One can object to a war without objecting to war.
That part is covered by the UCMJ (well, illegal rather than unjust)
I’m not equating them, I’m talking about universal ethical principles.
Proof we lost the Vietnam War:
Private John Winger: “So we’re all dogfaces, we’re all very, very different, but there is one thing that we all have in common: we were all stupid enough to enlist in the Army. We’re mutants. There’s something wrong with us, something very, very wrong with us. Something seriously wrong with us - we’re soldiers. But we’re American soldiers! We’ve been kicking ass for 200 years! We’re 10 and 1!”
This goes back to soldiers not being the ones to question orders. A soldier can’t just decide which assignment he/she wants to take based on his/her own viewpoint. Not everyone thinks the same and it would create chaos.
The UCMJ is focused on the conduct of military members, not international law. If you are ordered to secure an area by your commanding officer that’s a legal order. Whether or not the US is allowed to occupy that area does not make it an illegal order under the UCMJ.
The universal ethical principals you speak of are still entirely different. Nazis (not all German soldiers BTW) were people who sent innocent and non-combative civilians to their deaths. US Soldiers on the other hand are occupying a hostile territory that YOU don’t agree with. As has been stated by many other posters, there has been no governing body that has concluded these actions violate international law.
That seems like a false distinction to me. Even if we differentiate NAZI military operatives from rank-and-file German soldiers, not all NAZI operatives murdered civilians. Some did, as do some US soldiers. At best, you can make an argument based on average prevalence of such behavior, rather than paint a black-and-white picture of zero overlap.
Note, first of all, that no “governing body” was able to condemn NAZI actions prior to the Third Reich losing the war. The victor makes the verdicts, but those verdicts do not necessarily reflect reality. Had the Germans won, their crimes would have gone unpunished. Would you argue that, in that scenario, NAZI actions would have been non-criminal?
Secondly, actual verdicts are relevant to punishment, rather than to everyday discourse. Example: you watch X steal a car. Obviously, X will need to be convicted of this crime before he can justifiably be punished for it. However, the fact that he has not yet been convicted does not preclude you from referring to him as a “car thief.”
Thirdly, what verdict would satisfy your demanding standards? The ICC? The US has refused to sign the Rome Statute, and has in fact threatened to invade the Hague if the Court ever tries its soldiers. UN Security Council resolution condemning the US? I’ll give you three guesses as to why that’s somewhat unlikely to happen. And that’s pretty much it. Given that the US has purposefully foreclosed those two options, would you say that it is now by default incapable of illegal acts? In other words, it can justifiably do whatever it wants because it is powerful enough to escape any actual liability for its actions? I am uncomfortable with such a primitive “might makes right” doctrine.
I suspect if Germany and Japan won, they would have tried Americans for war crimes including Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some of the bombing in Germany and Japan was particularly nasty too,.
There is no alternative reality possible for the Germans and Japanese to have won AND the US to have dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Had the US never entered the war or provided any materials to the Soviet Union or the Brits then it’s conceivable that the UK might have surrendered or sued for peace, but I doubt many/any of them would have been charged with ‘war crimes’, despite their civilian bombing campaign. Had the Soviet Union lost in the first year I have no doubt that Stalin et al would have been put against a wall and shot if they were foolish enough to allow themselves to be captured alive by the Germans.
As for the Japanese, they weren’t really all that interested in the niceties. If they captured you then you were either killed or worked to death, regardless of what you had done or what your rank was.
-XT
That would be a different discussion. The premise was that if they did win, what would they have done? I think we would have been tried for war crimes.
Fire bombing cities that were not strategic would have been problematic.
Considering that both the Germans and Japanese did that too it might have been hard to have even a show trial and keep a straight face about it. Not that this would have prevented the Japanese or Germans from putting any leaders or high ranking officers or officials against the wall had they caught them. I seriously doubt that either would have tried to put US or British officials on trial (how many trials did the Germans have when they conquered France? No idea but I doubt it was a lot), unless they thought it would help them control the populace somehow. But Russia? Yeah…I could see the Germans killing every communist official or officer they could get their hands on, and having show trials for Stalin et al (and they would have deserved being shot or hung or whatever in any case).
But I’m not seeing some sort of wide spread trials for US or British military personnel or officials (perhaps aside from the top officials like Churchill or Roosevelt) being charged with ‘war crimes’ by either Germany or Japan, to be honest.
-XT
Funny, I rather think we’d be slave laborers if they had won. Well, those of us who weren’t liquidated for being Jewish, homosexual, Slavic, Roma, communists, cripples, Jehovah’s Witnesses, socialists, holding other undesirable political views, that sort of thing.
You don’t have to imagine it, they didn’t wait for the end of the war. Hitler’s Commissar Order:
There is some truth to Commissar’s post.
I was in the military during the Vietnam era, and while I was never spat on or derided as a baby-killer, I wasn’t going to walk unescorted and unarmed thru Berkeley or Haight-Ashbury in uniform, either.
However, I did walk there in mufti. The only time I ever dressed in uniform in public was when I wanted to save 50% on a plane ticket and that was a requirement (a mil ID wasn’t sufficient).
Lembcke’s thesis was seriously flawed. (I seem to recall that he has even backed off from it a little bit, although I have not yet found the article where I first read that).
His contention was that had anyone actually spit on a member of the military, it would have shown up in police reports and/or news accounts. This, however, presupposes scenarios such as having crowds of protestors line up to jeer and spit upon debarking troops at airports. THAT probably never happened and if that is the image conveyed by the “spitting” meme, it is in error. However, numerous veterans, (including at least one former poster on the SDMB), have related personal anecdotes about individual confrontations in which a “protestor” spat on a member of the military. Given the context of the stories, they seem quite believable and I see no reason to doubt them. A claim that such stories were manufactured by military intelligence has no foundation in fact, although I would find it plausible that some members of the military public relations organization played up individual incidents as if it were a widespread plague on the land. I, myself, have heard sporadic calls of “baby killer” from angry crowds, although that was not a widespread chant that I encountered.
(Interestingly, a separate theme that emerged from that war was the notion of groups of soldiers beating up mouthy insulters outside bars. I have heard that claim made by quite a few former military, bragging about how they defended their honor. Confirming an observation Bill Mauldin made almost thirty years earlier, none of the “proud” defenders of “honor” that I encountered actually served any time in Vietnam.)
I mean no disrespect to veterans or anyone in particular, but trusting stories from 30-40 years ago that have been heavily influenced by media, urban legends and a sense of injustice is fanciful. People’s memories are much, much more malleable than you think. People will remember themselves being in places they never were, at times they were elsewhere, doing things they did not do, with total conviction.
It is highly possible - in my humble opinion, probable - that most if not all of the vets who says they were spit on were not, but some really, honestly remember they were (or sort of remember they were and aren’t keen to really revisit in facts.)
A common theme I’ve heard both from my dad (who was in the Navy during Vietnam) and others is that they were told not to wear their uniforms when not on base or ship. Assuming you don’t think they are all making that up or have conflated false memories about it en masse, what’s your explanation for why the military would take this step? They had to have SOME reason…no?
Anecdotally, my dad never said anyone spit on him when he was in uniform (it would have been a highly foolish hippy who would spit on my dad). He said when he was back from Vietnam that there was a lot of general hostility directed at service people (this would have been in California), and that he was called a lot of names and that things were thrown at him and his shipmates. Possibly this has all become a mass conflation that all vets of that time have, but the stories seem fairly wide spread, and given the violence and frenzy of some of the protests I’ve seen from that time it’s hard to chalk them all up to false memory.
I think that were the vet was is going to be a factor as well. If you got off a plane in your uniform in, say, the South, you’d get a different reception than if you got off the plane in California or in the North East or Mid-West. I doubt there was a lot of spitting on vets in Alabama, say, while it’s fairly easy to believe that it happened in California or New York. Dismissing ever anecdote of shows of public hostility toward vets during Vietnam is as bad as just accepting them all at face value, IMHO.
-XT
I understand your point, but I see no reason to let the judgment fall on the “if not all” side of the line. By asserting that as the most probable case, you are declaring–without any support–that specific events could not have happened.
I am willing to acknowledge that the theme has been vastly overblown, but Lembcke’s methodology of relying solely on news and police reports for a series of minor, personal interactions is no more likely to provide an accurate picture of what occurred than faulty personal memories. As for “30-40 years ago,” Bob Greene’s book Homecoming was written in 1989–nine years before Lembcke and closer to sixteen years after the war, although it was, admittedly, about seven years after Stallone’s First Blood.
I doubt that spitting was anything like a common occurrence, but the claim that it never happened is not really supportable.
'Yea, I mean, I’d hate to think that kids today are enlisting and fiighting today for Rocky, Rambo, and Sylvester propagadated ideas that their parents were inculcated with through the fascist media and video games. Undying patriotism of the most jingoistic sort… Wolverines!
Dirty Hippies, and Go Glennn Beck… and pudding pops n’ Xmas Sweaters n’ stuff.
It would be a kangaroo court obviously. The US did not as a matter of official policy sponser mass murder of civilians. (BTW Hiroshima was the headquarters of the 2nd Army)
Fascist? :rolleyes: You sure are unbiased.
Yes. The sociopathy of fascism. Conservatives and liberals live it every day. You think I am immune? You think you got some monopoly on truth?.. I simply don’t and I admit it… only difference is that I see the far shore. Many of these young men and women that deign to die for us could have used a talk at Grandpa’s knee.
Fascism in and of itself isn’t inherently “bad” (some of its offshoots such as Nazism obviously is) anymore than anarchism or communism is. At any rate no mainstream US political party or politician is a fascist of any stripe. Indeed the people we are fighting in the Middle East are more accurately fascists.