Symbols of power, structures of violence

Axes of power in the My Lai massacre.

Acts of violence committed by a group reveal the social prejudices held by that group. The victim or victims of group violence are often seen or portrayed by the perpetrators of violence as fundamentally different from the perpetrators: less valuable, less powerful, less human. In hurting the designated ‘other’, the group enacts power and demonstrates its shared values. Group violence in the context of war is therefore not solely concerned with the combat situation but with the shared social situation of the group. Locating the symbols of power enacted in violence by groups of soldiers thus sheds light on the particular hierarchies in the soldiers’ country. The My Lai massacre, for example, demonstrates power structures entrenched in the Vietnam War – era United States. The moment of the massacre can be used as a lens through which to view broader trends of socially mandated structures of oppression and signifiers of power in the Vietnam War and in American culture at the time. This essay will point to racial, gendered and colonial or imperial acts of violence at the moment of My Lai, and relate them to the wider experiences – military and civilian – of American soldiers, showing that these methods of violence acted as symbols of power that flowed through the cultural fabric of the United States.