The second most moral army on Earth

After the war every single single Vietnam vet should have been stripped of citizenship and deported back to Vietnam in chains to spend the rest of their lives buck ass naked out in the jungle disarming UXO at gunpoint for 18 hours a day.

Hexbear: 4 comments

Lemmy: 64 comments

it doesn’t end there!

American Rape of Vietnamese Women was Considered “Standard Operating Procedure”

i’d include a quote here but every sentence in this article is more horrible than the last. i recommend you (the entity reading this reply) read this article if discussion of rape and war do not bother you. towards the end, it details how american media (especially movies) worked to downplay (and even invert!!!) these atrocities.

English translation: “For services in Song Mi”

I was just reading about the My Lai massacre of 1968.

Not to "whatabout...." this scene, but the Danish movie "Land of Mine" was very thought provoking for me in a lot of ways.

It follows German POWs, post WWII, forced to clear mines from the beaches. Their country did indeed place the mines, but these people forced to clear them were not the actual people who placed them, certainly didn't call for them to be placed there, and the Danish government knew they were not trained in landmine disposal. Many were killed in the process, and the whole practice was against the Geneva Convention. They were promised to be freed after clearing the beach but were then shipped off to other beaches to continue this dangerous work. The film was made at one of the actual beaches, and a real mine was discovered during filming.

I don't particularly enjoy war movies, but I feel the good ones show us the ways that all our leaders have forced or conned regular people into doing horrible things in the name of their country, but when we look back in hindsight and see it was a damn lie, it still never changes anything. Every country is guilty of it, and photos like the one above or the movie I mention can be good reminders, hopefully before more people get forced into these situations.

Conversely, Joyeux Noël about the WWI Christmas Truce was great, in seeing all sides grasping the pointlessness of the situation they were placed in and uniting as individuals in peace and friendship surrounding their shared values until the leadership on all sides found out what was going on and declared peace was an unacceptable outcome of war and had to stop at once.

Individuals undoubtably are capable of atrocities, but I think it's very seldom they came up with those ideas on their own, as opposed to cowards far away in a room somewhere forcing others to be their pawns in some pointless game nobody else really wanted to play.