Monday, October 21, 2013

Dư âm sau tang lễ Đại tướng Võ Nguyên Giáp

Đại tướng Võ Nguyên Giáp, 1994
Ảnh: Catherine Karnow,
vnexpress.net, 7/10/13
"Lòng dân
Không cần công văn
Không cần chỉ thị
Dòng người lặng lẽ đi
Về phía ngôi nhà Đại tướng
Thắp cho ông một nén hương trầm
Không cần tượng đài bằng đá
Không cần tượng đài bằng đồng
Lòng dân đã đúc tượng ông rồi!"

(VŨ ĐẢM)

(Trích vnmedia.vn 22/10/13, bài: "Nghẹn ngào trước 'tượng đài" Đại tướng bằng thơ")

Đọc Nick Turse, The New York Times, 9/10/13: "For America, Life Was Cheap in Vietnam"

"OBITUARIES of Vo Nguyen Giap, the Vietnamese general who helped drive the American military from his country, noted, as The New York Times put it, that “his critics said that his victories had been rooted in a profligate disregard for the lives of his soldiers.”"

"The implication is that the United States lost the war in Vietnam because General Giap thought nothing of sending unconscionable numbers of Vietnamese to their deaths.

Yet America’s defeat was probably ordained, just as much, by the Vietnamese casualties we caused, not just in military cross-fire, but as a direct result of our policy and tactics. While nearly 60,000 American troops died, some two million Vietnamese civilians were killed, and millions more were wounded and displaced, during America’s involvement in Vietnam, researchers and government sources have estimated."

.... "Westmoreland was largely successful in keeping much of the evidence of atrocities from the American public while serving as Army Chief of Staff. A task force, known as the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group, operating out of his Pentagon office, secretly assembled many thousands of pages of investigative files about American atrocities, which I discovered in the National Archives.

Despite revelations about the massacre at My Lai, the United States government was able to suppress the true scale of noncombatant casualties and to imply that those deaths that did occur were inadvertent and unavoidable. This left the American public with a counterfeit history of the conflict.

Without a true account of our past military misdeeds, Americans have been unprepared to fully understand what has happened in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, where attacks on suspected terrorists have killed unknown numbers of innocent people. As in Vietnam, officials have effectively prevented the public from assessing this civilian toll.

We need to abandon our double standards when it comes to human life. It is worth noting the atrocious toll born of an enemy general’s decisions. But, at the very least, equal time ought to be given to the tremendous toll borne by civilians as a result of America’s wars, past and present.