Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre

At least 347 and up to 504 civilians, almost all women, children and elderly men, were murdered by U.S. Army soldiers. Some of the women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated, and some soldiers mutilated and raped children as young as 12.

only Lieutenant William Calley Jr., the leader of 1st Platoon in C Company, was convicted. He was found guilty of murdering 22 villagers and originally given a life sentence, but served three-and-a-half years under house arrest after his sentence was commuted.

Research has highlighted that the My Lai Massacre was not an isolated war crime. Nick Turse places it within a larger pattern of American atrocities enabled by deliberate policies from commanders, such as "free-fire zones" and "body counts", as well as widespread racism amongst American military personnel. Many other atrocities were also covered up by commanders.

Why you should know about this: It is important to know about history so that we can learn from it, avoid the mistakes and atrocities of the past, and know which institutions have a history of performing atrocities, trying to cover them up, etc. and what that looks like.

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

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.

Initial reports claimed "128 Viet Cong and 22 civilians" had been killed in the village during a "fierce fire fight". Westmoreland congratulated the unit on the "outstanding job". As relayed at the time by Stars and Stripes magazine, "U.S. infantrymen had killed 128 Communists in a bloody day-long battle."

Melvin Laird the Secretary of Defense discussed them with Henry Kissinger who was at the time National Security Advisor to President Richard Nixon. Laird was recorded as saying that while he would like "to sweep it under the rug", the photographs prevented it. "They're pretty terrible", he said. "There are so many kids just laying there; these pictures are authentic".

Inside the White House, officials privately discussed how to contain the scandal. On 21 November, Kissinger emphasized that the White House needed to develop a "game plan", to establish a "press policy", and maintain a "unified line" in its public response. The White House established a "My Lai Task Force" whose mission was to "figure out how best to control the problem", to make sure administration officials "all don't go in different directions" when discussing the incident, and to "engage in dirty tricks".

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

That sounds like something that We Should Know about.

Read The Fort Bragg Cartel if you want more info on this.

Afghanistan too.

Sorry trying to find article. I think it was US contractors doing it. Either way.

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

War. What is it good for. Absolutely nothing.

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

That's just one village.

"According to the Information Bureau of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam (PRG), a shadow government formed by North Vietnam in 1969, between April 1968 and the end of 1970 American ground troops killed about 6,500 civilians in the course of twenty-one operations either on their own or alongside their allies. "

"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."

Edit: I haven't done extensive research and as was pointed out the actual numbers might be much higher, and my figures don't include deaths and damage from Agent Orange chemicals

The US murdered over a million civilians in Iraq.

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

Why do I have that feeling that they’ll do it in Iran as well…

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

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.

Rule 2.

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

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

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

US soldiers also raped thousands of French women during WW2.

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, pushing their shit to previously unreachable corners. 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 you pirate your shit.

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

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.

For context “he” here is General Westmoreland.

| 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.

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

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.

Edit: This is not an attempt to excuse or justify their actions. All of the men (and maybe women now too) who have done these things, and the leaders who let it happen should be punished severely. I have my own ideas on that punishment, but don't want to start a debate on that.

The police protect women,

WHICH WOMEN!?

While I understand what you're trying to get at - that humans in a group can do terrible things they wouldn't do alone - what you wrote is simply not true in and of itself - 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. The reason they felt that way was because of societal conditioning.

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.

Welcome to war

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

"I broke my arm! Well a full body burn is worse. Oh, ok, I feel better now."

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.

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

Its not a war, it's a raid.

"We're not as bad as the worst of the worst" isn't the gotcha you seem to think it is.

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

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

Sure, you should make a thread about that.

Nixon is dead, we will never know.

it's a quote from a song, sorry. i was in agreement with you

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.

https://youtu.be/LwQRfckSANI

Is that what the Denzel Washington-Russel Crowe movie, American Gangster was based on?

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

ok are you a three letter operative bro

Did they harm your grandma?

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.

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)

https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/llmlp/MyLaiHearings/MyLaiHearings.pdf

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.