Was going to hash this out in GD but I got too angry and decided that the intellectual laziness and resulting smarmy self-righteousness of some of the posts were not worthy of rational address nearly as much as they were of public ridicule.
First of all:
This is absolutely fucking asinine. Peter Morris seems to be under the impression that soldiers pick and choose their targets the same way outlaws do. That’s just stupid. The culprits in a murder are the triggerman and those who facilitate the killing and the killer’s egress. The culprits in a war are the politicians—the guys WITHOUT the guns. In fact, the guys without the guns have proven their willingness to PICK their gunmen when volunteers are in short supply. You’re a pacifist? Point your finger at the politicians who promote death over discourse. Oh and by the way, you’ll need to be looking beyond your borders to find most of them so I suggest you brush up on your linguistic skills and regional world history so you are of some kind of intellectual stature to persuade the leaders of one group, on their own terms, that it’s wrong to kill those whom they see as undesirable. Wait…that was pretty complicated. Might actually require a bit of effort to become conversant in Arabic, Farsi, Kurdish, Turkoman, Assyrian, & Armenian and to actually grok the subtleties of the cultures represented by those languages, let alone the roots of conflict between the ethnicities that share those languages. Let’s just make things simple ok? Rather than become knowledgeable and broker a peaceful solution, let’s just point our fingers at the guys with the guns and say, “Murderer!” Never mind that our own leaders are too lazy to work with the troubled groups to stop the bloodshed, it’s so much easier to point at the gun instead of the gunman. Never mind that the happiest soldier is the one who’s not killing someone.
And constanze, your entire post reeks of kool-aid. You speak about military discipline as though you are an authority on the subject—how it turns people into unemotional killers and how people are unable to think for themselves in the absence of orders—but it’s clear that you don’t have a fucking clue what you’re talking about. The false authority you advance is disgusting in its ignorance and vacuity. You spew drivel about people being turned into non-thinking, soulless machines who can’t function without someone else pulling their strings, and then have the gall to back that up with shit that is so transparently theoretical it’s clear that whoever spoon-fed it to you didn’t really understand what they were saying either. Dick.
But the soldiers are the culprits too. Nope. No more than garbage men are the reason for landfills. Military personnel are those of us who recognize that politicians can’t always solve the world’s problems verbally and that it takes more than a wish to have a standing army. It’s a horrible job but somebody’s got to do it. Let’s assume SSG Schwartz loves to eat the beating hearts of the enemy even as that vision accompanies them into oblivion. So what? He wouldn’t be allowed to do it if there wasn’t a demand. And he’s not in a position to create the demand. He’d just be a garbage man who loves his job.
**If someone was to invade my country, I’d be willing to fight and kill them. **You’d be willing but you wouldn’t get very far without the training given to the career soldier you’d be fighting. You’d be a dead patriot before the sun set. The blood oozing from your charred corpse would be reeking with testosterone and love of country, but it’d still be oozing from your charred corpse. We make war horrible for one reason: to make someone think twice about starting it. (My biggest problem with having a deserter in the White House, but that’s another thread)
Wait, I don’t get the point - are you claiming that a soldier who kills in wartime bears no culpability for the killing at all? 'cause that is just dumb.
If by “culpable” you mean “to wantonly participate in an unjustified action unsupported by a society”, then that’s exactly what I’m saying.
The soldier kills those assigned as The Enemy. He intentionally pulls the trigger, but it would be laughable to suggest that mercy is an option once the soldier has been deployed to the battlefield.
Culpable: meriting condemnation, censure or blame, especially as something wrong, harmful or injurious; blameworthy
Destroying an identified enemy, as defined by the governing body employing the soldier, does not merit condemnation, censure or blame. Given the role of a soldier, NOT destroying the enemy is the definition of culpability.
My Lai continues to be used in military education as an example of all kinds of military discipline breakdowns. Thanks for bringing it up, because it demonstrates the need for soldiers to be rational, thinking professionals and not killing machines.
I am of mixed emotions about that. Inigo, you are basically saying it is right and proper for soldiers to surrender moral judgement to to the state, and let the state decide who is a legitimate target for death. And even further, that reasons for killing those targets and destroying certain goods and properties useful in a war, also justify killing some indefinite amount of not-targeted-people as collateral damage, because of their proximity ot “legitimate” targets.
I just can’t buy this as completely acceptable. This leads to things like gassing Jews on the one hand, and fire bombing Japanes cites from the air on the other.
I think soldiers MUST be culpable for they damage they personally do, not in a legal sense but on a moral one. It is this willingness to surrender moral judgement of issues of life and death, and kill at the behest of others, that makes war possible.
MMmmmnnnnno. Don’t think I addressed collateral damage directly, and I think you would be hard-pressed to demonstrate that collateral damage doesn’t play a role in modern warfare decisions. We don’t carpet bomb cities anymore.
So…no soldiers, no wars? I’m pretty sure that’s not what you mean. The fact the My Lei is still relevant, and the existence of the ideas of “lawful” and “unlawful” orders answers the moral obligations of soldiers to be accountable for what they do. If I’m in a combat zone, I am obliged to kill certain people, and obliged to try NOT to kill others. I don’t think I ever implied, “Woo Hoo! It’s a war and I get to check my soul at the door!” That’s the kind of crap constanze was advancing.
No, just wedding parties and other innocent civilians but there again they aren’t real people - just “collateral damage” in modern warfare terminology. Having said that if you personally are Army, then at least you can see the consequences of your actions up close. Air Forces on the other hand…technology doesn’t stop AF personnel from being baby killers - it just insulates them from it. Cowards flying high, bombing people who cannot fight back.
And well done on not carpet bombing cities full of civilians. hearty handshake
“Collateral damage” has been reduced in scale, but not eliminated. The fact remains that an important enough target (how this is decided, I couldn’t tell you) will be hit even if there is a high probability that innocents will be killed.
And frankly, the reason collateral damage has been reduced has more to do with the precision of weapons rather than moral judgement about killing innocents. It’s agrueable, I suppose, that precision weapons have been developed to reduce civilian casualties, but most of the history I’ve read about them is that they were developed to reduce our own casualties. You hit a target the first time with one or a very few weapons, and you don’t have to keep repeating the mission and exposing your own troops again and again until you finally get a hit.
Peter Morris is incapable of engaging anyone rationally on any controversial point. Look at the threads about James Randi. Best to ignore him so as not to hijack the thread.
That being said, I basically agree with you, Inigo. Unless you believe there shouldn’t be an army at all it’s pretty silly to compare soldiers to murderers. If you believe there should be an army, even if only for national defence, then no moral culpability attaches to soldiers, only to politicians who start dubious wars. An Army where every mission had to be vetted by every single soldier would be worse than useless. Better not to have one at all.
I find this deeply disturbing. At least half of military actions are unjustified, since if one side is “right” then the other is not. In many cases they are both wrong. Sometimes it’s up to the people with the guns to decide to either say “no” or point them in the other direction. Otherwise soldiers are just pawns, which I think is demeaning.
Do you know anything about the U.S. military or any military in history for that matter? This is one of the most idiot and ignorant statements in SDMB history. Soldiers are pawns as are almost everyone that works in corporate America and elsewhere for that matter. In the military, you can’t just refuse orders unless they are illegal. You can end up in military prison for that. They are all volunteers anyway so there is no reason become a pacifist once actual battle starts. Battles are two sided and you have to protect both your own life and the lives of your fellow soldiers as well regardless of the current foreign policy. To claim otherwise is crazy.
There’s a phrase which perfectly describes some wars, and most soldier’s actions in those wars. “Necessary evil.” Both words are important and neither can be dismissed. You don’t think the act of taking lives in the line of duty is an evil? Talk to some soldiers who have done it. Clearly, when dealing with a species as violent and domineering as humans, it is sometimes necessary. That doesn’t absolve the act of its evil nature.
Soldier are indeed pawns, and that’s why war works. They kill, and are killed by orders from above that they dare not disobey, even of they want to, which most of them don’t. And the vast majority of society is ok with this. And I suppose it is demeaning to the soldiers, but it just as demeaning to virtually everyone else in society. It is a problem of the human condition.
I think it’s an interesting question whether this is a learned behavior or something inherent in human nature – this willingness to surrender your will and most or all of your moral judgement to a higher authority. I suspect it’s learned, and can be unlearned, or never taught, if societies had any real incentive to get rid of their militaries. But I’m just guessing.
Thank you, it’s nice to be outstanding at something. Do I know anything about the military in history? Sure, the Germans killed 10 million civilians in WWII, 618,000 Americans died in the Civil war, Pol Pot and his army killed off about 25% of his countrymen. I guess I don’t see that as an argument for continuing to do things the same way. In my view a German soldier would have been right to refuse to carry out orders and risk death or prison. I find it hard to think you don’t agree.
“War, Nobby. Huh! What is it good for?” he said.
“Dunno Sarge. Freeing slaves, maybe?”
“Absol - well, okay.”
“Defending yourself against a totalitarian aggressor?”
"All right, I’ll grant you that, but - "
“Saving civilization from a horde of -”
“It doesn’t do any good in the long run is what I’m saying, Nobby, if you’d listen for five seconds altogether,” said Fred Colon sharply.
“Yeah, but in the long run, what does, sarge?”
Terry Pratchett, Thud!
Hope people caught the joke in the first three lines.
You are a smart enough guy yet I don’t agree. Someone is always going to be there to take your place and if you have a family, you might as well do it yourself. As mentioned above, humans are an exceptionally aggressive group when it comes to our own species. Wars will never end because of our nature. Soldiers have to do what they are told. The U.S. Civil War was especially brutal because we fought brother against brother but it still had to be done. If I could go back in history, I would personally fly to Japan to drop the nukes. It needed to be done and that is simply the last cog on a very large wheel. I wouldn’t feel bad if I was one of the scientists developing the project either.
One soldier essentially defecting is not going to get anyone anywhere except for a transient sense of self-rightousness. There are 20 year olds underseas in nuclear subs ready to launch nuclear warheads right now as well as those in land bases. I have met many of them. They aren’t bad people. The U.S. has the honor or being the biggest clan in the world. We protect our own which is good because foreign invaders are always around the corner based on previous history.