Thread: Time to take this off the shelf and throw it out for good......

Perhaps one of the most iconic images to come out of the Vietnam War, this photo depicts a uniformed South Vietnamese officer shooting a prisoner in the head.
When you look into it, however, there is much more to this photograph than first meets the eye.
There is an undeniable brutality to this photo, but even Eddie Adams – who won a Pulitzer Prize for capturing this shot – later admitted that it didn’t tell the whole story and he stated that he wished he hadn’t taken it at all.

Looking at this image out of context, it appears as though an officer is gunning down an innocent prisoner, perhaps even a civilian.
You are apparently witnessing a savage war crime.
That is the reason this image was adopted by anti-war protesters as an indictment against the Vietnam War.
Without understanding the background, there is no reason to think that is not the case. It seems like yet another image showing someone acting horrifically and immorally during war time.
But, when you learn the story behind the man who is being executed in this photo, the image and the reasoning behind the execution becomes a little bit clearer.

The name of the man being shot was Nguyen Van Lem, but he was also known as Captain Bay Lop.
Lem was no civilian; he was a member of the Viet Cong. Not just any member, either, he was an assassin and the leader of a Viet Cong death squad who had been targeting and killing South Vietnamese National Police officers and their families.

Lem’s team was attempting to take down a number of South Vietnamese officials. They may have even been plotting to kill the shooter himself, Major General Nguyen Ngoc Loan.
It is said that Lem had recently been responsible for the murder of one of Loan’s most senior officers, as well as the murder of the officer’s family.

According to accounts at the time, when South Vietnamese officers captured Lem, he was more or less caught in the act, at the site of a mass grave.
This grave contained the bodies of no less than seven South Vietnamese police officers, as well as their families, around 34 bound and shot bodies in total.
Eddie Adams, the photojournalist who took the shot, backs up this story.
Lem’s widow also confirmed that her husband was a member of the National Liberation Front (Viet Cong), and that he disappeared before the beginning of the Tet Offensive.

After being captured with the bodies during the Tet Offensive, Nguyen Van Lem was taken to Major General Ngoc Loan. In a street in Saigon, Loan executed Lem with his .38 caliber Smith & Wesson.

The photographer, Eddie Adams, had this to say of capturing the photo:

" I just followed the three of them as they walked towards us, making an occasional picture. When they were close – maybe five feet away – the soldiers stopped and backed away. I saw a man walk into my camera viewfinder from the left. He took a pistol out of his holster and raised it. I had no idea he would shoot. It was common to hold a pistol to the head of prisoners during questioning. So I prepared to make that picture – the threat, the interrogation. But it didn’t happen. The man just pulled a pistol out of his holster, raised it to the VC’s head and shot him in the temple. I made a picture at the same time"…....

The General then walked up to Adams and said, “They killed many of my people, and yours, too,” then walked away.

This may have been the end of Lem’s life, but it was not the end of the story.
The image of Lem’s execution, and public reaction to it, played a small role in bringing the Vietnam War to an end. Although that is no bad thing, it also demonized General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, which was something Eddie Adams was extremely sorry for.

He was quoted as saying,

"The General killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera". Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them; but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. What the photograph didn’t say was, “What would you do if you were the General at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?”

Adams felt that, by taking the photo, he had ruined Loan’s life. He felt Loan was a good man, in a bad situation, and he deeply regretted the negative impact that the photo had on him.
In fact, Major General Loan later moved to the United States. When he arrived, the Immigration and Nationalization Services wanted to deport him partially because of the photo taken by Adams.
They approached Adams to testify against Loan, but Adams instead testified in his favor and Loan was allowed to stay.

When Loan died of cancer in 1998, Adams stated, “The guy was a hero. America should be crying. I just hate to see him go this way, without people knowing anything about him.”

”Original material credit to https://cherrieswriter.wordpress.com/

Economic genius AOC, seems to think that the law of supply and demand means she demands money and taxpayers are obliged to supply it.

This authoritarian leftist Dem wants FELONY prosecution against conservatives who mock Congress online or disagree with Congress online. She is a Soros-funded fascist



washingtonexaminer.com

Rep. Frederica Wilson demands prosecution for those who mock Congress online

Americans should block out Anti American owned media who continually try to stir up trouble for our country and our president...and definitely not allow children to listen to their fake news.



saulsnews.com

MSNBC not planning to air Trump’s July Fourth celebration live

He drafted the US Constitution.
He was responsible for the Louisiana Purchase.
He wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.
He was an advocate of free public education.
He commissioned the Lewis and Clark expedition.
He championed to keep the Indian nations allied with the US.
He kept the US out of the Napoleonic wars and maintained neutrality when it came to conflict between Britain & France.
He founded the 2nd Library of Congress after the British destroyed the capitol in 1814.
He founded the University of VA.
But the city of Charlottesville VA, in judging him by today's standards, can no longer tolerate the celebration of Thomas Jefferson's birthday, because 200 years ago, he was a slave-owner.
I'd love to know where the hell Charlottesville, or the state of VA, or the United States would be without his contributions. I'd love to know when the PC bs crap is going to stop! I'd love to know what the city of Charlottesville plans to gain from further revisionist history!!!



washingtonexaminer.com

Charlottesville, Virginia, votes to remove the birthday of Thomas Jefferson from city holidays

DEMOCRATS INSURANCE FOR ILLEGALS!
"Despite that 93 percent of Californians have health insurance, the California Legislature voted Monday to tax California citizens who do not buy health insurance. This penalty revenue will be used to fund health insurance subsidies to encourage more people to purchase health insurance, and to provide health care to ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS!”



californiaglobe.com

California Legislature Passes Health Insurance Individual Mandate Penalty - California Globe

Nothing Is More Expensive Than A Free Government Service



Every such promise of 'free stuff' should be greeted with instant, habitual, and empirically verified incredulity...

Wed, 07/03/2019 - 15:40
41 SHARES

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The American Institute for Economic Research,

I’m listening to politicians hock their wares these days. The same ideas keep reappearing. Put them in charge and health care will be free. College education will be free. All life essentials will be free. Jobs will fall like manna from heaven. There will be a guaranteed income. Retirement will be secure.



You get the impression of government as some magic fairy who bestows goods and services on people without the annoying part of having to forgo income to get them.

It’s a world without prices, without demands, without cost, a bounty that comes to one and all merely because powerful people legislated it to be so. The power of a piece of paper backed by law!
That’s the fantasy. The reality of government is radically different. Everything is priced. The pricing is not subject to the competitive discipline of the market. It is irrational pricing made up by a bureaucrat. There are always conditions. Noncompliance is punished by the taking away of your liberty and property.
This is the daily reality of life under government control. Far from feeling like benevolence, in practice, it is exploitative and often brutal. The daily experience of this should be a warning to anyone who considers expanding government control more deeply and broadly into other areas of life.
Let’s just consider an obvious case where government exercises hegemonic control: the ability to drive your car from here to there.

I tell the following story not because it is particularly unusual but only because it is on my mind because it happened just three days ago.
A friend of mine was planning a trip to the city with another friend. They were going to have a night on the town. They hit the road with a sense of carefree happiness and anticipation. Only a few miles later, the blue lights appeared behind them. The policeman pulled them over and demanded identification. The driver asked why she had been pulled over, but the policeman wouldn’t say. After checking the ID, he revealed that he had been checking plates and fishing for possible problems.
He returned after some wait to announce that her license had been suspended. She was shocked. It was an unpaid speeding ticket. She pointed out that she did, in fact, pay the ticket. The electronic database disagreed. He said he could arrest her, but he would exercise compassion and merely impound her car. This he ordered, leaving them potentially stranded on the side of the road. They asked for a ride home. He mercifully agreed to give them that.
Their weekend of fun was ruined. When the Department of Motor Vehicles reopened on Monday, she called. The policeman was completely mistaken. He never should have stopped her. Now, what is the recourse? She could spend a few days in court with an attorney. The result might be some kind of black mark on the cop’s record. Or maybe not. The worst possible result for him would be a paid temporary suspension, but that wouldn’t be likely.
In the interest of time, she could just pay the money. I’m going to make up some numbers because this hasn’t happened yet. She will pay a towing fee, a storage fee, a license-reinstatement fee, a court fee, and some others. Let’s say it costs, in the end, $1,000, plus the opportunity cost of missing a weekend vacation, plus the trauma of being repeatedly threatened with arrest and having her car temporarily stolen by the government.
And yet, it was all a mistake.
That’s the kind of pricing that the state does for you.
Or consider a case where nothing goes wrong. I will use my own case. I bought a car out of state. To make it legal in the state in which I want to drive it, I had to pay a registration fee, a license fee, a fee for the payment of electronic tolls, an emissions-check fee, a titling fee, a property tax, a downpayment on insurance, the first month’s insurance, a local-government fee, a runner fee, a processing fee, and several other fees I can’t remember, for a total of $1,300. All mandatory. This is just to be able to drive from here to there. If I fail to do even one of these, I could be stopped and arrested, and my car could be impounded.
This is further supposing that I get no tickets. A ticket can be written for just about anything. And the price of the tickets is entirely made up by bureaucrats. They aren’t so high as to incentivize you to protest but aren’t so low as to starve the state of the revenue it wants.
In the market, there is always downward pressure on prices. Every entrepreneur tries to cut costs to attract customers. The state is always working to raise its prices as high as possible to get as much of what you own as possible.
If you have ever spent any time in traffic court, you know the racket. You are charged and charged at every step, every piece of paper, every movement made by anyone in the building. They are random, and they add up. The real victims are, of course, the poor, who are pillaged constantly for money they don’t have (so they have to get creative about getting money, not always in legal ways).
The whole world of government services is packed with prices. You have no choice. Everywhere you go you have to pay. And consider this: your taxes are already paying for all these services which are provided for you on a pricing basis. The toll roads, the processing fees, the court fees, the filing fees, the usage fees, the late fees, the tickets, and on and on forever. In practice, government has no hesitation for charging you for everything they grant you for free.
You can’t escape them. There is a Medicare tax, a cell phone tax, a tax on tobacco, a tax on liquor, a tax on landline phones, a tax for being self-employed, a tax on airline tickets, a tax on gasoline, a tax on electricity, a tax on water, a tax on television, a trash-collection tax, a hotel tax, and even a special tax for those who decide to give up their citizenship because they are sick of all the taxes. New York has even a bagel-cutting tax, not to mention thousands of excise taxes.
And keep in mind that you are already paying taxes for the very existence of lots of services. Government taxes you once for providing the service and taxes you again if you actually use the service. I can’t right now think of a single thing that comes from government that is actually completely free.
This fact should at least reveal something about how credible these claims are that somehow magically in the future, you will be getting things for free from government. Every such promise should be greeted with instant, habitual, and empirically verified incredulity.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-...rnment-service