That’s basically the whole idea of forming a country. To protect “us” from “them,” which at the very least entails a belief that we are more worthy of living than are they.
I think your difficulty is in squaring this with the idea of an over-arching objective morality that applies to everyone everywhere. However, the two ideas are easily reconciled–there is no such thing as an over-arching objective morality that applies to everyone everywhere. There’s just us and them. I am an us, so I want us to win.
I rather disagree. The point is that Dio wanted to portray everyone else as mad killers, and rather unhealthily enjoyed it by creating false equivelancies. You may argue I broke board rules in pointing this out, but they are quite relevant. But let it be as you wish.
I’d like to use an example to show you why I think your statement is wrong and dangerous: Rwanda
Now, bare with me because I’m doing this from memory. In Rwanda, you had two groups: Tutsis and Hutu. They were able to establish an “us vs them” mentality and slaughter each other. But the reality of the situation was that the distinction was entirely arbitrary. The German and Belgian colonizers created the distinction based on things like the size of someone’s nose, meaning that half of the family members might be Hutu and the other half Tutsis. Never the less, the distinction stuck and they were able to conduct mass genocide of people that were actually themselves. There was no us vs them, just us. But as soon as you’re able to look at your neighbour and say, “that guy is a cockroach that needs to be sqashed” it becomes a lot easier to kill him.
The fact that so many American civilians view Iraqi civilians in that way, how can you expect them to welcome you as liberators? bin Laden has no problem hiding in Afghanistan/Pakistan because they have the same us vs them attitude. And why shouldn’t they?
I personally believe that if we (the generic Western version) were able to reduce this tribal behaviour it would have a dramatic impact on how we view conflicts. It becomes a lot less palatable to bomb a random country when you start to view them as “us” instead of “them.”
You missed at bit there. American life (mine, my families, etc.) being more important (to me) than a foreigner’s makes it okay to go shoot him how? Less important doesn’t mean unimportant, and, perhaps unlike you, I need to rank things in my head. You may be more enlightened than I am, and you can make decisions without value judgments, but I need to compare things before I jump ahead, and that means that some things will be valued higher than others.
The current Iraq war is probably a fair example of my point of view. It is as idiotic seeming to me as it was when it was being pushed for. Every death there is as horrible as every other. However, I still value the lives of the Americans, especially the ones I know, more than I value those of the other allies or those of the Iraqis.
Is that really such an odd thing to you? Would care as much about the death of a nameless guy fighting for his side as you would about the death of a college buddy? If you don’t feel the same way about these two deaths, then you have valued their lives differently. Does valuing your friend more than the nameless guy mean you want to send your friend around the world to kill the nameless guy? No? Then why would I want to send my friends around the world to kill people nameless to me?
To bring this back to the debate at hand a bit, Hitler’s kids are at a valid military target whenever Hitler is with them. If Hitler really wants to protect his offspring from the horrors of war, he will situate them far from anything that has to do with the war, and never visit them. To go further, if Hitler had his 12 year old in charge of the Hitler youth’s AA guns, then the kid himself would be a valid military target. In all cases, it would be a tragedy that kids were caught up in the ugliness of war.
As far as us versus them, you, and Rand, are come at it from the opposite direction I am. Us is not the policy driver, but the result of the policy at the individual level. The Hutus and Tutsis at the street level did not have much choice in what side they ended up on. The failure did not occur after the massacres started, but before, when the members of what would become the two sides did nothing to keep themselves from the mess they ended up in.
Iraq is the mess it is because we forgot what us versus them means, and we did nothing to use it to our advantage. In the first Iraq war, us was the entire world, them was handful of greedy politicians. In the second us was America and few close friends we conned or bullied into following us, them was the people of Iraq who didn’t see us as their heroic liberators. For some reason this still does not make me value Americans equally with anyone else.
I would freely engage in collateral damage and the slaughter of innocents - if I didn’t, it would just encourage the “bad guys” to surround themselves with innocents. If I maintain a strict policy of “Kill 'em all and let Odin sort 'em out”, then the terrorists or whoever will have no reason to use any innocents as human shields (except prisoners of war), and thus, innocent caualties may be reduced.
There may be a reason nobody’s ever asked me to run their country…
So here is the part you are missing, and this should help enlighten you: When your buddy dies in a war you feel sympathy, and when an unknown dies in a war, you currently feel nothing, he is unknown to you, so you don’t bother to care. As an indication of that lack of emotion, your local paper will put a photo of your college buddy on the cover, but gloss over the fact that so many unknowns are dieing. What you need to start feeling is empathy. What ever you feel for your buddy, you need to recognize is being felt by HIS buddies.
The result should be that when you hear about a bombing in an Iraqi market, you will quickly realize that people feel exactly as you would if the bombing was local. If a US war plane destroys an apartment complex, your reaction should be, “holy shit, imagine if they blew up MY apartment complex?! I’d be pissed!”
To put it in a more visceral tone: every day Iraqis experience 9/11. That should allow you to empathize with what’s going on, and shift your line of reasoning to, “us and them are EQUALLY important.” Thus, more care is required when starting, conducting, and maintaining a military engagement.
Here, again, you take less and more to the extremes. It’s really annoying. Less does not mean nothing. More does not mean only. You’re also wrong, when my buddy dies, I feel grief, when your buddy dies, I feel sympathy. Nothing I’ve said means I lack empathy, just that I rank these emotions. Do you take issue with the rank I give them, or do you take issue with the open discussion of ranking them?
Oddly my reaction is more along the lines of boy, I bet the guys who flew that mission are fucked up about this. Or do you actually think that the bombers and the planners really wanted to blow up that complex? Then I feel bad for the people who lost their friends, family and homes, then I feel relieved that it was far away, then I feel bad about feeling relieved, then I wonder what this is going to do to relations with the nation this happened in. You may only have a simple reaction to it, but, well, I’m not enlightened enough to reduce the varying and different emotions I have to a single point.
See, here’s the problem. I’m talking about the on-going existing combat, from a low-level point of view. You’re talking about the process that led there. If you think I agree with that process, then you need to reread my posts. Once the conflict has started it is us versus them. It isn’t really a nice thing, but it’s a hell of a lot better than good versus evil, which boils down to the same thing, but lets you off the hook morally, because, obviously, you’re good.
The first hypotheticals are unrealistic and stupid. From a combat or military standpoint, defend your idea that setting a 4 year old on fire would or could save even one soldier. The idea is meant to be, if you’ll pardon the pun, inflammatory but real world? It’s high-order bullshit and you know it.
Same with the baby scenario. In no way would raping a baby save even one life, ever.
The OBL scenario is a better, more realistic one and yes, with my heart in a shattered pile of red glass I would blow up that school, and it would create such unreasonable hatred and anger within me for people like OBL that I could scarcely contain it. Which is why we’re in this mess in the first place.
And I will go as far as saying it would be OK to kill the wife and kids even if the main target was not in the area. Hitler, or whomever we are really talking about here, already made that decision for them.
[QUOTE=FinnAgain;1142739That is even sillier.
When one side says it’s a war and starts dropping bombs, well… it’s a war.
What, you think that only mutually agreed upon wars ‘count’?[/QUOTE]
So we DID formally declare war. I did not know that. Or are you saying that any time a head of state orders his military to attack someone that it is A-OK? Like if the president of Iran ordered a missile strike on Peoria, killing hundreds, including a Chief of Staff, then it is OK?
Through all of recorded history, wars were, in fact, fought even if they were not officially declared. And yes, Congress did authorize the use of military force. You can parse that however you want, I suppose.
Yes, that is exactly what I said.
Also, that tyrannosaurs make good eatin’ and my colony of pixies and elves give me endless amusement.