> You are ignorant of the history of modern warfare. There is nothing
> special about My Lai. My Lai is not an aberration created by what you call
> "group-based mental disorder." My Lai was the norm in the Vietnam War. In
> fact, the indiscriminate destruction of civilian lives is _the_ foundation
> of modern warfare. Bombings are intended to destroy civilian lives &
> civilian infrastructure. Vietnam was no exception. Howard Zinn writes in
> _A People's History of the United States_ (NY: HarperPerennial, 1980):
'the indiscriminate destruction of civilian lives' is a pretty capacious category, encompassing as it does everything from nuclear bombardment from a hemisphere away to exterminating the dispersed inhabitants of a rural village by hand. the notion that there's no- thing useful to be gained from drawing these distinctions isn't all that useful--unless, of course, one in more interested in posturing than in actually fighting the use and dissemination of the *specific* techniques involved in various forms of accomplishing that larger end.
and, please remember, that fight against 'modern warfare' takes place on many fronts: 'at home,' through civil efforts to expose specific atrocities as well as generally atrocious military doctrines, and 'abroad,' through resistance on every level. put simply, if the greek partisans, the viet cong, and the zapatistas sat around pontificating about the nature of 'modern warfare,' they'd have fared a bit more poorly.
[quoting zinn]
> Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton in early 1966, seeing that
> large-scale bombing of North Vietnam villages was not producing the desired
> result, suggested a different strategy...:
>
> Destruction of locks and dams, however,...might...offer promise....By
> shallow-flooding the rice, it leads after a time to widespread starvation
> (more than a million?)....
a 'different strategy' that was based on psychosocial surveys per- formed in the wake of the german withdrawal in WW2, refined during the korean war, and 'perfected' over a long period in vietnam. your reduction of everything to 'modern warfare' admits of no distinction between a eradicating a village and destroying an entire nation.
[more zinn]
> The heavy bombings were intended to destroy the will of ordinary Vietnamese
> to resist, as in the bombings of German and Japanese population centers in
> World War II -- despite President Johnson's public insistence that only
> "military targets" were being bombed. (Zinn 471) *****
this is rubbish. those psychosocial surveys and susbsequent attempts to refine them had long since revealed that 'the will of the enemy' was a hopelessly general category. the goal of what by ~1967 had come to be known as 'landscape management'--destruction of the water table by random bombings, destruction of ground cover with defoliants, de- struction of topsoil and root structures using chemical weapons and physical force--wasn't to destroy anyone's 'will': it was intended to deny the guerillas *any* sustenance or cover, physical or social, in order to URBANIZE them.
> There is no profound psychological mystery in war.
ah. it's modality is racism, a function of capitalism, and therefore we must fight 'capitalism'--by arguing against postmodernism.
cheers, t