>Ted wrote:
>>There was no
>>such authority figure at MyLai. No one told the soldiers to massacre
>>unarmed civilians.
>
>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.
Yes, I know there were a thousand My Lai's in the war against Vietnam. That's why I'm interested in My Lai. It tells us a lot about that war and also about the centuries-long war of Westerners against non-Westerners, the latest chapter of which has played out in Israel/Palestine. (As Chomsky reveals in Fateful Triangle, Israeli mental pathology is crucial to understanding their treatment of Palestinians. He hammers the point home over and over again.)
>***** The massacre at My Lai by a company of ordinary soldiers was a
>small event compared with the plans of high-level military and civilian
>leaders to visit massive destruction on the civilian population of Vietnam.
I know. And if the war against Vietnam doesn't reveal collective insanity at all levels of decision-making, we can put that notion to rest right now.
>>The instructions given by the senior officers to the
>>junior officers, including Lt. Calley, were ambiguous.
>
>Orders were not ambiguous. Wasting civilians was the main strategy of the
>war, and Lieutenant Calley acted accordingly:
To assume that the soldiers were following unambiguous orders is akin to assuming that because newspapers don't tell us the real story, they must be under overt censorship. Chomsky is fond of quoting Orwell's introduction to the second edition of Animal Farm, where Orwell describes how censorship in Anglo liberal democracies follows, not from direct orders, but from a more subtle process whereby the more perceptive reporters, the ones who succeed, get the hint that they're not supposed to rock the boat. The troops at My Lai certainly got the hint that it was acceptable for them to kill indiscriminately. But it's one thing to have a vague understanding and another thing entirely to actually commit mass murder.
>
>***** On March 16, 1968, a company of American soldiers went into the
>hamlet of My Lai 4, in Quang Ngai province. They rounded up the
>inhabitants, including old people and women with infants in their arms.
>These people were ordered into a ditch, where they were methodically shot
>to death by American soldiers.
You make it seem like it was all very quick and clinical, the result of soldiers dutifully following orders. This is not the case at all. No senior officers, including Col. Barker, told Capt. Medina or Lt. Calley to start killing women and children. In fact, they were told specifically in a briefing the prior day that Vietnamese prisoners were in their hands, and it was their duty to protect them. American troops did not go into the hamlets of My Lai with the intention of killing its inhabitants. They went in with the intention of engaging the Viet Cong's 48th battalion. Medina believed that all the women and children would be scared out of the village, and the only people remaining would be Viet Cong soldiers. He instructed his troops to kill all of these soldiers and to destroy the village in the process. Instead, they found that the soldiers had all left, and the only people remaining were women, children, and old men. The killing began in a piecemeal fashion. It began spontaneously, and it gradually took on momentum. The soldiers were swept up in a deranged need to kill. This horror went on for hours.
>The testimony of James Dursi, a rifleman,
>at the later trial of Lieutenant William Calley, was reported in the _New
>York Times_:
>
>Lieutenant Calley and a weeping rifleman named Paul D. Meadlo -- the same
>soldier who had fed candy to the children before shooting them -- pushed
>the prisoners into the ditch....
>
>"There was an order to shoot by Lieutenant Calley. I can't remember the
>exact words -- it was something like 'Start firing.'
>"Meadlo turned to me and said: 'Shoot, why don't you shoot?'
>"He was crying.
>"I said, 'I can't. I won't.'
>"Then Lieutenant Calley and Meadlo pointed their rifles into the ditch and
>fired.
>"People were diving on top of each other; mothers were trying to protect
>their children...." (Zinn 469) *****
>
>Why did Calley and soldiers under his command do this?
>
The My Lai massacre reveals the breakdown of mental illness in human society. Cally, Meadlo, and Hugh Thompson represent the three major categories of mental well-being. Cally was clearly a psychopath (probably Antisocial Personality Disorder). He was the person most responsible for igniting the killing. On the other extreme, Hugh Thompson was enraged by what he saw and did everything he could to stop it. He even landed his helicopter twice during the killings and rescued civilians from American troops led by Calley. In the middle was the mass of troops, as represented by Meadlo. As you can see, Meadlo was torn. He was a normal person with a functional conscience, yet he participated in mass murder. The vast majority of people fall into this middle category. They are not psychopathic at an individual level, but they are susceptible to getting swept up in a group pathology. One moment you're killing, and the next moment you're crying, or vice versa. Thompson represents the third class of people, those who not only are sane individually but who are immune to group-based disorders and retain their moral sensibilities in the face of group madness. This applies to the leadership in the Vietnam war, and it applies to society in general. The radical left is comprised primarily of individuals in the third category, the Hugh Thompsons. We are the sane ones, but because of the general pervasiveness of insanity in America, we are different and are therefore often perceived as being crazy.
>
>There is no profound psychological mystery in war.
>
You have not read Blood Rites, by Barbara Ehrenreich. If you had, you would not have made that statement. Though Ehrenreich explores the various mechanisms that have cropped up over the millennia which have perpetuated the institution of warfare, she makes it *absolutely clear* that war originated strictly as a result of psychological factors, and that despite the onset of other factors over time, the psyche continues to exert immense influence over the initiation of wars.
Ted