I think you are wrong. Man is exceptionally aggressive because of testosterone. It is not the species. It is the male of the species.
It is time we start thinking of ways to see all peoples as “our own.” They are our species.
I do not blame just the soldiers or the decision makers in government. I am a pacifist and have been for most of my life. Yet I pay my federal income tax. I’ve never had the courage not to pay it. Am I not just as responsible?
Damn Zoe, I have always adored you but you just took a serious break from reality. The reason females have not always been as aggressive and violent as males is because they weren’t allowed to. There are plenty of females in both the officer and enlisted ranks these days including some bomber and fighter pilots. Have you ever worked in a seriously tilted female environment? I have including now. Nothing was directed towards me because I was one of the only males but the level of aggression that females can direct towards each other is brutal. I have to coach my wife against such aggression because the screaming telephone calls wake up the kids.
yup. Anyone who thinks that only males are violent is delusional.
Females can be vicious.
Note where it doesn’t say anything there about society’s support
You’re sort of arguing by assertion here. The hidden assumption being that what society wants is equivalent to what is moral. Which is so often not the case.
Moral actors never give up their moral culpability for voluntary associations. It is only those who are compelled (conscripts) who lose some (but not all) culpability
But they (the grunts, that is) were following orders, like you want them to.
He’s a game. Think of all the female leaders that have ever been. Then see how many had peaceful, uneventful reigns. Take your time.
That is absolutely wrong. Following orders is no excuse, that was established at Nuremburg. The individual soldier might not have the big picture, and of course you tend to trust your command, but if it is you pulling the trigger or pulling the switch you ARE responsible. How often do the politicians or the public not even know what bad shit is happening? Do you really think SS troops executing Jews were not responsible because Hitler ordered the exterminations, regardless of capital punishment or other people willing to do the job?
NB: I’m German, and I’d like to think that we learned something from our past. The Europeans in general seem to have. And we were the ones in the foreign invader environment, not you guys. As of now these days are hopefully over.
Which is exactly what U.S. soldiers are taught and have been for at least as long as I have been involved with it (20 years). Soldiers are taught that their responsibility to not follow a lawful order is at least as important as their duty to follow lawful orders.
But the notion that soldiers should be able to decide when and how they are used is ridiculous. Civilian control of the military is a much better idea then soldiers deciding for themselves. You can vote out the civilians. You can’t vote out the military.
Pavlichenko … 309 confirmed kills
And god save the SS units that ran into the female infantry units armed with PPSH … hell hath no fury as a woman defending her children…Not to mention the 3 all female bomber units, and the tanker units.
Just because you switched from carpet bombing to so-called “intelligent bombs” doesn’t do away with collateral damage. Did your news not report about the many dead Iraqui civilians? From WWII on, the US military has heavily relied on the use of Air Force to save US soldiers lives over the lives of foreign civilians.
I wasn’t advancing it. My Lei is still relevant because the US Military didn’t learn anything about and from it, and so it’s being repeated. See Abu Ghrabi. See endless reports out of Iraq about soldiers attacking and raping and killing civilians. The stress int he army is on obeying orders from above, that comes first. And how many times are US Soldiers taught about the Geneva convention, for example? I’ve never seen any of the US military dopers here mentione that “we wouldn’t do that, that’s inconceivable because of the Geneva convention” - apparently, they don’t know about it. The only mention is how the UCMJ would punish certain behaviours - but I didn’t find any mention on how to treat civilians.
As for being mindless killers - I guess those reports I saw of US soldiers that play hard rock while firing on people from their tanks are all lies, or tendential, or something? Fact is, the more of the “designated, lawful targets” a solider kills, the better a soldier he is, right or wrong?
Yah, like Boudicca defending her children by massacring the civilian populations of Colchester, London and St Albans.
So whose fault was My Lai and Abu Ghraib? Who ordered the bombing with Napalm in Vietnam? Who ordered shooting at buses during road checks - the politicans or the Army officers?
And there’s a big deal of difference (though you might not know that from your own army) as to how you train your soldiers, and how you decide to lead your war, once the politicans found it necessary to start one. If you see armies as a kind of “World Police”, there are differences to what cops do, too.
You can say beforehand, from politicans and from the constiution, that even in war, certain kind of methods won’t be used to win, that some costs are too high if you want to stay “good guys”. That’s things like the Geneva convention, which the US doesn’t seem to have heard about, judging from actions in the Vietnam war up until Iraq.
You can train soldiers to be effiecient at killing, and to obey their officers and the UCMJ, and nothing else. Then things like My Lai and Abu Ghraib happen, where two scapegoats are punished, and the rest goes on as usual. You can promote boot camp and macho culture as being ultimate in soldiering to be hard and tougth and not have sentimental emotions for the enemy (who is after all really bad guy, otherwise you wouldn’t fight them).
Or you can train soldiers to obey orders and what the Geneva convention means and that certain orders are not allowed. You can tell them that the other side are people too. Then you have a standing citizens army (since it sadly is necessary in todays world) of people who want to obey the constitution, not an army of professionals who sign up for money to possibly kill people.
Or
Um, what? I must have missed that part where the US was invaded or in danger of being invaded in the last wars. WWI? WWII? Vietnam? Afghanistan? Iraq? Or do you believe that nonsense “If we don’t fight them over there, we fight them here?”
So My Lai and Abu Ghraib and the dozens of incidents in Iraq that journalists report on (but the Army doesn’t prosecute) happened on lawful orders. Since only a handful of scapegoats not responsible for giving orders were put on trial afterwards. And since one of the politicans in administration (Dick Cheney or Rumsfeld, I think, but I can’t remember) said before the attack on Iraq that the “gloves would come off”, the soldiers knew that torturing people was acceptable to the US.
So is following lawful orders the problem - since the UCMJ doesn’t seem to forbid these actions against civilians - or that the soldiers don’t recognize that some orders are unlawful? In either case, real occurences that keep happening again and again certainly say to me that the moral training of the US army is deficient.
Uh.
Remember those times when the governing bodies employing soldiers decided that “All those civilians over there” were identified enemies?
Likewise, I suppose that we should cease the practice of handing out medals to soldiers, and instead give them to the politicians? After all, if no blame is attached when fighting men commit acts of villianry, why should praise be given when they perform acts of heroism?
It is morally bankrupt and more than a little silly to claim that soldiers cease to become moral agents once they become soldiers. If a soldier commits an immoral act, it is an immoral act, whether or not they were ordered, and whether or not the order was lawful. Soldiers can at times be under terrible pressure to commit immoral acts, yes, but as you say, soldiers are volunteers.
No they didn’t. They happened when soldiers followed unlawful orders. And the soldiers and those who gave those orders were prosecuted. In the many JAG briefings and classes I have had over the years My Lei has usually been used as the main example of an unlawful order. You couldn’t be more wrong.
What about Abu Ghraib?
Hell, what about the firebombing of Dresden, the concentration camps, the gulags, and every other time the legitimate government said “Kill 'em all!”?
I’m sure the lawyers weren’t responsible for this, but William Calley got a slap on the wrist and was out of prison in what? – less than a year IIRC. Nobody else was convicted of anything. Didn’t he get a presidential pardon?
And while I’ve not followed the news stories about court martials related to crimes in Iraq, there seems to be a lot of wrist slapping there too. And I’m not referring to Abu Graib, but to cases of murdering civilians, in some cases prisoners and in some cases out in the street.
I’d be very interested to see the results if anyone is collecting data about the outcomes of courts martial for Iraq-related events.
Of course he is. How the bloody hell could you have an army other than on that basis? You’d just have a group of individuals wandering about, debating when it’s right to kill and who it’s right to kill. They’d still be debating when the enemy slaughtered them.
You as an individual cannot escape moral responsibility for your acts because someone else told you to do it. Period. You certainly may escape legal responsibility and therefor punishment, because society has set the rules as they are. So, what does moral responsibility amount to? If I were religious I would say some kind of divine retribution, but I’m not religious. So for many soldiers the punishment is PTSD, and feelings of guilt for the rest of their lives. And this even for soldiers who felt their cause was just and their actions justifiable. I wonder if it’s any different for soldiers who didn’t particularly identify with their “cause”.
If you have a problem with what happened to Calley you don’t have a problem with the military. He was convicted of murder. He was not pardoned. He did however win appeals at the Federal District Court. The Army appealled it higher. He had the right to appeal just like any other convict. He used it. I don’t agree with what happened but then again I don’t agree with the results of a lot of appeals and judges decisions. But it wasn’t a military judge.