Hi cnyndwllr; Re US atrocities in Vietnam.
There's no denying that there were atrocities, as there were convictions for some of them. Where the left is wrong is in suggesting that atrocities were common. Where the right is wrong is in minimizing the amount of atrocities.
Atrocities are universal in war, but what is also universal is an inclination to minimize one's own side's contribution and to maximize the other. Humans love to gossip. Even in the verifiable historical absence of any atrocities at all, stories of atrocities will still be rumored.
A great book for getting insight into this universal tendency of humans to gossip about atrocities is this scholarly, somewhat pedantic, but nevertheless fascinating book:
GERMAN ATROCITIES, 1914
A HISTORY OF DENIAL
...
Is it true that the German army, invading Belgium and France in August 1914, perpetrated brutal atrocities? Or are accounts of the deaths of thousands of unarmed civilians mere fabrications constructed by fanatically anti-German Allied propagandists? Based on research in the archives of Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, this pathbreaking book uncovers the truth of the events of autumn 1914 and explains how the politics of propaganda and memory have shaped radically different versions of that truth.
John Horne and Alan Kramer mine military reports, official and private records, witness evidence, and war diaries to document the crimes that scholars have long denied: a campaign of brutality that led to the deaths of some 6500 Belgian and French civilians. Contemporary German accounts insisted that the civilians were guerrillas, executed for illegal resistance. In reality this claim originated in a vast collective delusion on the part of German soldiers. The authors establish how this myth originated and operated, and how opposed Allied and German views of events were used in the propaganda war. They trace the memory and forgetting of the atrocities on both sides up to and beyond World War II. Meticulously researched and convincingly argued, this book reopens a painful chapter in European history while contributing to broader debates about myth, propaganda, memory, war crimes, and the nature of the First World War.
...
yalepress.yale.edu
Eventually, the Vietnam war will fade from our emotional present to an extent that will allow us to more soberly assess the amount of atrocities there.
For a view of the war from the other side, there's a well known book (which I'll probably eventually read even though I don't read much Vietnam history) written by one of the 10 survivors of a 500 man NVA unit after 10 years of war in South Vietnam:
The Sorrow of War
Kien, the protagonist of this rambling and sometimes nearly incoherent but emotionally gripping account of the Vietnam war, is a 10-year veteran whose experiences bear a striking similarity to those of the author, a Hanoi writer who fought with the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade. The novel opens just after the war, with Kien working in a unit that recovers soldiers' corpses. Revisiting the sites of battles raises emotional ghosts for him, "a parade of horrific memories" that threatens his sanity, and he finds that writing about those years is the only way to purge them.
...
amazon.com
-- Carl |
