The problems with every debate on gun control are. . . .

that most gun control suggestions are written by people who are blisteringly ignorant on firearms and the statistics and examples people through out, even if they are real, are poorly analyzed.

 Stock Photo:  Two rural hillbillies using an AR 15 to shoot at cans of Budweiser.  Umm. . . no it isn't, but as ignorant as most commentary about firearms is, I wouldn't be surprised to see that caption.

It's often noted by gun control proponents taht there's a wave of support for new gun control legislation, or evcen pending gun control legislation, following a disaster. But that's part of the very problem.

American legislation isn't parliamentary. That can be frustrating but it also means that as a rule there's enough time that's gone by between a proposal being made to it being enacted, if it is, that it's relatively well though out.  This is often not the case with legislation that goes through parliaments, which is unfortunatley often the disaster that proponents of gun control make.

So what tends to occur, is a debate like this:

Gun Control Proponent (GCP):  We need to do something to enact common sense gun control!

Gun Owner (GO):  Okay, I agree with you.

GCP:  Great!  That means banning these terrible assault bazookas used by dove hunters, the bastards!

GO:  Um, wait just a minute, that doesn't make much sense because. . . 

GCP:  Stop holding things up, bastard!

GO:  Screw you and the horse you road in on, the people who said you wanted to take my .410 were right, you want to take everything.

Or like this:

GCP:  After a kiling in Australia  that country banned everything down to bb guns and now everyone in Australia is happy and nobody has died even of natural causes since!

GO:  Well actually. . 

GCP:  Shut up. . hater.

GO:  Well that's it, you really do want to take my .410.

Or like this:

GCP:  The US is the only country in the world that has this sort of bloody rate!

GO:  Actually, Finland's, per capita, is nearly as high.

GCP:  Finland isn't a real country.  And no other country let's its citizens own semi automatic arms!

GO: Actually most do, and some, like Switzerland. . .

GCP:  Nobody should own anything, shut up.

And then people wonder why nothing gets done.

Now, I don't mean to suggest that this is all one sided. But to a large extent it is.  The press is heavily concentrated on the coasts and heavily urban.  Basically, firearms ownership fits into a category of items which the liberal press, and it is a liberal press, doesn't get why you would be interested in and therefore it doesn't approve.

There's lots of things like that, actually.  You wouldn't want the same group of people setting NASCAR rules, or rules for outdoor sports, or the like, either. As there's a lot of stuff that is just too rugged for them, and they're not going there.  It's one of the very deep problems with our country, as its become so effete that its becoming weak and a rift between the more rural citizenry and the urban citizenry has become massive.

And that spills over to this.

What we know about the recent killing is that the killer used a "bump stock" which allows an AR platform rifle to fire as if its an automatic weapon.  Hardly any firearm owner has heard of  bump stocks. This is a really rare and peculiar niche item and most firearms owners would be inclined to agree to ban them. They do not appear to have any real legitimate use that can't be foregone.

You would think, therefore, that this could be calmly discussed.  But it won't be, as the banners will immediately want to discuss "high powered" military weapons.  But because they don't really grasp what they are talking about, that will soon spread to any semi automatic weapons, a class of firearms that has been in existence for over a century.

A wise policy maker, in this circumstance, turns to the knowledgeable and asks for their help.  That's not going to occur here.  And therefore the press will be baffled about "why nothing gets done".

But perhaps the press would understand it better if there was a suggestion that truth in media be regulated by people who hate newspapers and don't read them.

That'd be bad, of course, but it would make the point.

__________________________________________________________________________________

This was written yesterday and set up to be auto posted today.  Since it was written, Sen. Diane Feinstein has drafted a bill to ban bump stocks.

To her credit, the bill is really short and addresses only that.  I'm a lifelong user of firearms and don't favor restrictions as a rule, but on this I'll make an exception.  Bump stocks are an end run around the old National Firearms Act and they should be regarded as such.

Feinstein's bill oddly exempts law enforcement agencies, but no law enforcement agency is going to want bump stocks. The design concept alone wouldn't be wise for an agency that would have to reply on the device and law enforcement agencies can already purchase actual automatic and selective fire weapons, new, so it wouldn't be something they'd need or want. For that matter, while there are agencies that do have automatic weapons, most don't and those that do virtually never use them.  An exception for agencies here is not wise for a plethora of reasons.

None of which means that my observations above are incorrect, I'll note.

I don't post political links on Facebook. . .

 

except, perhaps, on very rare occasion and limited, as far as I can recall, to attending the public lands rallies last summer.   And I suppose I "like" some pages that are on that topic. So I guess I do.

But it's not a constant stream.

Originally Facebook, I guess, was to allow certain distant people to follow each other.  At some point, and that some point was no doubt quite early on, that changed to where people started posting their political and social views often through links.

I'll do that here, to be sure, but then this is a different type of forum.  I don't do that, except as noted, on Facebook.  But it's gotten so bad on Facebook in some instances that I can identify who has posted the link simply by looking at the item linked in.  This may show, I suspect, how shallow American discourse on some topics has really become.  Or maybe it shows how shallow it always was, but it wasn't so obvious.

I have some friends who are radically Republican.  I mean radically.  And they're pro Trump to the he can do no wrong level.  Others, conversely, hate him.  I have one liberal friend who is obviously a massively unhappy person who is radically left wing, radically opposed to the Republicans and radically opposed to Christianity.  Indeed, while I know I shouldn't, I can't help but think of her a bit in the context of the tragedy that just occurred in which its' now been repeated that the shooter "didn't have any interest in any of that stuff".  And they wonder why he was a killer?  At least in my experience, people who are opposed, and that's what it seems they really are, opposed, to an afterlife are bitter to the point of at least suggested violence in about half the cases.

Some of my friends post their religious views constantly as well.  I'm less critical of that, as that's a deeper part of a person's personality, but here too I can tell who they are (as would make sense) simply by the post.  If a post is going after Pope Francis, it's one person.  If its a link to a Mark Shea column, it's another.  If its sort of generic Protestant, well that's another.  And if its Mormon, I know right away who it is.

Well, I guess that's all okay, or at least the latter part is.  But the former, where people flood Facebook with the "100% Red Blooded Trump For Life" site, or the "Good Timing Karl Marx Communism Ain't Dead. . . It's Just Resting Its Eyes" site, well. . . folks ought to reconsider that a bit.  Or at least ponder things a bit more deeply on occasion.

Infamnia. Vices to Virtues

In 1931, under the leadership of Charles Luciano, the heads of the American Mafia families gathered in Chicago to reorganize the American Mafia on a corporate basis.  Prior to that, the American Mafia was organized, sort of, on an old world monarchical basis, sort of, in which heads of various Mafia families would attempt to unite the American Mafia under the leadership of a dictatorial boss, called the capo di tutti capi.  That is, the head of all the heads.

 Charles Luciano

Luciano, whom we of course usually know as "Lucky", wasn't just lucky.  He was a business genius.  The organization of the Mafia on corporate lines, with a commission acting as the board of directors and Luciano as the first chairmen was brilliant.  It didn't solve all of the Mafia's problems, to be sure, but it sure made its operation easier, and coming just as Prohibition was ending, it couldn't have come at a better time for the American mob.

The Commission not only organized the mob, but it organized the criminal activities of the mob.  The Mafia's activities were (and probably still are. . . the Commission is known to have last met in 1985) varied, but it was classically concentrated in three areas, those being; 1) Prostitution, 2) Gambling,  and 3) Drugs.

Now, again, I'm not saying that the Mafia left every other criminal activity alone, but it was focused on these three over the decades.  And the third one, we would note, was actually the source of violent debate in the Mafia, as to the morality of engaging in the activity.

Now that may strike the reader as odd, and indeed it is odd, but consider the mindset of the group.  Yes, this was crime, but it was a type of crime that was rationalized in in its purveyors.

All of these activities feed on human weaknesses.  Indeed, in the modern parlance, we are told that you can be addicted to any of these. There are sex addicts, pornography addicts, gambling addicts, and certainly there are drug addicts.  All of this is tragic.  But if you are of a cold hearted view, these are all vices that their users have fallen into due to their human weaknesses.

I'm not endorsing that view, but I'm noting that a person can rationalize it, and the Mafia did.  The Mafia didn't want its members using prostitutes.  It didn't want its members taking drugs. And it didn't want them gambling.  It figured that people of lower moral and personal character would fall into these vices, however, and therefore there was no real harm in being the party selling them.  It was just vice. That is, if people of low moral character are going to go to prostitutes, and if women of low moral character are going to sell themselves, why not be there to be the seller?  If people of low moral character are going to take drugs, well why not be the ones selling them?

Looked at that way, the Mafia is sort of a libertarian radical free market business organization.  Sure, all of that stuff is against the law, but people are going to buy it anyway so the law doesn't really matter, right?

Well, the law of course always matters, but the mob was right that people were always going to buy.  The law really served to discourage and take the edge off of these activities, rather than prevent them wholesale, as preventing them was always an acknowledged impossibility.  That's true, however, of most laws.  Most criminal activities can't be fully prevented, only reined in somewhat.

All of these activities adopted by the Mafia are quite unique, compared to other things.  They aren't like theft, or extortion, or the like, even if they may be associated with them. For one thing, they all travel together, making adopting them criminally somewhat easy. Where you find prostitution, you will find drugs.  Where you find gambling, you will find prostitution and drugs.

And they are all uniquely addictive.  People don't become addicted to other criminal activities they way they do, on a close personal basis, to these three.  

And now they've all become incorporated into American society.

And that should give us pause.

Just last week Hugh Hefner died. Hefner made his living by being a successful pornographer and pornography is a species of prostitution.  The women who appeared and still appear in its slick magazine have prostituted their images, offering them up for imaginary sex for a few bucks for the men who buy the magazines. Hefner's genius was in the portrayal, and the ugliness is in the reality. That it was s success, and that American culture has reduced nearly the entire female population into the same category as the prostitutes, and that's what they've become by appearing in the magazine, who appeared there, is a huge blight on our society and part of a massive current social problem.

Gambling has come out of the backroom and has built at least a couple of cities of false glamour.  Now, I'll admit that I don't feel that individual acts of gambling are immoral. But let's also not hide that its effects can be very destructive. Also, and given as I don't gamble its easy for me to say this, it's just weird, although its something that goes back, in an unorganized form, into antiquity.  Perhaps the original unorganized nature of it should be its default setting, if possible.  A Distributist view of gambling, per se.

And drugs. .. well, think of big weedy Denver.  Like gambling, they've gone mainstream, and all the vice that goes with it will simply keep on keeping on.

And we wonder why things seem so messed up.

Well, consider poor Charles Luciano.  A business genius who had to spend his declining days back in his country of birth, Italy.  And not a statute to such a leading light in contemporary American culture anywhere.

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: Oh no. . . .

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: Oh no. . . .: Lex Anteinternet: Oh no. . . . : Apple has come out with the Iphone 8.  . . and now there's a major update for the Iphone 7. And an ...

Oh a second update already. . . .

Gee. . . that would suggest that the first one wasn't really fully worked out. . . .

Hmmmmm

Mehr Mensch Sein

 

Or, as it translates from the German; "Be more human".

Recently (well, not so recently, as this post has lingered for a long time as it's difficult to write for some reason) I posted a long, and likely almost completely unread, on The Benedict Option.  But it occurs to me in some sort of vague way that people have been grasping for something like that for awhile.  And in a plethora of ways.  Mehr Mensch sein really sums it up, and it was intended to by its originator, who was a Renaissance man and, as part of that, a theologian, but then a true Renaissance man would have to also be a theologian, in part.

And that's part of it.

This is a hard thing to define and write about, as the concept is so vast, but the single biggest problem in the Western World today is that people are not human, or rather they're not completely human. To put it another way, people aren't natural human beings.

They're consumers.  They're employees.  They're employers.  They're some self defined something which, increasingly in our society, is self defined by their sexual impulses.  Their statistical units.  Their professionals. Their careerists.

All of this is not very human.  Indeed, it's inhuman.

 

It's also confused and lonely.

And pointless. And that's a really big problem, and expresses itself in any number of destructive, horrific, ways.

No  wonder we see such confused and lonely behavior.

This manifests itself in any number of ways, but it might be easiest to sum it up by simply noting that while some celebrate the long industrial fueled liberation from want, we have reached a point where, as a society, we are confused and not very happy.  Indeed, those who study it tend to find that third world societies, as long as they're free from war and famine and the like, are made up of happier, often much happier, people.  In comparison, the Western world is increasingly in despair, confused and unhappy. 

Indeed, as one speaker I saw on the dreaded Youtube recently set out, in a speech regarding the fiction of fluid gender identity, suicide is mostly a White, Well Off, Western World, problem (which gender confusion, we might note, also is).

Almost everything that pop psych wishes to tag that on proves to be wrong in some ways, or at least a lot of it does. For example, the oft told story that bullying causes suicide has no statistical back up.  People who want to change their genders don't reduce their risk either.  Gay marriage doesn't create gay bliss.   A modern life full of defined categories previously unknown to man but now in the latest edition of the DSM doesn't operate to reduce those conditions, there just get to be more and more of them with each passing edition.

Somethings hugely amiss, and while we resist it, it isn't all that hard, really, to see what it is.

Except we basically don't want to.

What we know of our species, as a universal, is that we're a really smart intellectual mammal. We're part of nature, but our intellects universally look toward the divine.  Even people who would deny that, and there are plenty, do this.

 

We have largely freed Western Society from want, but not what it wants the most.  As it turns out, pretty clearly, as a species we tend towards that which we originally tended towards, almost none of which Western Society aims for.  We don't actually crave 1,000 Facebook friends so much as we do ten real friends. We don't look for fulfillment in a life of Hugh The Creep Hefner sexual abandon so much as we want to become one with one other person.  Denying our biological gender and pretending that we the other gender, or that being attracted to the same gender is normal, is not natural and will not make the person so afflicted feel natural.

And denying that there is a Natural Law, and that the Natural Law is outside of ourselves and a greater divine entity, and that that entity doesn't define himself by how we define ourselves, isn't going to cut it.  Clerics who pray to the Cosmos at local Democratic Party conventions aren't doing anyone a favor, in other words, they're part of the problem.

So it turns out that as a species we seek much of the best of the world that actually existed, even if our re-engineering of everything in order to free ourselves from the worst of what existed was not illegitimate.  But at the point we are at, things should really give us pause.

We're rushing head on to try to break down the barriers that are keeping what little remains of the Western World's sanity intact, while also shoving everyone we can into bigger and bigger cities that are simply reservoirs of societal despair in the long run.

 

A true cowboy, who is already about 100% more man than many men in this society will ever be.

And the byproduct so far has been youth who grow up with no sense of anything other than a need to have a career and obtain money fall into despair and take their own lives.  Others, old and young, about whom nothing more can be said than  "No religious affiliation. No political affiliation. He just hung out" become violent killers.  Boys whose anemic pathetic upraising never taught them how to be men or have manly virtues decide they want to take refuge in the former protected class of women and become one.  Girls who are taught that the only glory in life is to act like the male protagonist in Wall Street decide to become those people including their gender.  The denial of the fact that the world is fallen and we must deal with that fact has lead to the denial that there are conditions that deprive some of their sanity in serious ways and causes others to pack animals around for legalized "comfort".

 

Enough of all of that.

If we as a society are really to deal with this, in some ways, it's time to go back. And up.  And that means accepting that an increasingly urbanized world joyfully imagined both by laissez fair Republican politicians and Democratic social reformers is from, a human point of view, an dung heap.  We don't want to do there.  And things need to be real, not computerized, and not sanitized for your protection.  Men need manly things, and women need womanly things, no matter how socially improper that idea is to the nurtured crew at the DNC and the faculty lunch room.  And acknowleding a sense of a greater entity out there, and that not all beliefs are equal merely because they are beliefs, needs to be accepted.

If we don't, we'll get more of the same. And that isn't working out.

 

And so you'll see some mehr Mesch seiin post tags here from time to time trying to get at this certain difficult to express essence.  Be more human.  And know what it is to be human, truly.

Lex Anteinternet: De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. M'eh. Ross Douthart of the New York Times says what I did, more bluntly.

It's not everyday that I beat Ross Douthat of the New York Times to the punch, or press, or whatever the proper phrase would be, but with this entry below:

Lex Anteinternet: De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. M'eh:   Yes, this is the third time I've run this photo.  I just like it.  Two young couples.  Migrant farm workers in Louisiana and thei...

I did.

Indeed, the title of my entry, one of the original Latin versions of the phrase counseling that a person not speak ill of the dead (literally, "of the dead not ill, only good") was informed from the same phrase that Douthat's is, which was Speaking Ill of Hugh Hefner.

I beat Douthat by only one day, I'll note, and while I thought my entry risked being too blunt, I can't hold a candle to Douthat in those regards.  He noted:

Hugh Hefner, gone to his reward at the age of 91, was a pornographer and chauvinist who got rich on masturbation, consumerism and the exploitation of women, aged into a leering grotesque in a captain’s hat, and died a pack rat in a decaying manse where porn blared during his pathetic orgies.

Hef was the grinning pimp of the sexual revolution, with quaaludes for the ladies and Viagra for himself — a father of smut addictions and eating disorders, abortions and divorce and syphilis, a pretentious huckster who published Updike stories no one read while doing flesh procurement for celebrities, a revolutionary whose revolution chiefly benefited men much like himself.

Right on Ross!

Well exactly. . .

 Quite some time ago we posted this item:

Lex Anteinternet: Peculiarized violence and American society. Looki...: Because of the horrific senseless tragedy in Newton Connecticut, every pundit and commentator in the US is writing on the topic of what cau...

And now we have Las Vegas.

Of the killer's brother, the following was noted.

No religious affiliation. No political affiliation. He just hung out,

Well. . . exactly.

I've been working on a post for some time using the German phrase  "

A world gone mad.

A mass murder in Las Vegas, Catalonia voting for independence from Spain, a President who gets into twitter debates with everyone about everything.

What on Earth?

Is it murder?

The episode of Burn's and Novik's documentary on the Vietnam War prominently featured the prize winning photo and film footage of Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, head of the South Vietnamese National Police shooting Nguyễn Văn Lém in the head, in the streets of Saigon, with a revolver, during the 1968 Tet Offensive.  The podcast that came about on the topic of the documentary (it wasn't part of the documentary, it's oddly a podcast about each episode of the documentary, very prominently featured the same thing.

In the podcast, the shooting is repeatedly referred to as a "murder".

Was it.

First some background.

As noted Nguyễn Ngọc Loan was the head of the South Vietnamese National Police.  He was not, as the speakers in the podcast incorrectly stated (and I can't recall what the documentary stated) an army officer.  He had been, but at the time of the shooting he was the head of the police.

Nguyễn Văn Lém was what we'd normally refer to now, and was occasionally referred to then, a terrorist.  He was in handcuffs and under arrest as he'd been detained after his actions in the offensive.  Head of a small unit, Lém had eariler captured ARVN Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Tuan and his family and attempted to force the Colonel to show them how to drive tanks.   Lieutenant Colonel Tuan refused.  Lém killed then killed Col. Tuan, his wife, six children and his eighty year-old mother by cutting their throats.  There was one survivor, a seriously injured ten year old boy.

So, quite frankly, Lém was a real bastard.  A bastard, we'd note, of the Communist true believer type from all over the globe for whom such actions were not uncommon.  And things like this were not uncommon during Tet.

So, getting back to Loan, was his shooting of Lém a murder, or something else?

That may be trickier to determine that a person might suppose.

Let's start with this.  What's murder?

Every human community on earth recognizes that there's such a thing as murder and that its one of the most horrible of crimes.  But nearly every human community also recognizes that not every instance of one human killing another is murder.  Rather, generally, most societies of all types hold that killing another human being without an extreme justification is murder.  Killings in self defense are not murder.  Killing in defense of others, which extends out, commonly, to how we view actions by the police and the ultimately the military, are not murder.  Most people agree on that much.

Beyond that, there's other instances of humans killing other humans that are not generally regarded as murder, but they get trickier.

Actually, it's not even beyond that. We mentioned policemen and soldiers, but let's break that down.

That policemen are authorized to use deadly force in their work is not doubted by anyone, but where that line is drawn is not agreed upon and never has been.  In some societies (and this is something directly relevant to what we are discussing here) police use of deadly force has been regarded as very wide indeed, although not usually to the level of summary execution. . . always.

Under the Common Law, at one time, the police in Common Law jurisdictions were regarded as authorized to use deadly force to apprehend a suspected felon up until he was apprehended.  That's where the old line that we used to shout when we played police as kids, "Stop in the name of the law" came from.  If you didn't stop, back in the day, a policeman could shoot you.  There were no investigations or anything much that happened.  That's the way it was. Fleeing from the law is still regarded as evidence of guilt (a questionable proposition).  Not all that long ago that presumption went pretty far in what it authorized.

Indeed in some regions of our own country the use of deadly force against suspected criminals was regarded as so proper that there was a common assumption that the police need not really bring a suspect in alive. In the American West it was truly the case that sheriffs and marshals shooting suspects in the sticks was pretty accepted.  This generally applied to average citizens as well who were generally regarded as authorized to act on what everyone knew to be against the law.  Indeed, a sheriff in North Dakota openly questioned Theodore Roosevelt as to why he simply had not shot some suspects he chased down over a long distance who had stolen a boat.  It seemed odd to the sheriff, and it would have seemed odd to most residents of the west at the time.  Hanging thieves and murderers, even by civilians, was seen as perfectly legitimate and an extension of the proper enforcement of the law.  The scene from Lonesome Dove in which cowhands hang murderers is pretty much spot on.  People didn't worry that much about taking people to the law and they felt authorized to simply "carry it out".  A much different concept of the law, to be sure.

Carrying on, even now in some regions of the world the police can go very far in using deadly force and not be regarded as acting outside of the law.  A friend of mine who was in the Navy in the 1970s recounted being on leave in a Caribbean nation when a fellow sailor had his wallet lifted.  They ran to a nearby traffic policeman and pointed otu a fleeing man they knew to have taken it.  The officer unholstered his pistol, shot the fleeing man, and gave them the wallet back.

We'd regard this as a shocking violation of the law and murder.  There, he was simply acting as a policeman.  The old Common Law in full force.

Indeed, beyond the Common Law, there's the "old law" we've spoken of before.  Restraint on the use of deadly force in revenge or self protection or out of a sense of justice is a societal restraint.  While all people everywhere recognize murder, most cultures at one time sanctioned a lot of violence and most people still sympathize with a type of it that's well beyond what the law allows.  There are a lot of movies on this topic in the Western World where restraints on official killings are the highest.  In spite of that, the man or woman acting in revenge who takes life outside of the confines of the law remain popular.

More on all of this in a moment.  Let's talk about soldiers in war first.

There's sort of a general concept out there that any killing in war is legitimate, but it isn't.  Indeed, since World War Two it is in fact the case that people all over the world have tolerated less and less deadly violence in war.  Wartime never authorized wholesale slaughter, although there's been plenty of it.  As early as the aftermath of World War One there were war crime trials and during the war itself the the Germans were rightly condemned for their murderous actions against Belgian and French civilians.  Some have noted how this played into Allied propaganda, but the fact of the matter is that the Germans during the Great War already foreshadowed what they'd do in the Second World War and were condemned for it.  Soldiers are not to kill civilians. Nor are they to kill Prisoners of War.

Not that don't both happen and the latter, in fact, has often been tolerated.  Indeed in various ages it was highly tolerated.  An order to give "no quarter", i.e., don't bother with taking prisoners, was at one time regarded as a legitimate order for various reasons, often because the battle had become too much of a mess to sort out friend from foe quickly.  At least since some point in the 19th Century, however, such orders have not been regarded as legitimate, and indeed have been regarded as illegal.  That doesn't mean that they haven't been given or suggested.

For Americans, a lot of struggle over such suggestions came about during the later stages of the Indians Wars, by which time most Americans did not regard them as legitimate.  By that point they'd frankly stopped, although tragically the battle that such things are most associated with, mistakenly, occurred in that period, Wounded Knee.  Wounded Knee was more of a general mess than people suppose and less of a real massacre.  Real massacres did occur however, particularly prior to the 1870s and often not by Federal troops but mustered militia. Bear River in Idaho and Sand Creek in Colorado are good example of real unformed massacres by men marching under the Stars and Stripes.  The latter is a particularly heinous example.

By the Philippine Insurrection Americans were no longer willing to tolerate it and the one example some agitated people mention today, inaccurately attributing it to Pershing who had nothing to do with it, is an example of one commander authorizing very broad deadly force. That resulted in an investigation which was aimed towards a prosecution but that did not occur as the sufficient evidence could not be gathered. That did stop such actions in the prosecution of that war, however.

The shooting of prisoners again arose, although not in the public eye, as a feature of World War Two even with the American military. It's still a topic that isn't addressed much, but generally what occurred is that there were instances in which certain units simply stopped taking prisoners or mostly stopped.  In Europe this tended to to occur, on a very limited basis, where those units had suffered from the same conduct by the Germans. As a reprisal, they stopped.  In the Pacific, however, it was very widespread.  Taking Japanese prisoners was dangerous anyhow and the war in the Pacific degenerated to some extent to one with heavy racist overtones.  Not many Japanese soldiers attempted to surrender but a lot of Americans weren't very interested in taking Japanese prisoners anyhow.

In Vietnam something like that occurred, but on a much more limited scale.  As this became known it became widely circulated in the American press and after the My Lai massacre it became very widely know.  "Search and Destroy" missions and the like tainted the American military for years in the minds of the American public even though most US troops never served in units that either conducted them or committed any atrocities.  None the less, some atrocities did occur.

Which gets back to what is considered legitimate in war. Atrocities never are, but conduct towards prisoners and even combatants has varied widely. At one time, an order of "no quarter" was regarded as legitimate.  It certainly isn't now.  The French were regarded as barbarous at Amiens for raiding the English rear and killing the boys in the train, a truly hideous act.  The Welsh in the same battle killed a lot of French downed chivalry, which was regarded as bad monetary practice.  Standards haven't been always exactly the same.

So what does that all have to do with Nguyễn Ngọc Loan and Nguyễn Văn Lém?

Well, maybe more than we think.

Both Vietnamese sides took prisoners during the Vietnam War but the north uniformly treated them horribly.  NVA treatment of prisoners was based on the Communist concept that anyone fighting a Communist nation is guilty of a crime. The Soviets treated German prisoners of war the same way during World War Two (the Nazi treatment of Soviet prisoners was more purely genocidal).  The NVA treatment of prisoners was itself criminal. And when their fortunes appeared good they were not above mass execution of civilians.  The ARVN may not have been sweethearts towards prisoners they took, but htey were much better and there was always an official policy of trying to convert prisoners to the Southern cause.

Of course, not all prisoners were uniformed by any means, which creates the classic franc tireur problem.  For years it was regarded as perfectly legitimate to execute, on the spot, men bearing arms but not wearing uniforms.  Nations complained about it, but it was regarded as legitimate.  And execution of men captured wearing your uniforms against you also routinely resorted in execution. The United States in fact did this during World War Two when it captured Germans wearing American uniforms.  Military Police shot them.  No trial, just execution.  Nobody has ever suggested at any time that the US was acting improperly in doing that.

So, where does that leave us.

Well, I don't know .

I have to presume that the Republic of Vietnam had some sort of judicial code that prevented the execution of suspects.

I know that the Republic of Vietnam, with American assistance, was carrying out a program of assassination of suspected Communist agents in the countryside, which seems to be much the same thing.

What the actual standard in the country was is hard to know, particularly given the level of corruption that was common in South Vietnam.

So, was the killing of Nguyễn Văn Lém an extra judicial police murder or simply a rare filmed example of common South Vietnamese justice in action?  Or was it a battlefield execution of a franc tireur, if that practice was still regarded as legitimate by the Republic of Vietnam.

Did South Vietnam have an official death penalty for murder?  Most nations have had one at some time. Indeed most nations have had one that applied more broadly than murder, to be sure.  That has generally not been regarded as illegitimate for true crimes.  But it's also generally been regarded as requiring a real fair trial as well.

No trial here.

So was this, then murder?

That's hard to know.  It was probably technically at least a crime and that crime was murder (although the author of the Wikipedia article on Loan argues that it was not technically illegal).  And it was horrible.  But Lem had done something horrible. But that doesn't sanction a horrible extra judicial murder.  But maybe that was official justice in South Vietnam.

Indeed, in the rough justice sense, the photographer who took the famous still photograph came to deeply regret it.  He later stated about the photograph:

The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. What the photograph didn't say was, "What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?

He, Eddie Adams, later went even further, and apologized to Loan for the photograph.  Upon Loan's death at age 67, Adams stated:

The guy was a hero. America should be crying. I just hate to see him go this way, without people knowing anything about him.

No answers.  Just a lot of awful questions.

None of which even begin to approach the question of whether such actions are moral.  I would say clearly not, but my view may be in the minority on a lot of the questions I've raised.

Taking a second look at Vietnam.

While we don't normally do previews, we thought we'd note that we are going to do a few, albeit very few, about the Vietnam War, following the recent Novik and Burns documentary on the war. 

This is, of course, well outside of the time period we try to focus on here, although we stray from that a lot anyhow.  And we wouldn't normally note that we were set to stray, but as this will be a short series, and we've otherwise been focusing more recently on the era we claim to be about, that we thought we'd note it.  Not that we're going to stop posing on other stuff, topical or otherwise.

Artillery Hill, Camp Wheeler, Macon, Georgia. October 2, 1917.

13th National Army Cantonment, Camp Dodge, Iowa. October 2, 1917.

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month

Helene Ethel Fairbanks (nee Cassidy) (1882-1944), wife of Warren Charles Fairbanks and daughter-in-law of Charles Warren Fairbanks, Vice President of the United States to Woodrow Wilson.  No, this photograph doesn't have a direct relationship to this topic, but then again it does.

Normally Sundays are a slow day here on Lex Anteinternet, but we've posted a bunch this morning.  It's just one of those days, I guess.

One thing we'd note, having noted it in the Casper Star Tribune this morning, is that October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

Coming at the start of a week in which the past week saw the death of Hugh Hefner, ossified creep, who pretty much seems to have thought of women as nothing more than a set of breasts and one other organ, perhaps his death can serve to at least emphasize the terrible nature of this deadly killer.  I wonder how many of his young female subjects who prostituted their images in his slick print journal came down this this?  You know that some did.  That has to be the case as it strikes a massive number of women. The figures are staggering.

So here's hoping that perhaps this awful disease can be stopped, and here's to hoping that women pay attention to it, and I'm sure most do, so that they don't fall victim to it.  For folks who don't bother with their local paper anymore, on a day like today, it's worth picking up.

Lex Anteinternet: De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. M'eh. Throwing rocks at Hugh Hefner . . . I'm not alone in that.

Just a couple of days ago I posted this about the passing of Hugh Hefner:

Lex Anteinternet: De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. M'eh:   Yes, this is the third time I've run this photo.  I just like it.  Two young couples.  Migrant farm workers in Louisiana and thei...

Folks who may have thought, and probably still do, that I was a bit off base by going after the recently departed Hefner and essentially condemning him as one of the worst products of the 20th Century may be disturbed to know that I wasn't the only one.  Of course, I'm cheered to know that myself.  Maybe there's some hope out there.

One of Time's columnists, in fact, did much the same thing.  Op ed writer  Jill Filipovic, who shares two of my three vocations with me, did the same but from a female prospective, starting off her article with:

Hugh Hefner loved his things: his silk bathrobes, his palatial mansion, his vintage cars. And of course, he would be quick to say, his girls — those interchangeable blondes all below a certain age, with their Barbie-shaped bodies and smiles that never moved their eyes.

Hefner claimed to "love women." He certainly loved to look at women, or at least the type of women who fit a very particular model. He loved to make money by selling images of women to other men who "love women." He certainly met a lot of women, had sex with a lot of women, talked to a lot of women. But I'm not sure Hefner ever really knew any of us. And he certainly did not love us.

And it goes on from there.  Well worth reading.

She notes:

What Hefner and Playboy never did was present women as human, or consider us anything like men. Hefner made female sex objects more relatable and accessible — the Playboy centerfold was the girl next door, not the famous movie actress —but this wasn't so much an elevation as a downward shift: social permission for men to look at all women through the zipper in their jeans, and not even bother to pretend it was otherwise.

Quite right.

The Laramie Boomerang for October 1, 1917. Liberty loans and a shakeup in the officer corps.

The Monday, October 1, 1917 edition of the Laramie Boomerang presented a grim cartoon for Monday morning readers as well as news on the first big Liberty Loan campaign that was kicking off.

Chances are, however, that men and women with sons in the National Guard were more interested in the article indicating that the Army was culling the officer corps of the Federalized Guard, which it was..

This is a story that's well known to students of the Guard in World War One and World War Two, but perhaps less so to others.  Having just run an item here on the Guard during the Vietnam War in which I sought to correct something that's a bit of a slight to the National Guard it might seem here that I'm doing something that's a bit of the opposite, but history is what it is.

Truth be known, while the Guard had been reforming itself and drawing closer to the Army since the passage of the Dick Act early in the 20th Century, which made it an official component and reserve of the Army, old aspects of the more independent state militia system lingered on in a couple of forms.  One was the existence of "Champagne Units" which were nearly fraternal military organizations for the very well heeled.  These units were not necessarily bad, we should note and indeed at least one of them was very good. But that was truly an oddity. Often over subscribed these units, typically cavalry, were hard to get into and saw men who were millionaires serving as privates.  Again, having said that, they weren't bad units.

More problematic is that the officer corps of the National Guard could be inconsistent.  The degree to which this was truly a problem remains debated, but that there was some problem can't be doubted.  Some men were simply unsuited to be officers and others were not fit enough to be officers. 

Having said that, that wasn't completely untrue in the Regular Army, although it was much less true, and it would also be true of the Army raised to fight the war.  All in all, most men were suited and indeed sometimes highly suited for their wartime roles and the National Guard gave a good account of itself.  The war couldn't have been fought, from the American prospective, without the Guard.  The lingering Regular Army resentment over the Dick Act, which had not been universally popular with the Army, played a role in what would occur with National Guard officers as well, and that would continue on in to World War Two.

By World War Two, however, the National Guard would be closer yet to the Regular Army. That war would draw it much closer and by the time of the Korean War it was much more like it is today in those regards.  Today, it's very close.

As an aide in this paper, it's odd to see the headline about a "star athlete" opting to attend the university.  With a big war breaking out, that's not a headline we expect to see.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: United Methodist Church, Basin Wyoming

Churches of the West: United Methodist Church, Basin Wyoming:

This is the United Methodist Church in Basin, Wyoming.  This style of church is a bit unusual for a Methodist Church, although at least the Methodist Church in Wheatland Wyoming has a similar Federalist style.

Roads to the Great War: Doughboy Basics: Why They Were Called Doughboys?

Roads to the Great War: Doughboy Basics: Why They Were Called Doughboys?: A. The Coinage of Doughboy For us today, and maybe for all Americans who will follow, the Doughboys were the men America sent to...

The Vietnam War

 

The Vietnam War by Ken Burns and Lynn Novik

I have already mentioned in a couple of threads that I've been watching this documentary.

Given the focus here on the Punitive Expedition and, more recently, World War One, it might come as a surprise that I have a real interest in the Vietnam War, although I've written about it here before.  This will be, however, only the 30th post on the topic of the war since we started the blog.  Not a lot compared to the 613 on World War One (to date) or even the 182 on World War Two (to date).  Still, it has been for a very long time something I've been pretty interested in.

That's the case for a variety of reasons, one being that the war is within my living memory.  The war was ongoing when I was born in 1963 and it was something that I became increasingly aware of in my youth.  When the US pulled out of the war in 1973 I was ten and can well remember that, including various things that occurred in the war during the Nixon Administration period.  To my surprise, in fact, I can personally recall some things about the war much earlier than that.  When the North invaded in 1975 and the Republic of Vietnam collapsed I was only a couple of years older but that was something that I was very much aware of.  Indeed, at that time in my youth I thought I might want to opt for a military career and I followed the fading fortunes of South Vietnam carefully, even putting up a National Geographic map in my bedroom so I could follow the war as the NVA closed increasingly in on the doomed former ally of the United States.  The war was a topic of conversation in the house as I grew up, although probably not in the way you might figure.*  My father and mother thought the war was a mistake.  I, my youthful self, didn't.

Soon after that I started to try to find histories on the war and to this date I've frankly never been satisfied with any of them.  But I did learn quite a bit about the war.  Later on, when I joined the National Guard, I learned a different prospective yet as so many of the fellow Guardsmen I served within the 1980s were veterans of the war.  One of the first major essays I wrote in college was an exploration of the Tet Offensive of 1968. And so on.

So I was looking forward to the documentary, although holding back some reserve about that as well.  I like the Ken Burns documentaries I've seen quite a bit and I was worried this one wouldn't measure up, and that if it didn't it might make me question a bit his earlier documentaries that I do like.

So I'm glad to report that I think this documentary is okay.

Not spectacular, but not bad. And frankly, it's a really tough topic to take on.  If I were grading it, I think I'd give it a B-.

Burns and Novik worked on this for a decade.  At least one of the people interviewed for the documentary has passed away in that period.  In releasing it, Burns has stated that it was his view that only now, in the 2010s, can a documentary on the war be released and be objective.  I think that's likely correct, and I also think that we are now ready, perhaps for the first time, for a good objective treatment of war in the written form.  I'll hope for that.

The documentary is presented in ten episodes, some of which are 1.5 hours long but most of which are two hours long.  Not every episode is equal in quality to the others.  In my view, the documentary might have been better to have been seven episodes rather than ten, but that's a tough call for the doumentarian to make.  I'd guess they probably had enough material for twenty episodes had they chosen to go that long (which would have been a mistake).

The documentary is presented in the now standard Burns form.  We are introduced to a collection of speakers who speak in nearly every, but not every, episode.  Unlike The Civil War, or Baseball, these speakers tend to all have first hand experience with the topic being addressed, which does make it different from those well known documentaries (I haven't seen Burn's documentary on World War Two which may follow this form to a degree).

Because it's ten sequential episodes its a bit difficult to determine how to properly review it.  Reviewing each episode might be tedious, but on the other hand its hard not to do that in some sense.  Nonetheless I'm not going to strictly do that.  Indeed, I'm going to start off where I think the documentary falls short, which may be additional bad form.  Nonetheless. . .

The most significant failure of the documentary was the failure to really handle the story of French involvement in Vietnam adequately. This is a failure, however, that nearly every treatment of the Vietnam War makes. In fairness, this failure was less pronounced here than it often is.  There's always a temptation to treat the French Indochinese War as simply a minor prelude to the American war in Vietnam, but that's a fairly serious mistake.

It's a mistake as the French first became involved in Indochina, and more particularly in Vietnam in particular, in the early 1600s. That's correct.  French presence in Vietnam predates, by decades, American independence from the United Kingdom. The story of that early involvement, indeed how France came to be in Indochina at all, is exceedingly complicated and very difficult to understand.  It mirrors, however, to some degree the story of the British in India.  Basically, French interests of various types, not the French government, entered the area and that lead to conflict.  As the French interest expanded, the French government began to take an active role in what ws occurring.

 French naval infantry in Tonkin, ie., northern Vietnam, 1884.

This lead the French ultimately to directly intervene in Vietnam in 1858, an event which touched off thirty years of conflict with the indigenous people.  French dominion of the region, including Vietnam, lead to a sort of unitary geography that had never existed before so, as with India, while France didn't create the Vietnamese, in some ways it created Vietnam.

 French Indochina in 1930.  Note that the borders on the map heavily reflect the modern states in the region.

The French were so successful in "pacifying" Indochina that the region became the desired post for French Foreign Legionnaires, who dreamed of being posted there.  Nonetheless the Vietnamese never accepted French dominion of their heavily rural jungle land, even as they acquired bits of French culture. Again, this strongly recalls the British in India, who managed to stamp British culture on the existing Indian one as they formed an India out of a collection of regional states, while never really acquiring the loyalty of the people who lived in them.  Open rebellion in native troops broke out in 1930, signaling that all was not well.  By that time, as the documentary correctly and importantly notes, Ho Chi Minh was already a Communist seeking the liberty of the Vietnamese from the French

Of course, part of what came not to be well was Japan had different ideas for Asian people that didn't include liberty, even if it didn't include Europeans.  When the Pacific War broke out on December 7, 1941, France was already the anemic Vichy state that the Germans had left it and the Japanese basically simply walked into Indochina with the French accepting it.  The Vietnamese, however, did not and a guerilla war against Japan broke out.

Vichy propaganda poster showing unity between France and northern Vietnam, 1942.

Burns and Novik handle this history, but in a light form.  Like most treatments of the Vietnam War, the entire century plus long story of France in Indochina prior to the Japanese occupation is handled in a light form.  Vietnam had long been occupied by the French prior to the Japanese occupation. Why was there only one significant rebellion, prior to World War Two, by the Japanese?  How much had French culture impacted the Vietnamese?  Why did the rebels of mid 20th Century find refuge in Communism in Vietnam, as in so many other places. What about the other, and there were other, nationalist movements that sought to expel the French but didn't adhere to Communism?  This stuff would be nice to know.

And it would also be nice to know why the French ever wanted Vietnam.  It's an odd possession, quite frankly, for them, or anyone. For Europeans it was primitive and dangerously diseased ridden. Early French military missions fell by the droves to disease. What was it about the place?

The story of the rising Communist/Nationalist struggle against the Japanese, and how it morphed into a struggle against the return of the French was also given a typical treatment and as usual it gives a light treatment to European dreams of restored colonial possessions and American opposition, at first, to that.  This could also have been treated more completely.  This is a complex story but of note the British, while not openly admitting it, had come to the reluctant conclusion that the sun was setting on empire everywhere and was acting accordingly.  India, the crown jewel of the British Empire, was granted independence in 1947.  The UK made a pretext of not granting independence to Israel voluntarily but in actuality simply withdrew from the region to let the contestants fight it out in the same year. The British were clearly going home.  They even worked to prevent the Dutch from restoring their presence in the Dutch East Indies, a rare example of one colonial power refusing to allow another to keep its colony while not trying to take it for its own. 

The French, however, seeking to restore France's position in the world following its defeat at the hands of the Germans in 1940 acted to try to hand on to, and restore, its empire.

The US, at first, opposed and would not cooperate with French efforts.  The Roosevelt Administration was not terribly alive to the threat of Communism anywhere and the Truman Administration, at first, was only slightly more concerned.  Given this, the administrations either actively opposed French colonial restorations or were not cooperative with them.  In 1949, however, the situation abruptly changed when China fell to the Chinese Red Army.  The prior year, 1948, the dangers of Soviet expansion became manifest when the Soviets blockaded Berlin.  The isolationist Republican Party became converted to active global opposition to Communism overnight and the heat then fell on Truman in a major way.  The North Korean invasion of South Korea cemented that and the US began to slowly, but actively, support the French effort on the thesis that it was an anti-communist effort, which was true, but only partially.

French Foreign Legion airborne artillery in Indochina during their war following World War Two.

Burns and Novik touch on part of this history, but not all.  I wish they'd dived into it more deeply.  They do a good job, however, with the French Indochinese War, although they failed to cover the request the French made for the US to deploy atomic weaponry at Dien Bien Phu, which is a significant oversight.

Following this, I think they do a good job with the story of American involvement in the war thereafter.  They do an excellent job revealing the political machinations that occurred behind the scenes.  Some of the revelations are startling and hard to grasp.  Kennedy comes out looking better than I'd generally credit him to be (I'm not a Kennedy fan).  Lydon Johnson comes across as shrewd and alert, but bizarrely inclined to keep wading deeper into the "Big Muddy" even though he was expressing absolute doubts about the entire project, privately.  Nixon comes across as an even bigger crook than we generally look back upon him to be, which is pretty horrifically exposed.  All of the Administrations come across as willing to lie and scheme against the presumed wishes of the American people.

 US Army advisers and Vietnamese Special Forces, Vietnam War.

Well, what of the portrayal of the American war itself?  I think it was well done, balancing events back home, politics and the war, quite well.  People with strongly vested views in the war will likely be unhappy that their side isn't more fully portrayed as correct.  Revisionist histories of the war, of which there are now several significant ones, are not given pride of place.  The arguments presented, and they are arguments even if they do not appear to be, given the conflict on interpretations of the war and how it was waged, and lost, are very well presented and hard to argue against. For those who can recall the war personally the end of the documentary is gut wrenching.  It must be leagues more so for those who experienced it in any fashion.

Boomers protesting the Vietnam War, from our thread Boomer, wake up. Generations, Part One of Three.  Of interest in this photo, only one of these young people have anything approaching a Hippie look even if they are protesting.

I was glad to see that the documentary went on after the fall of Saigon to briefly note Vietnam's following war in Cambodia, although I was disappointed that the fall of the non Communist regime in Cambodia was not dealt with itself, as I'd consider that to be part of the Vietnam War.  Indeed, the wars that occurred in Cambodia and Laos are part and parcel of the same story, so their omission was surprising.  A bit more on Vietnam's war with China, which occurred in the late 1970s, would also have been appreciated.

Pathet (Communist) Laotian troops, riding in an American 6x6 truck, in Vientiane in 1972.  The situation in Laos had been tense since the country had gained independence from France and it had teetered on the edge of falling to Communism for years.  Like South Vietnam, it fell in 1975.

Burns and Novik's history of the war is presented as an unresolved history by its own admission. The documentary makes the argument that the rift in American culture that we clearly see all around us know came about due to the war and that perhaps the documentary can be a step on the way towards healing that rift. That's a big claim, worth examining, and a big hope as well.

 

 Infantry in Vietnam.

There are indeed good reasons to look back on the Vietnam War as a major factor in the split in the countries culture into two cultures in a near cultural civil  war with one another.  Indeed, that's one of those arguments which fits under our You Hear It Hear First category as we've cited the rise of the Boomer left as a major element of this.  Given this, I'll credit this argument to a certain degree but I think it may be too simplistic to believe that no divide existed before the 1960s.  More accurately, the strong divide that had existed between right and left at various points prior to World War Two closed as a result of the war and while it rose again briefly after the war, the rise of Communism in the late 1940s closed it again. This is not to say that everyone saw everything the same way, as that would definitely not be true. But the big cultural divide we now have does indeed stem, at least to some degree, to a rift that developed during the war.

CH-54 landing in Saigon, April 30, 1975. At the time this photograph was taken, , as pointed out in an earlier thread, Hillary Clinton had already worked on the Nixon impeachment effort, Chuck Schumer was already in the New York Assembly, and Nancy Pelosi was already involved in California's Democratic Party.

Healing that rift is a big task and its unlikely that Burns' and Novik's documentary will achieve that, no matter how much that might be wished for. The split today isn't over the Vietnam War but rather over many other things.  Indeed the remaining rifts of the Vietnam War itself are more likely to be healed by the passing of that generation.  But that we can look back and see what occurred is a good thing, and perhaps that will contribute to the wider hope of recovering the middle that seems in recent years to have been lost, or at least recalling that there is a middle and where it is.

 Vietnamese refugees being evacuated from Saigon in 1975.

*A person shouldn't overemphasis this however.  In all of our households in that era, World War Two was the war that was "the war".

Roads to the Great War: Cossacks and the Great War

Roads to the Great War: Cossacks and the Great War: The Cossacks are an interesting aspect of Russian imperialism as well as the war, revolution, and Russian Civil War. They were originally ...