Murders and Rapes 500 ? Sentenced to House Arrest

[Grey Day for Elcia]

Find a recent example of the same type of situation in the US or your are complaining about nothing.

How about gunning down unarmed civilians and mocking them as they die and not being punished?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr/05/wikileaks-us-army-iraq-attack

We had a lot of long threads on that when it happened. While they may have made an identification error, it was not a war crime. There were weapons present, there was reported gunfire, they believed they identified shooting below, and so they engaged what they believed to be combatants.

As for any dark humor, that's normal. You can't kill people, even if they are trying to kill you, and still have a functional mental state if you don't have a release valve. You want dark humor, visit any trench from any army at any time in history. Also making fun of people isn't a war crime.

"Woops. Guess that was just a camera. Guess that guy wasn't holding an RPG. Guess those guys trying to pick up their dying friend and take him to help wern't so bad. Ah well. What's a dozen dead human beings?"

"Boy, it sure is much easier to invade this country and blow people's brains out from this plane if I call them names. It might be difficult otherwise."

Yeah, that's perfectly fine.

God I hate America.

Oh and there were two children in the van they decided to shoot the hell out of for no reason.

 

[Woodsey]

Uh... yeah. My Lai is pretty infamous.

 

[dobahci]

I applaud your effort to bring more attention to this, especially on a gamer site where people tend to be oblivious and apathetic to anything that occurs outside of their little bubble.

Ideally this kind of thing would never happen, and all soldiers only kill enemy combatants in war, and treat their POWs with the utmost comfort and respect, and so on. But just how far do you take that? War by its very nature implies breaking fundamental human laws. It engenders a situation in which people feel they can carry out such actions and later justify them on the grounds of being necessary. We have tried to codify certain basic laws of war in Hague and Geneva and so on, but it's an imperfect solution.

The same rules we use to judge the My Lai Massacre as a war crime could be used to declare the bombing of Hiroshima a war crime as well, yet the latter is usually considered a minority argument rather than the mainstream view.

 

[Grey Day for Elcia]

The same rules we use to judge the My Lai Massacre as a war crime could be used to declare the bombing of Hiroshima a war crime as well, yet the latter is usually considered a minority argument rather than the mainstream view.

Pretty sure the few thousand civilians (who made up the 80% of murdered individuals the day of the explosion) would agree that it was indeed a crime.

 

[Zakarath]

Yeah, the world is a cold place sometimes. War, especially.
So it goes.

 

[LostCrusader]

The same rules we use to judge the My Lai Massacre as a war crime could be used to declare the bombing of Hiroshima a war crime as well, yet the latter is usually considered a minority argument rather than the mainstream view.

Pretty sure the few thousand civilians (who made up the 80% of murdered individuals the day of the explosion) would agree that it was indeed a crime.

Pretty sure anyone who dies in war would call it a crime. There is a reason nuclear weapons are not used by anyone now, everyone knows how horrible they really are.

 

[Grey Day for Elcia]

As for the kids in the van, if the targets were valid targets, so was the vehicle they were heading towards unless there was a big red cross/moon/crystal on it.

Yeah, because it's not like you can see the two kids sitting in the van- oh wait, you can. Ah well, we don't want that one wounded camera guy to get taken to hospital and returned to his family! Blow that van up and kill his friends!

The scumbag murderers even remarked about how it was the parents fault for "bringing kids to a warzone." IT'S THEIR FUCKING HOME. The guy was taking pictures for Christ sake.

You want me to post a few more links of American 'soldiers' (read: murderers) killing innocent people and later going "whoops, my bad"?

"Put on a helmet, get in that foxhole and we'll tell you when we need you to kill someone. You are thugs and when we need you to blow up a nation of little brown people, we'll let you know!"​

 

[Caliostro]

Mylai is a pretty well known case.

And yes, it was bad. It was pretty horrible and disgusting. It was war. The idea that you can have a "clean" war is ludicrous. You either go to war or you don't. If you go to war you go to win. Isn't that how the saying goes? All is fair in love and war. It's not like the vietcong was above using shock tactics themselves.

Whether that war had any legitimacy to it or not, that's a different matter entirely.

 

[Grey Day for Elcia]

War, War never changes.

Soldiers cannot be held accountable unless they act outside of orders. They are in no position to say no or reject as that would land them in prison. Thus only officers are accountable for such things. It's horrible and the people who did it are despicable. But you as a civilian who was not there is in no position to judge at all. Ive never seen combat or been in a war as savage is Vietnam, hopefully I never will be. But I can't judge them as theres so many factors we cannot understand or see.

You weren't in WWII, so we can't judge the actions of Nazi death camp guards, yeah? After all, you've "never seen combat or been in a war as savage is Vietnam" and you can't judge because "theres so many factors we cannot understand or see."

If it's understandable why a group of men would follow orders to utterly destroy a village and brutally murder every single man, woman and child there, going so far as to mutilate some of them, so to is it understandable that some guys followed orders and forced Jews into the ovens.

No. Just no. If someone says "hey, you should go slaughter those kids," you take a fucking second to rethink that.

 

[dobahci]

No, it can't. My Lai was a clear war crime as the order was specifically aimed at civilians.

Hiroshima was a valid military target:

The issue might be settled for you, but it's not settled for everyone. The argument has been made that Hiroshima was a war crime and it is still being made to this day, and still being debated over.

Here's a quote by Leo Szilard, who was involved with the Manhattan Project:

"Let me say only this much to the moral issue involved: Suppose Germany had developed two bombs before we had any bombs. And suppose Germany had dropped one bomb, say, on Rochester and the other on Buffalo, and then having run out of bombs she would have lost the war. Can anyone doubt that we would then have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them?"

But we need to take a bigger look at the whole thing than to simply judge individual events or label specific countries (i.e. America) as terrible murderers. The central crime is war itself. There is no such thing as a justified war.

 

[Colour Scientist]

I thought My Lai was kinda well known. There are books about it and everything.

Ask a few random people the following:

"What is My Lai?"

It's heartbreaking that so many people were so brutally massacred and your average person has no damn clue. If it happens in America, the world hears about it for a week. Happens somewhere else or at the hands of Americans, "these things happen."

It's actually one of the most well known cases of brutality, especially from Vietnam. It inspired novels and documentaries. If I was to start quizzing you on other, non-American related massacres would you know them straight off the bat? There are thousands of examples of atrocities like this and while that doesn't make them any less horrific you can't blame the general public for not keeping track of them.

Spoiler

EDIT:

16/03/68

The village that played host to the brutal massacre, My Lai.

Also, the village wasn't called My Lai.

 

[Grey Day for Elcia]

I'm still waiting for you to show me ONE case in the last decade or so where a Mylai like situation happened at the hands of US forces.

Number of dead civilians in Iraq since the U.S. invaded: 110,000.

Civilian deaths in an area where United Kingdom troops served over a four year period: 3334.

Civilian deaths in an area where United States troops served over a four year period: 80,000.

God bless America.[/sarcasm]

 

[dyre]

Oh, it's you again with your "controversial" threads based on really obvious shit. Everyone and their dog knows about My Lai

What do you get out of making shitty threads like this?