Crosswords1 min ago
Sweeping it under the carpet
In all this fuss over war crimes, atrocities, treatment of prisoners, etc how come My Lai never seems to be mentioned? This is one of the single greatest atrocities of the post-WWII era. Nick Berg never deserved to die the way he did, but I get the feeling, with the Americans, that they reap what they sow. When will they ever wake up to this?
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One of the reasons that I find Noam Chomsky's point of view very persuasive is his ability to get to the heart of questions such as this. Chomsky by profession is a Professor of linguistics, linguistic theory, syntax, semantics and philosophy of language.
The reason I believe this is pertinant is that when you're dealing with heavily emotive scenarios such as the one you propose, semantics is everything. One man's abuse is another man's torture. Witness:
From a western point of view: The Iraqis tortue family man Nick Berg. A rogue element, which in no way indicated systemic failure, were responsible for abuse of Iraqi prisoners.
From an Iraqi point of view: The Infidel Godless Americans reaped what they sowed when a greedy American contractor, come to rape Iraq of its resources was executed in response to the Infidel Americans brutally torture innocent Iraqi citizens, may Allah have mercy on their souls.
So, Chomsky's solution is to say that you have to apply the same standards accross the board. That way, if you find something to be intolerable if it were done to you, it therefore becomes an intolerable thing to do to someone else. Until you can get to this point of view, it's almost depressingly inevitable that one set of people will justify their evil actions by contrasting them with those of another set of people.
More simply, Nick Berg & Mai Lai were both deplorable acts of gross evil. To try and make one more deplorable than another simply puts you back on an escallation footing.
The reason I believe this is pertinant is that when you're dealing with heavily emotive scenarios such as the one you propose, semantics is everything. One man's abuse is another man's torture. Witness:
From a western point of view: The Iraqis tortue family man Nick Berg. A rogue element, which in no way indicated systemic failure, were responsible for abuse of Iraqi prisoners.
From an Iraqi point of view: The Infidel Godless Americans reaped what they sowed when a greedy American contractor, come to rape Iraq of its resources was executed in response to the Infidel Americans brutally torture innocent Iraqi citizens, may Allah have mercy on their souls.
So, Chomsky's solution is to say that you have to apply the same standards accross the board. That way, if you find something to be intolerable if it were done to you, it therefore becomes an intolerable thing to do to someone else. Until you can get to this point of view, it's almost depressingly inevitable that one set of people will justify their evil actions by contrasting them with those of another set of people.
More simply, Nick Berg & Mai Lai were both deplorable acts of gross evil. To try and make one more deplorable than another simply puts you back on an escallation footing.
Well 'as you sow so shall you reap' is a biblicism (it's a perfectly cromulent word!) so yes there is something in the bible about this. However it also says 'turn the other cheek' and there's lots of talk about smiting ('And stay ye not, [but] pursue after your enemies, and smite the hindmost of them; suffer them not to enter into their cities: for the LORD your God hath delivered them into your hand') so just goes to show what a load of tosh it all is.
Stalin also came out with the chilling (yet regretably true) statement: "The death of one man - that's a tragedy. The death of a million men - that's just a statistic." But to actually answer the question, I have heard several references to My Lai in reference to the US army's behavious in Iraq - you just have to read the right papers.
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