the reality of western wars

It is not just the reality of  the American's Vietnam War that one needs to see  and understand, though it is a good pointer to  it's wars.  The statistics  of the millions and millions killed, in  what are basically colonial wars, show the reality of  the killing machine at work .

Now, in Kill Anything that Moves, Nick Turse has for the first time put together a comprehensive picture, written with mastery and dignity, of what American forces actually were doing in Vietnam. The findings disclose an almost unspeakable truth.  Meticulously piecing together newly released classified information, court-martial records, Pentagon reports, and firsthand interviews in Vietnam and the United States, as well as contemporaneous press accounts and secondary literature, Turse discovers that episodes of devastation, murder, massacre, rape, and torture once considered isolated atrocities were in fact the norm, adding up to a continuous stream of atrocity, unfolding, year after year, throughout that country.



It has not been until the publication of Turse’s book that the everyday reality of which these atrocities were a part has been brought so fully to light. Almost immediately after the American troops arrived in I Corps, a pattern of savagery was established. My Lai, it turns out, was exceptional only in the numbers killed.

The savagery often extended to the utmost depravity: gratuitous torture, killing for target practice, slaughter of children and babies, gang rape.  Consider the following all-too-typical actions of Company B, 1st Battalion, 35th infantry beginning in October 1967:

“The company stumbled upon an unarmed young boy.  'Someone caught him up on a hill, and they brought him down and the lieutenant asked who wanted to kill him...' medic Jamie Henry later told army investigators. A radioman and another medic volunteered for the job.  The radioman... ’kicked the boy in the stomach and the medic took him around behind a rock and I heard one magazine go off complete on automatic...’

“A few days after this incident, members of that same unit brutalized an elderly man to the point of collapse and then threw him off a cliff without even knowing whether he was dead or alive...

“A couple of days after that, they used an unarmed man for target practice...

“And less than two weeks later, members of Company B reportedly killed five unarmed women...

“Unit members rattled off a litany of other brutal acts committed by the company... [including] a living woman who had an ear cut off while her baby was thrown to the ground and stomped on...”

The Fictitious War and the Real One

Roughly since the massacre at My Lai was revealed, people have debated whether the atrocities of the war were the product of decisions by troops on the ground or of high policy, of orders issued from above -- whether they were “aberrations” or “operations.” The first school obviously lends itself to bad-apple-in-a-healthy-barrel thinking, blaming individual units for unacceptable behavior while exonerating the higher ups; the second tends to exonerate the troops while pinning the blame on their superiors.

Turse’s book shows that the barrel was rotten through and through.  It discredits the “aberration” school once and for all. Yet it does not exactly offer support for the orders-from-the-top school either. Perhaps the problem always was that these alternatives framed the situation inaccurately.  The relationship between policy and practice in Vietnam was, it turns out, far more peculiar than the two choices suggest.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175639/tomgram%3A_jonathan_schell%2C_seeing_the_reality_of_the_vietnam_war%2C_50_years_late/


 This site is provided as a humanitarian public service to inform people about past, present and predicted future Muslim Holocausts and Muslim Genocides.

This site is necessary because of extraordinary lying by omission and commission by Western media, journalists, writers, academics and politicians in relation to such atrocities against Muslims and against non-European Humanity in general.

Holocaust is the destruction of a large number of people. The term was first applied to a WW2 atrocity by Jog in 1944 (Jog, N.G. (1944), Churchill’s Blind-Spot: India (New Book Company, Bombay)) in relation to the “forgotten” man-made Bengal Famine (6-7 million Indians - many of them Muslims in a "forgotten" WW2 Muslim Holocaust - deliberately starved to death by the British, 1942-1945). It was subsequently applied to the Jewish Holocaust (5-6 million killed, 1 in 6 dying from deprivation) which was part of a horrendous WW2 European Holocaust (30 million Slavs, Jews and Gypsies killed in the Nazi German Lebensraum genocide).

https://sites.google.com/site/muslimholocaustmuslimgenocide/