• American #Carnage
    https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/16/american-carnage

    Americans have a remarkable tolerance for child slaughter, especially the mass murders of the children of others. This emotional indifference manifested itself vividly after the disclosure of the #My_Lai #Massacre, when dozens of Vietnamese infants and children were killed by the men of Charlie Company, their tiny, butchered corpses stacked in ditches. After the trial of Lt. William Calley, more than 70 percent of Americans believed his sentence was too severe. Most objected to any trial at all. In the end, Calley served less than 4 years under house arrest for his role in the execution of more than 500 Vietnamese villagers.

    Twenty-five years later, American attitudes toward child deaths had coarsened even harder. When it was revealed that US sanctions on Iraq had caused the deaths of more than 500,000 Iraqi children, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, icily argued that the deaths were “worth it” to advance US policy in the Middle East. Few Americans remonstrated against this official savagery done in their name.

    Now the guns are being turned on America’s own children and the rivers of blood streaming out of US schools cause barely a ripple in our politics. If the Columbine shooting (1999) was a tragedy, what word do you use to describe the 436th school shooting since then?

    #enfants #etats-unis

  • Letter from Vietnam MARCH 30, 2015 ISSUE
    The Scene of the Crime
    A reporter’s journey to My Lai and the secrets of the past.
    BY SEYMOUR M. #HERSH
    http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/30/the-scene-of-the-crime

    Guerre du #Vietnam : l’auteur du scoop de #My_Lai en 68 sur les lieux du #massacre
    http://geopolis.francetvinfo.fr/guerre-du-vietnam-lauteur-du-scoop-de-my-lai-en-68-sur-les-lie

    Dans l’article fleuve (comme toujours dans cette revue), le journaliste n’en reste pas qu’au massacre de My Lai. Il décrit à travers des personnes rencontrées les rapports complexes qui perdurent entre Américains et Vietnamiens, comme ce réfugié vietnamien retourné au pays ou ce combattant américain venu tenter d’expier les fautes américaines en s’installant chez l’ancien ennemi.

    Si l’Amérique n’a jamais payé de réparations au Vietnam pour ses bombardements ou l’épandage d’agent orange, le gouvernement US, et des associations de vétérans ont commencer à financer des programmes de déminage (mines, qui selon Hersh, ont tué ou blessé quelque 100.000 personnes).

    Aujourd’hui, note l’auteur de l’article, 70% de la population vietnamienne a moins de 40 ans et « les touristes américains sont une aubaine pour l’économie ». Sans compter que « diplomatiquement les Etats-Unis sont considérés comme un ami, un allié potentiel contre la Chine » avec qui le Vietnam a des relations tendues.

    Comme pour symboliser le temps passé, un homme lui donne la philosophie qui semble régner au Vietnam, quelque 40 ans après la fin de la guerre. « Nous Vietnamiens, nous avons une attitude pratique : mieux vaut oublier un mauvais ennemi, si vous pouvez gagnez un ami nécessaire ».

  • Anatomy of a War
    Video of a forgotten tribunal against US crimes in Vietnam.

    In 1966, two of Europe’s most distinguished philosophers, Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre, issued a call for a War Crimes Tribunal to try the United States for crimes against humanity in their conduct of the war in Vietnam. A number of us were sent to North Vietnam to observe and record the attacks on civilians. I spent six weeks under the bombs, an experience that shaped the rest of my life.

    The tribunal convened in Stockholm in 1967. The jury members included Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Isaac Deutscher, Vladimir Dedijer, Mahmud Ali Kasuri, and David Dellinger, among others. The gathering was either ignored or denigrated by the mainstream media. The aim was not legal but moral. To bring the crimes to the notice of the public.

    A year later Seymour Hersh exposed the My Lai Massacre, one of many carried out by US troops in Vietnam. There was no video record of the tribunal until the emergence, a few years ago, of this film by a Swedish activist, Steffan Lamm. It should speak to us strongly today as we watch the crimes being committed in Gaza.

    https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/08/anatomy-of-a-war

    #vidéo #guerre #Vietnam #My_Lai_Massacre #USA #Etats-Unis #crimes_de_guerre #Steffan_Lamm #crimes_contre_l'humanité

  • John Waters : Leslie Van Houten : A Friendship, Part 1 of 5
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-waters/leslie-van-houten-a-frien_b_246953.html

    http://www.monstersandcritics.de/downloads/downloads/articles19/199928/article_images/Rosemaries-Baby-Mo-23-04-ARTE-22-00-Uhr_3.jpg

    I have a really good friend who was convicted of killing two innocent people when she was nineteen years old on a horrible night of 1969 cult madness. Her name is Leslie Van Houten and I think you would like her as much as I do. She was one of those notorious “Manson girls” who shaved their heads, carved X’s in their foreheads and laughed, joked, and sang their way through the courthouse straight to death row without the slightest trace of remorse forty years ago. Leslie is hardly a “Manson girl” today. Sixty years old, she looks back from prison on her involvement in the La Bianca murders (the night after the Tate massacre) in utter horror, shame, and guilt and takes full responsibility for her part in the crimes. I think it’s time to parole her.

    http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/77/Leslievanhouten.JPG

    Leslie Van Houten has served more time than any Nazi war criminal who was not sentenced to death at Nuremberg. She has served more time that any of the Nazi defendants who were sentenced to life in prison except for Hitler’s deputy, Rudolph Hess, who died in his fortieth year in prison (the exact amount of time Leslie has now served). She’s served more time than Lt. #William_Calley who was originally sentenced to life in prison for the #My_Lai massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians. She has served longer than the surviving female member of the Baader Meinhoff Gang, a German terrorist group who murdered thirty-four people for left-wing “politics” and “revolution.” This group began with the student protest movement in 1968, the same year Charles Manson was recruiting his hippy army of LSD soldiers. Brigitte Mahnhaupt was convicted of nine political murders and sentenced to five life sentences, but served just twenty-four years. Another member, Irmgard Molle, convicted of a 1972 bomb attack in Heidelberg that killed three American soldiers, was released in 1994 after serving twenty-four years. Courts ruled that “the decision for probation was reached based on the determination that no security risks exist today.” And none of these radicals even said they were sorry!

    But how sorry is sorry enough? Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and armaments minister, and one of the few Nazi defendants to take responsibility for Nazi war crimes, even though he denied knowing of the Holocaust, struggled with this question. When Gitta Sereny interviewed him for her amazing book Albert Speer; His Battle with Truth, after he had been released after serving all twenty years of his sentence in Spandau prison, she asked the same kind of question about responsibility for the crime that the parole board asks Leslie. While Leslie participated in a much tinier version of a fascist regime, there are definite similarities in the issue of degrees of guilt. Was there something “inherently evil” inside Leslie, as Stephen Kay has charged? Was there a “lack of morality” underneath Speer’s initial attraction to “the cause,” wondered Ms. Sereny? “If I just answer that question with a ’yes,’” a free Speer honestly responded after decades of reflection, “it would be too simple. For of course now I think it was immoral. But what does that mean? Nothing. How can it help our understanding of these terms which is what you and I are trying to do here, I presume, for me to say, ’Yes, yes mea culpa.’ Yes, of course, mea culpa, but the whole point is that I didn’t feel this and why didn’t I? Was it Hitler, only Hitler, because of whom I didn’t understand? Or was it a deficiency in me? Or was it both?”

    #Fritz_Lang #Peter-Lorre #Ulrike_Meinhof #Hitler #Roman_Polanski #Rosemaries_Baby