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Politics, The Final Frontier (Politics)
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Mick Harper
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A disturbing programme on PBS Kill 'Em All: American War Crimes in Korea though originally a BBC Timewatch production. About the US Army killing civilians fairly indiscriminately in the early days of the Korean War. Not in My Lai-type situations but when dug in infantry were presented with (South) Korean refugees fleeing in front of North Korean advances. Word had got out of the possibility that North Korean soldiers might infiltrate with the refugees. So orders went out, "Kill 'em all." This appeared not only to be indulged in with some mild hysteria by the US Army command but later, quite deliberately, by Air Force and Navy units when things had rather more settled down. It was all very odd. One appreciates 'Gook Syndrome' especially among green troops under pressure but it really did seem more than that.

Hushed up still, pretty much. Certainly I wasn't aware and I like to think I keep tabs, pretty much.
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Boreades


In: finity and beyond
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Mick Harper wrote:
A disturbing programme on PBS Kill 'Em All: American War Crimes in Korea though originally a BBC Timewatch production. About the US Army killing civilians fairly indiscriminately in the early days of the Korean War. Not in My Lai-type situations but when dug in infantry were presented with (South) Korean refugees fleeing in front of North Korean advances.


Why did it seem disturbing? Was it the indiscriminate part?

Was there any indication of why PBS chose Korea? Perhaps it was far enough back in time to seem merely historical. As compared to (say) Vietnam (as My Lai was mentioned).

Which reminds me : By the time Vietnam came along, and the USA took over from France (defending what were at-the-time French oil interests, but not doing a very good job), the US Army had worked out how to minimise dug-in infantry situations. An old acquaintance of mine was, at the time, a very junior Lieutenant in US Military Intelligence. His very first posting in Vietnam was body-counting at the fully-automatic radar controlled machine gun emplacements that were used to defend fixed positions.

Of course, the fully-automatic radar equipment hadn't been programmed to tell the difference between fleeing civilians and advancing combatants.

He, being naive and new, reported as honestly as he could, but was surprised to find the numbers of dead bodies he reported became anything between five and ten time bigger by the time they reappeared in official reports.

It wasn't called indiscriminate, it was something like "pre-emptive defence". It wasn't hushed-up much though. Not as much as the size of the Vietnamese oil reserves.
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Mick Harper
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You have to be careful here -- the military don't actually have a desire to kill civilians (unless that happens to be a military objective, in which case the more indiscriminate the better). The technique you describe goes back to the First World War when machine guns with 'fixed lines' were used to discourage activity at night in no-man's land. Of course there was little possibility of civilians being caught up in that situation but nor, despite our fevered recollections, would there be in Vietnam.

The situation you describe (not radar-controlled, by the way, that would not be technically possible even now) would be a free-fire zone and I doubt that many civilian Vietnamese would be so incautious as to be out and about at night in one of those. It is true though that the American approach to war has a great tendency to conflate civilian and military 'kills' and then multiply the sum by ten. There's even a section about it in my Unreliable History though I understand you need radar to read the tiny print.
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Wile E. Coyote


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Mick Harper wrote:
It is true though that the American approach to war has a great tendency to conflate civilian and military 'kills' and then multiply the sum by ten. There's even a section about it in my Unreliable History though I understand you need radar to read the tiny print.


Shouldn't that be the American approach to "unconventional war". There are real problems with measuring conventional success at war, but if it is unconventional this measuring of success becomes even more difficult. It is not a simply a case of rolling forward and taking territory. Figures are needed. Each commander wants to do well, so if a body is dead and foreign, they of course become an insurgent.
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Mick Harper
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This is what I was getting at. The Americans are highly democratic which means using fighting methods that a) reduce domestic casualties to a minimum and b) inflate press releases to the maximum. Whether such fighting methods win wars, hearts, minds etc is another matter. As AE always says: you win some, you lose some.
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Shingler



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At the end of the day, it's not all that important to win wars in a traditional sense anymore. It's enough to accomplish objectives and sometimes, they're not that absolute as winning the war.
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Mick Harper
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Coo-ee, Shingler, welcome aboard.

At the end of the day, it's not all that important to win wars in a traditional sense anymore.

You mean, with a peace treaty of some sort? Are you advocating a sort of petering out?

It's enough to accomplish objectives and sometimes, they're not that absolute as winning the war.

Don't you have to win the war to accomplish any kind of objective? Otherwise somebody else's objective gets foisted on you. You might be onto something but it isn't clear yet what it is.
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Mick Harper
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Know Your Socialist History (no 155)

John Harris reviewing Roger McNamee's Zucked: Waking Up To The Facebook Catastrophe for the Guardian

Roger McNamee is a little longer in the tooth. Aged 62, he is old enough to know that the US beat the depression and won the second world war when “we subordinated the individual to the collective good, and it worked really well”. He knows that the anti-state, libertarian mores that define what we now know as Big Tech were born in the 1980s, and that by the early 21st century, “hardly anyone in Silicon Valley knew there had once been a different way of doing things”. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/07/zucked-waking-up-to-facebook-catastrophe
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Wile E. Coyote


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The problem with the EU is exactly the opposite of what everybody says, ie it is not bureaucratic enough/nobody follows the rules/loads of opt outs,/ special cases etc .

Macron is basically right the EU, needs to do more rule enforcing. They should start by chucking out all the countries not in the Eurozone like the Brits, and crack on Chinese style.

None of these far right parties will have the guts to leave the Euro Zone, they will settle for a huge wall round Europe.
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Mick Harper
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Excellent, Wiley! The namby-pambies are always wrecking things because of their panty-waist worrying about popular opinion. The Euro nearly came off the rails (it still might) because they wouldn't kick the overspenders in the cruds hard enough. That being everyone at different times because the local namby-pambies were worrying about their own local popular opinion. If the EU had said "No, no, no" to Mrs Thatcher, we'd have taken our licks and settled down as good Europeans (or fucked off) years ago.

But is this a bell-the-cat problem? Do you need to be China (or Prussia with the Zollverein) to be uber alles enough? Blimey, we're going to have to vote in our beloved fuhrer Nigel just to get out of the ruddy thing (as he would put it).
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Mick Harper
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It's not often I take agin' particular politicians, they seem to me to be doing a difficult job well enough, but occasionally I feel moved to speak out. I really don't approve of Jeremy Corbyn for instance. Not him personally but the people and (you'll see) the policies coming along behind him. With Boris Johnson, it's not his policies nor his confrères (standard old Old School Tory) but the man himself. Do we really want an intelligent Trump?

But maybe that's what it takes.
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Wile E. Coyote


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And the winner of the award for the most popular trope of 2019, goes to......dramatic pause.


Super smart folks.... always banging on about the dangers of populist tropes.

Well that was a turn up.
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Mick Harper
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What ever happened to turn-ups?
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Mick Harper
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No, I'm not in favour of impeachment proceedings either but I am in favour of enquiries that may lead to impeachment proceedings.

The vice-chair of the House Judiciary Committee dissents ever so genteelly from Nancy Pelosi's recognition that it's time to move on.
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Wile E. Coyote


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Wiley's favourite UN rapporteur (sic) is at it again.

"It might seem to some observers that the Department of Work and Pensions has been tasked with designing a digital and sanitized version of the nineteenth century workhouse, made infamous by Charles Dickens, rather than seeking to respond creatively and compassionately to the real needs of those facing widespread economic insecurity in an age of deep and rapid transformation brought about by automation, zero-hour contracts and rapidly growing inequality."


The basic message, delivered in the language of managerial efficiency and automation, is that almost any alternative will be more tolerable than seeking to obtain government benefits. This is a very far cry from any notion of a social contract, Beveridge model or otherwise, let alone of social human rights. As Thomas Hobbes observed long ago, such an approach condemns the least well off to lives that are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. As the British social contract slowly evaporates, Hobbes’ prediction risks becoming the new reality.


Come on Phil dont hold back. Tell us what you really think.

https://bit.ly/2QeeFas
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