My Lai Massacre - Oliver Stone Movie

I was reading the other day there about Bruce Willis signing up for the new Oliver Stone movie which is based on the real life My Lai Massacre that took place in Vietnam in 1968. After hearing about this, I thought i'd go off and find out a bit more about the My Lai Massacre.

In short, it doesn't make nice reading or viewing for that matter. In total between 350 and 500 civilians, mostly women and children were cut down by US soldiers. Eye witness reports from the time said that as locals bowed to welcome their guests they were beaten with rifle butts, women were raped and children were shot as they huddled for shelter. To read more by all means have a look through this further information on the My Lai Massacre...

It's a pretty horrifying story if you take the time to read through it but for me I think the main lesson is that when we think of massacres in this day in age, we tend to think of Darfur, Rwanda or Cambodia's killing fields. Although it wasn't on the same scale, reading this breaks the myth that these acts were only carried out by rougue communist states, right wing fascists or groups intent on acts of ethnic cleansing. Unfortunately if any man is placed in a particular set of circumstances they seem to be capable of these kind of attrocities whether they are christian, jew, muslim, communist or democrat. All too often we in the western world think that we are above this kind of behaviour and for man to move forward I think we have to accept that we are all the same animal.

Anyway, have a read, let me know what you think...

Interesting Fact of the Day! No. 9 - Vietnam

Despite the lyrics of Paul Hardcastle's 1985 No.1 claiming.....

"In World War II the average age of the combat soldier was 26...
In Vietnam he was 19."

This is in fact not true, the actual average age of an infantryman serving in Vietnam was actually 22.8 years.

The World War II figure is in fact correct.


Another interesting comparison between the two wars is that during WWII, the average infantryman saw about 40 days of combat in 4 years. In Vietnam, they would see 240 days of combat in 1 year. This was mostly due to the battlefield mobility that the helicopter offered the infantry...

source: www.vietnam-war.info

Aplogise and Move on...

I was reading an article on the beeb there about how Robert Redford has called for the US leaders to apologise for the war in Iraq.

I must admit though that after reading this article and thought about the whole thing, i'm quite puzzled as to who should be apologising to who?

I think Redford's point is that the American people trusted the government to act on their behalf after 9/11 but the government betrayed this trust. But I have a few problems with that.

Was it not revenge and retribution that America wanted? Now 50,000 Iraqi civilians are dead and when people are watching the pictures of Saddam with his throat wide open and his head at 90 degrees they're not feeling so blood thirsty anymore...

We all know Bush is a twat, much like the UK now doesn’t trust a thing that Blair says but I don't think everything can now be blamed on Bush. He didn't fool everyone into thinking he was a nice guy, he's always been thick and he's never even tried to hide it. The US happily voted in someone who if properly subjected to psychological testing, would probably be defined as special needs.

I don't think that leaders should be apologising to the electorate, after all it was the electorate that put them there. I do however think that the people of the US and UK should be apologising to the world. Instead of acting like the responsible elder brothers of the world, we've been acting like kids.

There's an incredibly complicated game of political chess going on at the moment. With the middle-east far from peaceful and China playing some sort of global version of "tin can alley" with satellites, it's not really a time to be letting the monkey try it's hand at chess, is it?

I do think that there is a good chance of some stability in the near future. It certainly looks like the Democrats will stump up a serious candidate for the next elections and hopefully the US can resume some form global diplomacy. Although, exciting though the prospect is, I fear that there will be some backwater mentalists out there who simply won't accept a female or black president.

As for the war on terror, how is anyone really expecting to win this fight? The "Kill ever Muslim in the world and hope you got the terrorists" policy seems to have a few flaws that are quite obvious to most of us. It's time to start to diffuse the situation by backing off and strong diplomatic channels to stop the tensions in Israel and the genocide in Darfur. Again, this isn't possible whilst the monkey's in charge. Other world leaders just seem to laugh at him as he tries to find the door off the stage.

You really have to think that the US twenty-second amendment could well have saved the world! It's probably something that the UK could do with come to think of it...

Interesting Fact of the Day! No. 7 - The Top 5 Military Spenders!

Here are the top 5 nations for military expenditure per annum...

1. United States $518,100,000,000
2. China $81,470,000,000
3. France $45,000,000,000
4. Japan $44,310,000,000
5. United Kingdom $42,836,500,000

It's a lot of doh innit! Some more stats include, Sweden's military budget ($5,501,000,000) is bigger than Iran's ($4,300,000,000). Kuwait's is $3,007,000,000 and despite it's neutral status Switzerland's is still $2,548,000,000.

If taken as a $ per person figure, the UK spends $706 per person per year, China only $62 per person, whilst the US spends a whacking great $1,736 per person per year!

Source: CIA Fact Book

Ding Dong Saddam is Dead! (And we all watched it on Youtube...)

Well, Saddam's now dead and I see that on the corners of Baghdad streets, kids are dusting off the second hand rocket launchers that they must've got for their christmas.

It's CNN I feel sorry for! There they go taking a team over there to cover the saddam lynching and low and behold some government official with a mobile becomes a youtube star.

It really is the sign of the times when as soon as we saw the official footage on TV, my girlfriend and I were trawling through Youtube to see if anyone caught the big drop on film. Sure enough, six hours later the news channels had changed to the mobile footage and Saddam will forever be linked with footage that makes Abraham Zapruder's film look like Speilberg.

Now there seems to be some debate over how ethical a private lynching was? Now this is a funny one for me. We bomb the crap out of Baghdad on a daily basis and a very conservative current estimate of civilians killed in the Iraq war sits at around 50,000 yet this one hanging is starting to make a few people feel a bit guilty? Imagine Bush and Blair had to sit and watch mobile clips of all of these people being shot in the head, crushed in their beds, bombed out of existence. Of course they can't think about anything like this, how could they sleep at night?

I guess the funny thing is that much like a serial killer, the guilt probably lessens as the number grows higher. Thinking about the death of one man and the consequences this has for his family and friends is far easier to comprehend than that of 50,000 doctors, teachers, fathers, mothers, children, shop keepers, computer programmers, students, babies, friends. The funny thing is that i'm sure that Tony and George sleep like babies each night. Odd that...