Manning Sentenced To 35 Years In The Slammer Fair....!!

[ARbound]

I agree that it's a generational thing, but it's also us intentionally not passing along this information. We really don't want to talk about it and conveniently
wish not to remember. It's hard to say we're so great when we have blood on are hands that never seems to wash clean. I'm proud of our accomplishments
and nations envying us, but like slavery, we need to own up to the bad stuff we did/continue to do. I'm not expecting French Polynesians or Moldavians to know what we did, just Americans and the people it happened too.

I'm in my 20's and the only reason myself, and a few of my friends know about stuff like My Lai, IA 665, Iran-Contra, Operation Condor, Congo Crisis, Grenada/Panama/Dominican Republic Occupations/"Liberations", etc. is because we intentionally went out of the way to learn about them, and in 11th and 12th grade luckily had a teacher that wasn't afraid to combat the notion that talking about our wrongdoings as a nation is not equal to hating America.

Ask your family and friends back home, how many knew there was a dictatorship in Arge? After that push further and ask them if they knew about Operation Condor. When I told my Argie friends that maybe 15%-20% max of people in our generation knew about the Dirty War/Operation Condor they were shocked.

I posted a picture of the poster that was plastered around town showing the opposition being in cahoots with Clarín and the US Embassy and a friend asked why Argies don't like the US Government, I asked him if he knew about the Dirty War/Operation Condor, nope, he's 22 and has BA, not a stupid kid either.

We're not perfect, and I don't think most Americans are naïve enough to claim we are, I just wish people would stop pretending like we're a victim in the world. Since the 1940's it's hard to find a country that hasn't been treated like a plaything by our government...

 

[kerriem]

This guy is F..ed up mentally and always has been. Just like the wimp Snowden.

I do hope your reference to Chelsea Manning being transgender wasn't the reason for you saying that she is 'F..ed up mentally'. People who are transgender are not mentally ill or 'F..ed up'. And what is so wimpish about Snowden? The man has put his future at significant risk by taking on the US government and chances are that he'll never see his home country again. Nothing wimpish about that in my eyes, whatever you think of the contents of his leaks.

 

[ghost]

I do hope your reference to Chelsea Manning being transgender wasn't the reason for you saying that she is 'F..ed up mentally'. People who are transgender are not mentally ill or 'F..ed up'. And what is so wimpish about Snowden? The man has put his future at significant risk by taking on the US government and chances are that he'll never see his home country again. Nothing wimpish about that in my eyes, whatever you think of the contents of his leaks.

"Hope" will keep you going. Keep up the good work.

 

[stevec]

I do contest the idea that military professionals are heartless paid killers. I was in the military for 12 years - first as a US Marine then as a US Navy Aviator. In my entire career I never once served with someone who could be described like that - and I served with a LOT of people on the very tip of the spear.

Baha Mousa's family suggest you open your other eye. As do the chaps from Abu Ghraib. (I appreciate the first example is British rather than American military.) By way of Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baha_Mousa

I think when you start to paint an entire population with one brush the argument loses potency fast.

Reductio ad absurdum. Clearly a particular culture can exhibit tendencies (a habitus) that, through its institutions and discourse, encourage a particular mindset and way of treating people, even if its effectiveness at cultivating that mindset varies among those citizens. Critiquing the imaginary community "America" doesn't imply that every single American is the same.

Pretty clearly, American exceptionalism and 'manifest destiny' betray any claims to an egalitarian outlook that values and respects other cultures.

 

[kerriem]

Every American from my generation and the one previous knows about My Lia. The generation of my kids do not because they didn't live through it.

Yet I bet your kids' generation are well aware of Independence Day despite not having lived through that. The reason your kids' generation doesn't know about the My Lai massacre is because the USA has chosen (culturally and politically) not to tell them about it. It is culturally awkward to admit that yep, there's quite a few bad people among us, and it proves the point that the US government and the US military is fallible. And who wants their citizens questioning whether merrily trotting off to war (with Australia 0.3 of a second behind you) is genuinely a good idea? All cultures might avoid highlighting their short-comings (Australia certainly has a very selective memory), but the major problem with the USA government and military doing it is that they wield massive power around the world and the consequences of the USA's selective memory often comes at huge human cost.

 

[kerriem]

"Hope" will keep you going. Keep up the good work.

Come on then Ghost, what is so wimpish about Snowden? And what would make you think that Manning is 'F..ed up mentally'?

 

[stevec]

I would respectfully disagree with your characterization that American's don't care about or don't value lives of people of other nations or that we see them as "sand niggers."

American exceptionalism and manifest destiny rather suggest otherwise. More to the point, your own MITTechnology Review begs to differ:

"Peter Bergen of the New America Foundation, who has made a thorough study of the publicly available data, estimates that from 2004 to mid-May of 2013, drone strikes killed between 258 and 307 civilians in Pakistan. That’s 7 to 15 percent of the total fatalities caused by drones in the country. Civilian fatalities in Yemen are harder to estimate, but they seem to make up about 8 percent of a much smaller total death toll. These are hardly numbers to wave away casually, but the weapons of a generation ago would have killed many more.*

And yet seen from a different angle, this comparison is nearly irrelevant, and the numbers appear to be quite high. For when we talk about accidental civilian deaths by drones in Pakistan and Yemen, we are talking about countries where the United States is not officially fighting wars...Imagine that Mexican commanders launched an air strike on a border town in California because their enemies were hiding there and that, as a result of poor aim or bad intelligence or dumb luck, a few dozen American citizens were killed. The American people and the U.S. government would be outraged, and justifiably so."

I do contest the idea that military professionals are heartless paid killers. I was in the military for 12 years - first as a US Marine then as a US Navy Aviator. In my entire career I never once served with someone who could be described like that - and I served with a LOT of people on the very tip of the spear.

Baha Mousa's family and the chaps from Abu Ghraib would like a word.

 

[GS_Dirtboy]

snip

Baha Mousa's family and the chaps from Abu Ghraib would like a word.

http://news.yahoo.com/u-soldier-behind-afghan-massacre-testify-sentencing-hearing-181639968.html

 

[ghost]

Come on then Ghost, what is so wimpish about Snowden? And what would make you think that Manning is 'F..ed up mentally'?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/bradley-manning-comes-out-as-transgendered-i-am-a-female/2013/08/22/0ae67750-0b25-11e3-8974-f97ab3b3c677_story.html Oh. I don't know. I guess he's just a pretty normal guy. I sure would want him backing me up in tough situation.

 

[kerriem]

http://www.washingto...c677_story.html Oh. I don't know. I guess he's just a pretty normal guy. I sure would want him backing me up in tough situation.

Ah, so you're a transgender-phobe. What's your fear? What makes you think she couldn't 'back you up in a tough situation'?Transgender people are totally normal and more common than you may realise. The problem here is your attitude, not Chelsea Manning.