A forgotten hero stopped the My Lai massacre 50 years ago | Hacker News Reader

A forgotten hero stopped the My Lai massacre 50 years ago

latimes.com

249 pointsDoreenMichele98 comments

I wouldn't call him forgotten - while I'm bad with remembering names, when I saw "My Lai", the first thing that came to mind was "that badass helicopter pilot who landed his helicopter between civilians and US soldiers, and threatened to open fire to protect the civilians".

What I didn't know was that he took so much flak for that - from statements that he should be the one punished to death threats and dead animals on his porch. Unsurprising, yet sad.

His name was Hugh Thompson, and today, let's remember that name[1].

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Thompson_Jr.

> What I didn't know was that he took so much flak for that - from statements that he should be the one punished to death threats and dead animals on his porch. Unsurprising, yet sad.

Pretty much to be expected in any situation where someone goes against convention. People are shitty when it comes to tribal issues.

This is the proof that war really brings out the worst or the best in people. Unfortunately most of the time it is the worst.

An extra point: his "helicopter" was about the smallest thing you could get and still call it a helicopter. It provided no cover or protection for the people inside. Had the soldiers engaged, Thompson and the others would have gone down instantly.

Photo: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hiller_UH-12_(H-23)_bw....

Thanks for this. In my mind, a "helicopter" is something like a Huey. This is a rotor with a tail!

High point: Thompson told the American troops that, if they opened fire on the Vietnamese civilians in the bunker, he and his crew would open fire on them.

Talk about courage.

Low point: He concluded — after a decade of research in Pentagon archives and more than 100 interviews with American veterans and Vietnamese survivors — that Americans killing civilians in Vietnam was “pervasive and systematic.” One soldier told him there had been "a My Lai a month."

Courage seems far too scarce a commodity.

His crew apparently deserve some credit also. From Wikipedia:

>Colburn and Andreotta focused their guns on the 2nd Platoon

That could have been fatal.

Hasn't really stopped either. Read up on things like the shoddy evidence that goes into drone bombing or the crimes of Seal Team Six or the many other horrific acts the US military has done in recent years and decades. If anything it seems like we are getting better at sweeping this stuff under the rug.

Yes, thats the point of this history lesson - we are still committing these crimes, on a regular basis, with impunity.

The only ones who can do anything about it is civilians. But, none of us seem to be too bothered by the 300,000 innocent lives lost, because America needs war.

"we" sadly means all of humanity. This is a problem of government forces in general:

Here's the other side in that same war doing it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_at_Hu%E1%BA%BF

Here's UN forces: https://www.apnews.com/69e56ab46cab400f9f4b3753bd79c930

The Dutch army: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rawagede_massacre

Saudi forces: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/a-saudi-coal...

The French army: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Bab_El_Oued

Japan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731

My first thought was, oh no not another “whatabout” post. But no, you’re making a good point in a fair and informative way. Thanks.

Indian army in Sri Lanka - https://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/17/world/studies-find-tortur...

Indian army in its own borders, in Kashmir - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_abuses_in_Jammu_a...

Japanese army in China - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Massacre

We can make a big list, it would be very depressing.

Humans across the world are generally pretty good in saying "it is only crime when the other side does it, not when we do".

"We" definitely means all of humanity.

The US military studied Vietnam a lot:

No more draft, career soldiers only Control the media One year tour of duty (they broke this one in Iraq because they were running low)

+ use mercenaries

"Oops, who could have imagined they'd be a little liberal with the bullets. Oh well."

> Control the media

This is a big one I think. From what I've read, in Vietnam, you just needed to get letter from your local newspaper accrediting you as a journalist, and you basically got a free ticket anywhere in Vietnam with the US military.

Now it's a lot harder to get embedded as a journalist with military units.

Mankind heroes. Honor and glory!

There are a lot of people who use the My Lai massacre as an example of the 'real' America. There are a lot of My Lai's and William Calley's in other countries throughout history. But far fewer Hugh Thompson's and to me that's the 'real' America.

In Michigan we've got the recent example of Dr. Hanna Attisha and the Flint water crisis. She was vilified by Flint officials, state officials and by the state's universities. The state health director called her irresponsible and execs at her hospital wanted her fired.

Worries made her physically ill. I do not know how she stood courageously for so long but she did. Eventually a Detroit Free Press article supported her and in time everyone withdrew their opposition.

https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2015/10/10/h...

> There are a lot of My Lai's and William Calley's in other countries throughout history. But far fewer Hugh Thompson's and to me that's the 'real' America.

There were a lot of My Lai’s in Vietnam. Biggest misconception is that it was some kind of fluke. But in a “war” where entire civillian populated areas were designated “free fire zones” where you could kill anything that moves, civillian massacres were the norm. Not every solider did it of course but it was a regular feature of that war.

It is good to recognize brave soldiers that resisted. But we must be respectful enough of those who were murdered to not attempt to rehabilitate the image of America in Vietnam by pretending those resisters were the norm or represented the true spirit of America and what it was aiming for or some such sentimental nationalist nonsense. As the article notes, a My Lai happened every month in Vietnam. Civillian mass murder was an explicit goal and the U.S. was very good at it.

Its one of those features of asymmetric warfare, that you can drag the enemy into the moral-mud-pits of combating opposition among the civilian population. For the opposite side this has the benefit of getting new recruits among the relatives and survivors and obviously of leading a far superior enemy by the noose ring through the public arena -which raises Opposition in a democracy - and reduces combat effectiveness in the military in dictatorships and democracy's (sovjet afghanistan).

I would really love to have the CIAs Information on how much vietnamese population was in active opposition to the american "police" action. My estimate would be around 75 %.

If the Vianamese were over here what percentage of Americans would be in active opposition immediately? What percentage after almost everyone saw friends and relatives slaughtered?

As the article quotes one soldier there was a mai Lai every month. You make it sound like this was a fact in the article. One unnamed soldier claimed that.

And I think the free fire zones were much more centered on artillery and air strikes and not ground infiltrations just walking and shooting whomever they wanted to, but it’s still horrible the disregard for human life.

But to state as you do that civilian mass murder was the goal, that’s false. The goal was war of attrition of actual combatants. What they did was not care or let civilian casualties stop them from trying to carry out that goal. Still horrible but come on there is enough bad stuff to point to without exaggeration and misleading.

That is pure unresearched wishful thinking.

They would fly helicopters up to farmers on a field who would look up at them in confusion and do nothing. Then they'd turn on a siren and when the farmers scattered they shot them all down for taking "evasive action", making them "combatants". There'd be reports of raids with hundreds of "viet cong" killed and a few weapons recovered. The killing machine was about body counts. Kissinger ordered "anything that flies on everything that moves." Villages were leveled in indiscriminate, massive bombing campaigns that exceeded twice the ordinance dropped in WWII. Millions were killed.

If you really want to research what happened in Vietnam start with Nick Turse's Kill Anything That Moves.[1] It's a polemical title but it's based on a ton of primary research, e.g. the Pentagon's War Crimes Working Group and the National Archives and interviews with over a hundred veterans. And that stuff will make any good soul polemical.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250045061/ref=rdr_ext_tmb

> twice the ordinance dropped in WWII

Nit-picking: it's "ordnance", not "ordinance".

> The Vietnam population did not see the kind of drop you would get from widespread systematic ethnic cleansing over a 19+ year war. 2.7 Million Americans went to Vietnam and a tiny fraction did some horrific things, but this was far more limited than often portrayed.

And deleted before I could reply - for anyone else interested and just two quick examples, read up on Free-Fire Zones and the Strategic Hamlet Program. The former is the indiscriminate killing of anyone found in the area and the latter is forced relocation of civilians and forced labor to build said new hamlets.

That's top down strategy and can't be put on people losing their composure in the field.

The Strategic Hamlet Program was adopted from the British, who used it to quell the Communist insurgency in Malaysia. Basically, round everybody up into a small group of villages for their "protection". Assume everyone who doesn't stay in the village is the enemy.

Notwithstanding the abuses in Malaysia (I'll leave it to others to question the necessity and efficacy), it definitely didn't translate to the Vietnam context. For one thing, in Malaysia the Communists mostly came from the ethnic Chinese community, who were a minority and already highly concentrated in the cities.[1] Vietnam had/has a similar ethnic Chinese minority (wealthy, urban, etc), but they were Capitalists, not the Communists. The pool of Communists was everybody else, the largely rural population.

[1] Interestingly, to this very day Malaysia still has laws which prevent Chinese from owning certain types of rural property, ostensibly to protect the rights of the rural Malay population. I don't know, but I presume such laws have always been in effect in Malaysia, even before the colonial era. At the time of the insurgency rural Chinese were probably already a suspicious group. In hindsight the insurgency was just an excuse for the powers (British, majority Malays) to reinforce the stable status quo, which is why the program "worked". In Vietnam the status quo was increasingly untenable.

If this was happening all the time, why was the helicopter pilot shocked? Sounds like the crew was equally shocked.

> Civilian mass murder was an explicit goal

It certainly was - of the North Vietnamese communists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_at_Hu%E1%BA%BF

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Saigon#Human_rights_af...

> On the 30th anniversary of the massacre, Thompson went back to My Lai and met some of the people whose lives he had saved. "There were real good highs," he told me, "and very low lows. One of the ladies that we had helped out that day came up to me and asked, 'Why didn't the people who committed these acts come back with you?' And I was just devastated. And then she finished her sentence: she said, 'So we could forgive them.'

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-wiener-my-lai-hug...

Another hero, whom I as a judge advocate personally admire, is Captain Aubrey Daniel III, the prosecutor in the case against Calley. While still on active duty, he wrote a letter to President Nixon urging him not to intervene.

Thompson displayed both physical and moral courage, whereas Daniel was never in any danger to life or limb. But his moral courage is courage nonetheless.

https://www.famous-trials.com/mylaicourts/1623-daniels-ltr

Most people would find it easier to just go along or look the other way.

These guys were true war heroes and had courage under fire. They should be held up as examples what soldiers should be.

They are held as examples at plenty of US military officer training programs, thankfully. I learned about this incident and Hugh Thompson at the USNA, where they drilled into our heads that morals, ethics, and the laws of war are absolute and it's the officer corps job to ensure they are followed to the T. I always took that to heart. Unfortunately, as in the civilian world, there are crappy people in the officer corps that don't care much (the American GIs that Mr. Thompson was up against that day, for example).

That’s scary, we all like to judge others’ actions in order to feel morally superior, but what percentage of people would actually do something when they see their peers, friends, colleagues and superiors doing bad stuff? It’ll be always easier to go along and just fool yourself and say “I’m just following orders”

We don't have to speculate as to what percentage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

"what percentage of people would actually do something when they see their peers, friends,"

The history of genocides, war crimes and dictatorships clearly shows that most people will go along.

I suspect it's less about "following orders" and more about "war is hell".

What would you or I do after a few months or years in hell? I for one hope never to find out.

A hell you didn't sign up for, you were drafted into it.

That makes for a big psychological difference I think.

It is not as simple as that though. We know from war and concentration camps how many people 'just follow orders'.

Briefly...

In WW2 the Nazis learned from the Soviets that mass graves were a bad thing if discovered. They also knew that the Final Solution was an actual crime, the leaders acknowledged this but deemed the crime to be necessary for the survival of their own imaginably 'Aryan' race. Hence they got the Sonderkommando Jews to exhume mass graves and to build huge funeral pyres that they then used to burn the bodies. The Sonderkommando guys just followed orders until they were expected to build one final funeral pyre after all of the bodies were burned. By then they twigged that they were expected to meet their own fate that way. Only then, at the last chance, did they try to do something, e.g. try and escape or sabotage the gig. So long as there was someone in front of them in the queue these poor souls could be forced to do the unthinkable.

The Germans had it all worked out, they could get people to shove their own mother into the gas chamber. They had enough bullets to make this fully possible. They could get practically anyone to participate in the criminal venture. Even if life was a misery in the concentration camp they could get people to want to stay there another day because life under such circumstances was better than being actually dead.

I am certain in my own mind that everyone I have ever met in my entire life could be made into a Sonderkommando if push came to shove. This includes people in my family so quite a claim.

I am also sure that everyone I have met has heard of the holocaust. Yet I do not imagine any heroics of the Schindlers List type of Hollywood movie.

On the other hand, most regular soldiers do not like killing people, even if they are engaged in an 'honest war' and not a known crime. Some soldiers deliberately miss. Some go AWOL. Some play football with the enemy on Christmas Day.

But then you have situations like Abu Ghraig where atrocities happen but the people involved do not believe they are committing a crime and have no fear of being found out. These people really do have a psychological problem, they are actually 'sick in the head'.

However, during wartime the overwhelming majority of the population are not on the front line or anywhere near. Due to fear, propaganda and circumstance (e.g. being a parent, being too young, being too old) this bystander population passively goes along with the war, even if they do not fully subscribe to the doctrine of the day. These people have no skin in the game, they mostly support the doctrine and they don't think that far outside of what they are told to think, even if they laugh at some of the lies told to them. When the likes of MLK talk of being alone, it is these bystander folk that hurt the most.

I've done a little research into rescuers during Holocaust. You may find that interesting.

http://250bpm.com/blog:125

Regular German army was part of ethnic cleansing and committed a lot of atrocities. It was not just camps, it was also random violence against citizens.

They did not missed on purpose. They burned whole villages.

You did not needed to be on the frontline to be killed by them, anywhere in occupied territory was enough.

>Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our awa

I'm in Mexico :/

Welcome to Europe mate. The place has always been a bit weird and I see no problem with Mexicans being considered Europeans. I'm British (we are properly strange)

May I also welcome you to the world of IP to location nonsense. Quite large chunks of IPv4 have been shuffled around the world to the point that geo location on IP is nonsense.

Europe by elimination. Not US, not South-East Asia, not Russia. Must be Europe.

A thing more oft than not forgotten about war, is the individual element. I was in my countries armed forces, while necessary. I saw many different types of commanders during that time. One thing not to forget is that a person is still a human even if a soldier. My commander ordered things I hated to do, while a person in a similar position was hung for failure to perform duty, allegedly because of his belief in human life.

Seymour Hersh, the reporter who's largely the reason we know about the My Lai massacre at all, recently published his Memoirs.

https://www.amazon.com/Reporter-Memoir-Seymour-M-Hersh/dp/03...

He's probably one of the most important investigative reporters to have ever lived.

Some of you may find the recently-staged monodrama focused on Hugh Thompson with the Kronos Quartet of interest. The NYT wrote it up [1], but excerpts can also be found elsewhere. I found it a fitting tribute to his memory.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/arts/music/my-lai-review-...

He wasn't "forgotten", he was energetically smeared and condemned by the most right-wing, racist and nationalist elements of the government, media and US population; and all of the people who committed the massacre were acquitted but one, and that one was ordered released from jail by the POTUS during trial with his life sentence ultimately commuted to 3 1/2 years of house arrest.

It's easier to think he was forgotten, than that he was hated and attacked by his own government and country.

If the latter is true, well - introspection is hard, and this is getting uncomfortable, so I guess I'll go check Twitter.

I read the wikipedia article about this article. There is picture of a woman seconds before being killed. She is with her children. She was recently sexually abused and was trying to tie her buttons. And it is really devastating. How did United States get away with this? All that captain got was a 3 years house arrest?!

If there was any justice in the world, the US officials who dictated military action in Vietnam would be tried for war crimes.

Well, that's the exception unfortunately, especially of you're on the winning side. Even in Germany, which is often held as a prime example on taking responsibility for their actions during WW2 afterwards, quite a bunch of medium to high ranked officials got away. Another example is Japan. Even fewer were prosecuted and punished for their war crimes there, even though the US were paying close attention first. It became less important after it turned out Japan could be a great ally for the US's involvements in Asia, so a lot of them could get off the hook.

If there was justice in the world, Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, and Obama would all be in The Hague, in irons.

There is no justice in the world.

Thats far too easy. In a democracy YOU are the state.

I wonder what would happen if we could live cast our military deployments so that every voter has access to every war crime committed? Maybe then people wouldn't be so quick to sign up for another war. Or they would at least be honest about it.

Watch films and TV shows where blatantly illegal actions - including Geneva convention war crimes - are committed by the heros. I'm not persuaded the public wants less of this. And politicians sometimes play to this, asking for action that's of dubious legality

Oh, I agree fully that citizens are responsible for the actions of their military, and as well those of their politicians.

The trouble is, the people always get the rulers they deserve.

I want to add to what chris_mc and others said confirming this horrible instance is used as a training exercise for lots of the US military.

When I did USMC boot camp in the late 2000s this and other less publicized examples were used to enforce disobeying unlawful orders and encouraging critical thought.

To quote a West Wing episode (AFAIK): "All wars are crimes." I'm glad we try to do better by teaching from our mistakes.

I’ve known several soldiers over the years and all had struggles with depression and possibly PTSD. I obviously wouldn’t want to present these limited data points as conclusive evidence, but I’ve been struck by the extent to which combatants pay a high price for their jobs. I feel sorry for them, because no-one tells them about this when they’re recruited. It’s a real bait and switch: promises of comraderie, glory and a trade and what you actually get is a thumping case of depression and PTSD. I don’t believe in karma, but this looks a bit like it to me.

Lets also remember Aubrey Daniel who worked hard to prosecute these war criminals.

When I hear about Vietnam, I think about the 13 young men I grew up with in a town of 6000 who didn't get a chance to be grandfathers.

Nobody 'wins'. We all LOSE.

"Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. ..."

So much for the World Wide Web.

Someone give me back the web 1.0 before 2000, please.

https://outline.com/pvdxgM

And 100% agreed, particularly for a major newspaper.

Thanks for the link. I hadn't heard of outline.com before, but seems like a useful service.

It is pretty nifty. They have a Chrome extension too, but that seems like massive overkill so I threw together a quick bookmarklet [1]. You need a decently new browser to use it.

  fetch(
    "https://outlineapi.com/parse_article?source_url=" +
      encodeURIComponent(window.location)
  )
  .then(res => res.json())
  .then(body => {
    if (body.error) {
      return alert(`Outline Bookmarklet Error: ${body.error}`);
    }
    window.location.href = `https://outline.com/${body.data.short_code}`
  })
  .catch(err => {
    alert("Outline Bookmarklet Error. See console for details.");
    console.error(err);
  });

Or minified to be copied directly into bookmark:

  javascript:fetch("https://outlineapi.com/parse_article?source_url="+encodeURIComponent(window.location)).then(o=>o.json()).then(o=>{if(o.error)return alert(`Outline Bookmarklet Error: ${o.error}`);window.location.href=`https://outline.com/${o.data.short_code}`}).catch(o=>{alert("Outline Bookmarklet Error. See console for details."),console.error(o)});

[1]: https://gist.github.com/giodamelio/c97f71a12eec5c142f21f757a...

It's not blocked here in Taiwan. I wonder if they're blocking it because of the GDPR?

Yes it is almost certainly blocked due to a misunderstanding of what the GDPR is.

“Misunderstanding”? Not necessarily. More like “not caring enough about Europe to bother researching how to comply”.

This is the natural reaction when random parts of the world decide to try to regulate what sorts of sites you’re allowed to put on the internet.

Another possibility is that they understand GDPR perfectly, and chose not to take on the immense liability associated with accepting traffic from those that are "protected" by it. It's a perfectly reasonable, logical decision, given that GDPR is a complex piece of legislation with enormous room for different interpretations under the laws of 28 unique countries, the enforcement of which is fraught with conflicts of interest.

>the immense liability associated with accepting traffic from those that are "protected" by it.

A third of the 100 most viewed US newspapers have shuttered themselves to the EU, however this mass blocking has not seemingly been the norm for newspapers or other businesses in other markets outside the EU, or noticeably stopped any businesses within it from running websites.

What makes US news media companies so fragile when faced with this particular piece of EU legislation, compared to everyone else in the world, that they would rather chuck away eyeballs for their advertisers than deal with it?

this mass blocking has not seemingly been the norm for newspapers or other businesses in other markets outside the EU, or noticeably stopped any businesses within it from running websites.

Of course people within the EU will continue to run websites under GDPR, they have no choice. Further, the reality is that enforcement will be squarely focused on importing cash from mid-to-large sized foreign companies. The anti-competitive goals of GDPR will not be achieved by fining EU companies to death - they'll be achieved by hobbling foreign competitors.

As for companies in other industries, I suspect that you're noticing a large number of US newspaper sites are blocking because they have a larger contingent of international visitors than most US sites do, and each one of those visitors could subject them to the enormous, arbitrary penalties included in the GDPR. Massive companies like Facebook and Google can afford to comply and deal with the numerous legal uncertainties associated with it (and have to because they receive a large percentage of their traffic from the EU). But for mid-tier media companies, compliance is an enormous expense, yet they are large enough that they would be an enforcement target. So they did the financially responsible thing: block the EU.

Finally, most smaller websites won't bother with blocking or complying, because they believe they will not be enforcement targets. This may or may not be the correct position to take; only time will tell.

I hope you'll blame your European leaders for that one.

It's a bit strange that we are remembering the "hero" but not the 500 or so innocent vietnamese men, women, children and infants who were raped, tortured and/or killed. Strange how we always have to make ourselves the good guys. The "heroes".

If you look at the war photos. You'll see infants. Such a horrific war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre

It's also strange that we say this is the worst event in vietnam war, when we dropped napalm on people ( chemically burning them to death ) and more than 4 million people were killed in that terrible war. God knows how many vietnamese women and children were raped. My Lai was one of thousands of my lai incidents in vietnam.

Isn’t that how it usually works. Japan remembers its war dead, we remember ours. They rember their heroes, we remember ours. Same for Soviets, Germans, British, French, Spanish, Philipinoes, Indians, Pakistanis, etc..

Since you mention the Germans: Their process of working through the past ("Vergangenheitsbewältigung") very much includes remembering the victims, massacres and non-heros, as well as embarrassement and remorse, while spending very little energy discussing the actions of positive figures. And even they are seldomly described as "heroes" ("Helden"), probably to avoid any ambiguity regarding the responsibility of the German people for the horrible events. Alas, Germany might be unique in that regard.

I have the utmost regard for Germany. I cant think of another example where the entire country acknowledged their own wrongdoings with sincerity. I have no skin in the game, but in some weird way it makes me feel proud for them

Sadly these days we have a lot of alt-right people arguing that this kind of working through the past has made us weak. In terms of WW2 they argue for recognition of all the German civilian dead in WW2.

The irony of trying to push for sympathy for German refugees in the war and at the same time disregarding the humanity of Syrian refugees is lost on them.

I see what you're saying here. But unfortunately, civilians get massacred in wars. If you laud the people who stop the massacres as heroes, you hopefully increase the odds of someone stopping the next massacre.

Finally, Hugh Thompson absolutely is a hero. Your quotes around that word are unnecessary.

Yes civilians do die in wars but the conduct of the US forces in South east Asia was pretty reprehensible by any measure. Particularly if you’ve read “Kill anything that moves” by Nick Turse

I completely agree - US forces behaved terribly during the Vietnam war. Sadly, I can't think of a war where civilians didn't get massacred. Maybe not to the same extent as in Vietnam, but massacres happen. The truly fucked up part is that there are likely many massacres that have never been reported.

Ok, so if you agree, there is no need to give the caveat "massacres happen". I recognize that you don't mean anything by it and it's a natural response when you are somehow associated with something icky to try and rationalize it. Still, it comes off as trying to soften the significance. If this was a discussion of war crimes perpetrated by some other country, would you feel compelled to point out that "massacres happen"? Americans committed the crimes, and America is responsible, period. Let's not try to blunt it. There's a measure of humility to be gained here, if we look for it, instead of a way to save face.

I'm sorry, but you completely missed the point of what I was saying.

I'm not American, so I have nothing to save face for. And 'massacres happen' is not a caveat, it is a fact. Civilians get massacred in every single war. And the military organizations involved still try to cover it up.

Consider the Haditha massacre in Iraq in 2008. A group of US Marines killed 24 civilians. And yet, despite all the tough talk about My Lai and how it's completely unacceptable, two things came out of Haditha:

- the US military tried to cover it up as soon as it happened.

- nobody served any time for their role in the massacre.

And again, as I said to conclude my last post. "The truly fucked up part is that there are likely many massacres that have never been reported."

I don't understand how that constitutes rationalizing something. Rather, as a society, we must celebrate the people who stop these massacres and human rights violations because they still happen. They have always happened.

See also: people who claim that the atomic bombings of Japan saved lives, and the people who claim that white people deserve credit for being the people who ended slavery in the United States.

As a student of WW2, millions of Japanese lives were saved by the atomic bombs:

1) Japanese military leaders were planning to continue fighting until no citizens were left: "even if the Japanese people die, their spirit will live on."

Surrender rates in previous island battles were on the order of 1% (ie. 99% killed or seriously injured.)

2) the Japanese people were facing starvation had the war continued. The early surrender helped with the rebuilding effort and prevented the nation from literally starving to death.

3) American leaders chose to bomb secondary cities, rather than completely destroy Tokyo, a capital city

4) had Russia invaded Japan, they typically would de-industrialize the enemy by transporting power plants and other facilities back to Russia

5) Japan actually refused to surrender to the USA. The emperor's broadcast never used the word, and the leader who signed the surrender document was approx. #10 in the leadership hierarchy.

The emperor was a serious amateur microbiologist and realized what an atomic bomb was, so did not need convincing that the war was lost.

(He was against starting the war with China and the USA and said so, but faced assassination and constitutional issues if he made a serious effort to change sentiment.)

This is not true, serious military figures in the US armed forces concluded that Japan was utterly defeated and was making peace feelers. They were basically defenseless at that stage of the war, against the bombing raids.

The civilian massacre could have been prevented by merely demonstrating the bomb. However they chose to experiment by dropping it on an city.

Two cities.

They didn't stop at one, they did it twice.

Sure, since they didn't surrender after the first one. And there might have been a third one...

Yeah, three days seems a reasonable time to wait before having another go after using the first nuclear bomb offensively in the history of mankind.

Stupid Japanese for not surrendering immediately...

I think it's more complicated than that. There were at least some people who were not planning to surrender. If it was up to me, I would have probably dropped it on a mostly uninhabited island near Japan. It's probably true we wanted to scare the Russians with our new super weapon.

But the big question is if Japan was close to surrendering anyway is why didn't Japan surrender after the first one, why did it take a second one?

Ernest Lawrence, who worked on the Manhattan Project (and won the Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing the cyclotron), famously recommended a non-lethal demonstration of the bombs:

> At the May 31 meeting, Lawrence suggested that a demonstration of the atomic bomb might possibly convince the Japanese to surrender. This was rejected, however, out of fear that the bomb might be a dud, that the Japanese might put American prisoners of war in the area, or that they might manage to shoot down the plane. The shock value of the new weapon could also be lost.

https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Event...

I think this ignores the historical context. The US had air control and been bombing the mainland relentlessly for a while. The firebombing of Tokyo had already caused bigger loss of life than the Hiroshima bomb did. So it was clear to both parties that the US did have the destructive capability and were willing to use it. This did not cause the Japanese to surrender. Why would it have made any difference to "demonstrate" the bomb, if actually bombing the capital and killing 100000 did not have that effect?

Even after the second bomb, just before announcing the surrender, there was an attempted coup d'etat by high ranking officers to prevent the surrender. So its not like surrender was a given after seeing a nuclear bomb.

It is only in retrospect it seems obvious that the nuclear bomb would lead to surrender. Even taking about "the decision to drop the bomb" as it was some unique moral dilemma is kind of anachronistic. Of course they were going to drop the bomb, just like they used any other weapon at their disposal.

Don't forget demonstrating both ability and willingness to the keen onlooker standing eagerly in the wings: the Soviet Union. It was ready to take on a weakened Japan in a drawn out conflict. Also, who knew what ambitions there were for Europe?

Best nip any grand ambitions in the bud.

(The Soviet Union was still some years away from having nuclear bombs.)

Tokyo was off the initial atomic bombing target list because it had already been mostly destroyed by firebombing.

This is incorrect. The Japanese were trying to negotiate surrender through the Russians, with their sole condition being that they could keep their Emperor. The Russians had not informed the USA.

The USA knew all of this, because they had cracked the Japanese codes and read their messages.

So yes, dropping the bombs was a straightforward attrocity.

All these points are fair except for #3. Tokyo was already burnt to the ground during the firebombing campaign.

History is written by victors.

Not necessarily. For example, the history of the Vietnam War is mostly written by Americans, even though the US lost.

Who deserves credit for ending slavery? Or is it no one because it was an immoral practice to start with? Or are you saying that just because a subset of white people were involved, that credit would not extend to white people as a whole? I guess I don't really see the significance of making a point of this. If someone is hurting me repeatedly, and then they decide to stop, I think they'd deserve credit for realizing they should stop. Furthermore, I'd want them to have that credit to encourage sensible acts going forward.

Also, ending slavery but then basically having effectively an analogue of apartheid right after does look like a minimal-motivation approach in retrospect.

All of America's wars since Vietnam have been horrific war.

You should put as much energy into observing the victims of Americas illegal wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, too .. America hasn't stopped killing innocent children.

Americans, however, have stopped caring about it.

Oblig: https://xkcd.com/206/

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