From My Lai to Gaza: How Genocide Is Not an Exception but the Playbook
Debranding the Colonizer's Playbook: Part I by ethos
Empire does not occasionally stumble into mass killing. It engineers genocide through doctrine, disguises it through law, and defends it through narrative discipline. What occurred at My Lai in 1968 was not an atrocity in the moral sense often implied by that word. It was an instance of genocidal violence, enacted against a civilian population that had been structurally designated as expendable. The fact that it was not even the sole isolated incident of this level of genocide that day shows that genocide has been at the very nature of the American empire since its founding.
What investigative journalist Seymour Hersh revealed was not merely the existence of mass civilian killing, but the systematic conditions that made such killing inevitable. My Lai was not an accident, a breakdown, or an excess. It was a localized expression of a broader genocidal strategy that treated Vietnamese civilians as a population to be neutralized, terrorized, displaced, or eliminated in service of imperial objectives.
Genocide does not require gas chambers or formal declarations. Under international law, genocide includes acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. The U.S. strategy in Vietnam, particularly under William Westmoreland, meets this threshold not through isolated orders, but through design. Attrition warfare, free-fire zones, body-count metrics, and population-wide targeting collapsed the civilian–combatant distinction entirely. Vietnamese people were rendered killable by category. That is genocidal logic.
Attrition Warfare as the Genocidal Playbook of Empire
Attrition warfare is not a neutral military strategy that occasionally produces civilian harm. It is a genocidal technology, refined over centuries of imperial expansion, whose central function is to erase a people by collapsing the distinction between combatant and civilian until an entire population becomes targetable by category. When empire adopts attrition as doctrine, it does not ask who is fighting. It asks how many bodies can be removed from the system until resistance, culture, and continuity can no longer reproduce themselves.
In Vietnam, this logic reached bureaucratic maturity. Under the command philosophy of William Westmoreland, success was quantified through body counts rather than protection of civilian life or political legitimacy. This metric did not merely tolerate civilian death, it required it. Soldiers were rewarded for kill numbers, commanders were evaluated on attrition rates, and entire regions were designated free fire zones where any human presence could be presumed hostile. Once a zone was labeled as such, the legal and moral status of everyone inside it changed. They were no longer civilians with lives and families, they were obstacles to be reduced, mere objects and bodies to pillage and rape. Because Vietnamese people were rendered killable by category, it made it genocidal in nature of the acts of violence committed by the United States military, the largest terrorist organization in the world.
