Ok, fine, I mixed up your posts and jlziana’s posts.
Fine. You wrote :
And I read : NOT the administration of said order. My mistake, once again.
This one is totally lame. If you prefer, we can carry one the argument in French. I will certainly makes much less spelling mistakes. Don’t forget to write IraK, though, in this case. Or perhaps you should write the name in Arabic, in which case, we’ll both get the correct spelling.
First a soldier who rapes can perfectly be following an order.
For the rest, I already wrote several times everything I think on this topic. Following an order don’t absolve you of your responsability. Whether or not the act is considered a war crime. And had the Axis won WWII, the dresden bombings would surely have been considered war crimes, for instance.
If it’s vile, it’s vile, whether you are the guy saying “pull the trigger” or the guy pulling the trigger. The guy saying “turn this city in rubbles” or the guy droping the bombs. The guy saying “rape the women” (and this was used as a deliberate policy in Yugoslavia) or the guy raping the women.
Of course, now, I don’t know anymore if it’s you or jlzania who wrote that the helicopter attack was vile.
And finally, if you’re ordered to “take out a B-52 bomber” in an unjust war, your action is still morally bankrupt. Loving your country isn’t any excuse for killing people when you’re the bad guy.
Are you sorry that he tortured people or are you sorry that he was my friend?
I’m often envious of people who see the world as entirely black or entirely white.
As I get older, I see more and more shades of gray.
You may find this hard to understand but Paul was an unfortunate young man who found himself in a very bad place in a very bad time.
I am confident that he has never hurt anyone physically again.
And he personally suffered enormously as a result of what he’d done.
There’s a new novel out that’s on my summer reading list called “The Dew Breaker”.
From the reviews I read, it’s the story of a girl in New York,a Haitian immigrant who discovers that her kind and beloved father was actually one of Pappa Doc’s henchmen.
For years she had been convinced that he had been one of his victims.
It just gets so much more complex than good vs. bad.
And no, there’s no justification for torture in my book but then, I can come up with only once or two scenerio’s that validate invading and occupying another country or asking people to die or kill in the name of my government and way of life.
How convenient that a person who could have been responsible for the act commited happens to find himself out of the reach of any court. Especially since he could perhaps have some embarrassing things to say.
However, what you say isn’t really correct. The Irakis courts would definitely be competent for a crime commited in their territory. The fact that he isn’t going to be handed to the Irakis is a different issue.
And I believe that the american courts are competent for crimes commited by american citizen in foreign countries. Someone could certainly tell us for sure.
The International criminal court wouldn’t be competent, indeed since Iraq didn’t sign the treaty creating it.
Elucidator: my name has nothing to do with jar jar binks, and I’m just repeating the quote as I heard it.
clair: get a hold of yourself. As much as I disagree with this war, there are several thousands who do agree with it. YOU are not the deciding factor in whether a war is unjust or not…which brings us back to the beginning where you shouldn’t be spitting on returning soldiers or calling them babykillers.
It’s Chicagoan. Drives me nuts to hear my kids use it, as I come from up by you where folks speak ENGLISH, but I’ve had to accept it. Ya move to a foreign country and you can’t expect your kids to hold onto the old traditions.
And Claire, you spell beautifully. Too well, in fact, as you are another of those Europeans who write English better than 95% of Americans. Could you French it up some more? You know, add some Edith Piaf éclat?
I don’t see the world in black and white. But you see, the case of your friend is certainly not unique. Most certainly, a lot of people who commited war crimes were “unfortunate young men who found themselves in a very bad place in a very bad time”.
If you think that your former friend shouldn’t be held responsible for what he did, the wide majority of people who committed war crimes couldn’t be, either. Actually it would probably be true for other kind of crimes, too. A serbian soldiers who has participated in executions and turned himself over has been sentenced to something like 7 or 10 years by the court in the Hague. Despite his remorse, despite him having been at the lowest level of responsability.
What applies to others applies to your friend. Except if for some reason you believe that he’s a special case. Something that the mothers or spouses of the militaries involved in these actions in the Iraki jails certainly think too about concerning their daughter or husband. But this doesn’t prevent us from condemning their actions.
Torturing prisonners is still a crime, and still result (or should result) in sentencings, even when the torturers are otherwise relatively good people. Which is the case generally speaking. There has been an interesting and quite famous study about a german reserve police unit involved in various crimes during WWII. For the most part, they were “good guys” too.
And as for his suffering, since I don’t know him, I can only think first about what his victims suffered and what they probably still suffer now, if they survived and are still alive. You can’t place the criminal’s suffering on the same level than the victim’s sufferings if you’re a neutral observer.
That’s not relevant to the discussion at hand, but I’ve been in the opposite situation concerning my father. But I knew his story too late, and I never could get past this.
And then? Should I not express any opinion because I’m not the POTUS? Then, I’m not sure why anybody on this board discuss any issue at all.
You’re believing that as soon as a government has decided that a war is mandated, everybody should forget about their own moral judgment because there are some people who approve said war? And that everybody should cheer for the soldiers? Even if you’re convinced that the people who are in the right are the ones these soldiers are going to kill? There are situations where the correct thing to do would not be to call your soldiers “baby killers” but to plainly shot at them.
Besides, I never made any statement about whether this particular war was just or not.
She doesn’t specified “legal orders” and criminal acts can perfectly be legal in some places. Besides, it doesn’t change my point, which his that legal or not, order or not, if an action is vile, the person committing it has to accept his share of the responsability.
Actually, I’m not trying to absolve him of anything.
However, I do make a distinction between systematic genocide in a concentration camp and a soldier thrust into a war doing whatever he thought necessary to extract the information he needed to protect his life and the lives of his comrades.
Do I think that there is ever a rationale for torture?
No.
And I’d like to believe that I’m incapable of ever torturing anyone.
Period.
But then I ask myself what I would do if my life and my buddies lifes were on the line daily and I thought that I could save them by extracting information from an enemy.
If I’d questioned them for days with no results and the bodies were stacking up,
would I beat them if I thought it would save my friends?
Would I humilate and degrade them if it would get me the answers I needed.
I sure hope not.
I heard an interview once with the man that wrote Schindler’s List.
He opined that both Schindler and the concentration camp commandant would have had very similiar lives had WWII not happened.
They would have both been adulterers and shady businessmen with alcohol problems.
However, the war transformed one into a hero and the other into a monster.
This may not seem relevent to you either,clairobscur, but it is.
War transforms people and changes their lives which is why I firmly believe that the only possible reason for going to war is in self-defense.
clair, I’m going to go ahead and let you carry on in all your self righteous glory where every soldier is allowed to make moral decisions on every action, and every killing is a war crime unless you say so. I rest comfortably knowing that I am making sense to a FEW people at least…which is slightly more than I can say for you.
But let me say this. The whole start of this ‘just following orders’ discussion was in response to my belief that I should not accost, assualt or verbally abuse soldiers returning from the war…ANY war, whether I believe in the war or not. Yes, I can protest the war, I can write to my congressman, I can put a peace sign in my window, I can vote for officials that will NOT continue the war, but in my opinion, the soldiers have seen enough and been through enough to know what they are doing is right or wrong, and particularly in the case of Vietnam, a lot of them didn’t have a choice in whether they went to war or not.
