A 1968 massacre in Vietnam
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"347 according to the United States Army (not including Mỹ Khe killings), however others estimate that more than 500 people were killed and the number of people who were wounded is unknown; the Vietnamese government lists 504 killed in total from both Mỹ Lai and Mỹ Khe"
Makes you wonder what happened when there was no one like this guy around. Reckon there's a bunch of villages there with no one left to tell the tale.
I suppose no one there ever asked "Are we the baddies?"
Pretty amazing from the people of that nation, though, to beat three world powers in the matter of a couple decades: France, the US, China. Takes quite something to do that when your enemies will do things like this. With the gloves off it's not clear that the powers can beat locals - as Russia is finding out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_at_Hu%E1%BA%BF
The communist single-party government of Vietnam refuses to acknowledge the Hue Massacre, and persecutes Vietnamese who speak out about it:
>The Vietnamese government still does not acknowledge that a massacre took place and does not allow any public dissent from this position.
War is complicated. The Vietnam War is extremely complicated. It is good that America can face up to the crimes committed in that war by its soldiers. I hope one day the Communist Party of Vietnam can do the same.
You're right about Vietnam tho, it was a very complex war.
They thought they were fighting for freedom, we thought we were fighting communism. Perhaps if South Vietnam was less corrupt.. wishful thinking.
In the end - no one comes away with clean hands from war. No one.
At the very most favorable view of that sentiment, it's true. Completely true.
In the least favorable light, this post is trying to play down something else without evidence. Thus it's some trolling lie.
If you view attempts at nuance as "trolling lies," you might be a great fit for one-party government.
But your point is true. There are good and bad people on each side of every war.
People love to talk about how the South Vietnam government was never democratic and heavily corrupt but never seem to consider the state of the country today in that same light.
This "fact" doesn't justify those wars.
I'm surprised I have to explain this on a forum frequented by adults. Then again, in this thread we see the goofy idea that there are "good people" and "bad people"...
It's funny you accuse others of having an infantile view of the war when you seem to be espousing the unsophisticated view of "good guys and bad guys".
Me: This "fact"... in this thread we see the goofy idea that there are "good people" and "bad people"...
This was just as much of an invasion as if USA were to occupy Venezuela at the invitation of Juan Guaidó. You should ask some Vietnam veterans about this.
Have you tried evaluating the North by the same standards?
"Ho Chi Minh kicked out the French in favor of USSR, rigged elections, and instituted policies of anti-religious secular bigotry. He was never elected in a real election, rather propped up by China/USSR because he served their interests."
Also, French and American commercial interests in rubber plantations did not justify the mass murder of Vietnamese people and large-scale bribery that was required in order to install Ngô Đình Diệm as prime minister in the first place.
FWIW I won't be complaining about America if war makes its way here.
I don't see a point asking this question, given that "we" are executing unarmed women and children.
Even his views of other nations are through American eyes.
The US was there at first to buoy up France's colonialism, then later to push for "democracy/capitalism," the US's own post-WWII "colonialism."
I don't know what your last statement has to do with anything.
...although recently Kissinger seems to have grown old enough to somewhat value human life:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/24/henry-kissin...
We live in times when people want to turn the war criminal Jimmy Carter into a moral hero. Don't even talk to me about more recent shit being too far gone. Carter ended the age of the New Deal President. He introduced neoliberal economics, which most people finally realize we're suffering from now. Our bleak future is Carter's "Crisis of Confidence." It's our fault, according to Carter.
I mean, he pretty much already is, from what I've seen (palling around with celebrities, getting good press for shunning Trump, etc.)
- GWB invaded Iraq under false pretenses, and ruined the place for generations.
- Obama got Obamacare through congress, giving millions access to healthcare.
- Trump tried a coup when he lost the election.
His feed is accessible via Nitter (and via that: RSS).
There are a few variants of Twitter front-ends. Threadreader is specifically aimed at presenting longer threads. Nitter removes the annoyances of viewing a specific post and discussion (it includes replies, Threadreader does not).
I've suggested that given the increased dark patterns / hostile attitude that HN might run its own Nitter instance and proxy Twitter submissions through that.
That suggestion might also be made of YouTube (via either Invidious or Piped), and Reddit (Teddit), and Medium (Scribe). There's also Bibliogram (for Instagram), though that site gets very few successful submissions.
HN does presently rewrite all Reddit submissions (and possibly comments) to "old.reddit.com" from "www.reddit.com" to provide the old desktop interface. I increasingly view threads only through Teddit to avoid numerous Reddit annoyances --- Teddit will rewrite further links so that you're rarely if ever redirected to the broken nominal site. (I can't recall an "if ever", other workarounds such as i.reddit.com or old.reddit.com frequently land back at the new broken-by-design site.)
The North Vietnamese committed many massacres (such as at Hue), but their political leadership justified them, and they still punish people who try to talk about them.
The US military studies this and other massacres so that future leaders will be better prepared to not let something like this happen. It is not illegal to talk about this and other failures in the US. The goal is to remember and to avoid any such thing in the future.
Russia is currently using massacres and other terroristic practices in Ukraine and other countries. It is an intentional strategy.
Edited to add: not only is it incapable of holding its war criminals to account, it has an explicit law to allow itself to invade anyone trying to do that (Hague invasion act). It's not incapable, it's hostilely unwilling.
What happened in Dresden, for example, was clearly a war crime, the biggest atrocity in one attack, one bombing run (not one bomb, but one attack), ever.
There is no honest judgement. There is no reciprocity. There is only the victors writing the history and punishing the non-victors, except the ones they pardon for being valuable.
Why? Because the war didn’t happen in a vacuum. The decision became a practical one and there were more important things to do.
It goes deeper - US needs allies, everybody does. But if you position yourself above everybody else and treat rest as sub-humans (which is what effectively various US laws state), people and nations will align with you only of its convenient for them, and not for 1 second more. You will receive a lot of hatred, open and hidden. Nothing healthy for long term empire.
Lots of Dresdeners were supporters of faschism before the war and after the war. A quite vocal minority still supports neofaschism up to this day. In the 90ies they installed the myth of the "holocaust bombing" as an allied war crime, trying to turn themselves into the victims of war.
Loads of Afghans support the Taliban. Doesn't mean firebombing any city there is the proper answer to anything there.
And loads of people support the US government, the Russian government, the British government, and so on and so on. All of those countries have some absolutely massive atrocities under their belts.
And absolutely none of it is deserving of burning the flesh off civilians and children.
There is obviously an element of “the victor gets to write history” to the Nuremberg Trials. But there is still an underlying, objective truth of grave injustice, and the trials did the best that was possible under the circumstances to capture it.
Dresden, Nagasaki, My Lai, the Iraq war in its entirety: all of these were wrong, to different extends and for differing reasons. The industrial slaughter of more than four million people, intended to wipe out a culture and motivated by nothing but shallow hatred, still stands apart, incomparable.
>What happened in Dresden, for example, was clearly a war crime, ...
It would only have been a war crime if the city was undefended. Since Dresden had AA guns and fighters defending it those attacks were not war crimes. Bear in mind the same test was applied to german bomber attacks, no germans were convicted for the bombings of Coventry or London, so there was no inconsistency in the way bomber attacks by the two sides were treated.
For a counterpoint, Alexander Löhr was hanged in Belgrade after the war, in part because of the bombing of the city he commanded.
Maybe, but that was the legal standard at the time. I've no idea what the charges and evidence were levelled at Löhr beyond the few lines in Wikipedia, except that his fate seems richly deserved for numerous reasons and it seems likely many of them had a perfectly valid legal basis. If there were any lapses in legal nicety, I shed no tears over the matter.
The defense used was generally that there were legitimate military targets (eg arms factories).
Article 25 The attack or bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings which are undefended is prohibited.
Article 2 of the Hague Convention No. IX of 1907 on naval bombardments in time of war allowed naval forces to fire on certain objects even when the locality concerned was not defended.
[snip]
Generally speaking, it was possible to observe a steady shift, for bombardment to be permissible under inter- national law, from the requirement that a locality be defended to that of the presence of a military objective. 5 By the time the First World War ended, therefore, the law of air warfare had virtually lost its sole codified basis: the prohibition on dropping explosives from aircraft had become invalid and Article 25's field of application had turned out to be extremely narrow. It had been replaced by the very imprecise prin- ciple of the "military objective"
If you continue reading that document it becomes clear there were multiple attempts the codify the rules (eg the Washington Conference talks, the Hague Commission of Jurists) none of which were ratified.
However, the 1922/23 "Hague Rules of Air Warfare" (which were not ratified) are notable in that the discard the idea that defense makes any difference and switched entirely to the military objectives view, with carve-outs to try to protect civilians and monuments.
https://international-review.icrc.org/sites/default/files/S0...
In 1946 the Nüremberg International Military Tribunal stated with regard to the Hague Convention on land warfare of 1907: "The rules of land warfare expressed in the Convention undoubtedly represented an advance over existing International Law at the time of their adoption ... but by 1939 these rules ... were recognized by all civilized nations and were regarded as being declaratory of the laws and customs of war" (reprinted in AJIL, Vol. 41, 1947, pp. 248-249). The International Military Tribunal for the Far East expressed, in 1948, an identical view.
Yes.
It's worth noting that the idea of "international law" really only became a thing with the Nuremberg trials. Before that it was assumed people would do the right thing, or something...
There's no treaty or legal doctrine arguing that. That seems to be something you've made up.
The generally accepted argument for strategic bombing being a war crime is that it targets civilians which is outlawed by the Geneva Convention.
AFAIK that had never been tried in a court but that's the logic. The "it was defended" argument isn't a factor in any legal discussion I've seen.
It's the story of abominable war crimes committed by abominable US soldiers who were never held accountable for their abominable crimes.
"In April 2010, WikiLeaks released the Collateral Murder video,[4] which showed United States soldiers fatally shooting 18 civilians from a helicopter in Iraq,[85] including Reuters journalists Namir Noor-Eldeen and his assistant Saeed Chmagh. ...
The My Lai massacre also differed, I would say, from that killing in Iraq. In numbers, obviously, but also in motivation: My Lai was a sadistic masssacre, involving not just murder but also torture and rape. There was absolutely no doubt, not even for the most motivated reasoning, that the victims were innocent.
and that's why the investigation was suddenly dropped after he got thrown out of the Ecuadorian embassy
https://medium.com/@njmelzer/demasking-the-torture-of-julian...
This isn't Anti-American, this is a reminder that we should strive to do the right thing no matter the cost. "Do what's right, legally and morally."