Best american military history books according to redditors
We found 305 Reddit comments discussing the best american military history books. We ranked the 131 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
We found 305 Reddit comments discussing the best american military history books. We ranked the 131 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
I am about 20% of the way through Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam and recall reading that if squads performed well and got high kill rates the dress regulations (including hair length) were relaxed.
Not sure if that's the case here .. but it could be.
Why are people down voting this, it's a reasonable argument. We went in and destroyed half their cities, destroyed their crops and tore the country apart looking for a man that might or might not (and ended up being the latter) not there.
Read Black Hearts. I mean, it doesn't happen too much but it still happens too much to be acceptable.
No, it's not an isolated incident — in terms of scale, US atrocities pale in comparison to those atrocities carried out by both North and South Vietnamese forces, but My Lai was just the most-publicised incident.
A DoD working group set up after My Lai to examine alleged US war crimes identified 320 incidents (not including My Lai) that were found to have some basis in fact. Army investigators substantiated seven massacres by US troops in addition to My Lai.
The LA Times reported the working group's files extensively once they were declassified — the stories they published are here. Nick Turse, the reporter who led the Times investigations, wrote a book called Kill Anything That Moves, which documents atrocities against civilians in Vietnam.
Investigators concluded that there was enough evidence to charge 203 US servicemen in connection with violence against civilians; 57 were eventually court-martialled and 23 were convicted. From the Times:
> Fourteen received prison sentences ranging from six months to 20 years, but most won significant reductions on appeal. The stiffest sentence went to a military intelligence interrogator convicted of committing indecent acts on a 13-year-old girl in an interrogation hut in 1967.
>
>He served seven months of a 20-year term, the records show.
>
>Many substantiated cases were closed with a letter of reprimand, a fine or, in more than half the cases, no action at all.
>
>There was little interest in prosecuting Vietnam war crimes, says Steven Chucala, who in the early 1970s was legal advisor to the commanding officer of the Army's Criminal Investigation Division. He says he disagreed with the attitude but understood it.
It's also worth reading this long series of reports by the Toledo Blade (for which they won a Pulitzer prize) investigating atrocities by a US counter-insurgency unit called Tiger Force.
Yes, obviously. Perception IS reality in people's minds. And when people are acting on false and extremely negative information, it can lead to racial discrimination, attacks, fear, hate, and even war. Look at what lots of people believe.
Tibetan genocide
Uyghur cultural genocide
Eating dogs is widespread
Steals hundreds of billions in ip each year
China's state subsidies to companies are unfair [this is common among numerous Western nations]
T square massacre
OBOR Debt trap
China is a colonizer
China is just as bad as America [https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/us_atrocities.md]
Live organ harvesting
Huawei is a spying system
etc
On top of that
America is NOT an empire so we don't need to worry where it goes [http://www.amazon.com/Rogue-State-Guide-Worlds-Superpower/dp/1567513743/]
America cares about human rights so when a massacre is reported we brush it off as an isolated incident [http://www.amazon.com/Kill-Anything-That-Moves-American/dp/1250045061/]
America's debt are transparent and fair [http://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Economic-Hit-John-Perkins/dp/0452287081/]
American dream is alive and well [social mobility is one of the lowest of developed nations]
America does not conduct economic espionage. [yes, it does since at least 1990's]
None of these things are true yet are widely believed. They aren't believed by everyone but they are believed by enough people that it's massively harming China's reputation.
Warriors & Citizens?
Two book recommendations:
Killing Hope - explores the United States' covert and overt operations globally, including crimes like Colombia and Guatemala.
Kill Anything That Moves - focuses specifically on Vietnam.
History of Bin Laden/Al Qaeda
He was a part of the fundamentalist military unit that assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981. In 1984, he was hired by the CIA, though they claim that their relationship was short-lived. He would soon join the military and become a member of the Green Berets, and serve as a drill sergeant at Fort Bragg while providing clandestine training to jihadists such as Mahmud Abaouhalima, convicted perpetrator of the 1993 World Trade Center bombings.
/u/nemracbackwards
Since I got banned from your sjw sub (yeah, so much for your claims of them banning only for “rape threats”, “misogyny”, “racism”), I’ll respond to you here.
> Not to derail this topic, but your mod u/Natalie-Ng and a user I believe u/dat0kki (sp?) have resorted to calling me a slut and whore as a defense in threads.
lol dafuq???? Where the fuck did I ever called you a slut and whore? YOU were the one that came flying out of nowhere to attack me and called me an ad hominem when I wasn’t even talking to your dumbass in the first place and was politely explaining why the wording of a title can upset some readers. So please don’t try to pull that victim card bullshit here.
And speaking of victim card…
> Imho, this male toxicity has everything to do with Asian culture. Asian culture has been extremely patriarchal, while yes this exist in all cultures, I believe it's unique for Asian culture and heighten in some senses towards misogyny.
Lol, I see white brainwashing has done its number on you and you’ve successfully, and rather stupidly, eaten up every negative stereotype about our community thrown at you.
Since everyone with half a brain was already able to debunk your bullshit here, I would just like to know, if you truly care about misogyny so much, why don’t you spend half the time calling out the REAL misogynists that also happen to be both Asian men and women’s and every other POC’s oppressors as you do shitting on your own race?
Pedophile profile: Young, white, wealthy
http://www.zdnet.com/article/pedophile-profile-young-white-wealthy/
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CpH1gOUUMAAC02K.jpg:large
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/08/01/cambodia-and-western-fabrication-of-history/
Your dearly beloved whites traveling to rape little kids
http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=2325416&page=1
Your dearly beloved whites most likely to commit familicide
https://www.nij.gov/topics/crime/intimate-partner-violence/pages/murder-suicide.aspx
Invading multiple countries and mass raping women? Not exactly something they’re unfamiliar with.
http://www.voltairenet.org/article177063.html
https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-History-Korean-1950-1951-Nonconformist/dp/0316817708/
https://www.amazon.com/Kill-Anything-That-Moves-American/dp/1250045061/
And please explain the Agent Orange Privilege
http://thiscantbehappening.net/node/2715
More and more sexual violence: http://imgur.com/AHK6D2R
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CmG07MuVAAAIqOP.jpg
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CmG08hxUYAAswLA.jpg
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CmG1B12UYAAdcOW.jpg
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CmG1DKGUYAAbZIe.jpg
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CmGWf4pXIAALmiv.jpg
More and more dehumanization by white men who pretend to be “egalitarian”
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CmG0blfUsAAIuHx.jpg
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CmG0lMkUYAAG4Rq.jpg
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CmG0mICUkAElY0j.jpg
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CmG0nfDUsAAo9K5.jpg
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CmG0OVwVEAA-rVx.jpg
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CmG0PYSUoAAmoIl.jpg
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CmG0QuUUgAAS78v.jpg
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CmG0SFRUkAAcBfe.jpg
MRA/MGTOW just sweeping the west happily
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2012/leader%E2%80%99s-suicide-brings-attention-men%E2%80%99s-rights-movement
Apparently, you do.
http://imgur.com/6bkGKZL
> The history of Western imperialism in Asia and its lingering effects present the greatest source of inequality for Diasporic Asian women today. White sexual imperialism, through rape and war, created the hyper sexualized stereotype of the Asian woman. This stereotype in turn fostered the over prevalence of Asian women in pornography, the mail order bride phenomenon, the Asian fetish syndrome, and worst of all, sexual violence against Asian women.
> Without first undermining the White sexual imperialist regime, violent crimes against Asian victims will continue to be largely perpetrated by White men
> For the Asian woman at the intersection of gender and race, achieving equality means overthrowing not only male supremacy or White supremacy, but specifically White male supremacy.
> It is the White male’s sexual dominance over the Asian female which emerges as the source of inequality the Asian female suffers.
> White Sexual Imperialism: A Theory of Asian Feminist Jurisprudence
http://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1243&context=crsj
> Sexual violence directed at Asian women by white men—and any Asian woman can tell you how unrelenting and commonplace such violence and sexualized racism are—is a direct result of Western imperialism
> No One Is Free Until All Are Free By Chris Hedges
http://www.rapereliefshelter.bc.ca/learn/resources/no-one-free-until-all-are-free-chris-hedges
> the foreigners here--mainly US and Canada--are unreal. It's a joke. And because of this, Korean women generally have a bad impression of western men. Add all of the ridiculous army assholes here…
>If you're not an English teacher, you're instantly higher value. Again, I cannot impress enough how deplorable the white man is here. It has to be seen...
> Thailand, Taiwan, Korea, China or Japan?
https://www.rooshvforum.com/thread-28141-page-3.html
> I know it sounds like an over-generalization, but it kind of seems that ESL teachers fall into to two categories: white guys with no game who want to give getting laid a try, so they go to some Pacific Rim country and hope the wealth disparity gives them that edge they need; and pedophiles who want to try out the underage hookers in Thailand or whatever.
> I don't know, it's just that I've known at least three guys who have gone across the ocean to teach english, and they've all been dirtbags.
> Tell me about it dude. Most of them don't even know how to teach or even have degrees. A lot of guys that get discharged in Korea stay here and teach english and make bank and use girls. And they don't even speak Korean!
Guys who teach english overseas are all scumbags | Sherdog Forums | UFC, MMA & Boxing Discussion
http://forums.sherdog.com/threads/guys-who-teach-english-overseas-are-all-scumbags.565263/
> “So you're coming to China to run away from your problems... Social anxiety, unattractiveness and/or loneliness. I don't blame you. I'm sure many here would admit to the same reasoning if they had the balls. Myself included…
> And you know what? It fucking works. You step foot in some shit tier city and suddenly you're the coolest, most interesting motherfucker in town. I get it. It’s an awesome feeling.
> But here’s the thing. Deep down, under the barriers and walls you’ve put up, all those problems will still exist. You can bang all the Rainies you want and feel like the biggest badass but there will always be a little feeling in the back of your mind, gnawing at your psyche like a ravenous molerat. A voice that whispers: I can’t cut it back home.
> Some guys will overcompensate to the extreme, banging anything that walks and being straight up assholes to everyone just because they can. Just to make that voice a little smaller. But it will still be there. That tiny, frustrating little whisper. This is all a dream. In 5 minutes, you’re gonna wake up in your old bed at your folks’ house in Bumfuck, Arkansas. And everything's gonna be shit again.”
> So you're coming to China to run away from your problems, eh? : China
https://np.reddit.com/r/China/comments/2bx4jg/so_youre_coming_to_china_to_run_away_from_your/
> Young guy is thinking of moving to China to work as a teacher. He'd heard about sexpats and alcoholic expats. China is full of them, he was told. What a bunch of losers.
> I've told the girls I'm not sure I'm ready for a serious relationship. It's their fault if the choose to hang on hoping for something more.
> He starts using tantan for hookups. It's so easy to have a few different girls on the go. I was hurting the girls I was hooking up with (they all seem to be looking for marriage).
> I'd become some sort of sexpat alcoholic. I'm just as shitty as any other guy.
[SERIOUS] Did China force you to face your inner demons? : China
https://np.reddit.com/r/China/comments/481sbh/serious_did_china_force_you_to_face_your_inner/
Because otherwise, you reek of mentally colonized garbage.
There are a whole host of reasons. I don't claim that my list is exhaustive.
The war wasn't particularly popular. The North Vietnamese (Viet Minh) were never a threat to the USA except in the paranoid anti-communist atmosphere of the times. It was a war fought to demonstrate our willingness to uphold the treaty obligations in the SEATO pact.
US society was undergoing several huge convulsions; there was the civil rights (and later, black power) movement and the big counter-cultural upheaval (free speech, drugs, and hippies) going on at the same time the anti-war movement was becoming a political force.
Morale withing many of the ground forces was steadily sinking. The war was difficult and the campaigns seemingly unending. Much of the ground combat was fought at the platoon and company level and the way the rotations of men were scheduled there were new guys ("cherries") replacing seasoned men all the time. There wasn't the same sense of belonging to a particular fighting unit. Each GI had his own personal calendar with the dates of his return from overseas and estimated date of termination memorized.
The lousy fighting conditions — jungle warfare, invisible enemy, unfriendly and treacherous villagers. and later, a feeling of alienation —
resulted in well publicized atrocities carried out by US troops. A lot of this stuff happens in every war but in these early days of the infant Information Age more of these incidents were recorded, documented, and broadcast than ever before.
Since many people (in growing numbers) didn't believe in the rationale for fighting the war to begin with they were less likely to identify and sympathize with soldiers who were involved in massacres of civilians or other commonly reported acts of barbarism. See Nick Turse's book.)
Actual incidents where Vietnam veterans were attacked or spat on are hard to substantiate. I do know of incidents where returning servicemen attacked anti-war demonstrators and bragged about it, however.
The idea of a psychopathic murderous American fighting man was at odds with the society envisioned by the anti-war movement and the drugs and rock counter-culture. Much of the disrespect for the Vietnam veteran comes from the vets themselves. Or maybe I should say "ourselves" — I was drafted and spent '68 and '69 in Vietnam. And while I can gratefully say that I personally did nothing to be ashamed of, I can't say my experiences gives me any sense of pride or patriotism.
TL:DR Another '60s guy complaining about the Vietnam war
Read or listen to Kill Anything that Moves by Nick Turse. Excellent overview and description of the atrocities that occurred during the late 60s in Vietnam. Nothing went too far, literally the worse things you can possibly think of to do to other humans and just scale it up to US War Machine levels. To all humans: babies, children, women, and men. To animals, livestock, cultivated fields, and whole ecosystems. And the attitudes, no remorse, no empathy, just kill as many humans as possible as quickly as possible. I can’t believe it’s not generally known what the US did down there, it’s just not taught in schools. You’d be lucky to find someone who remembers the My Lai Massacre, but that’s about it.
Isn't that a little premature? I we don't even know what's really going on yet. There are a lot of products on Amazon, some of which are provided by third-parties, etc.
What evidence is there that Amazon is doing this deliberately or systematically?
I don't see any mention of "adult" in the page for "Unfriendly Fire"... am I missing something?
The Kindle Edition of Unfriendly Fire does have a sales rank.
This could easily be an accident or error. Let's not get out the pitchforks and torches until we give everyone time to sort things out.
Edit: Unfriendly Fire's sales rank has been restored. Plus, Amazon PR has been saying this was a glitch from the beginning.
Edit 2: Sources are now reporting that a hacker actually attacked Amazon through its "report inappropriate content" tool, causing the products to be removed automatically.
My Lai was not an one off event, it was standard operating procedure. It is only remembered because people found out about it.
The atrocities - massacres and rapes - the Americans committed in Vietnam was approaching what the Japanese did in Nanking. It is similar in level of brutality if not in scale. Here are some quotes from testimonies of returning Vietnamese vets.
Brutalizing women:
> I saw one case where a woman was shot by a sniper, one of our snipers. When we got up to her, she was asking for water. And the Lieutenant said to kill her. So he ripped off her clothes. They stabbed her in both breasts. They spread-eagled her and shoved an E- tool up her vagina, an entrenching tool, and she was still asking for water. And then they took that out, and they used a tree limb, and then she was shot.
---
> After she was questioned, and, of course, dead, this guy came over, who was a former major, been in the service for twenty years, and he got hungry again and came back over working with USAID, Aid International Development. He went over there, ripped her clothes off and took a knife and cut, from her vagina almost all the way up, just about up to her breasts, and pulled her organs out, completely out of her cavity, and threw them out. Then he stopped and knelt over and commenced to peel every bit of skin off her body, and left her there as a sign for something or other.
---
> As I was walking over to him, I turned and I looked in the area. I looked to where the VCS were -- supposed VCS -- and two men were leading a young girl, approximately 19 years old, very pretty, out of a hootch. She had no clothes on, so I assumed she'd been raped, which was pretty SOP. That's standard operating procedure for civilians. And she was thrown onto the pile of the 19 women and children, and five men around the circle opened up on full automatic with their M-16s. And that was the end of that.
Killing children:
> I was picked up by a truckload of grunt Marines with two company grade officers, 1st Lieutenants. We were about 5 miles down the road, where there were some Vietnamese children at the gateway of the village, and they gave the old finger gesture at us. It was understandable that they picked this up from the GIs there. They stopped the trucks -- they didn't stop the truck, they slowed down a little bit, and it was just like response, the guys got up, including the lieutenants, and just blew all the kids away. There were about five or six kids blown away, and then the truck just continued down the hill. That was my first day in Vietnam.
Massacring entire villages:
> and there was a river on each side, and there was another company behind each river, and like the people were running around inside, and they were just shooting them, and like the newspapers said, "Operation Stone, like World War II movie," and we just sat up there and we wiped them out. Women, children, everything. 291 of them.
---
> Because we went into the area, and it was to set the example to show that we weren't fucking around. So the first thing we do is burn down the village and kill everybody just to let them know we weren't fucking around.
---
> When we went out, I'd say 50% at least of the villages we passed through would be burned to the ground. There was no difference between some that we burned and the ones we didn't burn. It's just that some we had time and we'd burn them. We were given orders whenever we moved into a village to reconnoiter by fire. This means whenever we step into a village we're to fire upon houses, bushes, anything to our discretion that looked like there might be someone hiding behind or in or under. What we did was we'd carry our rifles about hip high and we'd line up low to the village and start walking, firing from the hip.
And there are many more stories like these. Photos and transcript here. There is also a book. If anyone doesn't believe you, look at this iconic photo from My Lai: women and children moments before their deaths. The woman in black had just been raped, and is still buttoning her shirt.
I'll stick with the testimony of the soldiers who were there, and that of the Vietnamese victims and the serious historians who've gone through the documents and archives.
I've spoken with Scott Camil who is featured throughout the Winter Soldier, he gave honest testimony corroborated by comrades and by Vietnamese victims whom he visited and apologized to in 94'.
Read Nick Turse's work "Kill Anything That Moves", every single atrocity is painstakingly verified by multiple sources many of which are direct US gov documents that were suppressed.
>How do you talk about a group that often has individuals that work against AAPI well-being for personal interest, without being offensive?
Make sure to be clear about who is being addressed eg self haters. Do not generalize.
 
>We cannot override love.
Very wrong. You're assuming these relationships are love. I have facts and proof that very often, it absolutely is not. Do you realize that Af are preferred by sexist, racist, and misogynistic white men? Go read the redpill, hundreds of thousands of white men read that. Here's the latest..
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheRedPill/comments/4ojhit/how_to_stuff_your_white_meat_into_asian_girls/
 
If the Asian community is ever going to improve, they must face the fact that we're being divided and conquered by whites (mostly males). They are the enemy - not each other. See the list of crimes below. ALL done by wm who turn around and 24/7 show images of themselves "saving Af" from "evil Am". All Asians are being brainwashed constantly.
 
Some research below for support.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>White hegemonic ideologies of masculinity and femininity determine who gets to have sex with whom …We do not make choices of attraction in a vacuum…Hegemonic ideology becomes our commonsense notions.
>Women were painted as perpetually sexually available to white men while Asian American men were constructed as castrated or impotent…
Asian American Sexual Politics: The Construction of Race, Gender, and Sexuality: Rosalind S. Chou
http://www.amazon.com/Asian-American-Sexual-Politics-Construction/dp/1442209240
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>racialized images can cause Asian American women to believe they will find greater gender equality with white men and can cause white men to believe they will find greater subservience with Asian women. This dynamic promotes Asian American women’s availability to white men and makes them particularly vulnerable to mistreatment.
Asian American Women And Racialized Femininities 'Doing' Gender across Cultural Worlds
http://www.irows.ucr.edu/cd/courses/232/pyke/femininities.pdf
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>He defines internalized racism as “the ‘subjection’ of the victims of racism to the mystifications of the very racist ideology which imprison and define them” (Hall 1986 - 26).
>it is referred to as “internalized racial oppression,” “internalized racism,” “internalized White supremacy,” “internalized Whiteness,” and the much criticized term “racial self hatred.”
>The dominant group controls the construction of reality through the production of ideologies or “knowledge” (Foucault 1977 [1975]) that circulate throughout society where they inform social norms, organizational practices, bureaucratic procedures, and commonsense knowledge. In this way the interests of the oppressors are presented as reflecting everyone’s best interests, thereby getting oppressed groups to accept the dominant group’s interests as their own
>the subjugated inculcate, seemingly by cultural osmosis, negative stereotypes and ideologies disseminated as taken for granted knowledge.
>individual inculcation of the racist stereotypes, values, images, and ideologies perpetuated by the White dominant society about one’s racial group, leading to feelings of self doubt, disgust, and disrespect for one’s race and or oneself.
>All systems of oppression not thoroughly coerced through brute force and overt repression involve the dominant group’s ability to win consent of the oppressed.
>When the oppressed come to accept these identities as “real,” they are in effect internalizing their subjugated status
>One need not experience discrete, identifiable instances of overt discrimination to internalize racial oppression.
>White racism can infiltrate the world view of the racially oppressed without their conscious consent (Osajima 1993) in a subtle process some refer to as “indoctrination” and “mental colonialization” (hooks 2003).
What is Internalized Racial Oppression and Why Don't We Study it - Acknowledging Racism's Hidden Injuries
http://irows.ucr.edu/cd/courses/232/pyke/intracopp.pdf
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The origins of self hate and white worship are the same – racist stereotypes and lies that masquerade as “facts”…
>Even at a young age, the white racial frame that normalizes whiteness affects children.
>A study of sixty-five Asian Americans at an elite university found that respondents spoke more positively about their physical features when they seemed "less Asian" and more "white" or "American."
>Earlier research has shown Asian Americans being ashamed or attempting to hide their race or pass for white.
>At least I didn't have a Korean accent; then it would have probably been even worse.
>It made an impact over time, when all you hear is the negative instead of the positive. I always felt like the outsider and I was teased for just being Asian. They'd pull their eyes down, and they always thought I was Chinese.
>All sixty respondents had memories of being teased and feeling like a racial "other”.
>Asian Americans, especially girls and women, are disturbingly overrepresented with rates of depression and suicide. As recently as spring of 2011, The National Alliance on Mental lllness released a report that Asian American girls have the highest rates of depressive symptoms of any racial/ethnic or gender group.
Asian American Sexual Politics: The Construction of Race, Gender, and Sexuality: Rosalind S. Chou
http://www.amazon.com/Asian-American-Sexual-Politics-Construction/dp/1442209240
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A sliver of the crimes committed by whites against Asians.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
Cambodia
http://www.amazon.com/Sideshow-Kissinger-Nixon-Destruction-Cambodia/dp/0671835254/
Laos
Hiding America’s War Crimes in Laos | http://thiscantbehappening.net/node/2715
Vietnam
● http://www.amazon.com/Kill-Anything-That-Moves-American/dp/1250045061/
● http://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Program-Americas-Forbidden-Bookshelf-ebook/dp/B00KGMIW6Q/
Korea
● http://www.amazon.com/Hidden-History-Korean-1950-1951-Nonconformist/dp/0316817708/
Philippines
● http://www.amazon.com/Benevolent-Assimilation-American-Philippines-1899-1903/dp/0300030819/
China
● China’s Rise, Fall, and Re-Emergence as a Global Power | http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/03/chinas-rise-fall-and-re-emergence-as-a-global-power/
● USA’s warfare against China ½ | http://www.voltairenet.org/article177063.html
 
Asians need to ask themelves....why are they talking about their "progressive afwm relationships" and taking foodie pictures and demonizing Am for their "toxic masculinity" while being TOTALLY SILENT on mass rape, genocide, the white male pedophile epidemic in Asia. I can provide sources for that too if required.
 
Really, how does the ONE group that commits BY FAR, the most horrific crimes imaginable come out looking like heroes. That's the question everyone should be asking.
 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>how do you respond when people claim that we don't have a right to complain about discrimination due to the fact that there is racism/sexism within our community?
Ask them if the "tone police" would rather be born Asian than white. Or, you can point out the myriad of wm oppression like 620+ % MORE domestic violence than Am, 297% more raping than Am, etc. Point out their ludicrous "stop white genocide" campaign. Never get gas lighted by white hypocrites. They are absolute experts in bullshitting. I've seen it too many times.
Also this:
https://www.amazon.com/Kill-Anything-That-Moves-American/dp/1250045061/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1479436423&sr=8-1&keywords=kill+everything+that+moves
>look at the context. SK was a Western puppet that collaborated with compradors and the Imperial Japanese. They killed leftists. It's like "invading" your home to save your own family from thugs. See http://www.amazon.com/Kill-Anything-That-Moves-American/dp/1250045061/ same pattern [of killing leftists because they got in the way of Western capital] in every country.
https://np.reddit.com/r/aznidentity/comments/9au1ey/now_this_is_my_kind_of_movie_didnt_create_this/e4zcerf/
Popular myth, but actually it was the ammo rack that was the source of fire in most cases - a problem mitigated by wet stowage ammo racks in later variants, Source: Armored Thunderbolt by Zaloga
Coincidentally I am reading about this right now in Mary Roach's new book, Grunt. The chapter I read today mentions hand transplant surgery, but the main focus of the chapter is an in depth discussion of penile reconstruction as well as penis transplant surgery (and discusses the mental effects) for injured military men. It's a whole new field of research because in the past, severe injury to the genital area often resulted in death (and hard to get funding for since people don't recognize the importance of how it can make someone feel "whole" again, even without their limbs).
To understand the depth of the problem you’d have to start from the beginning from the Bank of Amsterdam, the origins of fractional-reserve banking.
Back in Amsterdam during the late 1500’s to early 1600’s, there were goldsmiths from whom people would buy gold and people would also store their gold at these workplaces, and in order to confirm that the gold was theirs, they were given paper receits, in turn these paper receits were worth the amount of the gold they had stored. The clever early bankers/goldsmiths soon figured out that they could create more paper receits than the amount of gold they had in storage and thus they could loan out great amounts of money which they didn’t have and charge interest on it which esentially created money out of thin air for them, and thus, fractional reserve banking was created.
This led to other banks being created such as the Central Bank of England which rose after the English Civil War when Oliver Cromwell betrayed King Charles I and beheaded him but he had been funded in this civil war by international money lenders, one of them being Menasseh Ben Israel who had lended Cromwell the amount he needed to the british treasury which was £1,250,000 on certain conditions, one of these conditions being that Jews would be allowed to resettle in England again since 1290 (when Kind Edward I had expulsed them from England for coin clipping which was High Treason against the crown at that time) and thus Jews resettled in England again after 350 years and other condition was to sign the charter for the Central Bank of England, which was signed and created and operates to this day.
So in essence, Oliver Cromwell sold out the crown to foreign money lenders who occupied one of the key societal positions in his nation and pretty much ruled as they wished. Soon after, Amschel Mayer Rothschild, the father of the Rothschild dynasty, sent his sons around the world to do financial work as he had ordered, one of his sons, Nathan Mayer Rothschild, was sent to England to operate with the Central Bank.
From there on it is a long history of the banks intruding on wars and funding different wars here and there and creating drama and diversion around Europe because of their immense financial gains and power.
All of this happened because people were too stupid and occupied with war and conflict that they didn’t realize the person infront of them was robbing them the entire them, it is a shame but to clarify, I do by no means imply that all Jews are connected to this or support any anti-Jewish sentiment, I am merely speaking of the Historical facts and genesis of the Rothschild dynasty.
Sources:
https://www.amazon.com/Pawns-Game-FBI-William-Carr/dp/1939438039
https://youtu.be/WVxWPkMXOmw
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam_Wisselbank
http://www.historyhouse.co.uk/articles/coin_clipping.html
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_of_Expulsion
I agree, i have read the book cover to cover at least 5 times, it has so much value.
Davids book is here
I can also suggest these:
Cpl. Forrest Guth: 'E' Company, 506th PIR, 101st Airborne Division
Biggest Brother : The Life of Major Dick Winters, The Man Who Led the Band of Brothers
Currahee!: A Screaming Eagle at Normandy
Brothers In Battle, Best of Friends (By William "Wild Bill" Guarnere and Edward "Babe" Heffron)
Beyond Band of Brothers: The War Memoirs of Major Dick Winters
and anything else by Steven E Ambrose is fantastic , especially citizen soliders and wild blue.
Lets highlight some of the inaccuracies in that WIB article shall we?
>Most tanks at the time ran on diesel, a safer and less flammable fuel than gasoline. The Sherman’s powerplant was a 400-horsepower gas engine that, combined with the ammo on board, could transform the tank into a Hellish inferno after taking a hit.
This isn't true, the only nations using diesel for most (if not all) of their tanks was Russia, Japan, and Italy. Germany didn't field a single diesel powered tank.
Nor is the gasoline the primary point of ignition in these tanks. The ammo, which the article suggests was simply a contributing factor, was the primary issue in burnt out tanks of all nations. Note that everyone's tanks burned quite often when knocked out.
>All it took was a German adversary like the awe-inspiring Tiger tank with its 88-millimeter gun. One round could punch through the Sherman’s comparatively thin armor. If they were lucky, the tank’s five crew might have seconds to escape before they burned alive.
So what? The Tiger was such a rare adversary as to be an immaterial threat in the grand scheme of the war. The Americans for instance only encountered a few from June 6th until the Ardennes Offensive began in December.
And to address you post for a moment:
> the most common german anti-tank gun was the 88 and it could tear a sherman to pieces from beyond the range of the Sherman's own gun
No that isn't even remotely true, the 88 was an exceedingly rare sight in NWE. Only 200 Tiger Is and 204 Tiger IIs fought on the Western Front (out of a total of 4434 Panzers of all types), and fewer than 100 JagdTigers and Nashorns. And 88mm AT guns were just as rare. By far the most common weapon in the German arsenal was the 75mm of various types. It was used in Stugs and Panzer IVs, the two most common AFVs on the Western Front, the Panther, and the Pak 40, which was the standard German AT gun right until the end of the war.
> which was the exact impetus[2] to develop the 76mm high velocity gun for the Sherman.
The 76mm M1 gun began development in 1942, soon after the introduction of the Sherman. It was recognized even then that the 75mm gun wouldn't cut it forever, despite its excellent performance in Africa and Italy.
What actually convinced the Americans to rush the 76mm armed Shermans to the continent was the Panther.
> the german panzerfaust could likewise destroy a sherman[3] and in Normandy close combat, 34% of tank losses were due to those.
Whats your point? A Bazooka could kill any German tank fielded as well, how is this relevant?
Anyway to get back to the WIB article:
>Belton Cooper, author of the appropriately named Death Traps, a study of U.S. armored divisions and their battles in Europe during World War II.
I am speechless... that they would call Belton's memoir a study of any sort just boggles my mind. Would you like to know one of the things he claimed in that "study"? Belton claimed that the name Sherman was created by the DoW to insult Southerners. And thats just one instance where he went wrong. Here
is an article explaining why the book is bad. I can provide more if you would like.
>During the European Campaign, the Division had some 648 Sherman tanks completely destroyed in combat and had another 700 knocked out, repaired and put back into operation. This was a loss rate of 580 percent.
Yup, the war was pretty bad, but lets take a look at what the 3rd Armored did to the Germans, you know, just for some context.
As you can see the 3rd Armored directly destroyed just a little less than 1500 Tanks and SPGs. Those are permanent losses, not those that are knocked out and then repaired. Those are losses what the Germans never got back. The 3rd in contrast suffered 780 permanent light and medium tank losses. So no, the statistics don't actually tell a different story. The Sherman did pretty damn good if you ask me.
>In comparison, the Tiger—clearly the superior tank when compared to the Sherman—was made of costly materials, laboriously assembled and expensive to operate. The Germans manufactured slightly more than 1,300 Tigers.
Well... this is a very simplistic comparison. Let me ask you this, could the Tiger have filled the same role in the US Army as the Sherman did, or even the role of tanks in the Wehrmacht like the Panzer IV or V?
No of course it couldn't, the Tiger was a heavy tank, not a medium. It never could have filled the shoes of the Shermans or T-34s or Panzer IVs, but then it wasn't supposed to. The Tiger was a shit medium tank in the same way that all those mediums were shit heavy tanks.
So no, the Tiger wasn't simply a "superior" tank. The answer to such a comparison is much more nuanced than that, but obviously the author is poorly equipped to deal with such nuances.
>Whether there was another trained tank crew to man the Sherman was more problematic.
The US did have crew shortage issues, but the same issues were being suffered by the Germans. The author is once again taking these things out of context.
>Although its 75-millimeter gun was less potent than German tank guns were,
Except for the most part that didn't matter.German armor was by no means invulnerable to the 75mm M3. Tanks like the Panzer IV, and AFVs like the Stug could be knocked out from normal combat ranges by the 75mm gun. The Tiger and Panthers were tougher nuts to crack, but cracked they were when they had to be. And as I said, the US upgraded the Shermans in response to the Panther.
>Additional weapons included two M1919 Browning .30-caliber machine guns and a Browning .50-caliber M2 on a coaxial turret mount.
Uh... maybe this is just poor wording but the Sherman did not have a 3 machine guns in a coaxial mount, nor was the .50 coaxially mounted.
>Despite its many weaknesses, the Sherman tank became a mainstay for both the U.S. military and armed forces around the world.
All tanks have many weaknesses. But the Sherman was, overall, a good tank. It was largely comparable to its primary adversaries, as well as tanks like the T-34, which it bested in Korea I might add.
Seriously, go read a book that isn't Belton's memoir. I would suggest Armored Thunderbolt for an actual historian's examination of the performance and record of the Sherman.
The short answer is that the military recruits from Republican areas more easily, not that the military turns people Republican.
You end up Democrats who are perceived to be prejudiced against those who join the military (for both political and "intelligence" reasons), and have a reduced exposure in their daily lives to those who serve.
Meanwhile, the BRAC efforts have greatly increased the size of military installations in Texas, the Carolinas, and Georgia. These areas tend to vote more Republican and they have more direct access to see what the benefits and disadvantages of military service actually are.
James Mattis' book Warriors and Citizens from August 2016 talks about much of this, but doesn't link it to politics, that I remember.
Personal anecdote:
If anything, the military has turned me more liberal - I had a guaranteed job/paycheck, plenty of time off, decent pay, clothes to wear, a place to live, career progression, educational and training opportunities, free healthcare, a guaranteed home loan, and a bunch of other stuff I'm forgetting right now. I know how all those things benefited me, and I can easily see how those things could benefit many more people, and the country as a whole if we were able to expand those programs.
I think I've shared this before but I also recommend you read Kill Anything That Moves. It goes through how and why things like Mai Lai happened (and there was an atrocity like this almost every single day during the war).
http://www.amazon.com/Unfriendly-Fire-Undermines-Military-Weakens/dp/0312373481/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239554070&sr=1-1
I guess you didn't read my comment. Here you go.
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Hearts-Platoons-Descent-Triangle/dp/B008SLEQF8
https://www.amazon.com/Kill-Anything-That-Moves-American/dp/1250045061
neat book
Just read Harry Yeide book on the separate tank battalions and the tank destroyer force in ww2
both are pretty good especially the infantry's armor as it covers the amphtrack battalions in the pacific.
I got it out of a paper copy of Zaloga's Armored Thunderbolt. But it is also, roughly, in the AskHistorians FAQ WWII section. Most people seem to think the biggest difference was moving the ammo out of the sponsons and basket. The wet storage itself may or may not have helped much. I mean, IDK how water smothers a self-oxidizing explosive.
There's a great book a journalist put together from primary sources.
Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (American Empire Project) https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250045061/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_q74TCbEW3ZD02
I cannot tell you how misinformed you are of al-Qaeda's status in Afghanistan. I highly recommend you read Taliban by James Fergusson, to get a clearer picture of the Taliban-al-Qaeda relationship.
The Taliban had been willing to hand-over Osama bin Laden since 1998.
Also as for this comic, the reason why the Americans left the Philippines Clark Airbase, was because it was of no use to them anymore, as there were no more regional threats that they did not already have bases close enough to.
If this were to be true Italy, Cuba and Japan, three countries (amongst many others) that have protested the presence of American bases, but both of them obliged to retain their bases.
Also, and very shamefully violence has succeeded in kicking out an American Base, in Lebanon for example, when Hezbollah killed a couple hundred American and French marines, in 1983. This led to an immediate American evacuation from Lebanon.
The presence of bases is not black or white like this comic presents them to be, I turn you to Catherine Lutz's book [The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle against U.S. Military Posts](
http://www.amazon.com/Bases-Empire-Struggle-against-Military/dp/0814752446). Its a very good read.
Furthermore I'm not against America being the global police, in fact I think its the only way of maintaining the global status-quo of peace and prosperity; but to paint such a black/white image, is to have a very naive look at the world.
>Doesn't matter how many civilians may have been killed, "They served!!1!" and were, therefore, heroes.
I don't know what you think you're talking about, but Robert Bales isn't shown as a hero. The men of the Mỹ Lai Massacre definitely weren't heroes.
I've never seen a soldier get outed for killing civilians and get treated like a hero.
Even guys who did do bad things to civilians, got away with it for years, were still brought to justice and lost all the "heroness" from people they served with, 502nds deployment to Iraq's Sunni Triangle of death is a great example of people that were seen as heroes, doing the best they could under their extremely stressful conditions, till their actions came to the light of day.
So, before you continue with your anti-military rhetoric, do research and see how they are actually looked upon. Just because someone went to war in Iraq or Afghanistan doesn't mean they killed civilians. Lastly, even if someone did kill a civilian by mistake or even on purpose, I can tell you they do not live with it easily.
Edited: conditions from condoms
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/358062-nigel-farage-says-the-jewish-lobby-has-disproportionate-power-in-the
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/the-chosen-few-a-new-explanati
https://np.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/4qz2cw/can_someone_please_explain_the_jews_control_the/
http://yournewswire.com/putin-bans-rothschilds-from-russia/
http://wikileaksnews.co/vladimir-putin-bans-rothschilds-entering-russia/
https://geopolitics.co/vital-issues/ben-fulford/big-power-plays-by-rothschilds-rockellers-leave-putin-on-the-defensive-and-china-in-the-middle/
http://humansarefree.com/2014/10/exposing-shadow-forces-behind-nwo.html
https://www.indiatimes.com/culture/who-we-are/these-are-the-13-families-in-the-world-that-apparently-control-everything-from-politics-to-terrorism-257642.html.
https://www.disclose.tv/the-13-illuminati-families-who-secretly-rule-the-world-313144
Also Must read for everyone in this sub:
https://www.amazon.com/Pawns-Game-FBI-William-Carr/dp/1939438039
To hit a few that haven’t been mentioned:
Colder than Hell is a pretty good autobiography about Korea.
Semper Fi Vietnam gives a pretty good overview of our actions Vietnam. Made me realize how heavy some of the fighting was, and how inaccurate the popular conception of the war was.
No True Glory and The Strongest Tribe are both pretty good accounts of Iraq. The former mostly deals with Fallujah and the latter with the Awakening.
> That's some pretty bad odds there friendo. Sorry to obliterate your idea that the American tanks were deflecting shots from 88s with their rear armour and flying around on magical American rainbows.
No, thats a strawman.
I am not saying that it had impenetrable Armour (please link me to where I am though). I am saying that it had enough Armour to outmatch the vast majority of the advisories that it faced during the war, while also having a capable gun in conjunction with being very fast and cheap to produce.
In regards to your last point, you do realize that after the ammo storage problems were solved, a ~1944 Sherman crew had one of the highest survival changes for a penetrating hit out of any tank of the war right?
Judging a tank simply on how readily it might burn when knocked out is a pretty narrow metric with which to measure the effectiveness of a tank, and by that metric the Sherman doesn't actually do that poorly. The problem wasn't unique to the Sherman at all but I figured I would back that up with some actual data, and then I wanted to add some actual context to what the Sherman actually was and what it wasn't because I have a feeling that your friend wont simply be convinced just by learning that the Sherman didn't catch fire any more than any other tank did (and less often than some other famous tanks).
So how often the Sherman was considered to burn really depended on the circumstances in which the data was collected. An American study conducted in France for instance found that 65% of Shermans burned when they were knocked out.^1 While a study of the British 8th and 24th Armor Brigades found that about 56% of there tanks burned when knocked out.^1 Another study found that they burned about 80% of the time. These rates all really depended on the sample of course so you are never going to get a single definitive rate.
The causes of this was primarily the storage of ammunition. In the early version of the Sherman, which I will refer to as "small-hatch" Shermans from now on, all of the ammunition was either stored in the turret (the ready-rack) or in the ammunition racks in the sponsons over the tracks. The problem with that location is that most of the time when tanks were knocked out, it was from hits to the sides which meant that the ammunition racks were quite often directly in the line of fire!
Even so, the Sherman was by no means the only offender in this regard. The Panther stored its ammunition in literally the same location, so did the Panzer IV, and the Tiger. This meant that any time these tanks were hit from the side they were very likely to burn. And according to an allied study the Panzer IV was the worst, burning more than 80% of the time.
The American's however recognized this as an issue with the Sherman and quickly set about attempting to fix the issue.
The first thing the US did was to issue an armor applique kit which would be applied in tank depots before being issued to troops in the field. There were four different kits but the one I am referring to can be seen in this picture (ignore the red box). Each of those armor plates were intended to simply increase the thickness of the hull armor over the ammo racks. Eventually the applique armor, on M4A1s at least, was made part of the actual hull casting, but on tanks like the M4, M4A2, M4A3, and M4A4 the applique armor was simply welded on till the production of those tanks ceased.
The applique armor was never seen as the final solution however, and in December 1943 the second generation of Sherman's, or large-hatch Shermans, began rolling off the production lines. This new generation of Shermans included a number of improvements but perhaps the most obvious change was the the front of the hull which can be seen in this picture of a small-hatch and large-hatch M4A3. The important thing to note however is that on the large hatch Sherman there is no applique armor plates.
This was one of the major improvements of the large-hatch Shermans, at least as far as fires go anyway. According to studies conducted by the Ordnance Department the best place for the ammunition was on the floor of the tank, and in some reports they specifically refer to this arrangement as the "Soviet manner", because this was how ammunition was stored in the T-34. So all the ammunition was moved to the floor in armored containers, and the turret basket was removed to allow access to the containers. Another feature that was added was called Wet Storage.
Wet Storage was basically this: all the ammunition boxes which were in the floor were surrounded by a water jacket. The idea was that if the ammunition racks were hit they would be flooded with water and put out any fire. On 75mm armed Shermans the water jacket could hold 38.1 gallons or .366 gallons per round (104 rounds total) and in 76mm armed Shermans 34.5 gallons or .515 gallons per round (71 rounds total).^2
Wet Storage worked extremely well, Shermans equipped with it now burned between 10 - 15% of the time as opposed to the 55 - to 80%^3 of the time, making the Sherman by far the safest tank on the battlefield as far as fires went anyway.
Another thing your friend will probably mention is the Sherman's gas engine, and he will probably cite this as a source of the fires in the Sherman. If he does this, you should point out that all German tanks also had gas engines, and ask why didn't their tanks have the same reputations. (Though they really ought to have anyway, they caught on fire just as often).
Some Myths -
This simply isn't true, and when the evidence is examined you will see that US forces did quite well. In a study of 87 tank engagements involving involving the 3rd and 4th Armored Divisions the US actually destroyed more enemy tanks and equipment then they lost, and in these engagements they were quite often fighting Panthers.^4
In the first 3 examples in the study, which involved a total of 27 engagements, a total of 155 M4s faced off against 114 Panthers. The US lost 10 M4s while the Germans lost 70 Panthers^4.
And the Sherman had been designed from the get go to fight other tanks. In FM 17-10 it states explicitly that both medium and light tanks should be used to fight other tanks. In 1942 the Sherman was more than capable of taking on any tank on the battlefield. Its 75mm gun could kill any German tank at the time and with 90mm of armor on the front of the hull (effective) it was mostly impervious to any German tank except at close range.
This situation remained about the same until mid 44, yes the Panzer 4 was upgunned, but even the 7.5cm KwK L/48 couldnt penetrate the front of the Sherman beyond 1100 meters while the Panzer IV remained vulnerable from about the same distance.
The Panther did outclass the Sherman, there is no doubt of that, and unlike what that other poster said it even outclassed the late war Sherman, but the Panther had its own issues, and while it did outclass the Sherman one on one, it was not so superior that it couldn't be overcome as the study I mentioned showed.
2.It took X number of Shermans to kill Panzer IV/V/VI
This is a very silly claim and there is no basis for it. Keep in mind that the Germans lost more tanks to the US than the US lost to the Germans.
Really, the Sherman was a tank that was comparable to other medium tanks of the era, for instance the T-34. Both tanks were armed and armored in similar ways, and they both served about the same roles in their respective armies. Neither tank was perfect, but they were good enough to do the job that was expected of them and they did them well.
Anyway, I feel that the second part wasn't all the eloquent but I am way past my bed time. If there was anything I did not explain well, let me know and I will clarify, I admit I was sort of pulled in all directions wile trying to put this together.
Oh by the way, the Ronson nickname is almost certainly anachronistic. The "lights first time, every time" was a slogan that didn't come out until the 50s. Ronson did make flamethrowers for Shermans though and I think that is probably where the name came from.
List of sources:
I haven't read any myself, but the only one that comes to mind is The Infantry's Armor by Harry Yeide. I used some of it for research and reference when I was writing up a unit history of my grandfather's WWII Pacific-based amphibian tank battalion.
Different book, but I read this years ago. There may be more info in it about contingency plans that I just don't recall.
https://www.amazon.com/Currahee-Screaming-Eagle-at-Normandy/dp/0440236304/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1518555847&sr=1-1&keywords=Currahee
Check out the book Black Hearts about this.
The Outpost by Jake Tapper tells the story of Outpost Keating. I haven't finished the whole book yet, but he consistently reiterates the poor combat decision to place the output there (as well as the lives lost because of it). I plan on reading SSGT Romesha's new book (Red Platoon) once it's out too.
Pawns in the Game, FBI Edition https://www.amazon.com/dp/1939438039/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_JPwXAbGXN45SK
I think this is the book. Description is verbatim the same
This is the main strategy of the illuminati: divide and conquer. Create wars and revolutions manipulating both sides to destroy themselves and take more power and control. We need to learn about their plans and be informed.
https://www.amazon.com/Pawns-Game-FBI-William-Carr/dp/1939438039
PART TWO
>The distinction I was trying to make is between serious religious study, and the cheap bullshit used to justify horrendous crimes.
Argument can be made, and has been made by the likes of Harris, Dawkins, et. al. that fundamentalists are actually espousing the realities of the foundational religious tenants, whereas moderates are not. I see theology as a way to meld reality with religious dogma in order to hold onto outdated and irrelevant belief structures - such as god. I had this conversation with someone just yesterday who identified as an agnostic deist. I asked him why he felt he needed to hold onto the concept of god. Essentially what I got from him is that it gave him a sense of community because, although his concept of what ‘god’ is was probably different than others they could still share the common bond offered through using the same linguistic term to define this supreme being.
I am totally in the Harris/ Dawkins camp that sees religious moderates as only providing legitimacy to fundamentalism, and that the practice of fundamentalism is the true practice of these religious ideologies in their unaltered, unabridged, to-the-letter, way. I’m an antitheist because I don’t believe it’s feasible to have an individual relationship with religion and use it to make just yourself feel better. Religion comes with tremendous baggage, and ultimately there’s runoff. Those who attach themselves to religion are those who are not satisfied with reality – they need to have more, there needs to be a higher purpose to things, as if what they have is not enough. This thinking ultimately leads to classism (it’s the foundational thinking of capitalists – never being satisfied with sustainability – always wanting more). Classism dictates the need for superiority over others and in religious terms this translates to othering non-believers. Now, this is all fine and well if an individual adopts a religious perspective completely on their own and lives a monastic life without contact with anyone else that may be affected by their beliefs – but that is statistically highly improbable. (This idea is used by many religious and self-loathing atheists as a justification for the perpetuation of religious thinking: “It’s alright if it makes them feel better, do good things and doesn’t hurt anybody else.”) Ultimately there is spill-over, because of the human need to collectivize and socialize with the like-minded. The worst part, in my opinion, is the ultimate indoctrination of children (of which the majority of religious adherents have been). I’m in the Hitchens/ Dawkins camp that view childhood religious indoctrination as a serious form of child abuse. There is no training manual for parents, and they want what’s best for their children so they tend to mimic and bestow the best parts of their perception of their upbringing and lives onto their children. Because they were brainwashed into believing religion is one of the best parts of their lives they pass that onto their children. As so many commenter’s in this thread have already said, statistically, religious indoctrination instills a lack of skepticism and stunts critical thinking outside the borders of their prescribed faith. By indoctrinating their children into their religious beliefs parents are stunting their children’s mental development with regards to being the best uninfluenced individual decision maker possible once they reach maturity. I speak this from experience as someone who was raised Jehovah’s Witness. It took me a LONG time to free myself from that, and had I not been forced by the government to attend school, I would probably never have had an out intellectually.
Last points:
>Would you agree with this [re. my Vietnam Statement]?
Yes and no. I do see religion as playing an important if not often mentioned part in the historical narrative of Vietnam. At the “great man” political level, there was a heavy influence from the Catholic Church in the affairs of the Vietnam War. (Here’s an interesting read on that)
With regards to the American soldiers on the ground I haven’t been able to locate the demographics from 1958-75, but considering the current religious demographics of the U.S. Military, I would fairly assume that the levels would have been higher in previous years (especially considering the recent uproar over an atheist in the air force refusing to pledge “under god” and the after effects of that in the courts). Also if you boil down the tenants of Nationalism as being the same as religiosity, you can argue that the same mind set is at work, and they go hand in hand. (I’m just as opposed to nationalism as I am to religion, by the way – both stifle critical thinking).
Two notable examples on either end of the spectrum is that of Ron Kovic, who was devoutly catholic when he enlisted for the Vietnam War, and then fought against it after he returned disabled (If you’ve seen “Born on the Fourth of July” you’ll know Ron’s story). And that of the soldiers who took part in the “Incident on Hill 192”, particularly Pfc. Steven Cabbot Thomas who was a co-founder of a white supremacist church following his crimes in Vietnam. (The incident on Hill 192 was dramatized in the Michael J. Fox/ Sean Penn film “Casualties of War”).
>it seems more like common human cruelty, considering that the majority of these soldiers probably weren't that well versed in Christianity anyway.
Considering the amount of army chaplains in the military and the requirements that still exist, It is fair to say that most were well versed in various forms of Christianity. There would need to be a study of Vietnam Veterans which would pose the question of how their religiosity played a role in their view of the war to come to a definitive conclusion and I know of no such study.
>From what I have seen, it seems as if racism and bigotry play a larger role than religious belief in many conflicts, even those based on religion.
Racism and Bigotry played a tremendous role in the Vietnam Conflict, and in fact those ideas have come to dominate the Historical narrative on that war. A fantastic book to read that covers the topic of American atrocities committed in Vietnam is “Kill Anything That Moves” by Nick Turse. Turse doesn’t really talk about religion but does talk a great deal about racism and ideas of National and ethnic superiority as being justification for horrible things like the Incident on Hill 192 and the Mai Lai Massacre.
But again, I wouldn’t absolve Religious influence by separating it from Racism and Bigotry – they work hand in hand. Religion has historically played a tremendous role in fostering racism and bigotry. As I explained above, religious adherence comes from a need to have more, which is the same as needing to be better than others. This is a core tenant of racism and bigotry – the adherence of superiority/inferiority. I assume you’re a theologist? If so, how many pages of the Old Testament are spent describing the ethnic superiority of the Jews (chosen people) and their military conquests over inferior races with the blessing of god? This plays a tremendous reinforcement of the concepts of racism and bigotry. There is significant weight in the argument that children are born racist, just as Dawkins says all children are born atheist.
Historians have to be careful because the information that is omitted from the factual accounts can play an important role in supporting and shaping the public perception and can tremendously aid the goals of state propaganda. As I mentioned in my previous wall of text, Many Cold War Historians have talked about how the Orthodox Church was persecuted because the Soviets wanted to take their land. This paints the Soviets as being the bad guy – flat out. What they don’t mention is the additional information of the Church’s resistance because they wanted to maintain control of the lands they owned and the power they had over the peasants. They don’t mention the incitement for rebellion for selfish reasons because it challenges the pro-capitalist message that has been established. “Great Man” history succeeds by simplification and omission, whereas Marxist History that focuses on the people and mass movements is a clearer, fuller and thus more accurate account in my opinion at least.
A few more to add to your list!
Books:
Matterhorn
We Were Soldiers Once and Young
Fields of Fire
One of the best that I've read about combat in Afghanistan is by Jake Tapper, called The Outpost.
The story is about COP Keating in the Nuristan region of Afghanistan, also known as the battle of Kamdesh.
It's a long read though very descriptive about the 173rd Airborne Brigades fight for the base.
I think that someone is going to produce a movie about the battle, if it turns out to be half as good as the book then it will be one of the better movies about Afghanistan.
Here's a story on NPR from Jake Tapper called The outpost that should have never been.
I think I read this as a Reader's Digest Condensed Book as a kid. I think I read it 5x
https://www.amazon.com/Currahee-Screaming-Eagle-at-Normandy/dp/0440236304
>Was that it? That's the way I saw it, but I was in the minority.
Yep, that was the plan for South Vietnam. The eventual end goal of U.S. troops there was to fight off the North Vietnamese invasion/insurgency, and allow the government to build up its military forces and civil society enough to allow South Vietnam to permanently defend itself against North Vietnam's efforts to take over the country. This is what "Peace With Honor" refers to. South Vietnam was basically intended to be a carbon copy of the situation we have with South Korea.
Both Korea and Vietnam had a DMZ and were backed by essentially the same powers. The only difference was South Korea only has oceans on either side of it, whereas South Vietnam had the weak "neutral" nations of Laos and Cambodia next to it. The North Vietnamese had already invaded and stationed multiple divisions worth of troops in "neutral" Cambodia and Laos, using them to conduct cross-border raids deep into South Vietnam well to the rear of the official North-South DMZ. This contrasts with the Korean peninsula, where Kim Il-sung was not likely to be successful in his efforts to station several divisions of troops in the oceans next to South Korea.
The overall national interest in helping South Vietnam was to resist the communization of mainland Southeast Asia, in order to show the Soviet Union that it couldn't bankroll and foment violent communist civil wars around the world willy nilly at low cost, because the U.S. would confront them and impose a high price on Soviet actions.
===
>Thanks for liking my stories. I am in remarkably good health lately, considering. Can't find the cause. The only change seems to be getting those damned stories out of my head. I feel better. Thank you for reading. Couldn't feel this good without you.
You know, you could get them turned into a book. Check out something like Reflections of a Warrior, which is a collection of bar stories from a Green Beret who was in Vietnam. Someone got a ghost writer to interview him and put his stories into words, and format it as a collection of stories. I was under the impression all the proceeds went straight to a SOF charity but I could be wrong about that. Anyway, just something to think about.
[https://www.amazon.com/Kill-Anything-That-Moves-American/dp/1250045061] Not leftist per se, but honest.
Not that irrelevant. You claimed that the US "condemned" the Khmer Rouge genocide thus somehow absolving it of genocidal responsibility. So I mentioned that the US has no moral high ground here as it was committing a genocide of its own. And I do dispute your opinion that the US presence didn't somehow affect the intensity of the genocide.
http://www.amazon.com/Kill-Anything-That-Moves-American/dp/1250045061
I referred to it elsewhere in this thread, this book shows that My Lai was just the tip of the iceberg.
> This will only get worse for them over time; and I suspect we will see a lot more white violence because of it.
Bring it on I say. This isn't the Vietnam or Korean war era where their superior tech and firepower allowed them to kill asians like stepping on ants.
The comments will make your blood boil:
http://www.amazon.com/Kill-Anything-That-Moves-American/product-reviews/1250045061/ref=cm_cr_dp_qt_hist_five?ie=UTF8&filterBy=addFiveStar&showViewpoints=0
>...Recruits in boot camp were trained never to call the people "Vietnamese" but gooks or dinks. Even our southern Viet allies in the war. There was an acronym "MGR": The "Mere Gook Rule". Recruits were trained to dehumanize all Vietnamese, they weren't real humans. Commanders wanted body counts, the higher the better, and there was hell to pay if the numbers weren't good. The quality and weapons recovered weren't important. Soilders learned fast they wouldn't be held accountable as long as they were giving the body count numbers leadership wanted to report. Intense pressure for high count rates. The dead tell no tale if they were civilian or not.
>The "My Lai Massacre" story of over 500 civilians killed that Seymour Hersh broke turns out to be the rule, not the exception. The metric of "body count" was a driving motivation. Immediate reports after the My Lai incident painted it as a glowing victory in the American press. Amazing. The driving metric was almost like commanders in civilian police forces issuing ticket quotas to officiers is the ananolgy I took away from this. They wanted body count numbers to convey back on American stateside nightly TV news how well they were doing in the war. And that is one vivid takeaway I remember as a child, seeing the nightly body count numbers on the evening news. "Yea! We're winning" my childhood mind would think. The adults at the time thought no differently, apparently. Journalists were taking the Pentagon press releases and brainwashing Americans with it. Nixon's 72 landslide win backs that ...
>...As a combat veteran of the Viet Nam war, I can attest the "mere gook rule" was operative throughout the war. Most GI's had complete disdain, if not intense hatred, for the Viet Namese people. I distinctly remember numerous conversations with troops who said "gooks" were not fit to live. They carried that mentality with them on combat operations. The body count was all important. Some commanders, fortunately including mine, were equally concerned with the weapons count; and fully expected the weapons count to be in line with the body count. But there were other unit commanders who cared less about the weapons count and accepted any recording of Viet Namese dead as VC. Torture? Yes, it occurred and was common. Rape? That too. One of my best friends in ROTC was commissioned in Military Intelligence (I was Airborne Infantry), and had the misfortune of getting assigned to the Phoenix Program. After going to MACV HQ in Sai Gon to beg for any kind of reassignment and being refused, he committed suicide. Why? Because, as he said, he could not bear going out night after night, pulling farmers and their entire families out of their hooches, watching as all of the family members, children included, were tortured, women and girls raped, bodies mutlilated and eventually, the entire family killed.
>...Even former U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey admitted to having massacred villagers.
This is not to minimize the racism that other groups have against mongoloid looking people. If these other groups have the same degree of tech disparity, maybe they would be slaughtering mongoloid looking people too.
Nice catch with Bluecoat. I'd go on to mention the strategic victory the British achieved was tying up Hausser's forces while the Americans exploited the breakout to the west following Cobra.
> With regard to Market-Garden, and having studied this battle at some length, the claim that Patton's front was a more promising line was very dubious, and Arnhem was a better (though risky) bet.
I'm keeping my response brief since I want to get into the tank contributions that the western allies made; I've always been fascinated by the failures of Market Garden and the hard lessons learned from the battle... but that's another discussion. Anyways - Ike thought so too: If Market Garden worked, Monty would give the Allies direct access to the factories which were not far from the Rhine at Arnhem. That's a very tempting target and I can't blame him. But, I have to simply contend that the counter-point used in regards to the main offensive through France and southern Belgium into Germany near the Saar River and Siegfried Line is: The prize is still entrance into Germany which would have put the Western Allies closer to the end of the war anyways and it might have once again drawn troops out of reserve to contend the region, if not forces from the Ostfront. But by this point in the war, the notion of "what forces?!" was becoming a fast reality for the Germans.
Like I said, skipping the heavy discussion cause it would become speculative... and also argumentative & off of the topic of contributions.
> To say tanks were for infantry support and not for taking on tanks is to reiterate the flawed US armoured doctrine of the Second World War. In fact it was impossible to separate the tasks, as the enemy was seldom co-operative. This is why the 'main battle tank' concept took over, an idea imposed by the facts on the battlefield as much as doctrinal changes.
Oh indeed. The emphasis on the infantry-support tank doctrine was a huge wartime detriment for the Western Allies' ability to fight the often times better armor and strong guns of the German tanks (Tigers and Panthers). So far as contributions by the Americans and the British go, that was one of the weakest ones in the grand scheme of things. Steven Zaloga's [Armored Thunderbolt: The U.S. Army Sherman in World War II](http://www.amazon.com/Armored-Thunderbolt-U-S-Sherman-World/dp/0811704246) is a good read on the Sherman's operational history throughout the war (he even touches on the Pacific). Yes, the Sherman Firefly was very powerful and the M4A3E8 "Easy Eight" with its 76mm gun was a viable second, but those two tanks were still fragile compared to the Panthers and Tigers. Steven's book greatly goes over whether or not the Sherman tank was an asset or a detriment to the Americans [and British].
On the note of Allied tech contributions, the British Archer was an interesting tank destroyer since its gun (QF 17 Pounder) was mounted on the rear of the chassis, but the tank destroyer was designed in such a way that the gun faced backwards, allowing for the drivers to back out of combat situations quickly once they fired their shots. The British saw her as an ambusher that would use its very powerful gun to punch through advancing [heavy] armor.
Meanwhile the Americans emphasized turreted tank destroyers like the M18 Hellcat and the M10 Wolverine: they were lightly armored (compared to tanks), but I'd note the Wolverine was exceptionally slow compared to its lighter brother, and considering its armor was still weak it was not very durable. The important point is that it was weak in mobile battles. Interestingly, the 90mm gun was a nice upgrade used on Hellcats and the M36 Jackson (sticking with TDs) which allowed them to compete with the QF 17 Pounder. The 76mm gun wasn't that bad, but the 17er blew her out of the water.
Jacksons were slightly up-armored by comparison, but for the life of me, why the designers wanted to upgrade the armor of a tank hunter is beyond me if they were still as likely to be damaged at the drop of a hat. My criticisms of the attempts to increase armor in the already fragile tank destroyers the Americans and British used has always bothered me. It doesn't make since because they were meant to be used in support, not as front line tanks.
TL;DR: Market Garden was a controversial snafu thanks to a series of mistakes (see lloyd's post for a few pointed issues); Patton might have been able to push through France into Germany; Allied Tank Destroyers were interesting concepts in ambushing armor and mobile tank-hunting warfare; Steven Zaloga is an expert in US armor.
On a Zaloga note, he has a book on the M18 Hellcat that is also interesting and covers its history as well. Makes for a good read on the turreted TD discussion. The man also wrote the book on Dragoon - not a huge operation, but still an interesting read all the same.
The nominee in charge of our military (i.e. a tool of violence used by government to enforce policy) wants the military to be as lethal as possible. I believe that's part of the job description.
He also just wrote a book called Warriors and Citizens: American Views of our Military where he called it a political and moral failure of our society for having turned to the military too often to solve problems, and that in his role as secretary he would work to make sure our society doesn't make the same mistakes in the future.
If you want some great war non-fiction, I am a HUGE fan of a guy Bing West.
West was a former Marine general who served as a Lt in Vietnam, and later worked as a researcher for the Rand Corporation.
A few of his non-fiction books I really liked:
"The March Up". He and another Marine vet, Ray Smith grab themselves an SUV and ride along with 1st Marines on the initial OIF invasion of Iraq. The cool part is, since West has been an infantry Lt, a Vietnam vet, a General, and a former senior staff member under Reagan, West has access to everybody. He has high level connections to get one on one interviews with politicians and Generals and enough combat street cred to pull up a chair with Enlisted Pvts and company grade officers.
 
"The Strongest Tribe" All about the reconstruction effort in Iraq, post invasion, during the occupation/stability ops phase. He pulls no punches. Speaks quite plainly about the mistakes that were made. (Bremmer, Rumsfeld, etc)
 
"The Village" The story of a CAP (Combined Action Platoon) in Vietnam. West's experience with CAP operations is actually the foundation of his understanding of how modern counterinsurgency ops (OIF) should be run. You see the influence in his later works. The idea of a CAP was, patrol through, seek and destroy op with enemy, roll out was NOT effective Counterinsurgency policy. The CAP idea was to take a unit and make them part of the local community. They would live with and among the locals for an extended period of time to secure the area. The village is the tale of a Marine unit living for a year and a half in a Vietnamese village as the local neighbor/police presence, at a cost of half of their member's lives.
Interestingly enough, "pick a neighborhood to secure, find the most tactically defensible building in it, move in for the year" pretty much describes my first OIF deployment.
If you read the book grunt the author destroys the shark myth but polar bears are the only bear to sense menstrual blood from same distance.
https://www.amazon.com/Grunt-Curious-Science-Humans-War/dp/0393245446
I just re-watched We Were Soldiers last night and plan to read the book it's based on. Amazing story.
I found out that every single soldier in the unit has an actor portraying them in the movie, even if that soldier never even has any screen time.
There's that misogylinity again. Be careful ladies. Only white "men" can protect you
A lot of what you're asking about has to do with transnational social justice, which is an entire field of its own. There's a lot of resources about it, especially from postcolonial/decolonial theorists. If you're really interested in learning more, I would say look up folks like Gayatri Spivak, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Inderpal Grewal, and Caren Kaplan.
In particular, since I'm predominantly a Foucauldian theorist, I'll direct you to Foucault's theory of power/knowledge and discourse (from his History of Sexuality and Discipline and Punish), for your questions on what qualifies as an institution.
As for specific questions...
> Could we construct a hypothetical community somewhere in the US where minorities could be racists?
As someone who grew up in a predominantly East Asian suburb, yes, but not against white folks. In my hometown, I've encountered fairly overt racism against Latinx and black folks. However, even as our population is around 70% Asian, those in power are still predominantly white, with half the City Council, and about 70-80% of our teachers. And there's no way not to be influenced by institutional racism on the national level. For instance, the media we consume (when I grew up, at least) was still predominantly white, and most of my classmates faced a lot of microaggressions when they had to go to the neighboring predominantly white suburb for whatever reason.
> What about on the international stage? The US is clearly a superpower, but it took us 11 years of intense searching to find Osama bin Laden AND we seem to be losing our 3 wars (poverty, drugs, and terror).
As others have mentioned, centuries of colonialism/imperialism matters. And the U.S. is still participating in neo-colonial endeavors. For instance, the U.S. has the the largest number of military bases of any country in the world. According to Bases of Empire, the U.S. has around 800 bases outside of the U.S. itself. Here's an article on it in politico.
Also, the U.S. is notorious for funding terrorists and dictators. There were even allegations of the CIA assisting (in a roundabout way) Osama bin Laden.
> but enjoys a privileged status similar to whites in the US in their own country, be racist towards whites in their own country?
As mentioned above, there are very little countries untouched by U.S. colonization. And, with the prevalence of Hollywood as a global phenomenon, whiteness is fairly exalted the world over. Speaking from someone who grew up in Taiwan, the western ideal of beauty is still fairly prevalent there, and a lot of colorism exists (i.e. putting down anyone whose skin is "too dark", elevating those whose skin is lighter, etc.). It's also a known phenomenon that it's easier to get a job if you're white in Taiwan than if you're, well, Taiwanese.
There are definitely privileged minorities in other countries who exerts power over the natives, though. In Taiwan, racism against the indigenous Taiwanese folks, while not quite as bad as in America, is still pretty darn terrible. So there definitely is privilege in being ethnically Chinese in Taiwan, but there's also still privilege in being white.
Disclaimer: I don't know anything.
On Vietnam: really? From what I've gathered, I've thought up to now that American forces were pretty brutal at times - leading to accounts such as this https://www.amazon.com/Kill-Anything-That-Moves-American/dp/1250045061.
I'm taking this bait because you're making a very serious claim: that American failure in Vietnam (among other countries) was, I repeat, solely due to a lack of sufficient brutality by Western forces. That's somewhat testable, and I'd be interested to learn more.
Don't know the origin, but I learned it when I picked this worn paperback book up (back in the 80s or early 90s). It's a first-person account of training and then parachuting into Normandy in WWII, and they sung the song then for sure.
https://www.amazon.com/Currahee-Screaming-Eagle-at-Normandy/dp/0440236304
They were not caught in the middle but deliberately killed by the US military. There is a good book about that, it is called Kill Anything That Moves.
We have no idea on the Viet Cong losses, as Nick Turse explains in Kill Anything that moves civilian deaths were explained away as VC on an epic level to meet targets that were set in place. Was really a fucked up system introduced to reach some fabled "Attrition Rate" that never happened. What we do know is that the longer the war lasted, the larger the NV Army became.
The perfect example of this was General Ewell of the 9th Infantry Division who led Operation Speedy Express in the Mekong Delta and claimed that his men had a Kill Ratio of 134:1. American medical teams who were treating the wounded however claimed that upwards of 80% were in fact civilians, earning him the nickname "The Butcher of the Delta".
If I may make a recommendation for reading more on this topic I suggest the excellent book In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan which gives a good background explanation of what has happened in Afghanistan.
Tough call! I'd say Grunt by Mary Roach. My wife will probably say A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry.
Reflections of a Warrior. This book is bad-ass, I've read it like ten times.
READ THIS if you want to learn about the Vietnam War, from the men involved.
Kill Anything That Moves
and here's some videos.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=kill+anything+that+moves
"Global War on Terror (GWOT) was known by those who fought it for long periods of boredom, punctuated by masturbation and enemy fire."
Seriously, there are so many viewpoints and critiques of the GWOT and implications of such an effort and progressing, globalizing world that Google really is your friend.
To give you only bullet points would be unfair. But I will toss a few good book links below.
http://www.amazon.com/Taliban-Militant-Fundamentalism-Central-Edition/dp/0300163681/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1405913163&sr=8-1&keywords=taliban
http://www.amazon.com/American-Spartan-Promise-Mission-Betrayal/dp/0062114980/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1405913151&sr=8-1&keywords=american+spartan
http://www.amazon.com/Horse-Soldiers-Extraordinary-Victory-Afghanistan/dp/1416580522/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1405913294&sr=8-2&keywords=horse+soldiers
http://www.amazon.com/In-Graveyard-Empires-Americas-Afghanistan/dp/0393338517/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1405913285&sr=8-1&keywords=graveyard+of+empires
i read the book, "Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam" by Nick Turse and in it Turse makes the argument that the United States government was so focused on the body count that they did not care if the bodies were NVA, or civilian. Do you agree with this?
I thought I remembered the photo from the Roy F. Chandler book but wasn't positive so I did a reverse image and it showed up in a couple of places listed as him.
http://200poundsis200pounds.blogspot.com/2011/03/guys-id-like-to-have-drink-with-vol-2.html
Google image search result
No, I'm not. Women in the military is a subject I am very well read on.
Here are a couple of books to get you started:
Book 1
Book 2
If you want to learn more about penis transplants, may I recommend this book: https://www.amazon.com/Grunt-Curious-Science-Humans-War/dp/0393245446
Probably. Source: http://www.amazon.com/Currahee-Screaming-Normandy-Donald-Burgett/dp/0440236304
Thank you for the candor in the way you expressed your reply.
If you're up for some military reading material sometime, give The Outpost a look. I served there with the 173rd airborne in the same 15-month deployment as the events of Restrepo and the Battle of Wanat.
Our unit didn't have an embedded documentary crew, but the book I mentioned covers 4 deployments worth of time from the perspective of the 4 different units that occupied and fought at Camp Keating from its concept and creation until it was eventually overran by the enemy.
ya...China's neighbors were "protected" by USA..especially Vietnam right?
http://www.amazon.com/Kill-Anything-That-Moves-American/dp/1250045061/
 
oh look, USA protected China too
http://www.zakkeith.com/articles,blogs,forums/anti-Chinese-persecution-in-the-USA-history-timeline.htm
USA’s warfare against China 1/ - http://www.voltairenet.org/article177063.html
Three_Letter_Agency: ^^original ^^reddit ^^link
History of Bin Laden/Al Qaeda
He was a part of the fundamentalist military unit that assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981. In 1984, he was hired by the CIA, though they claim that their relationship was short-lived. He would soon join the military and become a member of the Green Berets, and serve as a drill sergeant at Fort Bragg while providing clandestine training to jihadists such as Mahmud Abaouhalima, convicted perpetrator of the 1993 World Trade Center bombings.
Here are a few books that I recommend that are more academic in nature. Let me know if there is anything in particular with regard to either conflict that you would like.
Both Wars
Author | Title | Synopsis
---|---|----
Bob Woodward | Obama's Wars | Outline of the U.S. foreign policy decision making towards Iraq and Afghanistan in the early years of the Obama administration.
Daniel Bolger | Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars | Bolger offers a unique assessment of these wars, from 9/11 to the final withdrawal from the region, and the shortfalls of U.S. strategy.
Iraq
Author | Title | Synopsis
---|---|----
Michael Gordon | The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama | Follows U.S. strategic and political decision making process during the Iraq War and the U.S. occupation.
Peter Mansoor | Surge: My Journey with General David Petraeus and the Remaking of the Iraq War | An extensive outline of the development and outcome of the Surge during the U.S. Occupation of Iraq.
Emma Sky | The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq | As one of the longest serving diplomatic volunteers and a former opponent of the war, Sky provides unique insights into the US military as well as the complexities, diversity, and evolution of Iraqi society.
Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor | Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq | A definitive chronicle of America’s invasion and occupation of Iraq that traces the interactions among the generals politicians and reconstructs the principal battles from interviews with those who fought them.
Thomas Ricks | The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008 | The author offers news-breaking account, revealing behind-the-scenes disagreements between top commanders and the internal development of the Surge strategy.
Joby Warrick | Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS | An historical look at how Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's leadership of become al-Qaida in Iraq would influence the rise of ISIL.
General Stanley McChrystal | My Share of the Task: A Memoir | A memoir of the former head of the Joint Special Operations Command during the Iraqi occupation who played a central role in defeating al-Qaida in Iraq.
Afghanistan
Author | Title | Synopsis
---|---|----
Thomas Barfield | Afghanistan:A Cultural and Political History | An examining of the competing cultural and tribal dynamics in Afghanistan's recent history through an anthropological perspective.
Seth Jones | In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan | Jones examines the insurgency in Afghanistan, arguing that weak governance and religious ideology, coupled with the American insistense on a "light footprint" are the primary drivers behind it.
Ahmed Rashid | Taliban:Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia | The authoritative account of the Taliban, explaining the Taliban’s rise to power, its impact on Afghanistan and the Middle East and Central Asia.
Ahmed Rashid | Descent into Chaos: The U.S. and the Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia | Rashid provides a detailed account of the regional context and interconnections of the Afghan conflict, insisting that the key to peace for the entire region lies with Pakistan.
James Dobbins | After the Taliban: Nation-Building in Afghanistan | Dobbins examines the first year of the intervention in Afghanistan and describes how inter-agency rivalry, aversion to nation building, opposition to the presence of peacekeepers, and refusal to send more troops and commit more resources undermined U.S. efforts.
Mark Mazzetti | The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth | An overview of the CIA's targeted killing program against terrorist organizations.
> I'm saying we helped stop Hitler.
We? You mean the Americans stopped Hitler in WWII? Doubtful you were even alive then. And that statement is pretty meaningless. A lot of things stopped Hitler. One, he was almost out of oil. Two, the Russians. Three, his mental health due to his various drug addictions. Yes the Americans are somewhere on that list but to say "We stopped Hitler" is not accurate.
>And yes, the Vietnam War was a waste, because congress decided to break our promise, abandon South Vietnam, despite South Vietnam desperately begging us not to leave, and we let the North Vietnamese burn, pillage, enslave, and murder their way through South Vietnam, killing hundreds of thousands, throwing a million in slave labor camps, and displacing millions more.
Are you just parroting your government history books? This is far from the truth. Please read this book Kill Anything That Moves and get back to me: https://www.amazon.com/Kill-Anything-That-Moves-American/dp/1250045061 It is well documented that American soldiers were burning down villages and mass raping women in Vietnam. Leaving was the only thing they could do, because they were also getting their ass kicked.
>And Cambodia also fell because we left,
Wrong.
>and over one million were slaughtered in the Killing Fields as a result. Worst atrocity in US history.
That wasn't US history, that was Cambodian history, which you aren't accurately describing. The US bombed the shit out of Cambodia for a decade, killed thousands of innocent people, and even to this day, innocent Cambodians get mangled by US land mines. "We" fucked up that country beyond belief, then left and the Khmer Rouge came in and continued fucking it up.
> South Korea would not exist today if the US didn't fight the North Koreans. It would be one big Korea, only it would be like North Korea is today, a slave state.
Where is your proof of this claim?
> The nuclear bomb on Japan? That ended the Japanese Empire,
It was already over before the bomb(s). They were running out of oil as well.
>which up to that point, had murdered over twelve million people across Asia.
Link?
>Right up until they surrendered, they were still committing mass genocide in several Asian countries. The bomb put a stop to that, and it was the right thing to do.
I'm sure the surviving families of the nukes would totally agree! Anyway there were 2 bombs and the second one was 100% unnecessary, but the US wanted to flex its muscles and show the world what it had, to hell with the innocent Japanese people!
>Yeah the USSR taking over Europe sucked, but the US and Britain were fighting the greater evil at the time, the Nazis.
I know that's what the history books say, but where is your proof that the nazis were worse than the Soviets? Do you know how many died under communism? It's even more than Hitler managed to kill.
I'm just asking you to step away from the mainstream narrative a little. That's not where the truth lies here.
Well, let's see.
There's a professor based out of Washington, another professor - Harvard-educated, and a graduate in international security who writes for Time.
But hey, maybe all these guys are politically biased. That could happen, right? Let's see what the right-wing press has to say.
Oh, wait. Huh. Maybe someone with access to CIA data, then?
Well gosh and darn. Maybe the New York Times can provide a different answer?
No? Jeez, seems like ya can't trust anyone to toe the official line any more.
http://www.amazon.com/White-Feather-Carlos-Hathcock-Sniper/dp/1885633092
The 101st was no secret.
They were badass as fuck and the Krauts knew it.
Your comment still kicks ass, though!
If you haven't read Donald R. Burgett's series of first-person accounts, YOU MUST!
Curahee! A Screaming Eagle at Normandy is the first one.
It's the With The Old Breed by E.B. Sledge of the ETO.
Yes, and as Christians we of course did nothing to the Muslim populations during these periods. People like you are the reason the fighting never ends.
Also heres a book by a religious studies professor. https://www.amazon.com/Muslim-Americans-Military-Centuries-Service-ebook/dp/B01MRH83J1/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1503423662&sr=8-1&keywords=9780253027214
Info | Details
----|-------
Amazon Product | Muslim Americans in the Military: Centuries of Service
>Amazon donates 0.5% of the price of your eligible AmazonSmile purchases to the charitable organization of your choice. By using the link above you get to support a chairty and help keep this bot running through affiliate programs all at zero cost to you.
Women should not be in the military.
Read the following books and I think you'd agree:
Weak Link: The Feminization of the American Military
Co-ed Combat: The New Evidence That Women Shouldn't Fight the Nation's Wars
Women in the Military: Flirting with Disaster
The Kinder, Gentler Military: How Political Correctness Affects Our Ability to Win Wars
Here is the mobile version of your link
So, first, I'm not American.
Second, the "Was the My Lai massacre one of many?" article is based on Kill Anything that Moves, a book damning US military policy in Vietnam. I'm using the estimates from that book.
Beak it down!
Syria - US, barely involved!
Iraq - That's a big one, addressed above.
Somalia - Minimally involved. Insignificant casualties.
Yemen - Supplied arms to Saudi Arabia. I'm not in favor of that. Still, it's not like B-52s are bombing Yemen.
Pakistan - The US looked the other way on a near-genocide in the 50's. Absolutely shameful. But that's not on US hands. They've barely set foot in Pakistan. There are drones there, and that's an issue.
Afghanistan - Included, obviously.
Panama - A stupid coup. Not many casualties.
Libya - Minimal involvement.
Nicaragua, El Salvador, Grenada, Chile, Lebanon, every single country on the Indochinese peninsula, Peru, Dominican republic, Guatemala, Indonesia - Fuck, I've got to go to bed. Yes, the US has fucked up a lot and ought to be reprimanded. So, subtract Vietnam for a start; subtract Cambodia because fuck Nixon, bombing Cambodia was an unforgivable mistake. Outside of that you're looking at tens of thousands of casualties all told.
> all that shit is meaningless because you love your country so much and Stalingrad (a battle completely irrelevant to US armed forces) was BAD.
Again, I'm not American. And yeah, it was absolutely the Soviets under Stalin who won Stalingrad, the US wasn't involved beyond supplies. My point wasn't that the US is awesome, wooo, America #1. My point was that in a world where everyone is intimidated by US strength, you don't get Stalingrads, even on the other side of the world. You don't get World Wars, with the millions upon millions of casualties entailed. Instead, you get "police actions" and a couple thousand casualties. Not ideal, but not exactly Stalingrad.
https://www.amazon.com/Kill-Anything-That-Moves-American/dp/1250045061
Yeah...no. There was pretty horrific brutality, the equivalent of a Mai Lai massacre every week of the war. Millions of civilians were killed. In Vietnam the only potential 'game change' would have been invading the North and shutting down the NVA bases/recruitment centers. The reason that wasn't done was because of fears of fighting China again as was the case in Korea...which given their performance against Vietnam right after the Vietnam war (conflict over the Vietnamese invading Cambodia and toppling Pol Pot) shows that they were a paper tiger at the time. Still, given the rate of casualties was much higher for the US in the Korean war vs. Vietnam, I could see how the politicians were deathly afraid of fighting the Chinese again for political reasons (high body counts were not politically popular), especially just to secure Vietnam.
History of Bin Laden/Al Qaeda
He was a part of the fundamentalist military unit that assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981. In 1984, he was hired by the CIA, though they claim that their relationship was short-lived. He would soon join the military and become a member of the Green Berets, and serve as a drill sergeant at Fort Bragg while providing clandestine training to jihadists such as Mahmud Abaouhalima, convicted perpetrator of the 1993 World Trade Center bombings.
You're being downmodded because you apparently didn't read vinneh's response to yours very carefully. But since I was initially confused too, let me explain exactly how to check this.
Check out this link to the King James Bible on amazon.com and scroll down to the "Product Details" section. Do you see the "Amazon.com Sales Rank" and "Popular in these categories" sections?
Ok. Now click on the link vinneh provided for Unfriendly Fire and do the same. Notice that it has no sales rank, and no "popular in these categories" section!
That's the difference. From what I've been able to glean, Amazon.com internally has a flag that classifies some books as adult and removes them from sales rankings. Presumably this is because pornography sells very well, and if it were allowed to be ranked then it would continuously dominate Amazon.com's bestseller lists, etc, giving less, um, open-minded customers the impression that Amazon is just a pornography site.
The issue here is that Amazon.com has apparently classified anything even remotely gay themed (Unfriendly Fire is about what the author considers a policy error and its ramifications in the US military more than it is about gay rights, for example) as Adult internally, removing it from the rankings.
So for example, if "Unfriendly Fire" sold a bazillion gajillion copies it still would never show up on Amazon.com's bestseller lists, which seems to be what everyone is up in arms about.
The thing about stuff not showing up in searches appears to be an explanation of one of the possible ramifications of the adult flag in certain cases, but so far I haven't seen any examples of these books not showing up in searches. I think most people who are saying that books aren't showing up in searches were so overcome by hysteria that they didn't bother checking first.
But that doesn't change the fact that putting a book like "Unfriendly Fire" in the same category as porn because it is vaguely gay-themed is profoundly screwed up. I mean, some erotic gay romance I could see -- that scandalous and heterosexually themed DH Lawrence classic appears to have the adult flag set as well -- but a book about military policy?
Come on, that's ridiculous.
EDIT: In the case of "Unfriendly Fire", at least, it appears that Amazon has addressed the issue. See r3gis' reply to me.