My Lai Massacre

[Vyacheslav Brolotov]

Today marks the 44th anniversary of the My Lai Massacre that occured in the Sơn Mỹ village of South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. This crime against humanity can be blamed on the United States Army soldiers of the Charlie Company of 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, and 11th Brigade of the Americal Division, but more widely on the imperialist United States and its anti-communist allies. The Vietnamese government lists 504 innocent people, mostly women, children, babies, and the elderly, were killed in total from both the killings in Mỹ Lai and Mỹ Khe. This is what imperialism looks like:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6d/Dead_man_and_child_from_the_My_Lai_massacre.jpg/800px-Dead_man_and_child_from_the_My_Lai_massacre.jpg

In a attempt to maintain a colony in South Vietnam, despite local popular sentiment, the United States and other capitalist nations led an assault not only against the liberation forces of Ho Chi Mihn and the Viet Cong, but against the people of the whole of Vietnam. I think we should take this day to remember not only these victims of imperialism, but all of them from throughout history. We must stand and say no to any more United States imperialistic adventures. Never again must this happen.

A civil discussion should be commenced on the topic.

[Bostana]

WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?!?!?!

all the United States was doing was trying to help the people
:D

On a serious not though this is a sad and tragic event in history.

[Comrade Samuel]

Interesting, I could of sworn we had another imperialist war where civilians are being killed by American soldier(s) going right now.

[Prometeo liberado]

The only thing shocking about this is that the american public seems to think that maybe the next war will be different. A broken record spinning for years and years and the country still hasn't learned the words.

[Dire Helix]

Every Soviet schoolboy knew about this as Song Mi massacre. Do American school textbooks have anything on this and No Gun Ri massacre(I think I already know what the answer will be)?


The only thing shocking about this is that the american public seems to think that maybe the next war will be different.

Do they even care? Middle-class petty-bourgeois in any country are only concerned with their own well-being.

[Prometeo liberado]

When it came to light the country was pretty shaken. But as far as caring on a long term basis, no. It was seen more as an aberration than anything systemic.

[Ostrinski]

We learned about My Lai in a few of my history classes but no one seemed to care. My teachers taught it kinda nonchalantly. I agree with jbeard. People viewed it as an atrocity but for some reason felt like it was a deviation from the norm of the gallant American soldier, that it was isolated incident, and that all the soldiers needed was a good whack on the wrist and it wouldn't happen again. Pretty naive.

[Vyacheslav Brolotov]

Oh, and one of the biggest pieces of bullshit that some people say about My Lai is that the United States learned its lesson and never did something like that again.

[Zealot]

The so-called Vietnam War should be renamed the American War, as it is rightfully known in Vietnam. Eventually, the Vietnamese people swept the Fascist brood of genocidal imperialists out of Vietnam and proclaimed the Socialist Republic. A crushing defeat for imperialism that will be remembered till the end of time, along with the immortal contributions and inspiration of Comrade Ho Chi Minh.

Let's not forget that the May Lai Massacre wasn't the only massacre; the entire war was.

[Revolutionair]

Let's not forget that the May Lai Massacre wasn't the only massacre; the entire war was.

I've heard that there were more bombs used in Vietnam than in Europe during WW2, is this true?


There were more bombs dropped in the Vietnam War than there were in Europe during World War II.
http://www.omg-facts.com/view/Facts/44574


It is 28 years since the United States ended its air war on Laos - a bombardment in which American B52s and other aircraft dropped more bombs than fell on all of Europe during World War II. Up to 30% of those bombs failed to detonate.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/1100842.stm

[Zealot]

I've heard that there were more bombs used in Vietnam than in Europe during WW2, is this true?

Yeah I've heard that too. The US was waging a secret war against the Pathet Lao, the Laos equivalent of the Viet Minh, and carpet bombed the country. Unbelievably, a lot of it was also done out of laziness. American bombers whose attacks had been called off would dump their loads over Laos.

Calling the war the "Vietnam War" really makes it appear as if it was only in Vietnam when the fact is that the war was all over Indochina. But in Laos they also failed and the Monarchists stepped down from power shortly after the capture of Saigon in South Vietnam.

[Krano]

RIP all those innocent people who were massacred by the US army.

Yeah I've heard that too. The US was waging a secret war against the Pathet Lao, the Laos equivalent of the Viet Minh, and carpet bombed the country. Unbelievably, a lot of it was also done out of laziness. American bombers whose attacks had been called off would dump their loads over Laos.

Laos is still demining there fields to this date thats how much they dropped there.

[l'Enfermé]

I've heard that there were more bombs used in Vietnam than in Europe during WW2, is this true?


http://www.omg-facts.com/view/Facts/44574


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/1100842.stm
It is true, the same is true of the Korean War also. The My Lai massacre was only one of the thousands of massacres committed by US troops in Indochina, albeit one that received some media attention. And to RedScare, although the USSR, after Stalin, was not as bad as the US and it's satellites, when you mention things like that, you shouldn't forget that Soviet schoolboys weren't taught of massacres committed by the Soviet Union either. The USSR wasn't so innocent in this regard.

[Zulu]

The US was waging a secret war against the Pathet Lao, the Laos equivalent of the Viet Minh, and carpet bombed the country. Unbelievably, a lot of it was also done out of laziness. American bombers whose attacks had been called off would dump their loads over Laos.

That wasn't due to laziness. They were deliberately expending the munitions so that certain firms back in the homeland could secure state contracts for more.

Also, remember those millions Pol Pot supposedly massacred? Well, just some of it may have something to do with this:

http://www.us-foreign-policy-perspective.org/uploads/RTEmagicC_cambodia-bomb-map_02.jpg.jpg

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

Oh, and one of the biggest pieces of bullshit that some people say about My Lai is that the United States learned its lesson and never did something like that again.

Yeah, i agree the Mai Lai massacre is a horrible happening. But, i don't like to talk about the Mai Lai massacre so much, because Mai Lai was a glimpse of the Imperialist aggression. The real thing one should keep in mind is that Mai Lai was a high ranking order in the follow of "Search and Destroy" where high ranking U.S. officials literally made it Policy to burn down whole villages very well knowing this atmosphere stimulated mass rape and genocide. I guess you also know that 1/3 of the mangrove forests in all of South Vietnam were destroyed by chemical weapons by the americans, the whole thing (at least in my observation) was a top down "Barbarossa" style cleansing of "guerrilla" villages or villages that might have had some partisans in it. Very much like the "Barbarossa" Nazist invasion of the Soviet Union in my opinion.

[Sixiang]

Every Soviet schoolboy knew about this as Song Mi massacre. Do American school textbooks have anything on this and No Gun Ri massacre(I think I already know what the answer will be)?

It was never mentioned in my high school or elementary school textbooks or classes. In fact, we never even studied the Vietnam War. It was just disgustingly nationalist support of the American Revolution, a lot of talk about the civil war, briefly mentioning WWI, talk a lot about WWII, talk about how the 1950's were the best time ever. End the class. That's what they taught deep in the heart of conservative America where I went to Catholic school. I didn't hear anything about My Lai until last semester of college when someone did a report on it in my U.S. history class from 1865 to the present. It was mentioned in my textbook because it was written by a great Marxist historian, Eric Foner.


I've heard that there were more bombs used in Vietnam than in Europe during WW2, is this true?


http://www.omg-facts.com/view/Facts/44574


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/1100842.stm
Yes it is true. The U.S. airforce was often told to just drop off excess bombs wherever they felt like it. And the Laotian government is still dealing with those undetenated bombs. Their government has a department that exists solely to traverse the countryside, finding these bombs and mines and take them off of farm lands where people still stab shovels into the Earth.


Yeah I've heard that too. The US was waging a secret war against the Pathet Lao, the Laos equivalent of the Viet Minh, and carpet bombed the country. Unbelievably, a lot of it was also done out of laziness. American bombers whose attacks had been called off would dump their loads over Laos.

Calling the war the "Vietnam War" really makes it appear as if it was only in Vietnam when the fact is that the war was all over Indochina. But in Laos they also failed and the Monarchists stepped down from power shortly after the capture of Saigon in South Vietnam.
Hopefully future history books will correctly refer to it as the Southeast Asian-U.S. War.

[l'Enfermé]

That wasn't due to laziness. They were deliberately expending the munitions so that certain firms back in the homeland could secure state contracts for more.

Also, remember those millions Pol Pot supposedly massacred? Well, just some of it may have something to do with this:

http://www.us-foreign-policy-perspective.org/uploads/RTEmagicC_cambodia-bomb-map_02.jpg.jpg
What the fuck is wrong with you? Pol Pot literally killed 20% of the Cambodian population in just 3 years and would have killed more unless Vietnam invaded and removed him. Are you gonna paint him as some sort of Communist hero? The fuck forcefully removed proletarians from cities into the countryside and worked them to death...

But of course, you'll have Stalinists come here and go make up excuses for genocides, or pretend they didn't happen. Why am I the only person around here that doesn't find this sort of behaviour acceptable?

[u.s.red]

Pol Pot removed the bourgeois apologists, like yourself, into the countryside and killed a lot of them. One of the reasons, among many, was the bourgeois practice of forcing country peasants to sell their sons and daughter into sex slavery. That tends to piss the peasants off.

[u.s.red]

Today marks the 44th anniversary of the My Lai Massacre that occured in the Sơn Mỹ village of South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. This crime against humanity can be blamed on the United States Army soldiers of the Charlie Company of 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, and 11th Brigade of the Americal Division, but more widely on the imperialist United States and its anti-communist allies. The Vietnamese government lists 504 innocent people, mostly women, children, babies, and the elderly, were killed in total from both the killings in Mỹ Lai and Mỹ Khe. This is what imperialism looks like:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6d/Dead_man_and_child_from_the_My_Lai_massacre.jpg/800px-Dead_man_and_child_from_the_My_Lai_massacre.jpg

In a attempt to maintain a colony in South Vietnam, despite local popular sentiment, the United States and other capitalist nations led an assault not only against the liberation forces of Ho Chi Mihn and the Viet Cong, but against the people of the whole of Vietnam. I think we should take this day to remember not only these victims of imperialism, but all of them from throughout history. We must stand and say no to any more United States imperialistic adventures. Never again must this happen.

A civil discussion should be commenced on the topic.

It just happened again in Afghanistan.

[l'Enfermé]

Pol Pot removed the bourgeois apologists, like yourself, into the countryside and killed a lot of them. One of the reasons, among many, was the bourgeois practice of forcing country peasants to sell their sons and daughter into sex slavery. That tends to piss the peasants off.
Bourgeois apologists? He forced all the people from all the cities into the countryside...in Phnom Penh alone all of it's 2.5 million inhabitants were removed to the countryside.

[Zealot]

What the fuck is wrong with you? Pol Pot literally killed 20% of the Cambodian population in just 3 years and would have killed more unless Vietnam invaded and removed him. Are you gonna paint him as some sort of Communist hero? The fuck forcefully removed proletarians from cities into the countryside and worked them to death...

But of course, you'll have Stalinists come here and go make up excuses for genocides, or pretend they didn't happen. Why am I the only person around here that doesn't find this sort of behaviour acceptable?

Not even the big bad Stalinists are fond of Pol Pot. But things aren't always black or white, as you would like to believe. Is it really that unreasonable to assume that some Cambodians could have died while the US was bombing their country during the so-called Vietnam War? And that therefore some of the deaths attributed to Pol Pot were in fact American carpet bombings?

[Grenzer]

Borz isn't a "bourgeois apologist" just because he brought up the crimes of Pol Pot.

He's accusing you of being hypocrites for complaining about the damage done by American imperialism, but remaining silent on the subject of arbitrary suffering inflicted by self described Marxists. He's correct to some degree, but at the same time it's key to realize that Pol Pot has absolutely nothing to do with Marxism-Leninism. In addition, the specific point of the thread is to talk about My Lai and Vietnam, not the Khmer Rouge and Cambodia. The theories(if you'd like to call them that) of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge represent a fundamental break with the theories of Marxism-Leninism, and should be examined on their own terms. Marxism-Leninism and Maoism have no culpability with the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge.

The ideology of the Khmer Rouge was a bizarre mixture of collectivization, nationalism, and racism. If any other ideology could be compared to it, it should be and Maoism-Third-Worldism. Soviet and Vietnamese imperialist intervention in Cambodia ended up ending the Khmer Rouge regime, and as Exoprism correctly identified, American carpet bombing campaigns.

I think it's important to recognize that the My Lai massacre is not just a result of imperialism and capitalism, but war in general. Such atrocities will occur in all wars, regardless of the ideologies espoused by the belligerents.

[Revolutionary_Marxist]

The My Lai Massacre was a horrible event, comitted by the American military machine. We should remember the deaths of the innocent, past and present, commited by Americans and Imperialists anywhere as a reason to continue fighting Imperialism and their running dogs.

Also on a somewhat side note, I love how ignorant American pro Capitalists can be when faced with the various atrocities commited in the name of "freedom". They go and try to counter with supposed attoricites that communists commited without even paying any sort of acknowledgement on incidents such as these.

[Vyacheslav Brolotov]

Pol Pot was an asswipe who thought that he could make socialism into this agrarian phenomenon and hated all intelligence in general. Neither Marxist-Leninists nor Stalinists like him, so Borz just took that out of his ass. Also, I did not make this thread to play the "blame Stalinists for everything" game.

[Revolutionary_Marxist]

Pol Pot was an asswipe who thought that he could make socialism into this agrarian phenomenon and hated all intelligence in general. Neither Marxist-Leninists nor Stalinists like him, so Borz just took that out of his ass. Also, I did not make this thread to play the "blame Stalinists for everything" game.

I believe Pol Pot denounced the notion that he was a Communist Socialist, or even a Marxist Leninst Maoist.

[Grenzer]

I believe Pol Pot denounced the notion that he was a Communist Socialist, or even a Marxist Leninst Maoist.

I had thought he conceived of himself as a communist, but you are right that he didn't consider himself to be a Maoist, or a Marxist-Leninist. Democratic Kampuchea was nominally allowed to the People's Republic of China because of geo-political interests, but ideologically, they were very different. A member of the forum, Milk, had a website that explored Democratic Kampuchea from an academic point of view, but it appears to be down.

The Khmer Rouge's strategy(not that it made ANY sense) was to abandon all cities and focus exclusively on agriculture at first. They believed by doing this, they could have an efficient agricultural sector and use the surplus value of labor to invest into light industry. This would then develop into heavy industry(they supposed) and they would be well on the way to communism. In reality, by forcing people to leave the cities many people starved to death, and they also murdered anyway perceived to be of Vietnamese ancestry(which they believed to be an "inferior race") and anyone who believed in religion. Both Mao and Stalin would have seen the Khmer Rouge ideology as sheer insanity. The Khmer Rouge and Democratic Kampuchea is no doubt the biggest black eye in the history of what has been done in the name of communism, I think we can all agree on that.

[l'Enfermé]

" so Borz just took that out of his ass"...what I was responding to a Stalinist that was defending Pol Pot because the Americans bombed Cambodia...even though Pol Pot took over in 1975 and the bombing of Cambodia mostly finished by 1973 if I recall.

And the CPK maintained that they were Maoists until they dissolved.

[u.s.red]

Borz isn't a "bourgeois apologist" just because he brought up the crimes of Pol Pot.

He's accusing you of being hypocrites for complaining about the damage done by American imperialism,

americans do damage


but remaining silent on the subject of arbitrary suffering inflicted by self described Marxists

Pol Pot inflicts arbitary suffering


The ideology of the Khmer Rouge was a bizarre mixture of collectivization, nationalism, and racism.

I think it's important to recognize that the My Lai massacre is not just a result of imperialism and capitalism, but war in general. Such atrocities will occur in all wars, regardless of the ideologies espoused by the belligerents.

The My Lai massacre was an unfortunate result of war; the Pol Pot massacre was a deliberate act of Maoist third worldism, nationalism, collectivism and racism. That is, when we do it, it's just another unavoidable act of war; when a Maoist does it, it's deliberate ideological genocide.

[Raúl Duke]

No one mentioned Hugh Thompson, Jr in this thread yet?

He was the only American soldier with a conscious besides "following orders" of "search and destroy (and kill everyone indiscriminately in brass-sanctioned "free fire" zones) and tried to stop the massacre (he wasn't successful).

In one point, he ordered his copter crew to fire on the Americans if they didn't stop killing civilians (!).

[l'Enfermé]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/62/H%C3%A0i_c%E1%BB%91t.jpg/800px-H%C3%A0i_c%E1%BB%91t.jpg
Skulls of some of the 3,000 civilians killed by the Cambodian Maoists of Pol Pot in the Vietnamese village of Ba Chuc, a massacre that was one of the reasons the Vietnamese launched an "imperialist" war(as someone here claimed, he also added "soviet imperialism" in there even though the SU had nothing to do with it and the person is completely ignoring that the war was started by Cambodian military incursions into Vietnam, the counter-invasion by Vietnam a response and only happened after huge diplomatic efforts by Vietnam to bring about a peaceful resolution to the conflict) that liberated Cambodia from the Khmer Rouge scumbags.

Honestly, as far as "humanitarian interventions" go, the only actual intervention that was truly "humanitarian" that I can remember of is the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia. Maybe also the Inian intervention that prevented further genocide in East Pakistan.

[Ismail]

The point that should be made about showing US bombings of Cambodia is that thanks to them a lot of peasants initially went over to the banner of the Khmer Rouge (or rather the Khmer United National Front it dominated) out of desperation. Another point to make is that after the Vietnamese intervention the US (as well as China, of course) backed the Khmer Rouge, which said it was delaying "socialist construction" for "thousands of years" to fight Vietnam. By the time of his death Pol Pot said that his only hope was that Cambodia belonged to the West and, besides this, said that communism was "finished."

On February 21, 1979 Hoxha published an article in Zëri i Popullit strongly denouncing China's invasion of Vietnam. Hoxha described the Khmer Rouge like so (from Selected Works Vol. V, pp. 724-725):

In Cambodia, the Cambodian people, communists and patriots, have risen against the barbarous government of Pol Pot, which was nothing but a group of provocateurs in the service of the imperialist bourgeoisie and of the Chinese revisionists, in particular, which had as its aim to discredit the idea of socialism in the international arena... The anti-popular line of that regime is confirmed, also, by the fact that the Albanian embassy in the Cambodian capital, the embassy of a country which has given the people of Cambodia every possible aid, was kept isolated, indeed, encircled with barbed wire, as if it were in a concentration camp. The other embassies, too, were in a similar situation. The Albanian diplomats have seen with their own eyes that the Cambodian people were treated inhumanly by the clique of Pol Pot and Yeng Sari. Pnom Pen was turned into a deserted city, empty of people, where food was difficult to secure even for the diplomats, where no doctors or even aspirins could be found. We think that the people and patriots of Cambodia waited too long before overthrowing this clique which was completely linked with Beijing and in its service.

When the first conflicts broke out on the Cambodian-Vietnamese border, the view of socialist Albania was, and the world is witness to this, that disagreements between the two neighbour countries should be resolved through talks and without the interference of the Chinese or Soviet social-imperialists. But this was not done. On the contrary, the Pol Pot group, incited by Beijing, brought out in Pnom Pen daily communiques in which they announced that thousands of Vietnamese were being killed by its army on Vietnamese territory....

But the question must be asked: Why do the Chinese imperialists allegedly have the right to defend the barbarous fascist Pol Pot group, and Vietnam does not have the right to support the revolutionaries and the people of Cambodia to build a free, independent and sovereign country?In his speech to the 8th Congress of the Party of Labour of Albania on November 1, 1981, Hoxha summed up the Albanian position on Kampuchea: "In regard to Cambodia, our Party and state have condemned the bloodthirsty activities of the Pol Pot clique, a tool of the Chinese social-imperialists. We hope that the Cambodian people will surmount the difficulties they are encountering as soon as possible and decide their own fate and future in complete freedom without any 'guardian'." (Selected Works Vol. VI, p. 419.)

[l'Enfermé]

The point that should be made about showing US bombings of Cambodia is that thanks to them a lot of peasants initially went over to the banner of the Khmer Rouge (or rather the Khmer United National Front it dominated) out of desperation. Another point to make is that after the Vietnamese intervention the US (as well as China, of course) backed the Khmer Rouge, which said it was delaying "socialist construction" for "thousands of years" to fight Vietnam. By the time of his death Pol Pot said that his only hope was that Cambodia belonged to the West and, besides this, said that communism was "finished."

On February 21, 1979 Hoxha published an article in Zëri i Popullit strongly denouncing China's invasion of Vietnam. Hoxha described the Khmer Rouge like so (from Selected Works Vol. V, pp. 724-725):
In his speech to the 8th Congress of the Party of Labour of Albania on November 1, 1981, Hoxha summed up the Albanian position on Kampuchea: "In regard to Cambodia, our Party and state have condemned the bloodthirsty activities of the Pol Pot clique, a tool of the Chinese social-imperialists. We hope that the Cambodian people will surmount the difficulties they are encountering as soon as possible and decide their own fate and future in complete freedom without any 'guardian'." (Selected Works Vol. VI, p. 419.)
I can only agree with Hoxha.

The bombings of Cambodia, I think, killed 100,000-something Cambodians. My issue with Zulu is that he said

Also, remember those millions Pol Pot supposedly massacred? Well, just some of it may have something to do with this:

"Supposedly"? The implication he's making is that Pol Pot didn't kill anyone and the genocide attributed to him and his goons actually didn't happen, what happened instead is that the US bombed Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge-era and the deaths of those killed by the bombing campaign is falsely attributed to Pol Pot.

Most people would understand the problem I have with such blatant genocide-denial.