I disagree (Gaming)

by Coaxkez, Monday, November 29, 2021, 21:20 (1093 days ago) @ cheapLEY
edited by Coaxkez, Monday, November 29, 2021, 21:30

We are not better than them. We are not above them.

That’s horseshit. I’m absolutely better than anyone that’s used white phosphorous on civilians by nature of having not done so.

I don’t know you and don’t intend for this to be taken as a comment on your character, but have you ever been in a position where you could have done so? Again, it is very easy to pass judgment on servicemen who were there in the moment when you have not actually had any of their experiences. It is much more productive to crucify our politicians for starting the war than it is to go after the servicemen who were simply doing their jobs.

It’s the idea that human beings are capable of doing those things that really upsets, because it is frightening to realize that any of us can be pushed to that extreme given the right incentive.

That incentive being “I was ordered to,” I guess.

That you would trivialize war crimes while simultaneously telling me the people that committed them were heroes is just another level of completely batshit. I just can’t even.

In war, you do as you are ordered. That’s how being in a military works. It has to work that way or the military cannot function as a unit. But now we come to the white phosphorous issue. Tell me how many servicemen used white phosphorous against civilians? How widespread was that tactic during the battle? Do you really want to vilify the entire population of soldiers who were there that day for the actions of a few of their brethren, and do those actions negate the heroism of the servicemen who didn’t use white phosphorous? Maybe we should be asking who told them to use it and not vilifying the grunts on the ground anyway. But I’m sure you would have refused if only you were there…

I’m not trivializing it, but the notion that war conforms to rules is simply wrong, and provably wrong if you examine how literally any major war in history has been fought. We nuked two cities filled with civilians at the end of WWII. We did it because a million of our own soldiers were projected to die in a traditional ground invasion. Did those civilians deserve to die? Of course not. But did our soldiers deserve to die? We made a choice. It’s the cold, hard calculus of war. We weighed our lives against theirs and made a decision, because war is ugly and we wanted it to end faster, and also because we would be killing fewer of their people than they would have killed of ours in a ground invasion. That decision has invited no shortage of criticism in the 60+ years that have followed, but just imagine what would be said about us today if we had lost that war. It’s almost like the victors decide retroactively what constitutes a “war crime”.

We want the safety and protection that our military provides us, but we don’t want to face what that actually entails. We have become accustomed to our freedoms and our way of life and we forget the costs they sometimes demand of us.