Was it immoral to drop burning gasoline jelly (i.e. napalm) on Vietnamese villages full of innocent civilians?

Question

Or do Republicans still think this type of terrorism is perfectly acceptable?

Answer 1

Another interesting fact - the USA dropped more Bombs on tiny Vietnam then all nations in WW2 dropped together on each other. Some bomb craters had five layers.
Lesson to learned : No military will succeed, if the native population doesn't give up on their own accord.

Answer 2

First, to put an answer in perspective. The American involvement in Vietnam was started by Eisenhower (GOP), followed by Kennedy (THE Democrat) and Johnson (Dem. TX) who started the bombings, and ended by Nixon and Ford (both GOP). Thus, more bombs were dropped during Democrat governments than Republicans. Second. If the enemy is elusive, part of the civilian population, living in civilian lodgings or hiding there, how can you separate innocents from combatants??. Tell them to get away and expect the VC to stay and take the bombs??, Come on!!

Answer 3

Pacifism aside, the question of morality during war is closely connected to the idea of a "just war", rooted in the concept of self-defense. "Just" warriors are permitted to kill innocent civilians only as "collateral damage", the assumption being that as much care as possible was taken to avoid the destruction.

In practice, it is difficult to blame the warrior who is "following orders", although soldiers are court-martialed in extreme cases. Higher-ups are responsible, but usually have a good excuse. They always have good intentions.

The real question is that of justice: "who started it?". In the case of Vietnam, the answer is clear: Harry Truman and Charles de Gaulle, believe it or not!

At the end of WW II in 1945, France had no army, no navy, no ships, and no planes. One year later, France had assembled all that stuff and sailed half way around the world to invade Vietnam and chase Ho Chi Minh and his government into the jungle. If you ask where the French got all that stuff, nobody will tell you, except me: Truman gave a lot of surplus material to de Gaulle to carry out the invasion in violation of U.N. rules. (When the French were defeated in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu, I listened to prisoners being interviewed on TV. They were speaking German! A lot of SS war criminals had joined the Foreign Legion.)

Eisenhower's memoir ("Mandate for Change", 1958) stated the CIA told him that over 80% of the Vietnamese people supported Ho Chi Minh over a French puppet. But that super landslide wasn't enough. When the French reneged on a scheduled U.N.-supervised election and walked out, Eisenhower backed the puppet with an implied threat of nuclear bombs. The puppet then became an "outpost of democracy", set up with the help of real Nazis.

Over 3 million Vietnamese were killed and over 57,000 Americans died trying to force a 90% Bhuddist population to pay taxes to an elitist Catholic puppet government set up by foreign invaders.

If you accept the priciple of a just war, every dead or wounded Vietnamese, soldier or civilian, was an innocent victim, no matter how it happened. And every American, whether soldier, tax-paying citizen, or productive worker, became criminally involved in harming innocent people.

That's what you get when intelligent but poorly educated politicians are elected by an unintelligent, uneducated, and ignorant public. It is unfortunate that there are so few liberals, but since 50% of all adults have below-average intelligence, that can't be helped. But that is why our First Amendment establishes freedom of the press - to educate the public. But when the press is owned by conservatives, that doesn't help at all. The above description of events has never been printed in the "liberal" press.

Putting the shoe on the other foot is always a revelation. Can you imagine the reaction of conservatives if France invaded South Carolina and set up a puppet government?

Somehow, John McCain is a hero because he got caught dropping napalm on children and was sent to jail!. He complaind about torture, but he doesn't know anything about torture. If he dropped napalm on my children and I got my hands on him, he would really find out a lot about torture!

Answer 4

On a side note, Kilgore Trout was the first science fiction author to have predicted the use of jellied gasoline on human beings years before it occured.

Answer 5

Of course it was, but since when did morality ever stop a empire bent on domination? By the way, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans voiced any principled opposition to US aggression in Vietnam. All they argued about was means, not ends.

Answer 6

Of course it was. But how often do you hear anyone talk of these kinds of actions in the mainstream media?

BTW, right now in Iraq and Afghanistan, just about every kind of ammunition used by the U.S. contains some degree of radioactive uranium, making the whole operation an environmental and health disaster which will have consequences for generations to come.

Answer 7

This question should really be in the history section... you are just using a very general historical event to get your digs in the Republican party. I doubt that you care anything for the "innocent civilians" you mention in your question... you are using them to bait Republicans.

Thanks for caring so much.

Answer 8

Was it immoral to drop bombs on civilians in German cities during World War II, when the king of liberalism (President Roosevelt, a democrat) ran the U.S.? Was it immoral for Roosevelt to place in detention camps citizens of the U.S. simply because they were of Japanese decent?

Oh, and by the way, I think most of the bombing of Vietnam was done during the Johnson administration-----a democratic administration.

Answer 9

In a war, killing is not so surgical. The enemy had decided to use the civilian populace as cover. If you drop a bomb on the villiage you get the enemy and the sympathizers. You kill innocents but when the goal is to kill the enemy that's not the worry.

Answer 10

A war-crime