[From “My Lai II”]

America recoiled in shock at the My Lai massacre. In a war where the enemy routinely tortured, mutilated and killed villagers in order to maintain control, and where American troops greeted smiling villagers to hand out food, medicine and agricultural help only to see those same smiling faces shooting back at them at night, My Lai was not an aberration.

It was an inevitability.

One side got all the advantages, protected by the useful idiot public image war fought on American televisions. American soldiers must have felt like they were on another planet when they read and saw news reports, none of which mentioned the tendency of eight-year-old girls to smile and laugh and then throw grenades concealed in their dolls. Nor did the media mention the routine atrocities that the Communists used to keep power.

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America has been preparing a My Lai with its treatment of police.

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We need police more than usual because we have no social order and no culture in common. Without standards, people do whatever they want, and the cops rein them in when they get too dangerous.

“Police brutality” means cops deliberately using excessive force. The term has been extended to apply to any police violence that the crowd does not like, which means they ignore any of it that does not fit the narrative and categorize many justifiable incidents as police brutality.

This puts the police in a paranoid position where they nonetheless must go out there and deal with the residual effects of our society’s poor choices. Frustration and anger inevitably build.

We’re setting up another My Lai, and no one will talk about it.