In reading your analysis of Arya VI and the historical parallels that might attempt to “explain” Tywin’s actions, could we not look towards the US’s brutal occupation of South Vietnam and the rural concentration camps (“strategic hamlets”) created there by the US military? Considering GRRM’s conscientious objector status, and how he’s woven other American historical atrocities into ASOIAF (Reconstruction, slavery, its cruel and callous foreign policy, etc.), am I reaching here?

I think that’s a fair guess – certainly, GRRM seems to have been marked by his own time and the war in Vietnam laid a long shadow over his generation. 

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