> Subject: Re: genocide
>
> A response to the posting by, I think, Jerry West (not sure), who responded to
> my comment:
>
> The argument that I
> and quite a few others put forward about the war being "genocidal" / ecocidal
> nationcidal, "immoral & fundamentally wrong", etc. is grounded on precisely
> the view that the US IS and WAS guilty of significantly MORE than just the
> "ordinary brutality" of warfare in Vietnam.
GENOCIDE - The extermination of a national or racial group as a planned
move.
This applies to Hitler's final solution, it may apply to Turkish actions
in Armenia in 1915, it does not apply to Vietnam. The object in Vietnam
was to win a war, not eliminate any particular racial or national
group. It was a civil war with Vietnamese on both sides. To use the
term genocide so lightly lessens the import of the occurances of real
cases of genocide.
Immoral and fundamentally wrong? True! Lets stick to that argument, it
hits the nail on the head precisely. Gratuitously adding all of the
other verbal condiments just to show your outrage only demeans your
case.
More than just the ordinary brutality of warfare? Please tell me what
the ordinary brutality of warfare is, and where it has dominated a war
in the last one hundred years?
> clearly there is a moral line of SOME type --and I don't care what name you
> want to put on it-- when a military effectively wages war on civilians as
> opposed to wages war on the opposing military. Obviously this "line" is
> reflected in the widespread criticism of "weapons of mass destruction," etc.
> So, I'm not particularly fond of any kind of brutality; that's not the point.
> But the entire "just war" literature reflects moral questions that come up
> within this already unpleasant/brutal context.
Wars are not confined to military personnel. In modern warfare it is
the civilians that bear the brunt of the killing and destruction. How
do you compare the brutality in Vietnam to the bombing of Dresden,
Tokyo, or Hiroshima? How about the Russian sacking of Berlin or NVA and
VC executing of civilians and terrorizing of villages. How about the VC
use of children as human bombs? Strapping a grenade to a five year old
child and sending him or her into a group of soldiers to explode is
merely just war?
Were you happy with the US intervention in Vietnam except for a few
finer points of military etiquette? Your argument could be construed
that way. If you want to argue that it is immoral to support dictators
and non-democratic forms of government, and that the Vietnam war is
immoral for that reason, then I will agree with you. If you want to
argue that there were US (and RVN and NVA and VC) war criminals in
Vietnam, then I would agree with that too. If you want to argue that US
leaders were immoral and went to Vietnam for immoral purposes which made
the war immoral, then I can go along with that. But, the conduct of the
war was probably no more moral or immoral than any other war that we
fought.
>
> This is the essence of what distinguishes the immorality of the war in
> Vietnam, in my view: the United States sent its military to wage a brutally
> destructive war against the people of Vietnam (and Laos & Cambodia), cloaking
> it in "military" terminology and Cold War justifications but in direct
> violation of internationally-sanctioned mechanisms for "the people" to choose
> their own destiny (post-Geneva election).
This is more to the point and stands best alone without all of the
superfluous rhetoric about genocide and so on.
> American soldiers were also
> victimized by the fact that this structure of the; they were put in a position
> where they could be killed by "anyone", and thus "anyone" was an "enemy."
> Since it was kill or be killed (there's the basic brutality of it), this
> pushed many across lines they knew at some level were "wrong."
And many of them refused to cross those lines, and many gave a lot of
time and more to help people in Vietnam on a day to day basis.
Concerning ecocidal:
> Yes, well, the writer doesn't mention all the herbicides, Agent Orange &
> the like, that poisoned the ecosphere of Vietnam and damaged generations that
> followed the war. That I would call significantly more ecocidal (recall,
> wherever you put the blame, Saddam's burning of Kuwaiti oil wells) than
> shrapnel or napalm.
My point is that all wars are ecocidal. Now if you had orginally used
the term "significantly more ecocidal" the statement would have been
less contentious in the first place.
-- Jerry West Editor/publisher/janitor ---------------------------------------------------- THE RECORD On line news from Nootka Sound & Canada's West Coast An independent, progressive regional publication http://www.island.net/~record/