Rob Schaap:... The White House and the General Staff stand equally condemned in both cases, but, whether Kerrey is personally guilty of a war crime or not, that pilot is certainly all the more, and all the more certainly, so. Am I missing anything here?
``I think the interesting question is whether, as Christopher Caldwell thinks, the War in Vietnam is seen as evil by almost everybody. It is logical to think that it is, if the acts which it required are evil in everyone's sight, but people are not very logical. Hence the support for the war in Yugoslavia by people who should have known better, out of which the Novi Sad incident and other like it inevitably sprang. The focus on unusual individual acts allows the policies of war to go forward unhindered; that is why most of Congress voted for the War in Colombia, just as they voted for the War in Yugoslavia and the War in Vietnam. The connection between war and atrocity is blanked out.''
Gordon Fitch
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Precisely. ``...The focus on...individual acts allows the policies...to go forward unhindered....[and]...The connection between war and atrocity is blanked out.'' Except in the case of Vietnam, it is now that the connection between history, government, and public support that is blanked out and therefore erases collective responsibility, and collective understanding of these connections. That is we can simply forget it, all of it. We never did that, we never knew about it, we were only following orders, who was to know such things.... blah, blah, blah.
And since that never happened, the entire spectrum of US socio-economic and political policies that have un-interruptedly flowed, developed, and indeed expanded from that era, do not exist either. Hence, there is no insane capitalist imperium, hell bent on exploiting everything that lives on the planet, and we are not responsible for that either, even if there is such a nightmare---and even if we should do something about it no matter where it came from.
It's not in my job description.
Chuck Grimes