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The use of the word "massacre" implies something like My Lai or the Katyn Forest, a deliberate killing of large numbers of noncombatants, especially by infantry

The use of the word "massacre" implies something like My Lai or the Katyn Forest, a deliberate killing of large numbers of noncombatants, especially by infantry. Attacks by aircraft, like those in this video (as indicated in the article) and the previous one, should be described as something else -- although it remains the case that Apaches, F/A-18s, and B-1s (the US counterpart to the Backfire) do not have the large role in COIN that the Pentagon has assigned them, and their employment in Iraq and Afghanistan reveals a poisonously cavalier attitude towards non-American lives. The right way to fight COIN campaigns is known (see David Galula, _Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice_ (1967)); it is not the same as the Pentagon's -- although in fairness, the US military has been trending in the right direction since the happy day when Rumsfeld was given the boot.

joubert 16y ago
A massacre is the indiscriminate, unnecessary killing of a large number of people. It doesn't matter how you kill them.
vaksel 16y ago
like anything would be different if they killed more people. That My Lai incident you brought up? Where 300-500 civilians were killed? Where the soldiers went out of their way to eliminate every civilian(no fog of war, no "we thought they were terrurists"). Where they killed women, children and infants....only 1 person went to jail for it. 2 days later he was released from jail by the order of a president no less...pending his appeal, and on appeal he was only given 4 months in jail and 3 years under house arrest.
- dkimball 16y ago
  I agree that the US has a long history of double standards (WWII was particularly shameful: the worst criminals in that war were the Communists, who got away scot-free; and the Western Allies' strategic bombings, especially the deliberate targeting of German civilians by the UK and Japanese civilians by the US, were war crimes); but my point was just the connotations of the word "massacre." And if we want to talk about US-perpetrated crimes with horribly inadequate prosecutions for them, we should talk torture. Death is death, and that's the end of it; but Guantanamo Bay, or the rendition programs, or the US torture which the rendition programs replaced when it was forbidden, or the employment of torture down to the present day to control prisoners? The mind revolts. A country which trusts in God should remember that He is just.
  - Quarrelsome 16y ago
    "The worst criminals in that war were the Communists" Oh, you have a measuring stick, how does that work then? I was pretty certain that everyone that took part in that did some fucked up shit: * The Holocaust - Germans * Katyn massacre - Ruskis * Dresden Bombings - English * Nagasaki/Hiroshima - Americans If you'd like to forward your measuring stick to this page: http://members.iinet.net.au/~gduncan/massacres.html http://members.iinet.net.au/~gduncan/massacres.html Then I hope you could provide us with some nice totals at the end?
    - dkimball 16y ago
      My criterion is pre-1945 body count for the governments in question, including non-military actions (like the Holocaust of the Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs; and the Holodomor of the Ukranians) as well as military. It doesn't matter whether or not you count Operation Keelhaul, the campaign against "rootless internationalists," and the like: Stalin worked more people to death in the GULAG network (and starved to death in the special settlements) than Hitler gassed (and worked to death: the Nazi concentration camps were modeled on their Soviet counterparts) in the Holocaust. The Communists targeted class enemies, while the Nazis targeted racial ones, but this was a less important distinction than you think: if you were a kulak and became poor, you were now a poor kulak, not a proletarian... and in practice, Lenin and especially Stalin managed to off an awfully large number of race enemies anyways. Edit: For the "worst _criminals_" part, as opposed to "worst faction": look at the crimes that the Nazis committed, that the Japanese committed, and that the Western Allies committed; Stalin committed crimes of the same categories, including crimes which one of these three groups did commit and the other two did not. The Winter War was Stalin's Manchuria; Berlin was his Nanking; his artillery bombardments of cities were his strategic bombing; the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was his Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact; his extermination of the Ukranians and the kulaks was his Holocaust (remember: a kulak was a class enemy, but a kulak who became poor was now a poor kulak, not a proletarian); and he committed the Katyn Forest massacre, which was on a larger scale than any comparable massacre done by anyone else.
      - DenisM 16y ago
CWuestefeld 16y ago
The use of the word "massacre" implies ... a deliberate killing of large numbers of noncombatants I expect that the most famous "massacre" in history, at least to Americans, was the Boston Massacre in 1770. In that incident, 5 people were killed.
- arethuza 16y ago
  Depends where you live, I'd never heard of the Boston Massacre. Katyn and Glencoe being the examples that come to mind - with the details of the former being particularly gruesome.
- dkimball 16y ago
  Just because the Boston "Massacre" is called that doesn't mean that it _was_ a massacre. Revere and Sam Adams picked a fight, and then pretended that the violence they began had been perpetrated by evil, aggressive foreigners against their pure and noble citizens -- the same contemptible monkey-trick that Putin used in Georgia. The South Ossetians began the Russian-Georgian War, by firing artillery at Georgian villages; the Boston rioters began the "Massacre," and the British fired in response to one of their soldiers being knocked down -- not by a thrown rock, but by someone hitting him with a club. That's self-defense, not My Lai or the Katyn Forest; and the verdicts from their trials support that statement. The US has a nasty history of describing anything it doesn't like as a massacre; this is particularly visible in the Indian Wars, in which every incident in which the US wipes out an American Indian village is a "battle," and every incident in which an Indian tribe wipes out a US village is a "massacre." I'm not saying that the US was always in the wrong or that it was always in the right -- "American Indian tribes" is a pretty broad brush to be painting with, and some tribes (the Cherokee, most prominently) were more civilized than the US while others (the Sioux, for ex.) were honestly pretty barbarous -- but I am saying that traditional US historiography is propagandistic. However, this is changing (although sometimes only by becoming propagandistic in the other direction); and the connotations of the word "massacre" remain the same regardless of how the word's been abused.
dustingetz 16y ago
im sure you're smart and well-informed, but even with all those fancy references, none of us have any idea wtf you're talking about.
- dkimball 16y ago
  (I'm going to lose karma for this, but...) Your "tl;dr" was tl; I dr.

joubert 16y ago

A massacre is the indiscriminate, unnecessary killing of a large number of people. It doesn't matter how you kill them.

vaksel 16y ago

like anything would be different if they killed more people. That My Lai incident you brought up? Where 300-500 civilians were killed? Where the soldiers went out of their way to eliminate every civilian(no fog of war, no "we thought they were terrurists"). Where they killed women, children and infants....only 1 person went to jail for it. 2 days later he was released from jail by the order of a president no less...pending his appeal, and on appeal he was only given 4 months in jail and 3 years under house arrest.

dkimball 16y ago
I agree that the US has a long history of double standards (WWII was particularly shameful: the worst criminals in that war were the Communists, who got away scot-free; and the Western Allies' strategic bombings, especially the deliberate targeting of German civilians by the UK and Japanese civilians by the US, were war crimes); but my point was just the connotations of the word "massacre." And if we want to talk about US-perpetrated crimes with horribly inadequate prosecutions for them, we should talk torture. Death is death, and that's the end of it; but Guantanamo Bay, or the rendition programs, or the US torture which the rendition programs replaced when it was forbidden, or the employment of torture down to the present day to control prisoners? The mind revolts. A country which trusts in God should remember that He is just.
- Quarrelsome 16y ago
  "The worst criminals in that war were the Communists" Oh, you have a measuring stick, how does that work then? I was pretty certain that everyone that took part in that did some fucked up shit: * The Holocaust - Germans * Katyn massacre - Ruskis * Dresden Bombings - English * Nagasaki/Hiroshima - Americans If you'd like to forward your measuring stick to this page: http://members.iinet.net.au/~gduncan/massacres.html http://members.iinet.net.au/~gduncan/massacres.html Then I hope you could provide us with some nice totals at the end?
  - dkimball 16y ago
    My criterion is pre-1945 body count for the governments in question, including non-military actions (like the Holocaust of the Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs; and the Holodomor of the Ukranians) as well as military. It doesn't matter whether or not you count Operation Keelhaul, the campaign against "rootless internationalists," and the like: Stalin worked more people to death in the GULAG network (and starved to death in the special settlements) than Hitler gassed (and worked to death: the Nazi concentration camps were modeled on their Soviet counterparts) in the Holocaust. The Communists targeted class enemies, while the Nazis targeted racial ones, but this was a less important distinction than you think: if you were a kulak and became poor, you were now a poor kulak, not a proletarian... and in practice, Lenin and especially Stalin managed to off an awfully large number of race enemies anyways. Edit: For the "worst _criminals_" part, as opposed to "worst faction": look at the crimes that the Nazis committed, that the Japanese committed, and that the Western Allies committed; Stalin committed crimes of the same categories, including crimes which one of these three groups did commit and the other two did not. The Winter War was Stalin's Manchuria; Berlin was his Nanking; his artillery bombardments of cities were his strategic bombing; the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was his Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact; his extermination of the Ukranians and the kulaks was his Holocaust (remember: a kulak was a class enemy, but a kulak who became poor was now a poor kulak, not a proletarian); and he committed the Katyn Forest massacre, which was on a larger scale than any comparable massacre done by anyone else.
    - DenisM 16y ago

CWuestefeld 16y ago

The use of the word "massacre" implies ... a deliberate killing of large numbers of noncombatants I expect that the most famous "massacre" in history, at least to Americans, was the Boston Massacre in 1770. In that incident, 5 people were killed.

arethuza 16y ago
Depends where you live, I'd never heard of the Boston Massacre. Katyn and Glencoe being the examples that come to mind - with the details of the former being particularly gruesome.
dkimball 16y ago
Just because the Boston "Massacre" is called that doesn't mean that it _was_ a massacre. Revere and Sam Adams picked a fight, and then pretended that the violence they began had been perpetrated by evil, aggressive foreigners against their pure and noble citizens -- the same contemptible monkey-trick that Putin used in Georgia. The South Ossetians began the Russian-Georgian War, by firing artillery at Georgian villages; the Boston rioters began the "Massacre," and the British fired in response to one of their soldiers being knocked down -- not by a thrown rock, but by someone hitting him with a club. That's self-defense, not My Lai or the Katyn Forest; and the verdicts from their trials support that statement. The US has a nasty history of describing anything it doesn't like as a massacre; this is particularly visible in the Indian Wars, in which every incident in which the US wipes out an American Indian village is a "battle," and every incident in which an Indian tribe wipes out a US village is a "massacre." I'm not saying that the US was always in the wrong or that it was always in the right -- "American Indian tribes" is a pretty broad brush to be painting with, and some tribes (the Cherokee, most prominently) were more civilized than the US while others (the Sioux, for ex.) were honestly pretty barbarous -- but I am saying that traditional US historiography is propagandistic. However, this is changing (although sometimes only by becoming propagandistic in the other direction); and the connotations of the word "massacre" remain the same regardless of how the word's been abused.

dustingetz 16y ago

im sure you're smart and well-informed, but even with all those fancy references, none of us have any idea wtf you're talking about.

dkimball 16y ago
(I'm going to lose karma for this, but...) Your "tl;dr" was tl; I dr.