User talk:94.155.68.202

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Happy editing! I dream of horses If you reply here, please ping me by adding to your message (talk to me) (My edits) @  14:03, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

Vietcatholic
I agree that the source is not reliable, and have removed it from the Execution of Nguyễn Văn Lém article. Also, I'd recommend getting a proper account if you are going to consistently edit. It's more convenient than editing from an IP account. Harizotoh9 (talk) 22:42, 3 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the note. I don't edit consistently nowadays. I used to be somewhat more active some years ago and I still have an account from that time, but now I'm essentially retired and generally make only the occasional small edit or talk page comment while reading an article.--94.155.68.202 (talk) 14:27, 5 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Me and some other editors have made a lot of edits to the Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, Execution of Nguyễn Văn Lém, Eddie Adams (photographer) articles. Please review the changes. Also check the talk pages. In addition, I suspect the BBC may have copied from Wikipedia. See: Talk:Nguyễn_Ngọc_Loan Harizotoh9 (talk) 19:23, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

Loan
The narrative and facts get more confusing the more I look into this. In 76, Loan confusingly stated that the man was not a fighter but a civilian. Supposedly he's made many contradictory explanations, and the man has been variously been identified. I'm reading excerpts from Feldman's "Covert Capital" which covers Loan.

Harizotoh9 (talk) 09:38, 10 July 2018 (UTC)
 * 1976 news article
 * Covert Capital


 * Wow! This should definitely be included in the article, especially the changes in the pro-Loan narrative as traced on pp 199-200 of the book. And it looks as if there are many other things about Loan in 'Covert Capital' which are worth adding, too. That was some excellent digging on your part. It turns out that there was a decent academic source out there all along, while the Wikipedia articles (and consequently the BBC among others) relied on propandist sources like vietcatholic.--94.155.68.202 (talk) 23:49, 12 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Reading between the lines, it seems that Loan did not know the name of the person he was shooting, and afterwards he was reporting back rumors that he was told. It doesn't seem that the man's identity wasn't confirmed until his widow was found years later. "Covert Capital", for whatever reason, doesn't seem to acknowledge that the man's identity seems to have been confirmed.


 * I'm not sure if Loan's story is actually changing or not. I could read these statements as being consistent with Loan believing Lem is a suspected Viet Cong member, but he wasn't sure on his name.


 * There's also issues of language, since English is a 2nd language for Loan. This may have resulted in awkward or less than perfect statements.


 * In general, the right wing sources present a very clear narrative: Lem was a Viet Cong death squad leader. They seem to take Loan and South Vietamese sources as fact as a starting point. I suspect they're trying to rehabitutate Loan, and minimize Loan's execution, as a means of rehabilitating the Vietnam war in general. More neutral sources, or sources critical of the Vietnam war, seem to present a less clear narrative: Lem was picked up, was a suspected VC, and was executed. What he may or may not have done is unclear. Lem's widow does seem to confirm he was a VC, and even explain the origin of his nomme de guerre. Lacking direct link, Wikipedia should simply state what has been confirmed, instead of directly linking Lem to death squad actions. Harizotoh9 (talk) 07:55, 22 July 2018 (UTC)


 * I think that it can be considered beyond dispute that he was a Viet Cong member, but I don't remember having encountered the claim that the *main* task of his unit was extrajudicial killings as opposed to general guerrilla warfare; the former is not self-evident, and only the former could justify the term 'death squad'. 'Covert Capital' seems more interested in describing the changes in Loan's narrative than in researching the actual event in 1968, but it shows clearly that Loan didn't consistently provide the account involving mass murder of women, children and his best friend by Nguyen that the right wing sources have now converged on; and if even he didn't have such information himself at the time of the shooting - or, indeed, many years afterwards - it couldn't have motivated his on-camera execution of Lem, which is what the right-wing sources keep implying. I doubt that his deficient knowledge of English alone could explain the vacillation between 'commander of a sapper unit' and 'no fighting man', 'killed a policeman' and 'wounded one of my men', or the uncertainty (also in Neil Davis's acoount) about what exactly the man had done personally.--94.155.68.202 (talk) 17:47, 23 July 2018 (UTC)
 * Some further points - Loan's giving wrong names for the individual is signficant, because it suggests that he is trying hard to imply that he knew something about the victim that justified the killing - and yet actually didn't know whom he had killed. The timeline of the development of the current right-wing version in Covert Capital is also interesting. Loan only starts talking about mass murder of women and children and his best friend in 1979 (saying Lem had been captured near the police station where it had occurred), after having omitted to mention anything of the sort in 1972 and 1976, or even in another interview of the same year 1979. Finally, only in 1985 is the murder ascribed directly to Lem by Adams (citing letters of unnamed US military officers and not Loan himself, even though he had befriended him), and in 1998 Adams goes so far as to say that Lem had been 'seen killing'.
 * Loan's referring to Viet Cong partisans as 'no fighting men' and 'civilians who rob and kill' (which implies apolitical marauders acting for personal gain) seems highly misleading at best. On 'death squad' - attacking policemen, who are normally armed in the context of an insurgency, is something guerrilla fighters generally do, it implies fighting and does not justify the term. If also the policemen's families are killed in an attack, that is an atrocity and a war crime, but one committed by a combat unit, not by a 'death squad'. In general, I'd say that it is difficult to operate a pure 'death squad' in a territory where you are not an official or de facto authority, so I am sceptical towards use of the term to refer to terror perpetrated by guerrillas.--94.155.68.202 (talk) 20:31, 23 July 2018 (UTC)

Charles Edward Stewart
Hello, IP editor. I took the proverbial bull by the horns and got rid of the citation of "Essortment" in the above article. Essortment sort of reminds me of those cheap sites that freely copy from Wikipedia; definitely not a source for WP article material.--Quisqualis (talk) 05:29, 9 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Hello and thanks for notifying me! I feel validated. Great minds think alike, as the saying goes. :) --94.155.68.202 (talk) 18:34, 11 December 2018 (UTC)

Talkback
Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 23:36, 12 December 2018 (UTC)