YSK: The US massacred hundreds & raped children as young as 12 in one day. Only one perpetrator was convicted - later commuted by President Nixon.

Comments

• BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  What those in authority don’t want to tell us is that this is exactly what they expect in war. They want our soldiers to be so horrific that the other side quits. That’s the goal of EVERY leader who starts a war. Any hand-wringing or regret later is just theater.

  The only sin is letting the Civilians hear about it.

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  • TranscendentalEmpire@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

    It’s historically the only effective way to fight an insurgency and every military since ancient times knows it. Basically anytime you hear a modern military is enacting a “counter insurgency” it’s either code word for doing death squads, or it’s a tacit admission that they are out of ideas and have found themselves in an unwinnable quagmire.

    The only way to defeat an insurgency is to do massive amounts of crimes against humanity…or avoid creating one in the first place.

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    • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

      Valid.

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  • bearboiblake@pawb.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Yeah, you’re right of course, this is why we should get rid of all rulers, now and forever, and ensure that they never return. We do not need a ruling class to order us around. We can build a new society where all are equal, and where decisions are made by consensus, rather than by diktat or decree.

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• forestbeasts@pawb.social ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  “You should know: [totally horrible political sexual abuse thing with absolutely no kind of warning on it at all]”

  …no, I really, really didn’t need to know that, thanks

  – Frost

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  • bearboiblake@pawb.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    The warning is implied, don’t you realize that? If what happened at My Lai and the subsequent legal outcomes was justice, then that justice can be done to you as well.

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• phoenixz@lemmy.ca ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  The only reason why my Lai is known today is because one helicopter pilot had a conscience and ordered his door gunner to open fire on their own troops if they were to approach another group of Vietnamese civilians that he decided to protect

  Had he not, likely nobody would have known what happened

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  • raker@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    And only because this has gone public, they had to award Hugh Thompson Jr. with the Distinguished Flying Cross. Otherwise military court.

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• dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  it’s sad when I don’t even know which massacre is being discussed, or even which theater of war or era - there are just too many examples

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  • bearboiblake@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    And that is the very few we know of, the more you learn about these, the more clear it becomes they cover them up unless they definitively can’t. What we know barely scratches the surface of American terrorism and atrocities.

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  • RaoulDuke85@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    The military had a sex trafficking and drug trade during the Iraq war.

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    • bearboiblake@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      That sounds like something that We Should Know

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• FundMECFS@piefed.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  | Sentence | Life imprisonment; commuted to three years’ house arrest by President Richard Nixon |

  Fucking hell Nixon …

  “Protect the children and women” Except from my murderous rapist soldiers apparently.

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  • bestagon@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Interesting how this narrative keeps getting used to justify our colonialism. “These are backwards savages and we are agents of progress and feminism” and then, in the course of the conflict, women and girls are raped, killed, and bombed while women’s rights are stonewalled or even stripped away back home

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  • Quill7513@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    The police protect women, WHICH WOMEN!?

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    • FundMECFS@piefed.zip ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I’m a little confused did I say the police protect women? I don’t think I did. Fuck the police.

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    • postmateDumbass@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Nixon is dead, we will never know.

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• SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  US soldiers also raped thousands of French women during WW2.

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  • bearboiblake@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I’ve read about this too, and the US blamed the problem on black soldiers. Maybe that’s something that deserves its own post?

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  • toad@sh.itjust.works ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Yup. They burned my grandma’s city to hide the looting.

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    • Karl@literature.cafe ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Did they harm your grandma?

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• anon_8675309@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  It is important to know this because when the military is turned on you, you should know they’ll obey. If you think there are enough that would so no, you’re wrong.

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  • Abyssian@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    As a former member of the US military, please go fuck yourself.

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    • anon_8675309@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I’ll accept that.

      But it’s all about the crowd and momentum. The crowd gets hyped the crowd is gonna do some shit an individual won’t.

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    • I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Shut up and follow orders.

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    • bluejayway@lemmy.zip ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      you seriously think none of your fellow service members would listen to violent orders?

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• workerONE@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  That’s just one village.

  "German historian Bernd Greiner mentions the following atrocities reported and/or investigated by the Peers Commission and the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group, among other sources:

  Seven massacres officially confirmed by the American side. My Lai (4) and My Khe (4) (collectively the My Lai Massacre) claimed the largest number of victims with 420 and 90 respectively, and in five other places a total of about 100 civilians were executed.
  Two further massacres were reported by soldiers who had taken part in them, one north of Đức Pho in Quảng Ngãi Province in the summer of 1968 (14 victims), another in Bình Định Province on 20 July 1969 (25 victims).[citation needed]
  Tiger Force, a reconnaissance unit of the 101st Airborne Division, probably murdered hundreds of civilians during a 6-month period in 1967."
  

  and from bombing:

  “Estimates for the number of North Vietnamese civilian deaths resulting from U.S. bombing range from 30,000 to 65,000.[35][4] Higher estimates place the number of civilian deaths caused by American bombing of North Vietnam in Operation Rolling Thunder at 182,000.[36] American bombing in Cambodia is estimated to have killed between 30,000 and 150,000 civilians and combatants.”

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  • FlyingCircus@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    The US murdered over a million civilians in Iraq.

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    • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Robert MacNamara stated that the US killed 3-4 million civilians during the Vietnam War. Since he was the Secretary of Defense during that time, he wouldn’t have exactly benefited from exaggeration of the total.

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    • bilb@lemmy.ml ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Yeah, and those were “woke” wars according to the psychos in charge now.

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• Skankhunt420@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  after learning of the massacre, he wrote in his memoir that it was “the conscious massacre of defenseless babies, children, mothers, and old men in a kind of diabolical slow-motion nightmare that went on for the better part of a day, with a cold-blooded break for lunch”.[

  yo what the fuck

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  • FundMECFS@piefed.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    For context “he” here is General Westmoreland.

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• TheReanuKeeves@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  War. What is it good for. Absolutely nothing.

  Other than fulfilling the desires of sociopaths under the guise of being a patriot

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• dylanmorgan@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  YSalsoK that Colin Powell was instrumental the attempt to cover up My Lai.

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• nucleative@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  I suppose many of the perpetrators who were there are still alive today. I wonder if they sleep soundly in bed at night.

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  • ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Vietnam vets are not necessarily famed for coming back and having a great time.

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  • TheReanuKeeves@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Someone who lacks enough empathy to brutally gang rape women and children are rarely people who feel remorse for hurting others. They unfortunately probably laugh themselves to sleep at night knowing they committed some of the sickest shit imaginable and will never be punished.

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  • FatVegan@leminal.space ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Of course they do. People thank them for their service. These brave brave war heroes

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• quick_snail@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  This is bad. What Japan did to China was worse.

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  • SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    You can always find something worse. Doesn’t make it acceptable.

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  • 0x0@infosec.pub ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Sure, you should make a thread about that.

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  • dickalan@lemmy.world ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    ok are you a three letter operative bro

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  • Atomic@sh.itjust.works ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    What Japan did to China was worse? Ok. So what? What relevance does that have?

    Is that how your approach everything in life? Your mother is raped and mutilated, that’s bad, but what Japan did to China was worse. So… stop complaining I guess? (Obvious sarcasm but I genuinely fear you won’t catch that)

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    • quick_snail@feddit.nl ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Your comment can be summarized in one word:

      “Whataboutism”

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  • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    “We’re not as bad as the worst of the worst” isn’t the gotcha you seem to think it is.

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• glitching@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  them vets are the main foment vector for what we now know as the white supremacy movement. not that the sentiment wasn’t prevalent, but it was disjointed groups, churches, cults, klan, militias, prison gangs, etc., each pushing their own thing with only limited local reach.

  the influx of large swaths of radicalized and trained MAMs was the igniter. all those power squabbling groups started coming together under one banner and they had a new tool - computers.

  early on, they realized you can reach a whole lotta more folks with the new tech than the usual zines and the like. so they formed armored truck robbing gangs, and used the proceeds to buy home computers for establishing a network of BBS all over the country. I mean, if that’s not a michael mann movie, I don’t know what is…

  for more, kathleen belew - bring the war home, available at anne’s site or wherever your pirate your shit.

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• uberdroog@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  tile.loc.gov/…/MyLaiHearings.pdf

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• SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Welcome to war

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  • libre_warrior@lemmy.ml ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Its not a war, it’s a raid.

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    • nil@piefed.ca ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      These are the same words

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• hyperencabulator@lemmy.today ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Thank you for sharing, I had only heard of it tangentially until a Mr. Beat video on the Vietnam War. There’s a lot of fictional media in that time frame that references atrocities like this in that conflict, beyond just Apocalypse Now.

  youtu.be/LwQRfckSANI

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• minorkeys@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  We aren’t the ones deciding to go to war and cause a generation of men to have their psychological well-being put through a wood chipper. We don’t produce the propaganda that make men willing. We don’t make poverty rampant so men get desperate enough to enlist.

  It doesn’t matter if we learn, plenty of us already know and it doesn’t change anything. People like Trump, like Putin, like Netanyahoo, don’t care about us or whoever ends up a victim of their ambitions. Putin and Netanyahoo know what their troops do and don’t give a fuck, they might even use it to their advantage.

  The problem isn’t learning from the past, it’s that psychopaths are good at gaining power. They know and simply don’t care. If voters weren’t such ignorant imbeciles, maybe they wouldn’t vote for ppl like Trump, but they are, so here we are. If customers weren’t such ignorant, weak willed cowards incapable of not buying the new toys, we wouldn’t fund the people stealing all the property and making us poorer every generation. We are all victims of the decision-making prowess of the average voter, the average consumer.

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  • bearboiblake@pawb.social ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I understand how you feel, but we actually do have the power to change our world. We need to first recognize that something needs to be done, build a popular consensus, network and build connections with like-minded people, and start a real movement for change.

    Electoralism has not solved our problems in the past, and it won’t do so in the future. At best, it is harm prevention, and at worst, it’s a distraction from more effective efforts. I encourage people to vote for the candidates they feel best, but to be aware that it’s not a real, long term solution. It’s always just the best of two terrible candidates, both of whom ultimately serve the ruling class.

    The problems we have did not start and will not end with Trump, they are in the fundamental roots of our society, and the road to change our society is a long and difficult one, but it is a journey we have to undertake. We are going to have to act if we want to live in a better world. Simply giving in to nihlism is not an option.

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    • minorkeys@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      The people have never been roused to action simply because of a good idea, or a wise course of action. They are incapable of even identifying a good idea. Any individual that gains traction changing power structures is targetted and sometimes killed for it. We are all in a cage built by the wealthy and anything that’s effective is demonized through propaganda or made illegal and dealt with violence. We are also now on precipice of the greatest surveillance and propaganda system humanity has ever endured and people still don’t notice and stop supporting it. We are at the precipice of autonomous drone technology capable of killing that will be used for violence against the prisoners. All because the general population refuse to see the cage or the technologies that have built it, instead helping build their own system of subjugation. The average person is a threat and a traitor to their own interests.

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• Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  The issue here is humans. In large groups humans do terrible things. Usually in small group interactions they are pretty decent. It’s very odd. But probably the result of evolution. Other branches of “human” that didn’t act this way were probably wiped out by those that did.

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  • bearboiblake@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    No, that’s simply not true, large groups of humans do not necessarily conduct massacres, it’s far more of a function of the society and the conditioning of the people - these atrocities were conducted because those in the US military saw the Vietnamese as subhuman, and thus had no empathy for them.

    You may be surprised to learn that humans are actually the most co-operative animals on the planet - the scope, scale, and variability of human cooperation greatly exceed that of other animals. Our species is the only one we know of which demonstrates an innate willingness to help others we have nothing in common with.

    Some of the greatest accomplishments in human history have been achieved by humans working together to accomplish a larger goal. The ruling class divides and atomizes us to turn us against our best interests and our better natures so that we may be more readily exploited to their benefit.

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    • Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      So both are true. Humans are the most co-operative. But if you look at the achievements, most are done to better one group of humans over another. Rarely is something done for the good of all humans. I’m actually struggling to think of even one thing that was done for the good of all humans. There must be a few, but I just can’t think of any.

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  • Atomic@sh.itjust.works ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Please tell me you’re not trying to excuse the rape of civilians as “it’s just what humans do”.

    It has nothing to do with evolution. These were angry men, taking out their frustration and anger of being drafted, watching their friends die for nothing in a jungle, on the local population. Rather than the government that sent them there in the first place.

    The source of their anger fueling their ruthlessness is not evolutionary. It’s manufactured by the ones that sent them there in the first place.

    Neither of which justifies rape or mutilation in any way. But it’s why they were capable of doing what they did. Anger and hate.

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    • Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I’m not excusing it in any way.
      I wish I had a way to advance our evolution past this point so that we didn’t have a significant portion of the population that are monsters.

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• acockworkorange@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Rule 2.

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  • bearboiblake@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I’ve edited the post to contain an explanation for why learning about history is important.

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    • acockworkorange@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      You could have linked this this to what we can expect in Iran, but I guess that counts.

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