involving the deaths of hundreds of noncombatants largely committed in Quang Ngai Province (where My Lai is also located) by an elite U.S. unit, the Tiger Force (exposed by the Toledo Blade in 2003); seven massacres, 78 other attacks on noncombatants, and 141 instances of torture, among other atrocities (exposed by the Los Angeles Times in 2006); a massacre of civilians by U.S. Marines in Quang Nam Province's Le Bac hamlet (exposed in In These Times magazine in 2008); and the slaughter of thousands of Vietnamese in the Mekong Delta during Operation Speedy Express (exposed in The Nation magazine, also in 2008). Over the last decade, long suppressed horrors from Vietnam have been piling up, indicating not only that My Lai, horrific and iconic as it may have been, was no isolated incident, but that many American veterans have long lived with memories not unlike those of William Calley.
If you recall what actually happened at My Lai, Calley's more-than-40-years-late apology cannot help but ring hollow. Not only were more than 500 defenseless civilians slaughtered by Calley and some of the 100 troops who stormed the village on March 16, 1968, but women and girls were brutally raped, bodies were horrifically mutilated, homes set aflame, animals tortured and killed, the local water supply fouled, and the village razed to the ground. Some of the civilians were killed in their bomb shelters, others when they tried to leave them. Women holding infants were gunned down. Others, gathered together, threw themselves on top of their children as they were sprayed with automatic rifle fire. Children, even babies, were executed at close range. Many were slaughtered in an irrigation ditch.
For his part in the bloodbath, Calley was convicted and sentenced to life in prison at hard labor. As it happened, he spent only three days in a military stockade before President Richard Nixon intervened and had him returned to his "bachelor apartment," where he enjoyed regular visits from a girlfriend, built gas-powered model airplanes, and kept a small menagerie of pets. By late 1974, Calley was a free man. He subsequently went on the college lecture circuit (making $2,000 an appearance), married the daughter of a jeweler in Columbus, Georgia, and worked at the jewelry store for many years without hue or cry from fellow Americans among whom he lived. All that time he stayed silent and, despite ample opportunity, offered no apologies.
Still, Calley's belated remorse evidences a sense of responsibility that his superiors -- from his company commander Capt. Ernest Medina to his commander-in-chief President Lyndon Johnson -- never had the moral fiber to shoulder. Recently, in considering the life and death of Johnson's Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who repudiated his wartime justifications for the conflict decades later ("We were wrong, terribly wrong."), Jonathan Schell asked:
"[H]ow many public figures of his importance have ever expressed any regret at all for their mistakes and follies and crimes? As the decades of the twentieth century rolled by, the heaps of corpses towered, ever higher, up to the skies, and now they pile up again in the new century, but how many of those in high office who have made these things happen have ever said, 'I made a mistake,' or 'I was terribly wrong,' or shed a tear over their actions? I come up with: one, Robert McNamara."
Because the United States failed to take responsibility for the massive scale of civilian slaughter and suffering inflicted in Southeast Asia in the war years, and because McNamara's contrition arrived decades late, he never became the public face of slaughter in Vietnam, even though he, like other top U.S. civilian officials and military commanders of that time, bore an exponentially greater responsibility for the bloodshed in that country than the low-ranking Calley.
Butchery in the Mekong Delta
A few weeks after McNamara's death, Julian Ewell, a top Army general who served in two important command roles in Vietnam, also passed away. For years, the specter of atrocity had swirled around him, but only among a select community of veterans and Vietnam War historians. In 1971, Newsweek magazine's Kevin Buckley and Alex Shimkin conducted a wide-ranging investigation of Ewell's crowning achievement, a six-month operation in the Mekong Delta code-named Speedy Express, and found evidence of the widespread slaughter of civilians. "The horror was worse than My Lai," one American official told Buckley. "But… the civilian casualties came in dribbles and were pieced out over a long time. And most of them were inflicted from the air and at night. Also, they were sanctioned by the command's insistence on high body counts."
As word of the impending Newsweek article spread, John Paul Vann, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who was by then the third-most-powerful American serving in Vietnam, and his deputy, Colonel David Farnham, met in Washington with Army Chief of Staff General William Westmoreland. At that meeting, Vann told Westmoreland that Ewell's troops had wantonly killed civilians in order to boost the body count -- the number of enemy dead that served as the primary indicator of success in the field -- and so further the general's reputation and career. According to Farnham, Vann said Speedy Express was, in effect, "many My Lais."
A Pentagon-level cover-up and Newsweek's desire not to upset the Nixon administration in the wake of the My Lai revelations kept the full results of the meticulous investigation by Buckley and Shimkin bottled up. The publication of a severely truncated version of their article allowed the Pentagon to ride out the coverage without being forced to convene a large-scale official inquiry of the sort which followed public disclosure of the My Lai massacre. Only last year did some of the reporting that Newsweek suppressed, as well as new evidence of the slaughter and the cover-up, appear in a piece of mine in The Nation and only in the wake of Ewell's death was it mentioned in the Washington Post that a long-secret official Army report, commissioned in response to Buckley and Shimkin's investigation, concluded:
"[W]hile there appears to be no means of determining the precise number of civilian casualties incurred by US forces during Operation Speedy Express, it would appear that the extent of these casualties was in fact substantial, and that a fairly solid case can be constructed to show that civilian casualties may have amounted to several thousand (between 5,000 and 7,000)."
A year after the eviscerated Buckley-Shimkin piece was published, Ewell retired from the Army. Colonel Farnham believed that the general was prematurely pushed out due to continuing Army fears of a scandal. If true, it was the only act approaching official censure that he apparently ever experienced, far less punishment than that meted out to al-Megrahi, or even Calley. Yet Ewell was responsible for the deaths of markedly more civilians. Needless to say, Ewell's civilian slaughter never garnered significant TV coverage, nor did any U.S. president ever express outrage over it, or begrudge the general his military benefits, let alone the ability to spend time with his family. In fact, in October, following a memorial service, Julian Ewell will be buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.
Chain of Command
In his recent remarks, William Calley emphasized that he was following orders at My Lai, a point on which he has never wavered. The Army's investigation into My Lai involved 45 members of Medina's company, including Calley, suspected of atrocities. In a second investigation, 30 individuals were looked into for covering up what happened in the village by "omissions or commissions." Twenty-eight of them were officers, two of them generals, and as a group they stood accused of a total of 224 offenses. Calley, however, was the sole person convicted of an offense in connection with My Lai. Even he ultimately evaded any substantive punishment for his crimes.
While an opportunity was squandered during the Vietnam era, Calley's apology and the response to al-Megrahi's release offer another chance for some essential soul-searching in the United States. In considering Calley's decades-late contrition, Americans might ask why a double-standard exists when it comes to official outrage over mass murder. It might also be worth asking why some individuals, like a former Libyan intelligence officer or, in rare instances, a low-ranking U.S. infantry officer, are made to bear so much blame for major crimes whose responsibility obviously reached far above them; and why officers up the chain of command, and war managers -- in Washington or Tripoli -- escape punishment for the civilian blood on their hands. Unfortunately, this opportunity will almost certainly be squandered as well.
Similarly, it's unlikely that Americans will seriously contemplate just how so many lived beside Calley for so long, without seeking justice -- as would be second nature in the case of a similarly horrific crime committed by an officer serving a hostile power elsewhere. Yet he and fellow American officers from Donald Reh (implicated in the deaths of 19 civilians -- mostly women and children -- during a February 1968 massacre) to Bob Kerrey have gone about their lives without so much as being tried by court martial, let alone serving prison time as did al-Megrahi.
In the immediate wake of Calley's contrition, it wasn't a reporter from the American media but from Agence France Presse (AFP) who thought to check on how Vietnamese survivors or relatives of those massacred at My Lai might react. When an AFP reporter spoke to Pham Thanh Cong, who saw his mother and brothers killed in the My Lai massacre (and now runs a small museum at the village) and asked what he thought of Calley's apology, he responded, "Maybe he has now repented for his crimes and his mistakes committed more than 40 years ago." Maybe.
Today, some of Calley's cohorts, the mostly anonymous others who perpetrated their own horrors in Southeast Asia and never faced even a modicum of justice for their crimes, go about their lives in American cities and suburbs. (Others, who have committed unpunished offenses in the Global War on Terror, are still on active duty.) As a result, the outrage over what happened to the only man convicted of the terrorist act against Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, has a strikingly hollow ring.
A failure to demand an honest accounting of the suffering the United States caused the Vietnamese people and a willingness to ignore ample evidence of widespread slaughter remains a lasting legacy of the Vietnam War. So does a desire to reduce all discussion of U.S. atrocities in Southeast Asia to the massacre at My Lai, with William Calley bearing the burden -- not just for his crimes but for all U.S. crimes there. And it will remain so until the American people do what their military and civilian leadership have failed to do for more than 40 years: take responsibility for the misery the U.S. inflicted in Southeast Asia.
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57 Comments so far
Show AllHow about taking responsibility for ALL the misery this country has caused all it's own people and the people of the rest of the world from it's inception?
Oh come now. We all know how this works. When-if, in the future, the USA is militarily defeated by some hypothetical alliance of powers, after the leadership in power at the time is executed or led of to prison and the unconditional surrender documents are sighned, then a new class of American political leaders will emerge, no doubt comprised of left wing university professors and leaders of obscure political parties, and boldly proclaim that "THOSE OTHER GUYS (the capatalist imperialist swine) were guilty of horrific crimes and we tried to say so at the time".
Of course at that point one could say that the 'American' political leadership wouldn't really be 'ours' any more, but rather the puppets of some occupation force. Nevertheless, that is the only way I can see our leaders ever coming clean on the crimes of this nation.
"If you're not idealistic when you're young, you don't have a heart. If you're not nihilistic when you're old, you don't have a brain." - Sydlitz
Tell that to the Scarecrow and Dorothy.
An excellent analysis by Nick Turse.
The crimes of the american government are legion, the hypocrisy of the american people sickening.
A simply excellent article by Nick Turse whose contrast to how the Lockerbie bomber and Calley were treated belongs in every major newspaper in this country. What Turse could have added was that the few heroes involving My Lai were helicopter pilot Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson and his two men under his command. Thompson watched from the air as Captain Ernest Medina approached a woman who had been wounded, jabbed her with his foot, and then shot and killed her. Thompson then spotted American soldiers running after ten civilian Vietnamese, including children. Thompson landed his helicopter and told his two men:
"Y'all cover me! If these bastards open up on me or these people, you open up on them. Promise me!"
Thompson received the Distinguished Flying Cross from the military. The reason was that the military claimed Thompson took a Vietnamese child to a hospital who was "caught in intense crossfire." Thompson, in disgust, threw the medal away.
Chief My Lai prosecutor William Eckhardt observed that:
"[Thompson] put his gun on Americans, said he would shoot them if they shot another Vietnamese, had his people wade in the ditch, in gore to their knees, to their hips, took out children, took them to the hospital... flew back [to headquarters], standing in front of people, tears rolling down his cheeks, pounding on the table, saying, 'Notice, notice, notice'... then had the courage to testify time after time after time."
Hugh Thompson appeared before Congress in 1969 and was roundly criticized by Chairman Mendel Rivers [D-S.C.] who said that Thompson should be punished for placing his weapons on American soldiers. In a 1998 ceremony, thirty years after My Lai, Hugh Thompson and one of his crew [the other crew member died in combat three weeks after the incident] were finally recognized for what they had done.
One does not have to wonder too hard if many atrocities have occurred in Afghanistan and Iraq today by American soldiers that have gone unnoticed and unreported by our less than intrepid media.
Sioux Rose
I live near Rosewood, Florida. It's the scene where one night a group of rednecks killed the entire population of a small, thriving Black community. One female, a child then, managed to hide and became the teller of the tale of carnage.
I relate this incident because it is a microcosm of much of American thought when it comes to violence. Instead of owning the acts of vengeance, the heirs of this violence maintain a rigid stance of racism. In this way they build a psychological wall between themselves and those their ancestors trespassed against. To own the true depth of depravity would require a self-examination few if any are capable of taking on. That would require real courage, as opposed to the more pervasive cowardly acts that allow those well-armed to "take out" citizens fueled by the false rationale that such persons represent "an enemy." (I am waiting for Thomas More's knee-JERK reflex to this article.)
Words like war and enemy need to be taken out of the lexicon. They are the mental equivalent of lethal viruses.
In South Africa, the ingenious use of "Councils on Truth and Reconciliation" did the unthinkable: They brought victims and perpetrators together so that there could be an attempt at real soul healing, catharsis at depth. Eye contact means one takes in the other's intrinsic humanity. This is what has been lost in America. Like the children of those that preyed upon that small Black community, most Americans have been taught to identify with the aggression of their ancestors, and assume a self-righteous stance that shuts out the necessary therapeutic process that would make such action impossible (as opposed to inevitable) to repeat.
The nation is due for a collective soul-cleansing. I believe that financial and related conditions will force this upon a population otherwise too smug to understand where it has become dis-eased, and in need of major healing. Although the statistics on rape, domestic abuse, alcoholism, substance abuse, perversion, obesity, depression, and gambling are off the charts, the net effect, that of the SICKNESS of a society that worships force, have seldom been studied "in concert."
A nation that worships Mars puts force/violence/war first, and its people having been conditioned through religions that misuse Divine word, and a media that is utterly suffused with aggressive imagery reflect this dark senseless consensus. Fortunately some of us have flown over this cuckoo's nest and are trying to bring light to the darkness. It is a daunting effort, but the ONLY real effort any sentient soul can own, for EVERYTHING depends upon a return to light. And that light represents what coheres the human family (as well as matter) together. Mars has torn asunder, and in its exclusive worship of only the Divine Masculine, has seen Creation itself as a fucntion of that tunnel-vision. In emulating the supposed "big bang" it has made the acquisition of the great bomb(s) its goal, and thoroughly identified with what one Pope aptly defined as a "culture of death." The depraved indifference to life seen in babies with genetic defects (due to exposure to heinous chemicals), in dead zones surrounding entire continents, in lives cut short by horrific flying drones, added to so many other diabolical acts... it all comes from NOT owning what Jung described as "the shadow."
Mars identifies with a god of death and destruction and is the ENEMY to all living beings. On a global scale, efforts must be made to take down the death star. In purporting to protect us, it extorts the $ needed for lunch programs and micro-loans to impoverished women. In boasting of its inordinate power(s), it mostly acts to leave behind a trail of deadly ordnance, like the countless unexploded land mines that leave so many children without working limbs. What a legacy! And still the madness continues, as if on steroids. Even now with the evidence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in plain sight, with the thousands returned from the Gulf Wars with radiation sickenss, their condition made covert like that of soldiers who left Vietnam with the equivalent from Agent Orange. War turns on everyone and leaves no one safe of intact, it cripples any society's collective psyche, and reflects the UTLIMATE blasphemy to the Creator, what most would term a "God" of Love.
In the final analysis the best way to deflate Mars is to place our efforts and resources in homage to Venus, his Divine counterpart. She exalts peace, diplomatic efforts, justice, equal gender-based (and racially-based) relationships, beauty, the arts, music, massage, pleasure, and natural desires. When Mars rules, Venus is placed in deficit. It is time to balance the scales, "as above, so below" style.
Sioux Rose: thoughtful post, as always. Rosewood is about halfway between where I live and where you live, maybe we could meet there sometime for lunch: "there" being apparently a lone BP gas station which is all that is left of Rosewood, so far as I have ever been able to find it. I have black friends in Gainesville who have been active in trying to "memorialize" Rosewood, but nowadays they seem to be too tied up in celebrating the cult of Obama to pursue that very far: you know, if you're a black person in America, you don't want to do anything "very black," lest you upset the apple cart of our "beyond race" society. With this kind of neglect from the black community, fat chance they will ever be given either an apology or any chance at "reconciliation" with their attackers: if you could even find the victims.
About Mars and Venus, I appreciate your cheerleading for the Venus side. Though I live in a Martian body and have never had any "gender identity" issue, I think I was actually born on Venus: there is some controversy over my birth certificate from Mars and my Venitian gramma's testimony that I was born there but I'm unwilling to throw gramma under the bus and deny her testimony on this. (Martians are noted for their counterfeiting proclivities) I totally agree with you that the way of Venus is the way to go. I just wasn't willing to follow H. Clinton who I'm sure was really born on Mars. Cynthia McKinney, Cindy Lasley, Amy Goodman, Naomi Klein, Barbara Lee, Sioux Rose, another story.
Glad you're back from your Excellent Adventure. Jerry
Sioux Rose
JERRY: Thank you for your patience re: a lunch date. I'd love to invite people from CD to Cedar Key, a beautiful remote resort that has not left the 50's behind, that is, it's still a quaint fishing/clamming village with gorgeous Gulf views. That's a good spot for lunch!
Every human being is a "Kodach moment" that captures the energetic essences of all planets (and no doubt forces we astrologers don't yet know about) at the instant of his birth, and first breath as a sovereign entity. Therefore Venus does hold a voice within the chorus that governs from within. (Although I didn't care for the film as it showed Woody Allen's sexism, "Mighty Aphrodite" begins with a character confronting that Greek Chorus as an EXTERNAL entity.) As you know I have waxed long and occasionally lyrically about the Venus-Mars Divine equation, and how far our world has departed from its exquisite life-affirming (the pair intended as lovers!) premise, the one based upon balance.
The female that identifies with the patriarchal power structures (i.e. the status quo) is the Athena type, she, the goddess who denies birth through a mother, that her origin issues from Zeus, her father's HEAD. There are gentle men and martial women to be sure. I have tried to convey in this forum that the 12 Disciples of Jesus (or the 12 Tribes of Abraham) also refer to a specific set of personality structures that give rise to resonant life paths. It takes all 12 to make a holistically harmonic world. Mankind has been playing with half a pack, with most of its theses and theologies conducted by Mars, the composer of death marches and funeral dirges, primarily. I take it as duty and privilege to reaquaint any who care to listen with the aesthetics and power of the Divine Circle, origin of the archetypal 12.
I saw an HBO movie about Rosewood a few years ago...it was very disturbing back then when I was still sort of in my shell. I doubt I could watch it now without my blood pressure meds.
the big difference between these two events is quite clear - lockerbie wasa cia/mossad operation aimed at killing some key american military personaell on the flight who were loooking into the cia/mossad participation in wide spread international drug smuggling. that case died with lockerbie. as opposed to callley who was just a drug crazed murderer.
"According to a BBC report:
A Pan Am investigation is believed to have concluded that the Lockerbie bomb was targeted specifically to kill a small band of US Defence Intelligence Agency operatives (including Major Charles McKee) who had uncovered a drugs ring run by a CIA unit in Lebanon.
The drugs-ring is said to have been set up by Israeli Mossad agents.
Reportedly, the drugs ring involved 'CIA-asset' Monzer al-Kassar, a Syrian with links to the brother of Syria's President Assad.
Reportedly Monzer al-Kassar was involved with Lt-Colonel Oliver North, of Iran-Contra fame."
so, from the reagan administration onward the cia has been a gun running, dope selling mafia unit of killers and assassins - makes the nation proud don't it.
so calley was a murderer and Abdel Baset al-Megrahi was a patsy, not quite the same thing.
thanks to our corproate media we never get to hear other news stories from former mi6 ops who report there is no case or evidence in the lockerbie case whatsoever outside planted cia evidence. th bbc has covered this story in detail.
drug money, imperial war and the psyop to rule the world
same old same old from the mossad and the cia
remember the mossad motto: it is by deception that we shall do war
This is an outstanding piece by Nick Nurse, and its value is only augmented by Tom Engelhardt's preface to same, posted at the top of Tom Dispatch: well worth a click on the link at the top of the CD re-post. Tom does something there that I miss a little in Nurse's article itself: he focusses mostly not on Calley of the self-admitted My Lai massacre (and the inadequacy of his "apology"---as exceptionalists we mostly don't "do" apologies)--but on the treatment of al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie "terrorist" who denies his guilt in the crime for which he served that 8 years. I would have given more attention to the latter's denial, and to the validity of the judicial process under which he was convicted. With torture and other forms of "enhanced" interrogation, our "exceptional" (i.e. internationally illegal) prosecution techniques can convict just about anybody of just about anything. Engelhardt appropriately focusses on the use of those techniques in two successive presidential administrations (and he might have noted, the slim-majority approval of such methods by the American people at large). As you see, exceptionalism covers both forms of hypocrisy: WE don't have to apologize because we're never (really) wrong and WE don't have to observe international rules of conduct because, being always right, we have a "right to defend ourselves" by whatever method we deem essentially to do that. And Israel, you thought only YOU were exceptional.
BTW, CD didn't enable comments on the latest Englehardt article.
Given CD's opaque and capricious administration, I wonder if it was simply an oversight, or if they felt it would elicit excessively "disturbing" comments.
· Yr Obd't Servant
YOS: not sure what you meant by CD not "enabling" the Engelhardt comments. On my computer, clicking the TomDispatch link above the CD's title line does take me to the Engelhardt comments, doesn't it on yours?
I mean that here on CD, there's no blue "Comments" panel below Englehardt's article-- the one reading "94 Comments so far Show All".
I didn't mean Englehardt's own comments, I meant a CD "Comments" thread like this one.
If I click on the link, it does take me to the article on the Tomdispatch page.
· Yr Obd't Servant
Calley, who admitted at trial to killing Vietnamese civilians personally, but served only three years of house arrest following an intervention by President Richard Nixon, received a standing ovation from the Kiwanis Club of Greater Columbus, Georgia . . .
Calley merely massacred communist gooks and slopeheads. What's the big deal? But the wog? He killed white people. Let's send an assassination team to Libya and finish him off.
Joe Allen, in his trenchant analysis of that conflict entitled "Vietnam: the [last] war the U.S. lost", quotes an Army psychiatrist who examined Calley and who noted that:
"Lt. Calley states that he did not feel as if he were killing human beings, rather they were animals with whom one could not speak or reason."
As I wrote in my earlier comment, thankfully there was a Hugh Thompson who could recognize that the Vietnamese were human beings who did not deserve to be treated as being sub human.
"Lt. Calley states that he did not feel as if he were killing human beings, rather they were animals with whom one could not speak or reason."
_________________________________
Sad and pathetic, though not surprising.
Introspective psychotherapy has been thrown into the dustbin of history by Big Pharma and its pill-popping mandate, but what more vivid image of "projection" can there be than a man projecting the persona of the Good Soldier in "combat"-- that of an animal with whom one can not speak or reason-- onto his targets.
Armed to the teeth with death-projecting weaponry, no less.
· Yr Obd't Servant
Sioux Rose
OBEDIENT: Profound observation. Thank you for sharing it. It was precisely those high numbers (30 million?!) of persons being prescribed anti-depressants that led me to write Moon Dance. It provides an organic understanding of the cycles of time, and guides readers so that they can recognize their ups and downs, and predict them in advance. This helps to offset the scheduling of troubling encounters at the worst possible intervals. (Of course that is not always possible; however the knowledge of one's highs and lows provides time parameters that can lead persons towards an empowerment that drugs purposely take away.)
Forty years later it's oh so easy to condem those involved using hindsight of history and today's standards. Having lived through that era and having gone through basic in 1968, I can attest that 'dehumanization' was par for the course. We were fighting an enemy that did not wear uniforms (much like today), and every asian was looked at with skepticism, just as every person today with a Arab appearance is 'eyed' by the public. Children and women were used by the "enemy" as combatants (much like today), and the psyche of the American solder was hardened, lest he crack.
I do not condone, nor to I 'justify' what occured, but going back to beat a dead horse is not productive. Lt. Calley recieved a presidential commutation of his sentence. He was not pardoned and guilt was still asserted.
The basic failure back then was that ALL PARTIES were content at allowing a low level participant to take the blame for the entire system. So long as the system allows scapegoats to give the blood sacrafice, nothing will change through history. Those who fail to learn from history ARE doomed to repeat it. So long as the upper echelon is insulated from prosecution, we will repeat the same scenario over and over.
Throughout history every side has 'dehumanized' the enemy. WE are the 'devils' to many of the Arab world, to include some of our 'frienemies'.... Indians, black slaves, the Germans, etc, you name it, were all 'dehumanized' by one group or another in order to maintain a power structure. I'd suggest that we look at history using old spectacles.
"Forty years later it's oh so easy to condem those involved using hindsight of history and today's standards. "
"todays' standards"
I truly don't know whether to laugh at the irony or cry for the ignorance.
Some of us condemn murder with eternal standards.
VDB wisely noted that "Some of us condemn murder with eternal standards." It should be apparent that the morals of Joseph Darby, the whistleblower who turned in the pictures of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, are just as strong as those of Hugh Thompson. Having a conscience is not constrained by a particular era. Speaking out against injustice transcends the time period that one is living in.
And how many time have YOU been in combat? When YOUR life is on the line, AND you have been indoctronated to mistrust every "gook", AND you've seen your budies blown to hell from a seven year old with a live grenade.... well maybe the you get a different perspective. HINDSIGHT calls it murder, as indeed it was, but the "present" (back in 1968), calls it following orders for self preservation.
please don't "cry" for MY ignorace.... but perhaps for the ignorance for all those who speak, never having experienced the horrors of combat, and then 'judge'. My posting was NOT to justify any historical action, only to say that those who don't know, shouldn't be telling tales out of school. You obviously couldn't understand such a concept, but.... oh well...
nobodyknown,
Being in combat has little or nothing to do with how one viewed the Calley atrocity. You are using your putative combat experience as a thinly veiled apology and rationalization for the massacre. You try to excuse, something which cannot be excused, using a long discredited argument of a perverse greater 'authenticity.' My grandfather served three years in Vietnam in combat units, his brother even longer. He had two Purple Heart medals, which he burned as he felt dishonored by the honorarium. His unit was one of the FIRST to enter My Lai after the fact. If anything, what he saw and heard first hand made him take an even more radical and jaundiced view of America than I do.
I would be one of the last to say that being of partial Vietnamese ancestry makes me inordinately sensitive, if not prejudiced about the My Lai catastrophe: It does not. That does not privilege me or make my thoughts on the matter more authentic than any one else's. Take it on advisement only 'combat man,' but attitudes such as yours are exactly what I commented on: Why so many would rather remain part of the problem, than part of the solution. They do so by choice. They liked what happened at My Lai! They rationalized it then, and they do so today. That's the apple, in the saying "as American as Apple pie!" It tastes good to them.
The subsequent acts of conscience emerging from American soldiers who witnessed the savagery cannot efface what remains an indelible disgrace on the American people; nor can similarities of cross cultural comparisons; nor can the fact that 'it happened in a war, under combat stress ' in anyway rationalize away what will remain, for time immemorial, an abject moral catastrophe. Some cultures may eventually express contrition. Sadly, that is not the case with the United States of America.–(Jill Bains).
Sioux Rose
AMFORTAS: Powerfully & eloquently stated. You have quite a beat on Truth, and the wit to express it with grace.
NO, you're wrong! I have NOT tried to rationalize the massacre or defend the action. In fact I implicitly stated so.... What I said is that trying to put the blame onto Lt Calley alone is asinine. The "person" is not the culprit, in the big picture.
Yes, I am aware the the Nurenburg defense of 'following orders' does not hold, not then, not now. What we should be considering, IF we want to be honest with ourselves is what lead up to the situation. The event happened just a few months after the Tet Offensive, the public opinion was beginning to turn, though most of the people still supported the war at that time, many Americans were being killed and the stress level on the ground was about as high as it got over there.
I NEVER justified the 'action', only the mindset of the ONE PERSON you claim committed all of them. Even in your post you refer to it as "the Calley atrocity" which implies that you believe that he and he alone was responsible. THIS IS THE PROBLEM, not as you've penned, that people "like what happened at My Lai".
YOU are as much of the problem, because you refuse to look at the root cause. We've got our sacrificial lamb, that's enough for your ilk. I have never met one person who "likes" what happened as you put it, but many 'understand' it. There is a huge difference here. Putting on blinders and always using a whipping boy will not change the situation.
"There is no excuse, so there can be no understanding" is your bottom line. I disagree. There indeed is no excuse, but without understanding, there will be no change and the same events will continue to repeat themselves.
Sort of off topic, but WHEN was the last time you've written to your congressman and asked him/her to 'close the Western Hemisphere Institute'?
You seem to suggest that Lt Calley had no real "choice" in the matter.
Were that the case EVERY US Soldier would have acted the same way under similar circumstances.
As i recall a helicopter pilot landed between Calleys groups and some fleeing Civilians and threatened to turn his guns against his own fellow soldiers if they persisted in their massacre.
How is it that this man made the CHOICE not to kill Civilians and women and Children while Lt calley and those that followed his orders did so?
Yes people can be indoctrinated to hate and to fear and in wars other peoples are demonized. But we all still have a CHOICE when the situation occurs wherein we might in a situation where we can ACT on those hatreds and fears.
The action of CHOOSING to act upon a prejudice WITH Violence and Murder is a CHOICE.
GwNorth
Well said. I attempted to bring that point across when I commented at Aug. 31 at 3:15 pm, at some length, concerning Hugh Thompson's heroic act from which he suffered much psychological trauma for the remainder of his life. As you correctly note, people are faced with the choices that they will make in life. Hugh Thompson, in contrast to Calley and Medina, chose to do the right thing by placing himself between the American soldiers and the Vietnamese women, old men and children. The people who participated in the GI movement back then also behaved heroically by choosing not to participate in the occupation and brutalization of the Vietnamese people. Many of them, unlike Calley and Medina, went to jail for their beliefs. Yet very few people in this country are aware of those people and Thompson and his two crew members who stood up to American aggression and imperialism.
My cry of dismay was not at any lack of intelligence.
From your post below, citing the old School of the Americas, it is clear that you are aware of the double standards inherent in America's narcissistic exceptionalism.
I was struck more by your ignore-ance of the obvious degeneration in current standards. Look around: there is a "serious" debate going on concerning torture.
How much is OK? Who should be subject? When and where?
There is no sane reason to even consider such questions.
While you were obeying orders in SE Asia, I was back Stateside avoiding the draft. I sure as shit wasn't going to let myself be locked up with killers and rapists for refusing to kill and rape.
I left the country: my home and family.
All posts wonderful! Great forum and great article by Nick Turse. But, it must be remembered that we have been actively engaged in the wholesale desensitization to violence that has infected our culture. We choose to watch the killing at the movies and on TV, and allow our children to play these stupid violent video games. We have welcomed violence into our homes and into our lives, using the excuse that we are smart enough to differentiate between real violence and the violence in the media that permeates our whole society. No, I remember this argument well. When we create a world, real and imagined, that is so steeped in violence, we end up where we are now. Numb.
Sioux Rose, thanks for the "out of the box" thinking you never disappoint us with.
Sioux Rose
WAYOUT: Venus is in Leo (passing over my planets), so thanks for noticing. LOL.
A very good analysis of our blind exceptionalism.
Another comparison, which continues daily, is like a growing mountain of corpses which the majority of people in the U.S. refuse to see, and that is the number of people brutally murdered because of the perverse dogma of Osama Bin Laden and the number of people brutally murdered because of the perverse dogma of George W. Bush (and now Barack Obama).
The majority of people in the U.S. seem to believe that the hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq, including the over 4 thousand U.S. troops, were killed by terrorists from outside of the U.S., when, in fact, these deaths, and the far greater numbers of people whose lives are still being damaged and ruined, were the result of murderous greed and lies emanating from the terrorists in Washington, D.C.
During WW2 of the coast of Africa, U156 sank what its crew thought was a troopship, the RMS Laconia. But when the sub surfaced to offer aid to the survivors, as per unwritten German Navy rules, the commander was horrified to discover that the ship had been filled with Italian POWs and Allied noncombatant civilians, with a few Allied guards for the Italians.
Kapitänleutnant Werner Hartenstein, the OC, immediately radioed Berlin for help and began taking survivors on board the sub and the lifeboats in tow. Meanwhile, Navy HQ ordered two other German and one Italian sub to drop what they were going and go help.
Eventually, with their decks overloaded with survivors and each towing many lifeboats, the four subs headed for land, with Red Cross flags draped over their deck guns to emphasise that they were on a lifesaving mission. Hartenstein broadcast, in English cleartext, requests for help from any vessel, describing the rescue operation and promising a truce to all cooperating units.
A B24 bomber pilot picked up the radio broadcast and, after overflying the area and seeing what was going on (and being specifically asked for help by Hartenstein), radioed his base for instructions.
The operations officer, one Captain Robert Charlwood Richardson III (sound like an elite name to anyone else? Does to me), ordered the pilot to sink the subs(!), an order that constituted a war crime since military units engaged in saving life were, by the customs of war going back at least to Napoleonic times, not to be attacked.
How much effort the bomber crew put into sinking the subs is unknown, but in fact the only casualties were among the Laconia's surviors. To save their ships, Hartenstein and the other sub commanders were forced to cast off the towlines and order the survivors off the decks into the water where many of them drowned before they could be re-rescued by British and Vichy surface ships.
Grossadmiral Dönitz, trying to save his sub commanders the agony of having to choose between the lives of their crews and the lives of their victims, flatly forbade any future attempts to rescue or aid survivors. A number of U-boat commanders, understanding Dönitz's motives, ignored the order. However, it was only the intervention of Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, testifying that the US Navy never even *considered* trying to rescue or aid its victims, that kept Dönitz from being hanged as a war criminal after the war!
Regrettably, Hartenstein and his crew were all killed 6 months later when a US Catalina patrol bomber caught them off the coast of Barbadoes.
Captain Richardson, the war criminal? He was never even reprimanded, never mind tried for his crime, and he retired as a Brigadier General.
Thanks.
Couple of points, first the sinking of any u-boat in WWII was not regretable. Secondly, the reason that Donitz wasn't hanged for his direction of the u-boat war had nothing to do with any intervention by Nimitz.
The battle of the Atlantic had no quarter given. Many survivors of sunken ships (on all sides) were killed outright, by machine guns or by exposure. But few of them were civilians (except the merchant seamen). Had the U-Boat skipper hit an allied troopship filled with allied soldiers do you really believe that he'd have tried to rescue them? There were troopships sunk at Dunkirk, yet the Germans never tried to rescue those soldiers. Richardson committed no crime in preventing the escape of the Italian pows, nor was there a crime in ordering the sinking of any u-boat that threatened the survival of Britain.
Trying to justify the massacre of civilians by refering to the massacre of soldiers is a bit strange.
You're entitled to your opinion, of course, however awful it might be.
But, as the saying goes, you're not entitled to your own facts no matter how badly you might want them. I've stated what's in the historical record, and can be looked up; you've stated what's in your imagination.
Your opinion is what? You have posted something that happened in another war for what reason? What the hell does your little titbit from the Second world war have to do with Vietnam, or with Afghanistan/Iraq? In WWII nation states fought each other, nation states that did have the power to defeat the other. Iraq/Afghanistan/Vietnam never had the ability to occupy or invade the usa, Germany did have such plans, and could have carried them out if their war had been successful.
The only reason I can think of for you posting this sort of thing on this topic is that you're one of those idiots who think that Germany should have been victors in that war. The historical record you refer to shows that Germany was far more brutal and inhumane in its conduct of war than the allies had been. Unless, of course, your sources for the war were written by the likes of David Irving and other discredited 'historians'.
"You have posted something that happened in another war for what reason? What the hell does your little titbit from the Second world war have to do with Vietnam, or with Afghanistan/Iraq"
I think the posting is relevant, as it demonstrates the barbarism, hypocracy and continuity of Anglo-American use of air power from the Brits dropping poison gas on the Iraqis in the 1920s to American plans to use remote piloted killer drones to maintain dominance in the 21st century. By the way, the 'Laconia' incident cited is well documented. There were 1800 Italion pows, 160 polish guards and ~800 British crewmen and passengers (including 80 women and children) on board. The American planes dropped depth bombs on the U156 despite red cross flags and a British crewmans attempts to signal them that a rescue was in process. If you think WWII anecdotes are irrelevant you should remember that it was the trauma of dropping napalm on a French village in 1945 that convinced Howard Zinn ( a USAAF bombardier at the time) to become an activist for peace and justice and oppose American imperialism.
"In WWII nation states fought each other, nation states that did have the power to defeat the other. Iraq/Afghanistan/Vietnam never had the ability to occupy or invade the usa, Germany did have such plans, and could have carried them out if their war had been successful."
Where on earth did you learn that Hitler planned to invade the USA? In his most ambitious-optimistic days (following the fall of France in 1940) he dreamed of reducing the western european powers (France, Holland, Belgium etc.) to the status of German satilites, the non-German allied slavic territories in the east (Poland, Yugoslavia, european Russia etc.) would be incorperated into a new "Gross Deutschland" followed by some sort of uneasy truce with what remained of the Britsh empire (depending on wether a highly improbable invasion of England worked out), the USSR (banished to the east of the Ural mountains) and the intact USA (which alone had vastly greater wealth, population and resources then Germany), while the Third Reich integrated it's new territories and built up it's strength. This would have taken at least a generation, as by 1944 the American navy was what? About 50 times the size of the German navy?
"The historical record you refer to shows that Germany was far more brutal and inhumane in its conduct of war than the allies had been."
Well, it was and it wasn't. History is more complicated then television and movies make it out to be. As the laconia episode illustrates the Germans, being racist imperialists, were quite happy, even eager, to fight a 'gentleman's war' vis a vis the western allies in the '39-42 period as this suited their situation. They had very limited resources, but possesed the best army in the world, so a soccer tournament style war - best 3 out 5 games wins, armies to meet on neutral territories scenario - suited them, as they were likely to win. Well, at least in the sense of a negotiated settlement. All of wich would free them up to wage a war of annihilation against what they saw as their 'racial inferiors' in the east.
The Anglo-Americans, being capatalist imperialists, and controlling most of the world's resources, were quite happy, even eager to escalate the war with Germany to a total war at the global level, to be won by attrition with unconditional surrender as the only option left to the Germans. With anywhere from 4 to 10 times the resources (if you don't beleive this consult Kennedy's "Rise and fall of the Great Powers) they could not lose such a war. The downside, of course, was that it left some 60 million dead. But hey, only 500K of them were Americans, so let's score one for the 'Good Guys' yeah!
"Secondly, the reason that Donitz wasn't hanged for his direction of the u-boat war had nothing to do with any intervention by Nimitz"
Well, from what I have read, the über hypocritical - 'lets kill us some nazis' allied prosecuters at Nuremburg were stymied by the hamstrung German defence attornies on two major occasions.Once when they tried to portray German 'unconditional submarine warfare' as a war crime several US navy officers were produced to testify that they had used the same tactics against Japan (not addmissible under the terms of the trial as allied crimes were verboten) and, more importantly, this was technically the only possible way to wage submarine warfare. Also, the attempt to blame the Germans for the massacre of Poles at Katyn was dropped when it became obvious that the Russion NKVD had commited the crime - 0ops.
"If you're not idealistic when you're young, you don't have a heart. If you're not nihilistic when you're old, you don't have a brain." - Sydlitz
No, there is a great deal of difference in killing soldiers during a war, and killing non-combattants by hunting them down and shooting them. What the yank soldiers did under the command of Calley was to shoot civilian non-combattants in much the same way that the German Army did when it invaded Poland, France, the Low Countries, or the USSR. It was something for which we hanged the krauts, but Calley got commutted.
To be sure, using air power to bomb civilians is a nasty sport. It also doesn't do what the military planners thought it should do. That is it doesn't reduce the moral of the target population but it does give them a sense that they're all in it together. You condemn the English and the Americans for dropping bombs on people who are civilians, yet you're ignoring that their enemies - the Germans - did the exact same thing; in Warsaw, Rotterdam, Guernica and many other cities in the 30s and 40s. However, the article we're talking about doesn't talk about dropping bombs on civilians, in both examples in the article it's talking about how the military was used to kill civilians. Your off topic post was about the military killing other soldiers, soldiers who wouldn't have needed to be rescued had the u-boat in question not shot a torpedo into a passanger liner.
Hitler wanted to rule the whole world. Had the war not broken out when it did, but in 1945 like Hitler planned, Germany would have had a much better chance of winning the thing. Germany did not fight a 'gentleman's war' nor did they ever try to do so. Where the heck did you get the idea that they were trying to fight such a war?
My source for talking about WWII isn't from movies or the freaking tv, I studied the topic at a University. It was the Germans who launched a 'total war' when they invaded the USSR in hopes of wiping out the subhuman Slavs. Had Hitler had half a brain, he'd have gone in as a 'liberator', and conquered the ussr quite easily. Instead he made it clear that the 'best army in the world' was to kill every man, woman and child that they could get away with killing.
In regards to the unrestricted u-boat war, you're almost right. It was the German defence lawyers who pointed out that the yanks and the brits used their submarines in exactly the same way that the Germans had. That's also why the German Air Force officers weren't charged with killing civilians during the war.
"Hitler wanted to rule the whole world"
People have said the same thing about Napoleon, Stalin, Bill Gates and the Pope. I even suspect my father would take that job if it opened up, but fear not, want and can are two different things.
"Had the war not broken out when it did, but in 1945 like Hitler planned, Germany would have had a much better chance of winning the thing."
What are you on about now? The infamous Z plan? All that was based on the assumption tha the head start Germany got in rearmament in the 1936-39 period could have been maintained thru '44 without any reaction from his adversaries. Is that realistic? It envisioned a German battle fleet of 10 battleship and 2 or 3 carriers to be completed by '48. Hmmm, didn't America have over 100 aircraft carriers by 1945?
Or were they going to win the war from the air? Lets see, by the time the war ended Germany had 4 or 5 experimental 4 engined bombers under test that in theory could have flown to New York. How many thousand B-17s, B-24s and B-29s did America have at this point? Plus the 6 engined B-36 and the Atom bomb coming on line. Not to mention the advantage of having the oil, uranium, rubber etc. to put these ships and planes into service. Where would Hitler have gotten that?
The 20th century german army was moved about over distance by rail, and still moved its guns and supplies to the front by horse. Tell me one war or major campaign won by the german army without rail connections to the front? Was there a Reichsbahn mainline to New Jersey? No? Then there was no reason for the good people of New Jersey to lose sleep.
"If you're not idealistic when you're young, you don't have a heart. If you're not nihilistic when you're old, you don't have a brain." - Sydlitz
My point was that you could have used a number of other incidents from the second world war which had soldiers killing civilians, to back up the arguement that soldiers killing civvies is wrong. You did not, now you're trying to drag me into an arguement about the origins and motives of that war. Something that is totally off topic for this thread. If you want to debate that sort of thing, there are a number of websites dedicated to that sort of historical arguement. There's no point in debating it on a thread that has to do with civilians being slaughtered by the military.
"You condemn the English and the Americans for dropping bombs on people who are civilians, yet you're ignoring that their enemies - the Germans - did the exact same thing; in Warsaw, Rotterdam, Guernica and many other cities in the 30s and 40s."
Well... It's really a question of scale and intention. The amount of tonnage dropped, lives lost, buildings destroyed, etc. in German cities (Hamburg, Dresden, Berlin, etc.) was greater on a magnitude of probably around 10 to 1 if you're comparing what the Allies did to the Germans from the air with what the Luftwaffe did to the cities they bombed. Vis a vis Japan, it was even more skewed. I've read a great deal about the air war over the years and it seems clear that the RAF and the USAAF were constructed with the sort of devastation they achieved in Hamburg and Tokyo very much in mind. The Germans and Japanese just didn't have the resources to create that same level of destruction from the air.
"Your off topic post was about the military killing other soldiers, soldiers who wouldn't have needed to be rescued had the u-boat in question not shot a torpedo into a passanger liner."
It wasn't actually Sydlitz who made the initial posting, it was Mairead. Also, the rescue was prompted by the fact that the Germans discovered there were civilians were on board the ship, which was a troop ship. Not sure of the legal difference between sinking a troop ship vs. a civilian passenger liner (all war's a crime to my mind), though that's certainly the same sort of distinction the American military uses to justify itself when it kills people. (All Afghani victims of drone attacks seem to be Taliban. Funny, that...)
The Laconia incident has a bearing on the discussion about My Lai and the Lockerbie bombing because it was a case where someone, in this case the American Captain Richardson, had the power to do the right thing and chose to do the wrong thing instead. (The U-boot crew also had the power to do the right thing, but were prevented from doing so.) Richardson could have allowed the rescue to go on unhindered, but chose to attack the rescuers, thereby condemning hundreds of people to death, probably many thousands if you consider the German naval policy change after this incident to disallow such rescue attempts. Captain Richardson ended his career as a brigadier general and had a role in managing America's burgeoning nuclear weapons stockpile during the Cold War. I wonder if he ever came to regret his choice in the Laconia incident or if he convinced himself that he didn't really have a choice? The fact that he became an "expert" on tactical nuclear weapons and was an advocate for Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (aka Star Wars) leads me to believe the latter is the more likely answer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Richardson_III
William Calley also had the power to choose to do the right thing in My Lai. He chose to "follow orders" and now claims to regret it. Not sure what kind of choices al-Megrahi has had.
thanks for this very moving article. american exceptionalism as usual.
Another article about Lockerbie, and not a word about an incident in the Strait of Hormuz involving Iran Air 655 (a passenger airliner on a scheduled route with some 270 paying passengers on board) and the USS Vincennes (a state-of-the-art US warship that was half a world away from the US and that couldn't tell the difference, we are supposed to believe, between an F14 Tomcat and a A300B2 Airbus) that happened some six months prior, for which it was, as I recall, payback.
Not even one US wrist was slapped as they had apparently done nothing wrong, and president Reagan refused to apologize for anything the US did. Do you think if he had done it might have diffused a little tension, and things might have turned out differently? (Not that I am making excuses for Lockerbie, don't think that.)
I believe another article on here mentioned that, and pointed out that the U.S. quietly paid over $100 million to Iran in compensation...so quietly, I never knew about it till I read that article.
Maybe they did and maybe they didn't, depending on whose version you believe. In one version they paid up, but immediately found something to bill to the Iranians to cancel it out.
But that is the Merkin way -- the idea that money fixes everything, when in fact the apology has to come first or it fixes nothing, at least not permanently.
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A classic in hypocracy where america has the right to inflict indiscriminately pain suffering and destruction and no one else can for what ever reason.
In modern terms, the last 300 or 400 years it is europeans, especially the UK and now americans(UK's cousins) that have terrorized the world; mike davis has it in his book 'Late Victorian Holocausts'; Chalmers Johnson describes it in his book or 'Blowback' trilogy.
The Spanish, Portugese, Germans and French were no slouches when it came to world domination and terrorism in it's own right. Nor the Russians, Japonese and Chinese. The "hypocracy" I believe is endemic to us because of a breakdown in the media. The past two decades have seen an unprecidented re-write of history. The media does not question, not inform. Our youth is taught from day one that the USA is the very best, thus all others are inferior. We are so arrogant, that we refuse to even discuss a health care system used widely throughtout the world, even while hospitals "dump" indegent patients on already overburdened public access health care systems.
We, by that I refer to the public, accepts allowing one person to be held accountable for all. Okay, in rare instances we may demand two or three be put up on charges, but we do not hold the people in Congress or at the Pentagon, or the White House accountable. We denounce "mercenaries" when they are foreign trained, but create the School of the Americas (Western Hemisphere Institute), and allow Blackwater to train on our soil.
The true "hypocracy" is in only going after the lowest echelon member in the cabal, in my opinion. I 'understand' Lt. Calley's frame of mind back in '68. His actions were wrong, but the actions are different than the person. As the article points out, he was the only one of more than a hundred found to be culpable. THAT is the injustice that must be addressed, not only for back then, but for today as well. Is the remote pilot for the preditor any less guilty? Or the B-1 or B-52 pilot? Yet the media does not even question. What good is a 'free press' if it does not strive to print the truth? Truth....as reported by the victors I suppose....
Well, thanks for specifying what I said a bit more and just to reaffirm, I wholly am with what you commented.
A great comparative of US attitudes toward 2 horrific acts of terrorism. Another comparison could be made with the coddling of Posada who admittedly masterminded the blowing up of a Cuban airline, and with Haitian terrorists harbored in the US.