Gigi-
I have respect for you for being consistent in your views in your last post. At least you are honest.
There is such a thing as natural law. Laws that are dictated by logic and reason.
There are such things as inalienable rights that reside in every human being as a result of these natural laws. None of this has anything to do with the concept of war crimes.
Don’t confuse the sick fucks that raped that young Iraqi and then mudered the entire family and burned their house for war criminals, they are just rapist/murderer/arsonists.
War crime is reserved for the illegal (or immoral) use of war or the illegal (or immoral) conduct of the war. For example, if your men rape the women, they are rapists, if you tell your men to rape all the women to cow the population and to breed out the opposition, you are a war criminal. Actions like refusing to accept surrender, killing your POWs because they are slowing you down, genocide, systematic castration, rape camps fall into the area of war crimes.
My firm sent my friend to the Rwandan war crimes tribunal as a prosecutor and there was a lot of debate among the prosecutors about not diluting the definition of war crimes. The sickest story I heard about the tribal wars down there was what they would do with the male prisoners of war down there. They would line them all up, strip the first guy and tie him to a chair. Then they would tell the next guy in line to bite off the first guys nutsack, if he refused, they would shoot him in the head, if he bit off the first guy’s nutsack, they would strip HIM and tie him to a chair and tell the next guy in line to bite off the second guy’s nutsack. They did this until everyon was dead or had their nutsacks bitten off.
There is no such thing as natural law. Proof of this is that “reason and logic” seem to have a knack of coming up with widely contradictory laws depending on the age and society in which they are developed.
There are no inalienable rights, save for those a given society affords its own members.
If you wish to claim otherwise you have some work ahead of you.
Perhaps you could offer some examples of “natural laws” and “inalienable rights”, bearing in mind that to qualify a law would have to hold equally across time and geography (and not just be examples of modern Western democracy’s conception of “natural law”).
Well I guess Aristotle is the first person I can think of who mentioned the idea to include natural law and natural rights. The fact that despots and tyrants have ingored these laws and rights for centuries doesn’t make them any less legitimate does it? I mean are our right really just stuff we picked out of a hat. Are the commonalities in laws all around the world just a coincidence?
Short answer is “yes”, I’m afraid.
There will of course be common areas of human laws etc - much of how we see the world is based on our genetic inheritance - but at given times, in given societes, each of these laws has and will be broken to suit.
Although not a sympathetic character, Thrasymachus in The Republic hit the nail on the head when he says “Justice is the interest of the strongest”… essentially that morality is decided by those who hold the power.
The laws we hold as “universal” are anything but… a glance at history will show that laws and morality are entirely contingent, and cannot be tied down to immutable universals.
It’s an uncomfortable thought, and it’s this gap that religion seeks to fill (by providing an external legitimacy to our moral deliberations) but the cold hard facts are that morality is a product of human interaction, and therefore alters its shape depending on the particular nature of the humans who create it.
I guess we disagree. I think there is such a thing as natural law, a norm of rights and obligations that we all have to respect in order to have a functioning and equitable society.
Murder actually means intentional,illegal killing.
Not just killing somebody.
I have the utmost respect for all soldiers of the alliance armies ,though I must confess to a slight bias here .
But I read somewhere a quote from a whorey old NCO from the Korean War
,
“In my day a hero was someone who charged a machine gun nest on his own with a bag of grenades and a bayonet between his teeth ,nowadays its someone who simply turns up” and Im afraid I must agree.
We have devalued the word “Hero”.
/south park
War is bad, mmmmmkay.
/south park
So everyone alive is a murderer? :rolleyes: Horay, that solved nothing.