Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Saturday, April 09, 2022

War is a crime

The concept of "war crimes" is ridiculous. In case you didn't know it, the principal charges at the Nuremberg trials were plotting and carrying out invasions -- committing an illegal war of aggression. How the defendants specifically waged war was not the issue. And by the way, the allied countries indiscriminately bombed cities for the precise purpose of massacring civilians -- as depicted by Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five.


During the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. generals spoke frequently of what they call "collateral damage." This is when they bomb wedding parties, as seemed to happen routinely, or when they bombed and destroyed the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, killing 42 people:

 

Starting at 2:08am on Saturday 3 October, a United States AC-130 gunship fired 211 shells on the main hospital building where patients were sleeping in their beds or being operated on in the operating theatre. At least 42 people were killed, including 24 patients, 14 staff and 4 caretakers. Thirty-seven people were injured.

Our patients burned in their beds, our medical staff were decapitated or lost limbs. Others were shot from the air while they fled the burning building. The attack from the air lasted for around one hour. The main hospital building came under precise and repeated airstrikes, while the surrounding buildings were left mostly untouched.

Throughout the airstrikes our teams desperately called military authorities to stop the attack.

No-one was prosecuted for this. It was collateral damage. Here's the thing. If you start a war, even if you don't behave with the deliberate depravity of Russian troops in Ukraine, you will kill and main innocent civilians.  That will happen inevitably because when you start dropping bombs and shooting you're going to blow up or kill the wrong people sometimes. To say that you didn't do it on purpose is not a moral defense, because you knew that it would be the result of your actions.


I'm not trying to argue that there is full equivalence between the actions of Russia in Ukraine and the actions of the U.S. in Iraq, but it isn't really a difference worth quibbling over. Don't commit illegal wars of aggression, any way you want to do it. To try to define a righteous or honorable or legal way of waging war is ridiculous. War is a crime.

 

Dear dipshits: This isn't about "hating America." It's just the actual, God's honest truth. This happened. "Loving America" would not mean denying the truth.

 

Fucking morons.

Also, too I am obviously not saying that U.S. involvement in WWII was wrong. I am saying that the concept of a war crime is not very meaningful, since the U.S. did in WWII precisely what is being called a war crime by Russia now. However, Russia initiated this war. That is the fundamental crime. Once you've crossed that threshold, further distinctions are not very important. As for the Civil War, the southern states were committing a crime against humanity. On similar grounds, allied actions in WWII must be judged very leniently.



 

 

1 comment:

Don Quixote said...

Precisely. And it’s a crime that has to stop if the species is going to survive. There is no excuse for war. Howard Zinn, who participated as a young man in World War II on bombers, later came to the conclusion in his book, “Declarations of Independence,” that there is no such thing as a “good” or “righteous” war. It is clear in 2022 that psychopaths like the Bushes and Putin are completely out of touch with reality. The problem is that psychopaths should not be leading countries. There is so much that needs to change in the educational system. It all starts in dysfunctional families where children learn to be controlled, manipulated, dominated and abused. This behavior is normalized.

What is abhorrent is that so many people support the actions of murderous monarchs. The idea of piss-ant little humans fighting for their little patch of turf at a time when we all have to be working together to figure out how to reduce carbon emissions and dismantle nuclear stockpiles only serves to contrast the completely out-of-touch state of mind of so many of the world’s people.