As of recent developments, they are to be treated as enemy combatants. I don’t know where you are going with this. Are you trying to say the US Army should not kill terrorists because it is murder? Are you trying to say that killing by soldiers who phoned in a bomb threat is ok? I miss your point.
Sgt Schwartz
And so the examples would go on. The basic problem is that there is the manual for good upstanding soldiering, and then there is what actually happens. I have no difficulty with the proposition that solders are sometimes good and sometimes do good things. Heck, you could perhaps even slip “mostly” in there somewhere.
But this branch of this thread arose because Sgt Schwartz said “Assholes who detonate bombs where non-combatants are, OTOH, are murderers.”. He stepped out of a well defended base and into a free fire zone.
Are enemy combatants murderers or soldiers when they bomb a pub with soldiers in it if they phoned in a warning? Or is the term too new to be able to say?
I just asked you question. Why do you want to know where I’m going with it? Is your morality and terminology shaped by your strategic goals?
You are correct, Princhester, that was out of line and out of character for me. I was responding to the percieved attacks of one poster.
I will not change my belief that the junior Servicemember commits murder as part of his/her duties. I will accept that murders have been committed by some soldiers in combat zones.
Sgt Schwartz
Bad example.
I’m not sure you’re really looking for a factual answer, but: The international law on that subject was somewhat out of date during WWII - we have to go back to the Hague conventions of 1907, which were more concerned with artillery bombardment. No one had envisioned the effects of saturation bombing. International law moves a bit slow, one could make the case that at least some of the commanders would have been prosecutable for war crimes under the 1949 Geneva conventions, but that’s of course purely academic.
WWII bomber pilots (bombardiers, really) were at least sometimes in the unenviable position of trying to hit relatively small targets with very imprecise means. Even if the “Gomorra” raids over Hamburg were primarily targeting the docks (a completely legal target, even under today’s stricter rules), there was no way to prevent the dock worker neighbourhoods from being reduced to rubble. Which they were.
Also, bombers and crews were not at discretion to choose their targets. They’d (try to) locate and bomb whatever target they were briefed on, and they were not in a position to identify what constituted a valid target and what didn’t. A bomber crew can’t tell a command bunker from a civilian air raid shelter from 20000 ft.
All that aside, it boils down to the following: As long as a soldier is engaging enemy combattants (or people he has reason to believe are combattants), he’s not a murderer. Presumably, they’d do the same to him, right? The soldier has an obligation under international law to prevent civilians from suffering during warfare to the best of his abilities - to the extent that it can be combined with military necessity. That last disclaimer is what makes it possible for any law to exist on this area at all.
Goldhagen’s conclusions are not widely accepted by scholars.
Not at all. I only asked a question based on what Sgt S. said. I never said that what bombers did in WWII was illegal.
I’m wandering a bit here, but if any posts above say or imply that at worst Allied bombing in WWII was guilty of collateral damage to civilian targets while aiming at military facilities, they are flat out wrong. There are numerous resources on the web on the subject, but I thought this quote:
“… it is clear the British execution of area bombing during WWII was indeed willfully and knowingly directed against civilian populations in deliberate and understood violation of traditional norms of war and civilized society.”
… coming as it does from the conclusions of a paper by members of the US military and not from a bunch of revisionist peaceniks might be of particular interest. The rest of the conclusion (and indeed the whole paper) is well worth reading and decidedly on topic as far as the points I have been making in this thread are concerned.
Your point being?
Hmm. I thought I just posted but now it’s not there. Anyway: if you are talking to me, my point being the first line of my last post. Correcting inaccuracies is regarded as a sufficient justification for posting around here, is it not?
Actually I suppose my point was a bit wider than that. Sgt S seemed to be suggesting that those who bomb non-combatants are murderers as opposed to soldiers. I then queried the designation of WWII bomber crews and several responses suggested that they didn’t mean to bomb non-combatants (their point being presumably that they were therefore soldiers and not murderers) but just did so as collateral damage in furtherance of strategy or military necessity. I responded that those goals can be framed so broadly as to justify anything.
My final post went to (1) the fallacy that WWII bomber crews did not target non-combatants and (2) reinforcing by example my point in relation to framing or distorting strategy to encompass the immoral.
I was aware that there was controversy over his conclusions, but I think some of the data and first-hand accounts in the book are valuable nonetheless.
Yep, that’s the crux of it.
By definition almost all countries accept the idea that killing for your country is not murder. However sometimes when a soldier does it ,he gets huge guilt. There are soldiers with serious mental problems as a result. Inside some people it remains wrong but they do not know until they are in the service following orders. Then it is too late.
Another thread on mere semantics has entered the second page. Jeez, what is it with you people and definitions of words?
You also should read Christopher Browning’s “Ordinary Men: Police Batallion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland”, for an alternative view.
The long and the short of it is that moral standards change. Morals are not the same now as they were 20 years ago, much less 60 years ago. Many things that would be considered solidly immoral today were at least “gray area” during WW2, and it’s disingenuous to imply otherwise.
It’s not “disingenuous” if you believe moral standards have improved, not just changed. Indiscriminate killing is wrong now, was wrong then and has always been wrong. Were such common practices in the old days as enslaving the conquered and mass rape moral in the past because the standards of the time claimed they were ?
Actually, if you read the cite in my post #47 you will see that the entire thrust of it is that what was done by the British by way of bombing residential areas was considered immoral at the outbreak of the war, but morality got bent by pragmatism. It’d be disingenuous to imply otherwise. Your post is full of shit.
Thanks for the suggestion! Looking at it on Amazon, it looks interesting.