The Art of Killing

[Druidic]

There's a great Leonard Cohen quote that goes something like, "What makes a soldier sad, makes a killer smile."
For me there is a difference between soldiers and war criminals. And war criminals shouldn't get a free pass for their crimes just because they're now old and less inclined to use their talents.

[Speaking Mute]

Quote Originally Posted by Druidic

So when you leave context out… The soldiers who stopped Hitler were just ‘killers’.

Indeed they were. The Holocaust was terrible, but even being Jewish and the descendant of survivors I feel it's overemphasized in a war were upwards of 50 million civilians died - the majority through famine and starvation. If the Nazis had proceeded merely gunning down or starving out undesirables - like the Russians and Japanese did - they probably would have gotten off much lighter in the history books. It also must be remembered that the USA only got drawn into the war through it's own fledgling empire in the Pacific and delayed liberating the concentration camps for strategic reasons. The moral high ground was accidental and exploited to the hilt - if Americans didn't come out of the war thinking themselves big heros, then Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and all the "police actions" and "interventions" since then wouldn't have happened.

...but these historical points are something of a tangent. The romance of warfare is how Hitler got his war in the first place; the Nazis had there lists of wrongs to justify aggression, and people came forward to answer the calling. The mindset to fight for countries and ideals is where most these wars take root.

Quote Originally Posted by Druidic

It doesn’t matter that the enemy in Afghanistan push a religion and a philosophy that you wouldn’t chose to live under for one minute. Abuse of women, death for religious ‘crimes’…whatever.

Sorry for being cliche, but my feeling is that if you want to win people's hearts and minds, you should refrain from bombing them. And humanitarian pretense generally takes a back seat to war romance once the battle starts...note the tone in this review of Lone Survivor:

Movie Review: See Mark Wahlberg If You Can Stomach It | ABC News - Yahoo

...there's no questioning about what exactly was going on, who these people the soldiers were supposed to kill, what exactly was accomplished - they're just brave men who sacrificed themselves for the good of the country, whatever that may be.

Quote Originally Posted by Druidic

Would you ever fight for anything…ever?

When the Canadian warships pull up on the Lake Eerie shore, sure. Freedom, democracy, or even a few idiots who manage to fly a plane into a building - no.

[Speaking Mute]

Quote Originally Posted by Druidic

There's a great Leonard Cohen quote that goes something like, "What makes a soldier sad, makes a killer smile." For me there is a difference between soldiers and war criminals. And war criminals shouldn't get a free pass for their crimes just because they're now old and less inclined to use their talents.

Again, nothing you can do to a war criminal changes the past. On a less metaphysical level, the persecution of war criminals seems to full heavily on petty thugs from tiny and poor countries, and usually on the side that's not in favor with the big and rich countries.

[Malone]

I don't think there's ever been a war fought for moral reasons. WW1 was a clash between imperialist capitalist powers; re WW2 Britain was happy to let Hitler gobble up as many small countries as he liked until Poland appeared on the menu, only then did they intervene; Germany declared war on the US, not the other way round; the US supported those brutal religious theocrats in Afghanistan against the USSR and didn't care about the effect on Afghan civilians; they also provided political support to the Khmer Rouge after they had been overthrown and their savagery made public etc etc.

I suppose one point in favour of pre-20th century conflict was that nations were generally honest in declaring their motives were purely those of self-interest, now there's a nauseating hypoocrisy in declaring motivations concerning 'human rights', 'freedom' etc etc.

[Druidic]

Sometimes I feel like no one is reading my words LOL. No offense, guys. I don’t feel particularly well and will conclude my part in this debate with a few brief sentences.

I never ‘romanticize’ war. It’s a dirty, horrific business. But I see a difference between slitting the throat of a civilian and a sniper taking out an enemy combatant. A Pacifist wouldn’t agree but I’m not in that camp. In Nam we had soldiers who lived and died by the rules and soldiers who went rogue. I refuse to tar all soldiers with the same ugly brush reserved for the latter.
And morality seldom enters into the Big Picture when we discuss war itself. Too many elements, a complexity that even the best historians don’t always agree on, make war a thing beyond morality, like a great mindless machine or an earthquake. I think Durrenmatt is right. There’s an ugliness in human nature that just can’t handle prolonged periods of peace. At best, wars are fought to defend a country from an identifiable threat; at worst, you have wars of opportunity, excuses for nation building, and all sorts of evil nonsense.

I just refuse to see all soldiers in the same light. Many, many do their best to act morally in an amoral chaotic situation.

[Mr. D.]

I'd like to add one small observation to this discussion. It seems that some of the posters think that war is something unusual. War is the normal state of affairs between organized groups - usually, but not always, nation states. When one or more of these organized groups lack the ability to conduct war peace breaks out. After a period of re-armament war breaks out again.
I was born during a war. My country, the United States, has been in numerous wars all my life. We had a 45 year long cold war as well as so many other wars that I can't keep them straight in my mind anymore. Viet Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. The war on Terror. You name it we've had a war there. Other countries are the same. The only thing that I can say is that Peace has been a very rare, valuable commodity in my lifetime.
My career was in US Customs. 10 years ago we got dragged into the War on Terror as well when the Department of Homeland Security gobbled us up. I'm 60 years old and I'm allegedly on America's front line in the battle.
Constant warfare warps the souls of those who fight. Each side in a war just knows that they're right with God on their side. This leads to so many atrocities. After a while the horrible becomes normal, and is even welcomed. That's what happens to someone like that Congo creep. He started out bad but he wasn't that bad at first. It takes practice and dedication to get that bad.

[Druidic]

I agree, Mr. D.

Peace is the problem, not war; war pushes the problems of peace aside, instead of solving them.
--Friedrich Durrenmatt, lecture at Temple University, 1969.

Wasn't it Bierce or Twain who referred to peace as "an unnatural state of affairs."

Fritz Leiber wrote a science fiction story set in a future where full devastating war is‘prevented’ by the deliberate ritualistic creation, at certain intervals of time, of limited artificial war with just enough bloodletting to satisfy a nation’s collective psyche.

[Malone]

As stated previously, I am certainly not one of those who thinks peace is the norm.

I simply refuse to buy the idea of a 'noble war'. It's all about self-interest.

As for those poor dupes living in their la-la land where all is good and Steven Pinker has 'proven' that violence is on the decline, I always point them to this:

Delusions of peace

[Robin Davies]

Quote Originally Posted by Malone

As for those poor dupes living in their la-la land where all is good and Steven Pinker has 'proven' that violence is on the decline, I always point them to this: Delusions of peace

It's worth reading some of the long discussion after that article (though I confess I haven't read all of it!)
John Gray makes some interesting points about Pinker's theories regarding the reason for the decline in violence - but does he refute Pinker's statistics that seem to show violence is actually declining?

[Malone]

To quote from another review:

"...the numbers do not add up. Pinker’s method for assessing the relative ferocity of different centuries is to calculate the total of violent deaths not as an absolute quantity, but as a percentage of global population. But statistical comparisons like that are notoriously vacuous. Population sample sizes can vary by billions, but a single life remains a static sum, so the smaller the sample the larger the percentage each life represents. Obviously, though, a remote Inuit village of one hundred souls where someone gets killed in a fistfight is not twice as violent as a nation of 200 million that exterminates one million of its citizens. And even where the orders of magnitude are not quite so divergent, comparison on a global scale is useless, especially since over the past century modern medicine has reduced infant mortality and radically extended life spans nearly everywhere (meaning, for one thing, there are now far more persons too young or too old to fight). So Pinker’s assertion that a person would be thirty-five times more likely to be murdered in the Middle Ages than now is empirically meaningless.

In the end, what Pinker calls a “decline of violence” in modernity actually has been, in real body counts, a continual and extravagant increase in violence that has been outstripped by an even more exorbitant demographic explosion. Well, not to put too fine a point on it: So what? What on earth can he truly imagine that tells us about “progress” or “Enlightenment”—or about the past, the present, or the future? By all means, praise the modern world for what is good about it, but spare us the mythology."

Or in other words, it's individuals who suffer and die, not percentages and proportions, and there are more individuals suffering than ever before.