50 Years Later What Can We Learn from the My Lai Massacre?

Published on Friday, March 16, 2018

by Common Dreams

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/03/16/50-years-later-what-can-we-learn-my-lai-massacre

[Photo taken by United States Army photographer Ronald L. Haeberle on March 16, 1968 in the aftermath of the My Lai massacre showing mostly women and children dead on a road. (Photo: Ronald Haeberle/Wikimedia Commons)]

On March 16, 1968, platoons from the army’s Charlie and Bravo companies began an assault on the village of Son My and particularly the hamlet of My Lai in South Vietnam.  Without encountering a single act of resistance from Viet Cong guerrillas, the American soldiers brutally killed roughly 504 Vietnamese civilians, including pregnant women and 210 children under the age of 13, among them, babies.  Women were brutalized and gang raped and the village was burned to the ground.  Lieutenant William Calley ordered his men to herd village residents into a ditch and left them with the order, “You know what I want you to do with them.”  Confused, the men failed to act until Calley returned and told them to “waste them,” opening fire himself.  The soldiers obeyed.

The massacre produced heroic actions by a few American soldiers, most notably Hugh Thompson.  From his reconnaissance helicopter, Thompson and his crew were alarmed by what they saw happening on the ground.  Landing the helicopter, Thompson stood between American soldiers and a group of villagers they had rounded up.  Ordering his crew to open fire on the Americans if they began shooting the villagers, Thompson rescued the Vietnamese civilians.

Army brass rebuffed complaints Thompson filed.  The military’s official version of the incident, published in several American newspapers, was that the Americans had killed 128 enemy soldiers.

However, one helicopter gunner named Ron Ridenhour began to hear about the massacre back in base camp.  After cautiously gathering information while still in Vietnam, Ridenhour wrote letters detailing the massacre to 30 government and military officials.  Most were never answered, but Ridenhour’s Congressman, Morris Udall, followed up by urging a formal military inquiry.  The secret investigation of Lieutenant Calley’s role led to his arrest for premeditated murder.

Tipped off about the investigation in late October 1969, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh interviewed Calley, Ridenhour and several soldiers who had been at My Lai.  Hersh’s widely published stories along with army photographer Ron Haeberle’s photos horrified millions at a time when the antiwar movement was at a peak and a majority of Americans believed the war to be a mistake.  Still, from that point forward media coverage was dominated by Calley’s trial and eventual conviction in 1971.  Many on the left maintained that Calley was being scapegoated to protect the military chain of command, while many on the right attacked the mass media or hailed Calley as a hero and flooded the Nixon White House with demands for his release.  Calley served only three and a half years of his initial life sentence, most of it in his own quarters.

Military brass quickly distinguished between the “isolated incident” of “murder” at My Lai and normal conduct of the war in Vietnam.  However, many veterans came forward to acknowledge that the killing of large numbers of civilians was a routine part of the American war.  As the Vietnam Veterans Against the War put it at their Winter Soldier Hearings, “My Lai was not an isolated incident,” but “only a minor step beyond the standard official United States policy in Vietnam.”

Indeed the destruction and poisoning of the Vietnam countryside and slaughter of the Vietnamese people is the most appalling feature of the American war.  By best estimates, more than 2 million Vietnamese civilians were killed in the war and more than an additional 2 million were wounded.  In addition to ground search and destroy missions, the United States dropped on Vietnam 1.5 times the tonnage of bombs the Allies dropped in all of World War II, along with 20 million gallons of Agent Orange and other poisonous herbicides, and an estimated 400,000 tons of napalm.

As we know, American ground units in particular suffered greatly, as well.  58,000 soldiers were killed, about 300,000 were wounded (21,000 permanently disabled) and 830,000 have had to struggle with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, as did many involved in the My Lai killings.

Vietnam remembers My Lai with the Son My Vestige Site, a somber museum and green space where photographs, sculptures, mass grave sites, villagers’ relics, and foundations of 18 destroyed homes are on display.

If the Vietnamese remember My Lai this way, how might My Lai be relevant to the United States today?  While it is horrifying that American soldiers responded to what they perceived as orders to “kill everything in the village” by doing just that, what of the morality of killing or maiming civilians as a routine function of warfare?

Historically, World War II was the difference maker.  About 15% of World War I casualties were civilians; most of the time soldiers simply slaughtered each other across “no man’s land.”  By the end of World War II, however, with vast “improvements” in weaponry and air power, 65% of all victims were civilians, according to the landmark 1996 United Nations report; by the 1990s more than 90% of war casualties were civilians.  The carnage of World War II prompted the participants to establish the Geneva Conventions, protecting civilians from “violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture,” as well as “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.”

So what does this mean for American wars or quasi-covert wars and military strikes in Central America, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, and Yemen which have produced hundreds of thousands of innocent civilian casualties?  Are not these war crimes according to the Geneva Conventions?  And what of the government’s repeated efforts to hide these casualties from us, and the mass media’s complicity in this?  Not only do American military attacks in the Middle East help to produce the spreading threat of blowback against Americans, but American soldiers continue to suffer from profound physical and emotional damage.  A contemporary term for the latter is “moral injury,” particularly relevant in wars where little distinction can be (or is) made between enemy fighters and civilians.

Is not this country suffering from moral injury?  Isn’t it time we had a full and open reckoning with this history?

GOP's Biggest Lie: Republican Tax Plan Reveals the Rot Is Deep

Published by Salon, December 2, 2017:
https://www.salon.com/2017/12/02/the-gops-biggest-lie-republican-tax-plan-reveals-the-rot-is-deep/

The “Big Lie” has been most closely associated with the Nazis' incessant propaganda campaign about an international Jewish “war of annihilation” against Germany, a campaign that brought the totalitarian Nazi regime to power and paved the way for the Holocaust.  In assessing Adolph Hitler’s psyche, the U. S. Office of Strategic Services reported,

His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

Sound like anyone you know?

On Nov. 22, Donald Trump declared, “We’re going to give the American people a huge tax cut for Christmas … a great big, beautiful Christmas present.”  This is one among many lies Trump has bleated about the tax cut -- a con job designed to appeal to Americans who struggle to make ends meet, whether they be unemployed or underemployed, the elderly, working or middle class, or poor.  In reality, the Trump/Republican Party tax cut, whatever final form it takes, is a pack of lies and distortions designed to further enrich the wealthiest Americans and solidify the takeover of our government by corporate wealth.

What makes this a Big Lie is its repetition over a period of 35 years of “supply-side economics,” years marked by an unprecedented upward redistribution of income and wealth and the growth of staggering inequality.

We know the wealthy are the chief beneficiaries of this tax cut.  According to the Tax Policy Center, the top 1 percent receive 34 percent of the corporate tax cut benefit, and the top 20 percent receive 70 percent of the benefit. Eliminating the estate tax only benefits those individuals with wealth exceeding $5 million ($10 million for married couples).  Eliminating the alternative minimum tax gets rid of the very tax created to prevent the wealthy from getting away with paying no taxes at all.  If it were removed in 2015, for example, Donald Trump would have been $31 million richer and taxed at 3.5 percent.  By contrast, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, those with incomes below $75,000 will be paying higher taxes by 2027.

The only possible legitimation for such a blatantly inequitable tax is the claim that cutting taxes on corporations and the wealthy will produce investment and job growth; not surprisingly Trump claims the tax cut will produce 10.5 percent growth in GDP over 10 years.  By contrast, the Urban/Brookings Tax Policy Center predicts 0.3 percent growth over 10 years.  When the non-partisan Congressional Research Services tracked tax rates from 1945 to 2010, they found that cutting the top tax rates had no positive effect on economic growth or the growth of savings, investment or productivity. Corporate CEOs themselves have acknowledged that they would use new revenue to buy back shares, retire debt, and issue shareholder dividends – i.e., benefiting Wall Street and its clients, not Main Street where we live and work.

It's 1967 All Over Again: The Roots of Our Current Divide Go Back 50 Years

Sunday, Sep 17, 2017 

Published by Salon

As a college student in 1967, “fifty years ago” meant 1917 and World War I, a time and event far from any direct connection with me. To young people today, 1967 must seem as distant and largely irrelevant.

Yet both years were profoundly important turning points in the life of this nation. 1917 marked the entry of the United States into World War I — perhaps the bloodiest, most pointless war in human history — and into a far more significant, militaristic global role.

While 1968 gets more attention from historians, 1967 saw important shifts in the nation’s politics that have shaped the world we live in today.

As the purveyors of public history, mass media reflections on 1967 typically emphasize popular culture and celebrities: Muhammed Ali stripped of his heavyweight title, the release of the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper,” the first rock festival at Monterey, the Summer of Love, the release of “The Graduate, etc.”  These brief glimpses fail to convey the historical context that produced events like these.

Yet two new films, Ken Burns’ “The Vietnam War” and Kathryn Bigelow’s “Detroit,” remind us that there are still conversations we need to have and lessons we need to learn from this past. Both films remind us of the roots of today’s Black Lives Matter movement and the never-ending American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

1967 marked the fourth consecutive “long, hot summer” of urban uprisings, epitomized by the decade’s two most destructive riots, in Newark and Detroit. While the national media had ignored inner-city life prior to the riots, the nation watched in horror as saturation coverage provided staggering footage of the cities burning, residents gleefully looting, and federal troops and National Guard crushing these urban rebellions.

Beyond Resistance: Toward A More Unified Left

March 31, 2017
 
The abominable Trump administration has generated the broadest sweep of active opposition and resistance since the long era of the 1960s.  A quick sampling of The Resistance Calendar reveals the nature and vast scope of this resistance. 

Bold resistance is important in and of itself.  It also becomes a crucial catalyst for mass movement take-off: the sense that change is possible.  The more resistance there is, the more likely it is that others will join in.

But resistance is not enough.  As outrageous and dangerous as Donald Trump is, we need to recognize that much of the current political regime has been in power for a long time, and they represent forces that began to redefine our politics in response to the last time we experienced a comparable surge of public protest across a wide range of political issues— the long era of the 1960s.

By itself, resistance is also difficult to sustain for long in the face of systemic intransigence.  Too easily, its demands will be redefined by the forces that shape our political discourse and our two dominant political parties.  

The issues people are addressing –racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, healthcare, economic inequality, war and militarism, union organizing, fracking, pipeline expansion, gerrymandering, public education, deregulation, and looming above it all, climate change and ecological deterioration— are far too critical to leave to those forces.

We find ourselves at a moment when conditions are so grave that the United States must turn a corner and launch into a new and far more democratic direction.  The time for a continuing see-saw between centrist-liberal Democrats and right-wing Republicans has passed.  The current upsurge of resistance has great potential to be the catalyst for this change of course.

Personal Reflections of an Antiwar Activist on Visiting Vietnam in 2017

While I can’t claim to have experienced the war our soldiers experienced, the U.S. war in Vietnam had a profound and painful impact on my life.  I grew up in the shadow of the glorified role played by the United States in World War II.  I embraced that role and participated in Memorial Day marches and ceremonies as a young Boy Scout.

                When I first attended Oberlin College as a freshman in 1964-65, I encountered a campus highly politicized in the aftermath of Mississippi Freedom Summer.  I joined in idealistic campus activism.  However, in February, 1965, when the United States announced that it had begun bombing North Vietnam, I encountered a very small group of dark-clad protesters against the war at Oberlin’s traditional protest site, the Memorial Arch.  My instinctive reaction was: who were these few people who felt they knew more than the State Department about Southeast Asia?  I acted on that instinct by standing as a counter-protester with a sign that read “Here’s one Young Democrat who supports the Johnson Administration.”

Like most Americans I hadn’t yet encountered anything that might contradict my naiveté, but I began to listen to classmates who read material I hadn’t been exposed to; I began to pay closer attention to the Vietnam “crisis” the media were now calling a “war.”  Before long, I had become a skeptic, a “dove,” who believed U.S. intentions were good in the struggle with the Communist Soviet Union but had been misapplied in a Vietnam struggle where at best our nation’s efforts seemed counterproductive.

It wasn’t much longer before I had learned enough about the war to realize that the stated “intentions” were a cover for an immoral assault on the nation and peoples of Vietnam (and, soon, Laos and Cambodia).  As my learning deepened about the war, it had three effects on me.  One was that it shattered my earlier belief in my nation’s “noble” foreign policy; it shattered the world I had grown up in and left me feeling that my country now viewed me as “anti-American.”  This was and is an enduring, painful part of my coming of age –like learning some terrible dark secret about a family member you have loved and looked up to as a child.