Question for anyone that shares this belief:
Should the Democratic party adopt this position as a plank in its platform? Why or why not?
I’m not American, so do not care what current crop of priveleged upper-castes is in charge in your country, nor what argumenhts they make to the rest of you to get there.
But - I do have this to say - if the donkey boys did do that, they’d be honest. Stupid, but honest. So of course they won’t, since most politicians are neither.
So supplying food, medical aid, and rebuilding roads and infrastructure for the affected civilian population is all unjustified? If you are going to fight an unjust war, you might as well go all the way? An invading army that attempts to give some aid to the civilian population is equally culpable as an invading army that lets the civilian population all starve?
I rarely find absolutes satisfying.
Things are rarely so straight forward. I find that our policy in Iraq has been utterly moronic, however, I feel that a soldier who shoots an insurgent while on patrol has not commited an immoral act. The insurgents have made clear that their aim is to restore Sunni dominance to the region and they are quite willing to slaughter civilians to make that happen. The foolish thinking that created the instability we now see might be immoral, but why should soldiers trying to stabilize the situation be labeled as immoral?
Would it be moral or immoral to suddenly abandon the Iraqis now? Would pulling all our troops out and allowing Iraq to fall into civil war be the moral thing to do? Is staying and continuing a war that began on false pretenses a moral thing to do? Which course will kill the least number of people?
I don’t know what the absolute moral truth of the matter is. I don’t think anyone does. So what justification is there in labeling all soldiers as immoral?
We ask our soldiers to do things that most of us don’t want to do. We sit back and enjoy the comforts that a stable global economy brings to us and the only cost we pay for it is in taxes. That stability would not exist without a strong US military. At what point do we, as citizens, take responsibilty for what we ask our military to do?
Der Trihs takes the fool’s path. He despise those who serve in what made his comfy life possible. It would be a different world if the US never became a country, or if Germany’s ambitions were not stopped, if the Soviet Union succeeded in pushing a failed economic philsophy across the world, or if the oil did not flow. I have no problem debating the morality of the actions we have taken to get where we are, but let’s not forget that its the majority of Americans who allow those actions to be taken. Blaming the military to do what we ask them to do is unjustified.
If you find me stuck with a flat on the side of the road, pull over, rape me at gunpoint, while your buddy fixes my tyre, does that absolve your buddy of involvement in your crime?
Not equally as culpable, but certainly not “good” by any definition of the word.
Good thing I didn’t use any then. Justice is not binary, nor is ethics.
But… I thought it wasn’t about the oil? :dubious:
In this analogy, let’s assume that Buddy got in my car under the assumption that I was going out to Fight Crime. Buddy agreed to do what I told him to do. Buddy knows that his refusal to do what I tell him to do is not going to change what I do*. Buddy knows that if he refuses to do what I tell him to do, Buddy may be locked away for years or even killed. Buddy knows that if he doesn’t fix the flat tire, the only real result of his refusal will be that the flat tire doesn’t get fixed (and Buddy gets imprisoned or killed). Buddy knows that if he actually tries to stop the rape, he’ll get shot, and you’ll still get raped.
In this case, yes: Buddy is absolved of involvement in my crime when he follows my orders and fixes your tire.
I do agree with you that anyone who assists an army in an unjust war shares culpability for the army’s crimes: to this extent, those who network computers, cook meals, play music, build cars, or otherwise assist the military share culpability. However, in some cases–e.g., bringing medical supplies to a bunch of civilians–the culpability for assisting in the war effort (i.e., for helping with propaganda) is vastly outweighed by the credit for actually helping out individual humans.
Refusing to bring someone medical supplies because doing so creates a propaganda success for an invader is going to be precious little comfort to the woman whose husband dies of an infection due to your principled stand.
Daniel
- Note that if Buddy were ordered to assist in the rape instead of change a tire, the analogy would need to be different at this point
There has already been another analogy, but I’ll use this one.
There’s a gang of bank robbers. You drive them to the banks and drive them away. They give you some of the money they steal. You give all of it to charity.
Are your actions moral or immoral?
Or, say you don’t even drive them, you just cook for them in their hideout, and tend their wounds. Or you bring them bullets. Or you bring them blankets. Or you put in the telephone lines.
To me, any action you take on their behalf knowing that these people are bank robbers is immoral. You are helping them rob banks. You are aiding them in immoral acts.
Instead of bank robbers, make them the Mob and your moral problem has just doubled.
No analogy is perfect, and I wouldn’t claim this one is, but I hope it points out one thing. For some of us, it doesn’t matter how removed you are from the actions, if you knowingly help them, you’re acting immorally.
For those who say that the citizens are at fault, I agree with you completely. I don’t get to pawn responsibility for the idiot in the White House off on other people. I didn’t vote for him, but I didn’t keep him from being elected. There is always something more I could have done but didn’t do.
I find the analogy a bit lacking. So let’s say you are a member of a minority tribe in a nation with vast natural resources. Your tribe rules the nation through terror and you have benefited from this by getting a nice government job. A few family friends have vanished when they said something they should not have, but you have done nothing.
Suddenly a foreign nation unfairly accuses your government of a crime which they have not committed. Well, at least a crime they no longer commit. They invade and during the attack your wife is killed and your innocent son badly injured. An invading army medic saves your son’s life.
What a bastard. He should have stopped the war or refused to go.
Meanwhile the majority tribes that your tribe put down for so long are now looking to kill you. The invading army’s presence prevents them from doing so. Of course they are also preventing your tribe from reclaiming power. If the invading army leaves, there will be war. Maybe that would be good for you. Maybe not.
At this point my moral compass gets all confused.
“The actions” should be "immoral actions, and “them” should be “the people who are acting immorally.”
If the military were severely understaffed, would this war have been started? Would Bush have instituted the draft to get it done? That’s a serious question, not a rhetorical one.
Did no-one see the post where I said medical help was the one exception?
No, I’m afraid this is not how I see the analogy - Buddy , while he may already be signed up for your CrimeFighting League, knows* before he gets in the car that you’re actually going out to rape someone. I say he’s culpable for still getting in the car with you. He should have done the jail time, in hopes that without him there, you might not actually be able to leave the garage for your rape-spree. Umm, because you need him to work the gears on the stick-shift (OK, this is where the analogy gets veeery stupid)
- Or, at any rate, had the opportunity to know, given that you’d left your Roadside Rapist’s Manifesto lying about the lair, and anyway, why were you Crimefighting on the Interstate when everyone knows the crimes happen downtown?
I didn’t. Sorry. My speed reading skills are not what they use to be.
Yes. I’m an anti-militarist. Too often militaries get away with appalling crimes because of just the doctrine you assert. You can’t fail to be struck, as you look at the history of the 20th century, how many civilians were killed by militaries – all militaries – and how few soldiers were actually held accountable. And you also can’t fail to be struck by how the concept of “self-defense” has become so elastic that it will excuse just about anything – the war in Iraq being Example A. If I genuinely felt that our army was a defensive army, and that our troops were held accountable for the civilians they killed, I would be a lot more ready with my support.
Skepticism about the military’s behavior and doctrines is sorely lacking in American today. We barricade ourselves behind this idea that soldiers if soldiers follow “the rules of war and the US military code of conduct” then their service is honorable and unimpeachable. We need to be more cynical, and realize that this just-following-orders doctrine is designed to shield both the men and the officers from accountability. Think about it. When a civilian is killed in Iraq, do we launch an independent CSI-style investigation to find out the truth? Of course not. If any investigation is launched at all, it’s the military investigating its own. At the end of the day, we care far more about maintaining the non-accountability of the soldier than we do about the civilians killed.
Make no mistake, our military has killed lots of civilians over the years. And I don’t see Magellan and **Monty ** showing a lot of grief over it.
That’s not an analogy, that’s just a retelling of the current situation.
Why not just call you a jerk? After all, where do you get the idea that I’m a one-trick pony, you jackass?
No, you jackass. That’s why I was flabbergasted. You apparently think your asinine assertion makes sense.
Cooking someone’s food is wrong? What a total jackass!
You can’t conceive of any time when feeding someone is immoral?
From my Iraq thread. The M.O. goes something like this:
-find a word or phrase in the disliked post that’s ambiguous
-argue about what the word really means, when knowing full well what the poster meant by it
-skip the poster’s actual point
Does the phrase “mercenary bodyguard” mean anything to you, poes gevriet?
Makes sense to me. But I guess you need to take your head out of the military’s buttcrack to see it, doos
When it fuels their oppressive occupation, you damn tootin’, gatkruiper
So did he shoot an insurgent, or a civilian? We give him a pass either way, because we allow that a soldier has to make a split-second decision. That’s the nature of war. And that’s what I’m complaining about. When we accept war, we accept what would be, in ordinary life, indefensible. And worse, we become inured to it, and run to put our “support the troops” blinkers on. The military becomes callous, and we become callous.
I’m not unsympathetic to this Benthamite argument, except that I will say it hasn’t played out very well in the past. Would Indochina have been better off without American military intervention? I say yes, beyond a shadow of a doubt, but YMMV.
I’m not labeling soldiers as immoral, I’m simply opposed to people saying that they’re moral (or more properly, beyond morality) just because they’ve put the uniform on. Some are moral, some not.
I don’t personally think our stability and prosperous economy are dependent on a strong military. Rather the opposite, in fact.