ericbarbour wrote:
....Everything in their little sick minds eventually devolves into manchild hacker clubs fighting over "turf" like a bad street-gang exploitation movie. This is how men fight wars: it's FUN for them, not an ugly slaughterhouse. 20 million civilians died in agony? Oops, sorry, at least we had FUN.
If heeling Wikipedia and abusing editors wasn't FUN there would be no administrators. And probably very few content writers--lots of them were attracted by the opportunity to bias content in the first place.....and once you join the gang and get your stupid little bowling trophy, you can shit on the people who make Wikipedia work in the first place. This will eventually kill it.
There are some men who were "thoughtful" in the FUN they had fighting wars, people like
Edward Lansdale, who was instrumental in pushing the CIA/US Army Special Forces towards the "rough beast" of the
Phoenix Program, that CIA/USAID/South Vietnamese National Police/ARVN Intelligence "project" which created a secret Gestapo hunting the NLF ("Viet Cong") cadre leaders, a "secret team" which tortured or killed anybody that got in the way. Lansdale had nothing to to with guys like John Muldoon, the Province Interrogation Center builder who put each of these well-armed* torture buildings in every province of South Vietnam, or the ICEX (first name for Phoenix) founder Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, the head of the RVN National Police who is best known for shooting an NLF member in the head with a revolver in the streets of Hue during the Tet Offensive in 1968; he did that while the film cameras and the high-speed SLR cameras of the American press and TV networks were on him - to send a message. Lansdale had slight dealings with "Blowtorch Bob" Komer, the head of CORDS (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support), the oversight organization for Phoenix; the "Revolutionary Development" was really a counter-revolutionary brainfuck to get the South Vietnamese to work with the US Army and the corrupt RVN government happily like antebellum Black slaves in a pre-1970s Disney cartoon - of course it never worked. Lansdale was the grandfather of the echo-y "ghost tapes" that would play over US Army helicopter speakers, with voices pleading for NLF or North Vietnamese soldiers to give up and surrender, or the Armed Propaganda Teams who did skits in villages asking for support and threatening villagers with bloody violence if they didn't. Lansdale had used the rural Filipino fear of vampires against the Hukbalahap Communist revolutionaries in the early 1950s; he would snatch the last man of a Huk patrol at night, have his Filipino Army goons kill the guy without bullets, then drain all of the blood out of holes in the corpse's neck (hanging him upside-down), and then leave the body on the trail right-side-up for his comrades to find. Before that he was using clandestine ("state pirate") radio in Italy to swing a crucial postwar election in the late 1940s because the Italian Communist Party had a shot at control.
Not everybody is Colonel Killgore, Animal Mother, that insane Marine heli doorgunner, Rafterman, all the Boys in Company C, or even The Warriors (Coney Island) - some people are Captain Willard, Private Joker, or "Masai", the ice-cold mirrored-sunglasses-wearing leader of that all-Black karate gang that puts out a bounty on The Warriors; the quiet, silently tough people who turn out to be the most dangerous.
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*The NLF lowest-end cadres would attack the PICs randomly at night; in Douglas Valentine's book
The Phoenix Project there is never a mention of one being taken down, or prisoners sprung. There was a national torture center (NIC) down at the docks in Saigon, and people they wanted truly kept were sent to tiny cages in a prison fortress on Con Son Island ("Pulo Condore" to the Imperial British of the 18th century) off the SV coast. It was a total hellhole, and the day after the war ended, the NVAF flew soldiers and medics to the place to release the prisoners, many of whom could no longer walk normally. Richard Holbrooke of Kosovo (and the near-destruction of Serbia as a political unit) and John Negroponte (Honduras under Reagan, where he played dumb about death squads; the "Global War on Terror" under Bush der Zweiter in the 2000s) both started out in government as Phoenix Program advisors.
Still "Globally Banned" on Wikipedia for the high crime of journalism.