Now your dreams will never again be so peaceful. You will see capital in your nights, like a nightmare, that presses you and threatens to crush you. With terrified eyes you will see it get fatter, like a monster with one hundred proboscises that feverishly search the pores of your body to suck your blood. And finally you will learn to assume its boundless and gigantic proportions, its appearance dark and terrible, with eyes and mouth of fire, morphing its suckers into enormous hopeful trumpets, within which you’ll see thousands of human beings disappear: men, women, children. Down your face will trickle the sweat of death, because your time, and that of your wife and your children will soon arrive. And your final moan will be drowned out by the happy sneering of the monster, glad with your state, so much richer, so much more inhumane.

—Carlo Cafiero, Summary of Marx’s Capital (1879)

The flamethrowers came in and we burnt the hamlet. Burnt up everything. They had a lot of rice. We opened the bags, just throw it all over the street. Look for tunnels. Killing animals. Killing all the livestock. Guys would carry chemicals that they would put in the well. Poison the water so they couldn’t use it… They killed some more people here. Maybe 12 or 14 or more. Old people and little kids that wouldn’t leave. I guess their grandparents. People that were old in Vietnam couldn’t leave their village.

[…]

So at that time they had this game called Guts. Guts was where they gave the prisoner to a company and everyone would get in line and do something to him… So they took the NVA’s clothes off and tied him to a tree. Everybody in the unit got in line. At least 200 guys. The first guy took a bayonet and plucked his eye out. Put the bayonet in the corner of the eye and popped it. And I was amazed how large your eyeball was. Then he sliced his ear off. And he hit him in the mouth with his .45. Loosened the teeth, pulled them out. Then they sliced his tongue. They cut him all over. And we put that insect repellent all over him. It would just irritate his body, and his skin would turn white…. I don’t know when he died. But most of the time he was alive. He was hollering and cursing. They put water on him and shaking him and bringin’ him back. Finally they tortured him to death.

from https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2018/07/what-we-did-in-vietnam

“I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better it will please me. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States,” General Jacob H. Smith said.

Since it was a popular belief among the Americans serving in the Philippines that native males were born with bolos in their hands, Major Littleton “Tony” Waller asked, “I would like to know the limit of age to respect, sir.”

“Ten years”, Smith said.

“Persons of ten years and older are those designated as being capable of bearing arms?”

“Yes.” Smith confirmed his instructions a second time.

There’s a documentary from 1972 called Winter Soldier, where veterans of the US invasion of Vietnam attested to their war crimes. Here are a few excerpts of the transcript: http://links.org.au/node/3343

Consider the following recollection of Vietnam-style “counter-insurgency” warfare, provided by Scott Camil, a former member of the 1st Marines:

Anybody that was dead was considered a VC. If you killed someone they said, “How do you know he’s a VC?” and the general reply would be, “He’s dead,” and that was sufficient. When we went through the villages and searched people the women would have all their clothes taken off and the men would use their penises to probe them to make sure they didn’t have anything hidden anywhere and this wasremoved but it was done as searching… The main thing was that if an operation was covered by the press there were certain things we weren’t supposed to do, but if there was no press there, it was okay. I saw one case where a woman was shot by a sniper, one of our snipers. When we got up to her she was asking for water. And the Lt. said to kill her. So he ripped off her clothes, they stabbed her in both breasts, they spread-eagled her and shoved an E- tool up her vagina, an entrenching tool, and she was still asking for water. And then they took that out and they used a tree limb and then she was shot.

An ex-machine gunner with the 1st Air Cavalry detailed the routine violence that accompanied cargo runs on his CH-47 “Chinook” helicopter:

It was quite usual that there would be a sniper outside a village in the foliage, in the trees, and if we took fire from one sniper we’d return fire on that sniper and then continue to spray the entire village with machine gun fire and M-16 ammunition until we either ran out of ammunition or we had flown so far away from the village that we could no longer reach them with the weapons…The free fire zones were posted on the operation map in the operations tent and this gave us a policy to kill anything that moved within that area.

Sadistic games at the expense of civilians were used to spice up the day:

Rotor wash was also used to blow down the huts, literally blow down the villages….So we’d come in and flair on a ship and just blow away a person’s house. Also, the Vietnamese, when they’ve harvested a crop of rice, put it out on these large pans to dry and that harvest is what is supposed to maintain them for that season— what they’re supposed to live on. We’d come in to flair the ship, and let the rotor wash blow the rice, blow their entire supply of food for that harvest over a large area. And then laugh, as we’d watch them running around trying to pick up individual pieces of rice out of a rice paddy.

While it was unusual for hundreds to be gunned down in a single location (as occurred infamously at My Lai in April 1968), the Winter Soldier testimony confirms that it was nothing out of the ordinary for dozens or scores of civilians to be slaughtered in “search and destroy” missions:

We moved into a small hamlet, 19 women and children were rounded up as VCS— Viet Cong Suspects— and the lieutenant that rounded them up called the captain on the radio and he asked what should be done with them. The captain simply repeated the order that came down from the colonel that morning. The order that came down from the colonel that morning was to kill anything that moves, which you can take anyway you want to take it… I turned, and I looked in the area. I looked toward where the supposed VCS were, and two men were leading a young girl, approximately 19 years old, very pretty, out of a hootch. She had no clothes on so I assumed she had beenremovedd, which was pretty SOP [Standard Operating Procedure], and she was thrown onto the pile of the 19 women and children, and five men, around the circle, opened up on full automatic with their M-16s. And that was the end of that.

Detainees were blindfolded on arrival and left that way throughout their stay in overcrowded cells. Music blared non-stop to drown out the sounds of torture – earning the centre the wry nickname “The Disco.”

“Here resounded our screams, our cries,” Bataszew told AFP on a recent visit to the place of her nightmares.

The building today is a private residence despite being earmarked as a memorial site. On the street outside, an improvised metal monument displays photographs of women who never came back from “The Disco.”

‘More viciousness’

“Women were a tough nut to crack and… punished with much more viciousness than men,” said Bataszew.

More than 40,000 people were tortured and some 3,200 were killed or made to disappear in the 17 years of Pinochet’s post-coup rule from 1973 to 1990.

Torture was different for women than for men. Some of the methods includedremoved them in front of their partners, or inserting live rats into their vaginas.

Some 35,000 victims of the military junta gave evidence to the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture in 2005, of which nearly 13 percent (3,399) were women – almost all of them subjected to sexual violence.

Victims testified of electric shocks to their genitals, or beingremovedd with dogs trained to perform this vile act.

[…]

Cristina Godoy-Navarrete, now 68 years old and a retired immunologist, was one of the first captives at “The Disco,” which was also known as “Venda Sexy” for the nature of the abuse meted out there.

“When I arrived there were only two other women. They took you to an underground area where they had equipment to apply electricity… and where they had the trained dog [for theremoveds],” she told AFP from London, where she went into exile after being freed a year after her arrest in 1974.

Some of the worst punishments involved women’s loved ones.

The report produced by Chile’s torture commission recorded evidence of men being forced toremoved their daughters or sisters.

“They held me to be tortured in front of him, as his wife,” recounted Erika Hennings, wife of Alfonso Chanfreau – a philosophy student and an MIR leader still listed as “disappeared.”

The retired teacher, 69, said she was detained for 17 days at the torture centre known as “Londres 38” after its street address, crammed into a room with 80 other people without beds and blindfolded for 24 hours.

“Londres 38 was a center of repression, torture… where I first encountered evil and cruelty,” she recounted.

She said she was “used as a woman” to put pressure on Chanfreau.

‘I get angry’

At Villa Grimaldi, yet another torture chamber, Shaira Sepulveda was held for 10 days.

“They got a special kick out of trying to denigrate, to destroy women,” the 72-year-old told AFP.

Michelle Bachelet, a former president of Chile and now UN Commissioner for Human Rights, was also held at Villa Grimaldi in the 1970s with her mother Ángela Jeria.

“I get angry, I get angry, I get angry to see how they took advantage to destroy and kill our companions,” Sepulveda said as she recently toured a rose garden created at the center in memory of female victims of the junta.

“They didn’t get what they wanted and I hope that someday we can have justice because they (the women) deserve it.”

from https://www.batimes.com.ar/news/latin-america/slow-justice-for-women-abused-by-chiles-dictatorship.phtml