[NotSammyHagar]

I think you didn't mean it, from your later comments, but you came across as saying we shouldn't only talk about My Lai because the other side did bad things too. Yes, they did bad things, but it doesn't excuse us. We claim we are better. Just like in the Iraq War 2 and our prisons where we treated people horribly, it doesn't excuse it just because someone else also did bad things. I think that's a core principal.

It doesn't lessen the horror of atrocities if the other side did it.

[candiodari]

> We claim we are better.

That's exactly the point made. The US IS better. Better than the Nazis, better than North Vietnam/Vietnam, better than China (and frankly better than all European states during and immediately after WWI/II at least). Better than North Korea. Better than South Africa.

With better I mean "how people are treated", in the human rights, in general, and only as part of government policy.

And yes, I agree. The US has it's downsides. The US has made mistakes. The difference between a mistake and a government policy is the number of times and the scale at which it happens, and the intent. The US has made mistakes, some of which lead to the death of hundreds, even thousands of people. Some of those mistakes involved the military. It was NOT the intent of any significant fraction of the US to make these events happen.

China, Vietnam, and Germany had a widely supported-by-the-people government policy of massacre. Every organisation in those countries is focused and involved in oppressing and massacring people for some reason. Vietnam's CURRENT government made children watch their own parents getting raped, slowly, and killed, then used them as insane soldier-killers sending them into defenseless villages where they brutally murdered everyone they could. This is NOT a one-off. They did this to children for decades.

The difference is indescribable and it is absurd to even compare the two. They are not on the same moral level, they just aren't. We are better than that, it's just that simple.

That's objectively so, and for some reason a lot of people feel the need to destroy historical views like this.

It may not lessen atrocities on the other side, but we should acknowledge the difference between mistakes and popular government-supported genocide.

Equating them does nothing, other than provide cover for these massacres. Hell, the amount of people talking up Chinese policy seems to be mounting every day. And, of course, the situation of people in China gets worse everytime some high up in the Chinese government thinks censorship is good enough that they can get away with something more.

It pains me to point out the obvious: "anti-racism" has become the leading excuse for racism, inequality and state-based massacres.

[simonh]

Ive looked carefully through he comments here and nobody is making any false equivalency In the terms you describe, or denying what you say about the US overall.

I don’t see why an article or subsequent discussion about a horrible crime committed by US soldiers, subject to an attempted coverup by the US army and limply prosecuted afterwards needs to also say how nice the US is otherwise. It doesn’t matter how nice it is otherwise. It’s got nothing to do with the issue at hand, any more than if it had happened in any other country.

[candiodari]

Really ? I get that message very strongly just looking at the very post above me (and the other comments by the same user in the same thread).

[NotSammyHagar]

I'm not saying there is an equivalence between the nazis and modern day us. I am just pointing out that when we do horrible things, we have to not deny it, not say it's not a big deal because someone else did something worse. We aren't equivalent, but we do make mistakes.