In an ordinary Iraqi town, villagers are holding a lively wedding.
At this time, a group of US troops suddenly broke in, and for the purpose of counter-terrorism, they carried out indiscriminate massacres of innocent people and also took off the organs of civilians and sold them.
This is the plot of the film "Iraq Wolf Valley", but it is also a real history of the Iraq War.
Many people wonder, aren't the U.S. troops in the movies very human rights-oriented? Killing civilians was only done by the Germans and Japanese troops, so how could the thick-eyed Americans do such a thing?
That's because "Valley of the Wolves of Iraq" wasn't made in the United States, it was a Turkish film.
This kind of evil deed is not that the US military has not done it, but that the US military has relied on overwhelming public opinion and movies to cover up the real history.
In fact, many people have forgotten that the people who kill the most people and kill people are this group of "human rights first" US troops.
01.
To say that the history of the massacre of civilians by the US military actually began from the beginning of the birth of this army.
During the American Revolutionary War, militias were organized in the states to fight against the British colonists, but they could not defeat the British, but they often attacked civilians, and killings were all over the United States.
Many events are not known because of a lack of records, but the Garner and other Sudo massacres are a few that have been documented.
On March 8, 1782, 170 militiamen from Pennsylvania surrounded a village full of Christian Indians who had embraced Christianity and abandoned Indian traditions.
However, the Pennsylvania militia decided to execute every Indian in the village.
The American militia smashed them to death one by one with giant hammers and peeled off their scalps at the end. Ninety-seven Indians were killed and scalped, and entire villages were burned to the ground.
In the end, there were only two survivors of the massacre, one survivor hiding in the woods to escape the disaster, while the other was simply knocked unconscious, woke up after being scalped and fled with serious injuries.
When an army is built with massacres, how can it be expected that they are really an army that respects human rights?
Sure enough, 100 years later, this army once again committed evil against humanity.
In 1896, the Great Philippines revolt against Spanish colonial rule broke out. But it was soon suppressed by the Spanish army, and the rebels fled or surrendered.
At the same time, however, the United States set its sights on this far eastern land, and on April 25, 1898, the United States declared war on Spain on the pretext of helping Cuba free itself from Spanish tyranny, and the Spanish-American War broke out.
The Philippine rebels on the other side of the world are still very happy, and they really think that the U.S. military is going to help them, but they don't want to think that the colonialists' aggression is essentially the same, Spain is cruel, how much better can the U.S. army be better than them?
Sure enough, after the U.S. military occupied the Philippines, it did not give the Philippines independent status, but became a new colonizer. The Filipino insurgents, deeply deceived, became enraged and began to rebel against U.S. rule, but the U.S. appointed Brigadier General Arthur MacArthur, commander of the 2nd Division of the Eighth Army, as commander of the U.S. army, with full responsibility for the suppression of the Filipino guerrillas.
Doesn't the name sound familiar? That's right, this Arthur MacArthur is the father of the famous Douglas MacArthur.
Arthur MacArthur strictly enforced the Three Lights Policy in the Philippines, burning all the villages occupied by the Filipino guerrillas, shooting men with gunpowder on their bodies immediately, mercilessly carrying out the policy of slaughter against prisoners of war, and using torture such as "spa" and "rope punishment".
Especially in the Battle of Shama, the U.S. military paid heavy losses. After the battle, U.S. Army Commander Jacob W. Bush H. Smith became enraged and ordered the soldiers to launch a massacre of civilians. He said, "I don't need prisoners of war, I want you to set fires and kill people; the more you burn, the more you kill, the more you will please me!" He ordered that anyone over ten years old or capable of carrying a gun should be killed.
The U.S. military has also set up concentration camps in the Philippines, brutally abusing prisoners of war and civilians, raping women, and robbing property throughout the Philippines.
By the end of the war in 1902, the population of the Philippines had fallen from 9 million before the war to 7.63 million!
That is, a full seventh of the population of the Philippines is gone!
The U.S. military's own legal investigation committee later admitted that the U.S. military had committed heinous crimes against humanity in the Philippines.
When the Philippine rebels were looking forward to the stars and the moon, and the American army to save them, would they think that it was the jackals who were waiting for them?
02.
The same behavior occurred during the Korean War, and many volunteer memoirs and war histories record the wanton bombing and massacre of Korean civilians by the U.S. military.
For example, the U.S. military often uses napalm bombs to directly attack villages, countless North Koreans are burned alive, and historians estimate that nearly 300,000 civilians throughout the Korean Peninsula died directly from U.S. bombing.
Even more brutal is the face-to-face slaughter.
When the KPA was defeated and retreated, southwards were also retreating southwards with South Korean refugees fleeing the fighting, but the U.S. military, fearing that the Korean People's Army was infiltrating among the refugees, issued an order:
"If refugees show up north of U.S. positions, they will be warned by firing fire, and if they continue their advance, they will be shot dead."
On the evening of August 3, 1950, after the U.S. Eighth Cavalry Regiment withdrew to the south of the Nakdong River Bridge, thousands of South Korean refugees were frantically flocking to the Nakdong River Bridge, trying to escape across the Nakdong River Bridge.
The commander of the US 1st Cavalry Division brazenly ordered the bridge to be blown up, and all the refugees on the bridge were buried at the bottom of the river with the bridge. Other refugees tried to swim across the Luodong River, but were shot and killed by the U.S. military.
The same tragedy had previously taken place in the village of Laogenli in Yongtong County, Chungcheongbuk-do, South Korea, when a group of refugees from South Korea took refuge under a railway bridge in July 1950.
The passing US troops saw the situation and feared that there would be spies of the Korean People's Army, so they opened fire on the refugees with machine guns, and more than 300 people died tragically, and the rest of the refugees scattered and fled, and were chased by US aircraft, and more than 100 people died in strafing and bombing.
After the Lao Gen-ri massacre was revealed, the South Korean people were indignant and strongly demanded that the truth be found out and that the victims be treated with justice. But the U.S. military claimed that no American was involved in the incident, and there were no U.S. troops stationed in the village of Lao Genli.
But some U.S. veterans came forward to testify that the massacre was indeed carried out: "There was a lieutenant colonel who shouted like a madman, 'Whoever is there!'" fire! Fire at all of them! There were children on the scene, but no matter how many, all the people between the ages of 8 and 80 were shot. Men, women, children, the elderly are not spared. ”
Under strong pressure from South Korea and the United States, the United States agreed to investigate the case. The final findings acknowledged the massacre by the U.S. military, while Clinton only expressed "regret" about the incident and made a hasty remark.
Of course, the worst was the massacre in the Shincheon area.
After landing at Inchon, the U.S. army quickly advanced northward and captured the Shincheon area.
From the next day, the U.S. military began a massacre of the local North Korean population.
In October, the U.S. military drove more than 900 North Korean civilians into a pit, poured gasoline on fire, and buried the unburned dead alive.
In November, more than 900 civilians were killed by U.S.-South Korea forces by similar incineration and burial.
In December, the U.S. military captured many villagers and stuffed them into the warehouse, then poured gasoline on fire to set the entire warehouse on fire, and the people in the warehouse either smoked to death or became a ball of fire.
According to the research of The Korean writer and shinkawa native "Hwang Hyun-hyun", the U.S. military slaughtered 35,383 people in the Shincheon area alone.
In the days that followed, a large number of villagers' skeletons were found near these villages, further proving the existence of the massacre.
In addition, the US military also had warships shelling Pohang, fighters strafing the refugee team and other incidents, killing countless civilians. According to the statistics of Korean scholars, the various massacres that occurred only in today's South Korea caused a total of one-twentieth of the death of the Korean population at that time.
Even so, South Koreans are still thanking the U.S. military for their "grace of reconstruction."
03.
During the Vietnam War, the U.S. military took this massacre to the extreme.
The enemy that the U.S. military faced on the battlefield in Vietnam was not a regular army like the Germans and Japanese troops, but a guerrilla army.
The mysterious North Vietnamese guerrillas caused huge casualties to the US military, and also made it difficult for the US military to distinguish the enemy, and the US military could only judge the war through the "annihilation number", so the atrocities of the US army in the Vietnamese battlefield appeared in an endless stream, and a large number of "killing the enemy and risking merit" behavior appeared.
For example, a 1965 U.S. Navy shelling of a fishing village off the coast of Vietnam killed more than 600 civilians. U.S. Defense Secretary McNamara said in a memo to President Johnson that U.S. troops kill or seriously injure about 1,000 civilians in Vietnam every week.
In July 1967, a group of 45 U.S. troops code-named Tiger Troops parachuted into a small mountain village in Vietnam. At the beginning of the landing, these American soldiers began to massacre. Men, women and children, whenever they see people, they shoot.
One veteran recalled: "Whether they ran or not, bullets would fly at them. ”
In addition to the gun killers of unarmed villagers, some soldiers also took out sabers and cut off the ears and scalps of the Vietnamese as their own booty.
It is said that an American soldier cut off the scalp of a Vietnamese female nurse intact in order to make a holster for his gun; other American soldiers cut off the ears of the slain Vietnamese and then tied them into a necklace and hung them on their bodies.
According to the investigation, the soldiers of this platoon had not previously received any orders from their commanders, and the massacre of local villagers was spontaneous.
A soldier of the "Tiger Force" said in an interview with the Blade newspaper: "We count the days and do not expect to live. In order to survive, we do whatever we want. The only way to survive is to kill, because you don't have to worry about what the dead will do to you. ”
Two of the veterans at the time put it this way: "In the massacre, some American soldiers have obviously killed red-eyed, and some have even taken the killing as a pleasure." ”
There were also American soldiers who could not look down, and they even raised their guns to ask their comrades to stop killing. Eventually, however, the commander of the Tiger Force demanded that the soldiers who stopped the killing shut up and not say these things to anyone.
In just a few days, at least 100 people died in the slaughter.
Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg of the US military massacre, and there are many similar massacres, the most famous of which is the MyLaiMassacre massacre.
On March 16, 1968, Company C of special operations battalion 11th Infantry Brigade of the 23rd Division of the United States Army carried out an operation to clear the 48th Battalion of the Vietnamese guerrillas in the village of My Lai 4 in San Tinh District, Quang Ngut Province, Vietnam, and Lieutenant Medina, commander of the C Company, issued an order to eliminate all personnel and completely destroy the area.
The massacre began, in a temple where a dozen women and children were all killed by rifle bullets fired from behind, and then the scope of the massacre continued to expand, and each time the Americans killed a single person, they became more brutal. BBC News described the massacre as follows: "Piles of people were gathered in canals or elsewhere and then killed by U.S. military automatic weapons. ”
In the middle of the village, a crowd of about 70-80 people was surrounded, and then Lieutenant Kelly ordered them all to be killed. Kelly also snatched machine guns from subordinates who refused to obey orders to kill civilians and slaughtered two other groups.
The second platoon killed at least 60 to 70 Vietnamese civilians in the course of sweeping toward the northern half of My Lai village and the village of Binh Tay (a small village about 400 metres north of My Lai village).
After the 1st and 2nd rows of "cleaning" once, the 3rd row is responsible for handling any "living forces". So the 3 platoons immediately began slaughtering all the living people and animals they could find. Including those who had been hidden before and reappeared, and those who lay in the pile of dead people and groaned.
In the end, the U.S. military massacred 504 civilians, both men, women and children were shot in My Lai village, and women were gang-raped and their bodies dismembered.
The next day, the headline of the Star-Spangled Banner, the official newspaper of the US War Department, said: "The US military surrounded the red elements and killed 128 people." ”
After the incident was revealed, only a lieutenant named Kelly was sentenced, but he was released on parole after 3 years in prison, and then leisurely began to help his wife start the diamond business.
After the war, it was found that this kind of massacre was so common in the U.S. military that some soldiers said, "All battalion-level U.S. units have their own My Lai village."
04.
After 2000, the US military began to massacre civilians in the "war on terror" in the name of "counter-terrorism".
On December 18, the New York Times published an article saying that thousands of classified documents show that since 2014, the US military has launched random air strikes in the Middle East based on inaccurate information, directly causing a large number of innocent civilian casualties on the ground, and the real death toll is much higher than the Pentagon's public claims.
Studies have shown that in the past 20 years, the United States has launched at least 91,000 air strikes in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Libya and other places, and the number of innocent civilians killed is at least 22,000, the highest or as many as 48,000.
In 2003, the U.S. military launched the Iraq War, which was also the year when U.S. airstrikes caused the heaviest civilian casualties, and at least 5,500 civilians lost their lives. Throughout the Iraq war, between 200,000 and 250,000 civilians died.
In July 2007, a video caused an uproar in which two U.S. military pilots in Iraq piloted an Apache helicopter and killed 12 Iraqi civilians, including a 22-year-old Reuters photographer and his driver, and after the shooting, the two U.S. pilots mocked the scene.
During the Trump administration, the U.S. military dramatically increased airstrikes, while canceling directives prohibiting attacks on homes and relaxing target selection rules, the number of civilian casualties caused by airstrikes increased significantly.
For example, on March 18, 2019, U.S. F-15E fighters attacked the town of Baguz in Syria's Deir Ezzor province, killing 64 civilians, including women and children.
In the final phase of the Afghan retreat at the end of August, U.S. forces also launched airstrikes in Afghanistan, and although a Pentagon spokesman said the airstrikes had successfully killed key members of the Afghan terrorist group Khorasan, the real result was the killing of 10 innocent civilians, the youngest of whom was only two years old.
For war, there are international rules of engagement, but the Americans always say that those civilians are guerrillas and cannot be effectively distinguished, and they are not willing to distinguish carefully. According to people familiar with the matter, when the US military is fighting in the Middle East, as long as it encounters a roadside bomb attack, it will arrest all boys over the age of 16 in nearby villages.
Even more astonishing is the fact that "none of the thousands of confidential documents mention accountability or disciplinary action."
05.
Why do the U.S. military always slaughter civilians?
The core of the reason for this is that the United States constantly pursues military hegemonism, and as long as it believes that wherever it threatens its hegemonic self-interest and where there are strategic interests to be achieved, the United States will swing the iron fist of war wherever it wants.
In the view of the US military, all factors that hinder the United States from influencing the local area, all factors that potentially hinder the United States from influencing the local area, and all factors that are suspected of hindering the United States from influencing the local area must be absolutely eliminated.
And physical annihilation is naturally the most "convenient" means.
In this way, the US military wantonly slaughtered civilians, but did not worry about punishment, because the US military often chose to hide the real situation, and almost no one was held accountable. Even the U.S. military believes in internal archives that the main cause of civilian deaths is "cognitive bias", "cultural differences", and because the US military cannot guarantee the "accuracy" of weapons.
Impunity for soldiers who have committed mistakes, concealment from the international community, and lack of remorse for the victims are tacitly acknowledging that the evil deeds done by one's own army are the right acts.
Perhaps, we can find the answer from the American and American culture that the US military likes to massacre civilians.
All the international relations colleges of all universities in the United States have a course called Use the force, which roughly means how to use force to achieve their own goals, how to use force to bring others to their knees, and how to deter through force and killing.
How can Americans who learn in school about killing to achieve their goals truly respect human rights?