Exceptionalism & Hypocrisy

By Adel – PeaceMaker

November 29, 2009

Nick Turse is an award-winning journalist, historian, essayist, and the associate editor of the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. He is the author of, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, points out, we are the great exception. If we do it, it essentially doesn't count…

A longstanding American aversion to facing what the U.S. did to Vietnam and its people during a war that ended more than 30 years ago. Since then, one cover-up of mass murder after another has unraveled into view. A long series of atrocities that have included:

The Vietnamese village of My Lai, not only were more than 500 defenseless civilians slaughtered by 100 troops who stormed the village on March 16, 1968, but women and girls were brutally raped, bodies mutilated, homes set aflame, animals tortured and killed, and the village razed to the ground. Women holding infants were gunned down. Others, gathered together, threw themselves on top of their children as they were sprayed with automatic rifle fire. Children, even babies, were executed at close range. Many were slaughtered in an irrigation ditch.

The mass killing of civilians in the Mekong Delta village of Thanh Phong by Senator Bob Kerrey and the SEAL team he led.

The murders, torture, and mutilations involving the deaths of hundreds of noncombatants committed in Quang Ngai Province by an elite U.S. unit, the Tiger Force.

A massacre of civilians by U.S. Marines in Quang Nam Province's Le Bac hamlet.

The slaughter of Vietnamese civilians in the Mekong Delta during Operation Speedy Express… casualties incurred by US forces may have been between 5,000 and 7,000… "The horror was worse than My Lai," one American official said.

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who repudiated his wartime justifications for the Vietnam conflict decades later, said both administrations were "terribly wrong".

Jonathan Schell asked: [H]ow many public figures of his importance have ever expressed any regret at all for their mistakes and follies and crimes? As the decades of the twentieth century rolled by, the heaps of corpses towered, ever higher, up to the skies, and now they pile up again in the new century, but how many of those in high office who have made these things happen have ever said, "I made a mistake," or "I was terribly wrong," or shed a tear over their actions? I come up with: one, Robert McNamara. I deduce that such acts of repentance are very hard to perform.

A long series of massacres, attacks on noncombatants, and torture, among other atrocities is what the U.S. is doing with the ongoing Global War on Terror. One cover-up of mass murder after another is still unraveling and bubbling into view today, just like what happened in the Vietnam conflict.