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talkpoliticsSo, in the light of the US bombing of the Drs. Without Borders facility in Kunduz, it's worth noting that this is far from the worst or the most large-scale war crime the US Army has committed in Afghanistan.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/07/26/kill-team-the-documentary-the-army-doesn-t-want-you-to-see.html
This documentary concerns an organized war crime committed by a group of people including someone with the bitterly ironic and unfortunate in this context name of Morlock commiting a war crime as a team with a temporarily effective coverup. In shades of Vietnam and World War II, the war crime included mutilations of enemy dead.The conscript armies of WWII committed atrocities, it was believed at the time, because they were literally drafted masses of people without prior experience brutalized by atrocities. The volunteer army was supposed to be more professional and willing and thus to a degree above those kinds of atrocities and criminal deeds.
The reality, however, as this shows, is that volunteer armies can and do duplicate the atrocities of the conscript army without much of any excuse as per the realities of WWII and Vietnam soldiers. The article raises a question of whether or not war changed all that much, but to put it brutally, soldiers in Afghanistan aren't asked to do anything in terms of occupation and making nice with the occupied and not multilating enemy corpses that the soldiers of Patton, Grant, Abrams, and Westmoreland weren't asked to do. The responsibilities are the same, the atrocities have a surprisingly resonant parallel.
Rather than the article's view that war is changing faster than the people who fight it, I'd ask if the very identical aspect of the atrocities in these divergent cases and divergent armies fighting different kinds of enemies instead points to how much things *don't* change and if it instead raises a much more frightening prospect: teach humans to kill and give them the weapons to do so and atrocities become mind-numbingly inevitable and blending into each other with a regular basis.
The soldiers who commit them should be prosecuted, and the deeds condemned, not celebrated. Yet if they recur like this, the obvious solution is not to have wars, but if we're going that route, I'd also like three million dollars and a week with Liv Tyler. How can organizations dedicated to the efficient killing of other human beings in wholesale decide that such and such violence with massive artillery barrages and targeted strikes by science-fiction worthy weapons as ultra-modern means to a ancient and skulking aspect of warfare is acceptable but mass murder of people to deliberately mutilate their corpses is not, and make it work? Why do they persist in failing to do so?
And equally, at what point do the atrocities pile up sufficiently to raise the question of why a supposed democracy persists in covering up crimes rather than publicizing them and condemning them and making them focuses of debate? One does expect the Putins and Assads of the world successfully to obliterate the memories of their crimes. If even a Nobel Peace Prize-winning President gambling on nuclear war with the other major nuclear power can't be trusted to contain war crimes, or to publicize them in spite of his flowery rhetoric of transparency, who can be? Do Americans really expect any of his probable successors to be any different?
And if the answer to this last question is no, then what can be done about these crimes? How should accountability work and be enforced?
I don't have full or complete answers to these questions but I hope others smarter than I do.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/07/26/kill-team-the-documentary-the-army-doesn-t-want-you-to-see.html
This documentary concerns an organized war crime committed by a group of people including someone with the bitterly ironic and unfortunate in this context name of Morlock commiting a war crime as a team with a temporarily effective coverup. In shades of Vietnam and World War II, the war crime included mutilations of enemy dead.The conscript armies of WWII committed atrocities, it was believed at the time, because they were literally drafted masses of people without prior experience brutalized by atrocities. The volunteer army was supposed to be more professional and willing and thus to a degree above those kinds of atrocities and criminal deeds.
The reality, however, as this shows, is that volunteer armies can and do duplicate the atrocities of the conscript army without much of any excuse as per the realities of WWII and Vietnam soldiers. The article raises a question of whether or not war changed all that much, but to put it brutally, soldiers in Afghanistan aren't asked to do anything in terms of occupation and making nice with the occupied and not multilating enemy corpses that the soldiers of Patton, Grant, Abrams, and Westmoreland weren't asked to do. The responsibilities are the same, the atrocities have a surprisingly resonant parallel.
Rather than the article's view that war is changing faster than the people who fight it, I'd ask if the very identical aspect of the atrocities in these divergent cases and divergent armies fighting different kinds of enemies instead points to how much things *don't* change and if it instead raises a much more frightening prospect: teach humans to kill and give them the weapons to do so and atrocities become mind-numbingly inevitable and blending into each other with a regular basis.
The soldiers who commit them should be prosecuted, and the deeds condemned, not celebrated. Yet if they recur like this, the obvious solution is not to have wars, but if we're going that route, I'd also like three million dollars and a week with Liv Tyler. How can organizations dedicated to the efficient killing of other human beings in wholesale decide that such and such violence with massive artillery barrages and targeted strikes by science-fiction worthy weapons as ultra-modern means to a ancient and skulking aspect of warfare is acceptable but mass murder of people to deliberately mutilate their corpses is not, and make it work? Why do they persist in failing to do so?
And equally, at what point do the atrocities pile up sufficiently to raise the question of why a supposed democracy persists in covering up crimes rather than publicizing them and condemning them and making them focuses of debate? One does expect the Putins and Assads of the world successfully to obliterate the memories of their crimes. If even a Nobel Peace Prize-winning President gambling on nuclear war with the other major nuclear power can't be trusted to contain war crimes, or to publicize them in spite of his flowery rhetoric of transparency, who can be? Do Americans really expect any of his probable successors to be any different?
And if the answer to this last question is no, then what can be done about these crimes? How should accountability work and be enforced?
I don't have full or complete answers to these questions but I hope others smarter than I do.
(no subject)
Date: 9/11/15 02:17 (UTC)So I think we - the people and the media - should be more consistent in what disappoints and upsets us (which is reasonable to expect if you're getting Liv and three mil a week)
(no subject)
Date: 9/11/15 06:31 (UTC)(frozen) (no subject)
Date: 9/11/15 08:29 (UTC)(frozen) (no subject)
Date: 9/11/15 20:15 (UTC)Take this as a friendly advice.