' The My Lai Massacre : Sources Of Obedience?

A Few Good Men portrays the importance of military orders, the reality of the ranking system and how much military leader’s authority can cloud their judgement. Former psychology professor at Yale, Stanley Milgram sought the reasoning behind the blindness of individuals when ordered to perform a task for someone who seems to be an authority figure. His infamous experiment was and is currently being dug through and examined thoroughly. Milgram’s research caught the attention of fellow psychologist Philip Zimbardo. Zimbardo conducted an experiment with similar interests in mind. He collected 21 men from newspaper advertisements to live in a false prison and live in the prison for two weeks. The experiment lasted six days due to how quickly the experiment escalated and transformed the “prisoners” and “guards” (Zimbardo 116). Their conclusions from both experiments are that power and stress can transform even the strongest willed people. Zimbardo and Milgram discuss the same sort of entitlement Colonel Jessup presumes to order an illegal code red due to his position on the base at Guantanamo Bay; also the entitlement Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee had over the case due to the position his father once had.

While writing "The Power of The Situation" Lee Ross and Richard E. Nisbett explains, there are no indicators on a persons reaction given a certain situation ( 149). Ross and Nisbett continue to say, a person 's past cannot determine how a human 's actions will take place in a future scenario, even if the human has a kind heart, they may not always be willing to help a person in need. Leading into this Ross and Nisbett state, " Social Psychology has by now amassed a vast store of such empirical parables" (Ross and Nisbett 149). Many people believe a past of a person will help them to identify or interpret how a person will act; However, Ross and Nisbett believe for this to be a fundamental attribution error (149). The power of a situation causes people to act in ways they may not have ever dreamed of, for instance The My Lai Massacre. "The My Lai Massacre: A military Crime of Obedience" written by, Herbert C. Kelman and V. Lee Hamilton consists of a small series of crimes committed by our own military ( Kelman and Hamilton 131). During the massacre military soldiers were humiliating and dehumanizing the enemies simply because their leading officer commanded them to do so (140-141). As their once simple actions became an everyday routine, the soldiers never questioned the unjust commands given by the authority (140). Dawson and Downey followed the orders given by their superior in command without a hesitation to stop and think whether or not the actions soon to be taken were

This leads Kaffee to defend his clients on the basis on which they simply followed orders from a higher ranking officer, Colonel Jessup (Reiner). According to Milgram’s experiments, even normal, harmless people are able to inflict pain on another individual. The military is based on a chain of command, the Colonel at the top, Privates at the bottom, and everyone else in between. Milgram argues that, when in problematic circumstances, people are proud of doing a good job for their authority (Milgram 221). In other words, they want to obey the orders given in order to please the person holding authority. Could this explain why Dawson and Downey executed the “Code Red”? This is precisely similar to the argument Kelman and Hamilton present in their article “The My Lai Massacre: A Military Crime of Obedience”. According to these authors, “American military law assumes that the subordinate is inclined to follow orders…” (Kelman, Hamilton 270). The soldiers in My Lai, although possibly interpreting the orders differently than intended, ultimately did what their commanding officer ordered. The Marines in the film may have also been under the impression that they would not be responsible for any harm which Santiago may endure. Again, Milgram could attest to this argument. He states, “The essence of obedience is that a person comes to view himself as the instrument for carrying out another person’s wishes, and he therefore no longer regards

In “The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal: Sources of Sadism,” Marianne Szegedy-Maszak informs the reader of the situation United States guards caused against Iraqi detainees. Under Bush’s presidency, United States soldiers brought physical abuse and humiliation upon the Abu Ghraib Prison. Szegedy-Maszak briefly analyzes the situation and compares the abuse to further scientific experiments in which test obedience. One of the experiments was the topic of another article titled, “The Stanford Prison Experiment,” written by Philip G. Zimbardo. In his work, Zimbardo discusses the experiment he held at Stanford University. A group of male students from the university were paid to participate in an experiment held in a mock prison. Half of the group

On March 16, 1968, over 300 unarmed civilians were killed in South Vietnam during an indiscriminate, mass murder event known as the My Lai Massacre. Conducted by a unit of the United States Army, the My Lai Massacre ranked one of most appalling atrocities carried out by US forces in an already savage and violent war. All victims involved were unarmed civilians, many of which were women, children, and the elderly. Victims were raped, tortured and beaten, even mutilated before being killed. The massacre was forever seared into the hearts and minds of the American people as the day “the American spirit died.”

Stanley Milgram’s obedience study is known as the most famous study ever conducted. Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, conducted an experiment that focused on the conflict between personal conscience and compliance to command. This experiment was conducted in 1961, a year following the court case of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram formulated the study to answer the question “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?” (Milgram, 1974). The investigation was to see whether Germans were specially obedient, under the circumstances, to dominant figures. This was a frequently said explanation for the Nazi killings in World War II.

Before we ask about My Lai Massacre, we need to know what is My Lai Massacre the My Lai massacre is My Lai massacre has indiscriminately shot unarmed civilians during the Vietnam War. The genocide was the duty of an officer of Charlie Company in the United States to lead a team in search of Vietnam. Their teams occupied a place called My Lai and slaughtered civilians under the direction of the high commander. Charlie Company entered South Vietnam in December 1967. In the first month there was no fighting, but in mid-March, five members of the team were killed by booby traps. Moreover, Vietnam’s 48th Battalion attacked US forces in the South Vietnam. The place of the incident occurred not far from where civilians live. This time, the US military was very angry and determined a massive counterattack the villages. Colonel Oran K Henderson orders Charlie Company to commit a massacre. The civilians who lived there were mainly woman, children and the elderly. American soldiers cruelly murdered and mocked them after receiving get permission. In the massacre more than 500 civilians were slaughtered and many women were raped and murdered. They attempted to conceal the events they had committed and led to an antisense sentiment that further divided the United States during the Vietnam War. However, some US military testimonies make their world known to their cruelty, including genocide and rape. In this paper, I will write down things about the behavior of the US

In the pursuit of safety, acceptance, and the public good, many atrocities have been committed in places such as Abu Ghraib and My Lai, where simple, generally harmless people became the wiling torturers and murderers of innocent people. Many claim to have just been following orders, which illustrates a disturbing trend in both the modern military and modern societies as a whole; when forced into an obedient mindset, many normal and everyday people can become tools of destruction and sorrow, uncaringly inflicting pain and death upon the innocent.

She begins recounting the notorious details, how innocent college students labeled prisoners and guards displayed psychological abuse after only six days of confinement, and makes reference to Stanley Milgram’s obedience study and Abu Ghraib, where similar maltreatment, perceived or real, was conducted on civilians by civilians. She addresses and refutes the accepted belief that the Stanford Prison Experiment proved that anyone could become a tyrant when given or instructed by a source of authority. Instead, she suggests that Zimbardo’s inquiry points toward but does not land on one exact conclusion. She explains the influence of the setting, the presentation of the roles, Zimbardo’s participation, and perhaps a sense of expectation felt, all of which can be reflected in the shocking behavior of a few guards. She argues that it should not have been so shocking. Konnikova discredits the neutrality of Zimbardo’s experiment by insisting that people who would respond to an ad for a psychological study of prison life were not “normal” people. However, with her diction and choice of evidence she displaces the study's culpability in a way that ultimately blurs and undermines her claim.

The My Lai massacre and the Abu Ghraib torture prison were both tragic events in history that Americans were involved in. The My Lai massacre took place during the Vietnam war in 1968. Lieutenant William Calley ordered the Charlie Company to proceed with the attack on the village of My Lai. Their goal was to exterminate the Viet Cong combatants and any one who stood in their way, but they ended up killing hundreds of innocent unarmed civilians instead. The Abu Ghraib torture and prison was an american military run prison that was active during the Iraqi war in 2003 until 2006. They captured Iraqi soldiers and tortured them in extremely inhumane and unimaginable ways. These horrific occurrences made an impact on a countless amount of communities and people’s lives around the world whether they had connections to the incidents or not, which is why this issue is such an important matter to discuss. The concepts that will be discussed in this essay are the similarities between the events of the My Lai massacre and Abu Ghraib prison, the major difference between the two, considering who was truly responsible for the events at the Abu Ghraib prison, discussing whether or not the lessons of My Lai were learnt, and the steps to take to insure nothing alike these events would ever take place in the world again.

After reading these documents, My Lai was nothing less than a massacre. After investigation it was brought to light that over 500 women, children, and elderly were killed at this time. There was ordered given from Captain Medina that were uphled by Sergeant Calley to kill, and to leave no one. This of course, is completely inhumane and unjustified. But many, many people died. The murdering was stopped by the bravery of Hugh Thompson who put himself and his helicopter, occupied by his company, in-between the Vietnamese people trying to escape and the American Soldiers. This ending the event and letting some survive.

     On March 16, 1968, in the Quang Ngai region of Vietnam, specifically My Lai, the United States military was involved in an appalling slaughter of approximately 500 Vietnamese civilians. There are numerous arguments as to why this incident even had the capacity to occur. Although some of the arguments seem valid, can one really make excuses for the slaughter of innocent people? The company that was responsible for the My Lai incident was the Charlie Company and throughout the company there were many different accounts of what happened that reprehensible day. Therefore there are a few contradictions about what had occurred, such as what the commanding officers exact instructions for the soldiers were. Even

As a desperate search for justice, in 1962, Holocaust organizer Adolf Eichmann wrote in a request for pardon of his death sentencing that he and other low-level officers were forced to serve as mere instruments shifting the responsibility for the deaths of millions of Jews and other groups of individuals to his superiors. The just following orders defense featured heavily in Eichmann's court hearings. In that same year, Stanley Milgram, a Yale University psychologist, organized a series of experiments that put the assumption to the test, whether regular people would harm another person after following orders from a person of authority. An eye-opening conclusion suggested any human was capable of these acts of evil, especially when under the

A Few Good Men depicts the court case of two marines, Private First Class Louden Downey and Lance Corporal Harold W. Dawson, who had been ordered to perform a "Code Red" on a fellow marine, Private First Class William T. Santiago. Stanley Miligram, a 1970's psychologist who wanted to test obedience in

Philip G. Zimbardo, Herbert C. Kelman and V. Lee Hamilton, and Crispin Sartwell directly or implicitly discuss the power of situation. Stanford professor Zimbardo’s “The Stanford Prison Experiment,” analyzes and explains his experiment, in which twenty-one male Stanford students were assigned roles as guards and prisoners in a simulated prison. He summarizes the extreme behavior and reactions that resulted in early termination of the experiment, and discusses the power of situational factors in altering the subject’s expected behavior (Zimbardo 116-117). Similarly, in “The My Lai Massacre,” Herbert C. Kelman and V. Lee Hamilton summarize this atrocious crime committed by the U.S. military; furthermore, they