Arrogant? Racist? Normal??

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I was reading up on the Vietnamese war out of interest and came across this particular quote:

Here's the source if anyone's interested...

Now for the reason I made this thread.

58000 Americans died. Between 1 MILLION and 2 MILLION Vietnamese died...ALSO?? WTF? I thought that was as blatantly arrogant and racist as it gets...or I could just be over-reacting. AM I over-reacting?? What do you guys think?

 

In any war, there will ALWAYS be more casualties among the race/nationality that lives in the area where the fighting is taking place than among the group whose sends in the soldiers. Physics dictates this.

 

I understand that. I just thought the way they referred to those 1~2 million dead was INCREDIBLY disrespectful to them, which is why I wanted to share that with my fellow SPers...

 

Look at Iraq/Afghanistan. If one US soldier scuffs his knee it makes the news for weeks at a time, but the tragic incident of the 14 year-old girl getting gangraped (plus her family was slaughtered while this was happening) by US soldiers did not generate as much interest.

First of all the media claimed the girl was an adult as this would be less severe and then certain newsstations try to say that the rapists were the real victims as they are suffering from 'combat stress'.

Edit: The impression that I got from Mi Lai was that most of the US was on the side of Calley and not the villagers that were killed for no reason at all. Calley got 3 1/2 years house arrest but didn't even need to serve that. Not bad for rape and murder.

I believe the image of Kim Phuc was supposed to be censored in the US, not because it shows the horrors that the civillians faced daily, but because it was 'pornographic'.

[ October 30, 2006, 14:52: Message edited by: Cúchulainn ]

 

Ah...so I wasn't over-reacting then?

That stuff made me so angry, I've stopped actually reading up on what's happening in Iraq...

Bloody BUSH! Hope he chokes on a bone and dies quick...

 

Faraaz you're completely right. Americans think their lives are more valuable than others.

Also I read about Contamination from U.S. chemicals in Vietnam . Also we all know what they did in Hiroshima and Nagazaki. How can they attack Iraq for having chemical weapons and how can they threaten Iran for their nuclear activities?

 

You know...the really frustrating part is that I reckon most Americans are just normal, regular people. I definitely do not hold with the misconception that the US is full of obese, dumb people who dunno jack about anything that doesn't have to do with their country, are racist, arrogant blah-blah...

Its just that the American government and the American media are predisposed towards portraying a somewhat narcissistic and egoistic image to the American public..."Land of the Brave and Free", "Defenders of Liberty" and so on and so forth...

Thats the kind of stuff which gives rise to this whole mentality to begin with...or atleast, that's my opinion.

At one level, I suppose one would prefer greater losses on the enemy's side or whatever...but that is still an unimaginable waste and a gigantic loss of human life, and trivialising it by making it an almost-afterthought is an insult to those people and all human life in general.

 

Yes, yes I know. I symbolized the matter too much. I know, Iran has signed a treaty and isn't obeying and Iraq was attacked for their relationship with terrorists (which didn't exist but certainly exists now). Anyway that was off-topic, sorry. Whatever USA does makes me angry too fast these days.

About main subject: saying "between one and two million Vietnamese deaths" seems like saying "it doesn't matter if a million more or less Vietnamese died". I'm not sure but i think Stalin said something like "A death is a tragedy, millions of deaths is a statistic". (He created good statistics too )

 

That's because we didn't keep precise casualties of the Vietnamese. There was no means to do so. We had the names of every member of every platoon, so we can get specific numbers for our troops who died. If a Vietnamese village had a few hundred gallons of napalm dropped on it because there were VCs there, you can't say if the were 100, 200, or 300 civilians. That may sound callous, but I think it makes sense that we CAN give precise number for U.S. deaths, but not Vietnamese ones.

 

Probably a little bit arrogant, but there is a certain amount of arrogance that comes from the US at the best of times. To be fair in this case though, it would have been hard to get precise figures on Vietnamese deaths. I'm sure it's something they could have got, had they been bothered to though.

 

You are not over reacting Faraaz. The US, like probably all other war faring countries quite naturally value their own people more. It do galls me as a bit hypocritical though when Americans scream and shout about tragedy and atrocities if American mercenaries are killed but not when foreign civilians are murdered. Thats just how it is, in the American eye and for most people one of their own is worth a thousand of anyone else. The offhand way the Vietnamese casualties were reported just illustrates that.

I care equally little (or much depending on your point of view) about my neighbour as I do about Mr X living in Zimbabwe but most people dont and will place a higher value on people the closer they happen to be to them. I find it disgusting, the same phenomenon showed its ugly head during the tsunami disaster hours and hours of news about what happened to rich Swedish tourists breaking ribs and whatnot and only cursory mention of hundreds of thousands dead locals. We in the western world generally dont give a flying **** about darker skinned people living on the other side of the world and thats a fact you cant dispute. Disaster in tourist area = front page news for weeks and national grief. 100000 dead in some mountain region with no Westerners, small notice hidden away somewhere. It disgusts me the different value we put on human life.

Look at the vengeance the US has taken for the death of some 3000 of their innocents, killing directly tens of thousands of the other sides innocents and indirectly several hundreds of thousands but hey, who cares, they are not rich white westerners so no one gives a ****. Thats how the world is today.

 

It(US)'s always arrogant, racist and even today that stuff is way too normal .

Faraaz you can't blame the text, but the people who dropped that napalm, like Aldeth said (in quite a straight way, though) there is no way to count those people.

I'm sad now.

 

When I read how physics dictate the loss of some two million lifes... I think I know where Faraaz is coming from. People seem to read a very dispassionate (to put it carefully), chilling sentiment in how Americans argue about the "collateral damage" of their wars.

I am sure it isnt anywhere near accurate to make such claims about Americans in a general sense. No doubt there are many appalled by it. But I can see how that impression of arrogance came about.

 

I see where you're coming from. If you're going to be fairly precise about the number of American KIAs and WIAs, you really ought to be equally precise about the Vietnamese KIAs and WIAs. Obviously, that won't be possible due to the realities of record keeping (or lack thereof); so include a note on why that isn't possible. I dunno, maybe the article does that (my browser doesn't seem to like the digital history site), but if it doesn't, it certainly should.

Balance. Balance is good.

Well, no. What's implicit in the handling of the stats is that, to the author (and presumably his intended audience), US losses are of greater significance than Vietnamese losses.

 

Now that's a completely reasonable statement. I don't think there was any disrespect intended when it was said that between 1 million and 2 million Vietnamese died. I think the reason it was phrased that way was because *we really don't know*. Little effort was made to count the Vietnamese dead, and after the U.S. pulled out, the Vietnamese to this day haven't released casualty figures to the rest of the world. So what happened here is they took the low-end estimate (1 million) and the high-end estimate (2 million) and gave it as a range. I see nothing wrong with that.

 

Oh, but stating the Vietnamese casualties first would mean that the deaths we caused are more important, so clearly we were there specifically to kill millions of Vietnamese. We're cold-blooded maniacs, killing for no reason other than pleasure, with no regard even for the lives of our soldiers.

While I don't think you're overreacting (if there was such an intent I'd be more pissed than you, because they'd be making America look bad in addition to just being insensitive pr*cks ), I do think you're overanalyzing it. It's a simple statement, not a value judgement. This argument reminds me a bit of the common argument over who gets the first-player controller. Does it really matter who's first?

I do agree that there's a bit of arrogance in our culture, and we probably do think more of ourselves than others. The first part is lamentable, the second part is natural. We don't know the Vietnamese that were killed. Some of them (probably a small fraction given the civilian casualties) were even trying to kill people we did know. It's just part of human nature to care a bit more about people we know, care about, and maybe even identify with. Note that the article is written in English, and likely by an American author. I'd suspect a Vietnamese-written article to have the two phrases swapped simply from self-interest.

 

It DOES matter who has the first-player controller.

They can usually set the settings and it's also usually the better and more responsive controller.

And yeah, that's overreacting. There's nothing disrespectful about that.

And Rally's completely right here.