Life, Love, and Liberty

“Re: Vietnam war (was Re: [LeftLibertarian2] Re: Justin Raimondo)

tony_hollick wrote:

> I do want you to understand that I _do_ understand the point
> you’re making.

I’m not at all sure that you do, since if you did, it would be much
harder to make sense of responding with this:

> I do not believe that the pilot who dropped the napalm that
> burned the little girl worke up that morning and thought: “Let’s go
> out today and deliberately napalm some children.” I believe he flew a
> mission, and was directed erroneously by the Forward Air Controllers
> to drop his bombs on what were believed to be military targets.

Well, hey, at least his heart was in the right place.

If you are claiming that someone is acting as “the defense” in a
particular conflict, then it ought to make some difference to you
whether the violence that they use actually succeeds in defending anyone
against anything, whether or not the means that they select are
appropriate to the task of proportional defense, whether or not the
people–the *actual individual people*, not The People in the mythical
political sense–that they claim to be defending ever actually asked for
their protection, or asked to be protected in the way that their
“defenders” set about protecting them, whether or not the putative
defenders actually tend to succeed, or had any realistic hope of
succeeding, in protecting those individual people as claimed, etc. Their
private thoughts and hopes have a lot less to do with any of this than
their outward actions and the context of those actions, particularly the
context of how those actions affect those they are putatively
protecting, and whether those they are putatively protecting ever wanted
that kind of “defense.”

My question is what the (ARVN, under a U.S. chain of command) pilot who,
as per the requirements of his mission, dropped napalm on the village of
Trang Bang, and then wheeled around and — oops! my bad! — burned the
fleeing refugees alive, mistaking a crowd of screaming children (among
them Phan Thi Kim Phuc) and ARVN soldiers for a military target, was
actually defending, and what he was defending it against. If you think
that incendiary bombardment of villages — knowingly and deliberately
burning people’s homes, and running a substantial and perfectly
predictable risk of burning the people themselves alive — villages
where few or none of the people, and especially not the people ruined,
maimed, or killed by the bombardment, ever asked for your “defense” –
is a good way of defending individual people’s lives or livelihoods,
then I think it obvious that you are trying to get to a predetermined
conclusion rather than reasoning in good faith.

Judging from the means, mission, and context, I think it is perfectly
clear what the ARVN and the U.S. military were trying to defend at the
burning of Trang Bang. It wasn’t Phan Thi Kim Phuc, or much of anyone in
Trang Bang. It was the U.S. occupation and the south Vietnamese State,
both of which were separate from, parasitic upon, and generally hostile
to, ordinary people like Phan Thi Kim Phuc. But if you think that I give
a good god damn about the “defense” of either of those, particularly
when the human cost of that defense is what’s happening in that photo
and in millions of unrecorded “missions” of fire, maiming, and death,
forgotten now by everyone but the surviving victims, the kind of
missions that immediately turned “It became necessary to destroy the
village in order to save it” into cliché, then you’ve got another think
coming.

> The little girl recovered from her awful injuries, and has
> visited the West, giving interviews.

Yes, I know that she has. She wouldn’t have except that someone who had
nothing to do with the military assault — Nick Út, the Vietnamese AP
photographer who took the photograph — took her and the other surviving
children to a hospital in Saigon, where surgeons exhibited actual
heroism and defense by defying all odds (it was initially believed she
could not have survived such severe burns) by saving her life.

Many of the children who were burned alive at Trang Bang were not as
fortunate as Phan Thi Kim Phuc. Many of them, including two of Kim
Phuc’s cousins, died in the bombardment.

> Lt. Calley’s misconduct was brought to trial after the bravery
> of a helicopter pilot there, and has recently been released from
> prison.

Yes, again, I know. Thompson’s decision to put himself in the line of
fire in order to defend villagers from rampaging U.S. “defense”, and his
decision to report what happened, is a good example of genuine heroism
and a genuine effort to defend realm people from aggression. The U.S.
military command’s well-known reaction to the report — a year and a
half of white-washing, stonewalling, downplaying, and conscious deceit,
until Seymour Hersh’s investigative report finally forced their hand –
is not.

> Ten million Germans were killed during WWII. Between half a
> million and a million German prisoners-of-war were murdered in US and
> British prison camps _after_ WWII had ended, and after they had
> surrendered in response to air-dropped Safe Conduct passes (James
> Bacque, “Other Losses”). Every female in Berlin between the ages of
> 14 and 55 was raped, usually many times, by Red Army “liberators.”
> Between nine million and fourteen million Germans died _after_ the war
> from the deliberate withholding of fertilizer and farming tools.
>
> Was smashing the Nazi State worth the price? You tell us.

The price to whom? Worth it for whom?

It may well be that the price to 40,000 people in Dresden was worth it
for you. But I’m not sure that you’re the one that should be asked.

Since I didn’t pay the price, I wouldn’t presume to say what would be
worth it or wouldn’t be worth it. But, as a logical matter, I certainly
wouldn’t recognize the savage conquest of half of Europe for Stalin’s
Red Empire, or the aerial terror-war that the RAF and US Army waged
against German cities, or the deliberately brutal occupation of Germany
by the corporativist-Stalinist Alliance, as examples of what you might
call “the defense.” And I think it’s interesting that you would treat it
as just obvious that an anarchist, of all people, would somehow just
have to concede the moral legitimacy of the conduct of the governments
involved in the single most destructive war in the entire history of the
world, no matter what the human cost inflicted upon innocent bystanders.

-C”

~ Charles Johnson

“Even today, America is certainly among the best places to live inside, despite its many troubles. For one thing, we still have many freedoms, at least tacitly, that most other countries do not. For another, living in America, we have much less a chance of being bombed by the U.S. government than do foreigners.”

~ Anthony Gregory

That last point gave me a real laugh. I am not sure if Anthony intended it to be funny or not though. It’s actually quite true!