Read this. Part of Hitler's plan was to create famines at the east to decimate the local people and provide food for Germans. At least 8 milion of people died in nazi-induced hunger, which makes it as huge tragedy as holocaust - but very few people know about this.

So, I ask again, how is killing 85 % of all crops different?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodlands

So you're saying the Nazi Holocaust and the U.S. invasion of Vietnam are equally onerous, because both involved destruction of crops?

That is comparing fundamentally different things based on a single non-essential concrete.

The most important point: Nazism was an evil fascist ideology that willfully killed millions. The United States has never been that way.

Secondarily, to give a concrete difference: The civillian death toll from Nazism was massively greater than the civillian death toll in Vietnam, even if you are extremely generous in figuring the latter (estimates range from 245,000 to 2 million, per Wikipedia).

> So you're saying the Nazi Holocaust and the U.S. invasion of Vietnam are equally onerous, because both involved destruction of crops?

I think the point was that both the Nazi-induced famine and the US-induced famine (and subsequent contamination) are both war crimes.

> The most important point: Nazism was an evil fascist ideology that willfully killed millions.

No doubt, but it seems that the non-fascist America doesn't seem have been, in this case, much more interested in sparing civilians.

Why is it important to divine which war crimes were more evil?

Far from all Americans who fought in Vietnam were honourable. Look to the Kerry quote posted by shoo. The scene in Full Metal Jacket with the helicopter gunner randomly shooting down farmers? An actual even witnessed by a journalist. It may not be the industrialised conveyor-belt-like method of the Holocaust, but there was the same callousness involved.

No, Vietnam did not have the same callousness involved as an entire nation's effort to wipe out an entire race of people.

Vietnam soldiers were a bunch of misguided young American cannon-fodder that didn't want to be there. Some of them were callous. It was not Nazi Germany.

Most German soldiers in WWII were unaware of the death camps, and were the same kind of mix of volunteers and conscripted youth with nationalistic and idealistic components. If you think it was the "entire nation" that was working towards the Holocaust, you need to read more books and watch fewer action movies.

Keep in mind also that men like Ernest Medina had a one-hour trial and was acquitted across the board, and William Calley was actually given a life sentence... very briefly, until the POTUS himself stepped in and changed it to house arrest, and shortly thereafter gave a full pardon. Meanwhile heroic men like Hugh Thompson were given senatorial censure and publicly hounded. Trying to paint the US portion of the horrors of the Vietnam war as merely the result of 'a few misguided conscripts' is, frankly, obscene. Hell, the journalists covering the war used to call the daily afternoon briefings from the military "The Five O'Clock Follies", due to the sheer amount of CYA bullshit in them.

Edit: Perhaps a question - who do you think is more callous: a soldier who rounds up 'undesirables' and puts them on a train to what they think will end up at a work camp somewhere; or a soldier who shoots unarmed, unthreatening civilians for either entertainment (door gunner) or some sense of revenge (My Lai massacre)? This is what I mean when I say similar callousness was involved.

Not to mention the CIA Phoenix Program death squads, whose methods were similar to the Gestapo's or the NKVD's.