John McCain: I hated gooks and I will hate them for as long as I live...quote me.

euph said:
My Dad is a Vietnam vet. 101st Airborn

He still has regular nightmares from the PTSD



He actually had very positive experiences with the Vietnamese people, specifically the Cham mountain people. He visits regularly, spends 4-6 months of every year there actually.
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This is actually very cool.
 
euph said:
My Dad is a Vietnam vet. 101st Airborn

He still has regular nightmares from the PTSD



He actually had very positive experiences with the Vietnamese people, specifically the Cham mountain people. He visits regularly, spends 4-6 months of every year there actually.
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do you think he has sex with prostitutes there
 
If I do go to Vietnam it would be with my gf so prostitutes are probably out of the question.


This has been Jodo's "I have a gf" drop of the day.
 
SkittleBrew said:
Yes, I disagree. A pilot doesn't have to hate someone to drop a bomb on them any more then a butcher has to hate a cow before putting it down on the kill room floor.
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:lol: you're such a Gonzo.

Spoiler
 
prowler said:
rilke one can make the argument that a soldier is just doing his job
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So is a hitman doing a hit job. They may not emotionally hate the object of their "work" but they implicitly hate them.

The form of hatred shown in McCain's gook remarks, on the other hand, is explicit, born obviously of the poor mental health he has as a result of "living in a box" as Fred Thompson might narrate.
 
Rilke said:
They may not emotionally hate the object of their "work" but they implicitly hate them.
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I'm guessing you've seen too many cartoons where the good guys can never bring themselves to kill off the evil villian, even though it would solve all the problems. And you therefore assume that in order to kill someone, you really need to summon forth all your furious hate & anger (or otherwise be a really evil person). Grunts on the ground or pilots in the air don't have to hate in order to kill. They might have to if they were given a choice between killing and not killing, but they rarely ever are.
 
CarpeIppon said:
I'm guessing you've seen too many cartoons where the good guys can never bring themselves to kill off the evil villian, even though it would solve all the problems. And you therefore assume that in order to kill someone, you really need to summon forth all your furious hate & anger (or otherwise be a really evil person). Grunts on the ground or pilots in the air don't have to hate in order to kill. They might have to if they were given a choice between killing and not killing, but they rarely ever are.
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few things:

-hate, or for that matter love, does not have to be a "furious" emotion. I am using the term "implicit" to mean an inward, invisible, non-emotional form of hate, and "explicit" to mean a visible, angry, form of hate. I cannot understand how it is not hate to bomb someone, but it can be hate when you are merely voicing your negative opinion of them.

-Your cartoon hero, who does not kill the villain "even though it would solve all the problems," as I'm sure you know, does not resemble a character from the Vietnam narrative. By killing the Vietnamese the United States did not "solve all of the problems." Vietnam, like Iraq in our time, was a source of problems not solutions.

-not sure if I understand properly what you're saying about choice, but... soldiers at some point come to a crossroads where they forfeit choice, but not responsibility. For they are responsible for having forfeited their choice.
 
Rilke, you are an idiot. My father killed a lot of Vietnamese, but he didn't hate them at all. He was a soldier, he did what he was told, and he did what he did to survive. He thinks about them to this day, and regrets killing those people. So shut the fuck up when you know nothing of what you speak of.
 
havax said:
Rilke, you are an idiot. My father killed a lot of Vietnamese, but he didn't hate them at all. He was a soldier, he did what he was told, and he did what he did to survive. He thinks about them to this day, and regrets killing those people. So shut the fuck up when you know nothing of what you speak of.
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Needle nose pliers do a good job at removing those hooks.

Put a ice cube on it first to numb it.
 
havax said:
Rilke, you are an idiot. My father killed a lot of Vietnamese, but he didn't hate them at all. He was a soldier, he did what he was told, and he did what he did to survive. He thinks about them to this day, and regrets killing those people. So shut the fuck up when you know nothing of what you speak of.
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Why are you calling me an idiot for knowing in advance what your father, with "regrets," knows in hindsight?
 
Rilke said:
-hate, or for that matter love, does not have to be a "furious" emotion. I am using the term "implicit" to mean an inward, invisible, non-emotional form of hate, and "explicit" to mean a visible, angry, form of hate. I cannot understand how it is not hate to bomb someone, but it can be hate when you are merely voicing your negative opinion of them.
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Killing someone in war isn't much different than driving your car to work. Its simply something a soldier has to do. There isn't any necessary emotional involvement, so you are just inventing shit.
 
CarpeIppon said:
Killing someone in war isn't much different than driving your car to work. Its simply something a soldier has to do. There isn't any necessary emotional involvement, so you are just inventing shit.
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I have made the very distinction between implicit and explicit hate that accounts for your scenario wherein "there isn't any necessary emotional involvement" when "killing someone in war." Just because you do not have an emotional response to killing does not mean you do not hate the one you destroy. You cannot argue that you love the one you destroy. And if you are ambivalent towards him only, why kill him? Obviously you have contempt for the ones you kill, regardless of how remote you may or may not be to the emotion of doing so.

Hobsbawm provides another framework:

Another reason, however, was the new impersonality of warfare, which turned killing and maiming into the remote consequence of pushing a button or moving a lever. Technology made its victims invisible, as people eviscerated by bayonets, or seen through the sights of firearms could not be. Opposite the permanently fixed guns of the western front were not men but statistics – not even real, but hypothetical statistics, as the ‘body-counts’ of enemy casualties during the US Vietnam War showed. Far below the aerial bombers were not people about to be burned and eviscerated, but targets. Mild young men, who would certainly not have wished to plunge a bayonet in the belly of any pregnant village girl, could far more easily drop high explosive on London or Berlin, or nuclear bombs on Nagasaki. Hard-working German bureaucrats who would certainly have found it repugnant to drive starving Jews into abattoirs themselves, could work out the railway timetables for a regular supply of death-trains to Polish extermination camps with less sense of personal involvement. The greatest cruelties of our century have been the impersonal cruelties of remote decision, of system and routine, especially when they could be justified as regrettable operational necessities.
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