Where is our empathy?

[sinkingfeeling]

Two Men, Two Legs, and Too Much Suffering: America's Forgotten Vietnamese Victims by Nick Turse.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/012508P.shtml
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174885

" Even those Vietnamese who didn't lose a limb - or a loved one - carry memories of years of anguish, grief, and terror from the American War. The fall-out here is still palpable. The elderly woman who tells me how her home was destroyed by an incendiary bomb. The people who speak of utter devastation - of villages laid waste by shelling and bombing, of gardens and orchards decimated by chemical defoliants. The older woman who, with trepidation, peeks into a home where I'm interviewing - she hasn't seen a Caucasian since the war - and is visibly unnerved by the memories I conjure up. Another begins trembling upon hearing that the Americans have arrived again, fearing she might be taken away, as her son was almost 40 years earlier. The people with memories of heavily armed American patrols disrupting their lives, searching their homes, killing their livestock. The people for whom English was only one phrase, the one they all seem to remember: "VC, VC" - slang for the pejorative term "Viet Cong"; and those who recall model names and official designations of U.S. weaponry of the era - from bombs to rifles - as intimately as Americans today know their sports and celebrities.

I wish I could tell Nguyen Van Tu that most Americans know something of his country's torture and torment during the war. I wish I could tell him that most Americans care. I wish I could tell him that Americans feel true remorse for the terror visited upon the Vietnamese in their name, or that an apology is forthcoming and reparations on their way. But then I'd be lying. Mercifully, he doesn't quiz me as I've quizzed him for the better part of an hour. He doesn't ask how Americans can be so ignorant or hard-hearted, how they could allow their country to repeatedly invade other nations and leave them littered with corpses and filled with shattered families, lives, and dreams.

Nguyen Van Tu grasps my hands in thanks as we end the interview. His story is part of a hidden, if not forbidden, history that few in the U.S. know. It's a story that was written in blood in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos during the 1960s and 1970s and now is being rewritten in Afghanistan and Iraq. It's a story to which new episodes are added each day that U.S. forces roll armored vehicles down other people's streets, kick down other people's doors, carry out attacks in other people's neighborhoods and occupy other people's countries."

Edited to add orginial link

[Briar]

1. Patriotism

is about eliminating empathy for all but "our" side. Nation states couldn't exist if they cared about the victims of their self interested activities.

[sinkingfeeling]

2. I'd call that nationalism. I do think 'patriotism' and 'nationalism' are two different things.