A Zeon worth fighting for.
Well now that work is out of the way and I am currently waiting for orders during Spring Break I am finally able to fully address IKnight’s “War Sucks!” post in a fuller manner. IKnight raises an important distinction between the war sucks theme and the prevalent misnomer that it essentially means that such a work is by nature anti-war. For the most part Gundam is anything but anti-war and with exception to a few animated works such as Waltz with Bashir and Grave of the Fireflies there aren’t many animated works that are at their core anti-war. For the most part Gundam is not anti-war since all mecha is a glorification of violence on some level and not an out right rejection of violence as a means to an end. In most cases those who do writing probably have never fought a war nor have ever served in uniform, even then there is a great deal of difference between a conscript and a volunteer. The only widely read writer that I can think of (note there are many more that may or may not have seen combat) who actually fought in a modern war was George Orwell, given that anime is done almost exclusively by Japanese writers and given that they hardly talk of the full scope of the last war that they fought it is unlikely that they are capable of fully understanding the great big mess that is war. IKinght is largely correct in deducing that opposition to one war does not automatically mean that such a person is anti-war, the notion that there can be a just war is proof enough that there are few true pacifists.
If there were to be an anti-war Gundam the protagonist would have to be a GM pilot, not some invincible kid.
I’ll be honest I don’t think that most civilian can even begin to understand what war is and how it is possible for decent people to irrationally enlist. Even if IKnight says that all the conflicts he hears about were in far off places he does ignore the situation in Northern Ireland or what it would have been known to him as “the Troubles” thereby demonstrating what I think is a fundamental issue with civilians in general and idealists in particular, willful ignorance. War is at its core death on an industrial scale nothing will ever change that, not the Geneva Convention, weapons bans, or the International Court of Justice. The creation of such institutions is simply a mark of the notion of a just war and a clean war which is in my experience rather prevalent in the better off places in the world but by no means universally held even there. What mecha, and in keeping with IKnight’s example, such as Gundam does is vindicate acts of war on the part of the titular heroes, with notable exception to UC. In the case of UC it was the chronicle of a long running war with distinctions between good and evil harder to define as it dragged on since both the Federation and Zeon engaged in atrocities of one sort or another at various times. Most importantly of all is that no matter how great a pilot Amuro, Char, or any one for that matter none of them could put an end to it. For all of the heroism, camaraderie, and nobility none of mattered in the grand scheme of things, it was all in vain. More recent Gundams aren’t anti-war as they amount to little more than power fantasies of the lone teenage hero doing superhuman things on par with curing blindness there by dumbing down the issue of war down to moralistic platitudes of little if any value. Nevertheless ‘War Sucks’ is a universal theme in Gundam, along with all the romanticism associated with war adventure, romance, and heroics, and for good reason, since mecha in Gundam are machines of war and not machines that play basketball.
These days it seems child conscripts are quite fashionable, and as such there will be much tomfoolery and SNAFUs.
‘War Sucks’ is common enough sentiment but because morals differ from place to place making moral judgments on war is largely a futile exercise. The idea that there can be a just war ought to confirm to everyone that war will not be going out of fashion anytime soon. In the case of the Neo-Conservatives the 2003 invasion was justified, not every one agreed and heated and ugly arguments were tossed about across the globe largely over the rather pointless issue of whether or not it was right. Herein lies the crucial divergence of how a soldier and a civilian would think, for the civilian having the moral high ground is important, for the soldier the thing he/she cares about most is victory and how to live to see it. I know for me that once the die was cast there would be no take backs and the only thing that really mattered is and always will be victory, since in all honesty I’d rather deal with the consequences of winning than the consequences of losing and like Patton I’d don’t give two shits for some one who lost and laughed. Even if an indeterminate number of servicemen take issue with the dice being tossed in the first place assigning blame doesn’t help me or anyone else who is in country, but for any civilian that cares about politics (which is pretty much everyone) being right helps them in ways I don’t fully understand. The fixation on moral high ground and moral justification plays a large role in Gundam, sure the side they are on can be wrong, but the hero is always right and largely free of any sort of misbehavior and if there is even the slightest bit of ambiguity there is usually an excuse which is harped upon constantly. In addition the in the recent Gundam series there is a distinct lack of death on the hero faction which automatically removes much of the PTSD factor further making war a mere backdrop for mecha beating each other to pieces.
As for the those who actually volunteer there is much less bitching, though a lot more trash talk.
Within the mecha genre the most glamorous of all soldier subtypes is already chosen, the pilot. There is a great difference between a pilot and infantry, after all a pilot will rarely see the first hand the results of his/her handiwork in the same way a ground pounder would, the fact that pilots do put kill markers on their planes is indicative of how each group has different views on killing. Moreover a pilot is usually an officer with better pay and better facilities than the enlisted. Things are easier for a pilot since IFF is usually good and for the most civilians don’t go off getting in the way in fighters or mobile suits, hence by default a mecha pilot will rarely if ever accidentally kill civilians as opposed to the infantry whose environment is far more confused and IFF is depended sole on a snap judgment measured in milliseconds. For the most part if a pilot does pull off a blue on blue it’s because he/she hit a ground target that was misidentified. So by default Gundam and mecha can’t ever really be anti-war because they deal with a sanitized aspect of war the only more sanitized version would be something about sailors on ships bravely swabbing the deck, not to say that their contribution is unimportant (as the Carrier Battle Group is the primary arm of force projection) but rather that they do have a sanitized environment which they swab on a regular basis. Moreover pilots don’t as a rule have it any where near as bad as the infantry since the idea of digging a hole to shit in with toilet paper being a luxury item is often enough to disabuse anyone with a romantic notion of war.
Damn civilians always getting in the way, this is not a photo op people!
While IKnight is right that every serviceman thinks that war sucks, the important difference is that for the most part those who choose to enlist or accept a commission broadly fall into the following categories the guys with no where else to go, mild misanthropes, guys who want the benefits, the guys who believe in their nation, and any combination there of. The guys who only sign for the benefits are often the first to desert and flee to other places seeking asylum and as a result their thought processes are utterly alien to me. Of the remainder for the most part there is the prevailing belief that while killing is bad letting the Jihad-kuns of the world to go about unopposed is far worse and war being war casualties, even collateral ones, are inevitable since fitting everyone with IFF would be impractical not to mention hard to implement on consenting people given potential overtones of Orwellian Dystopia.
As distasteful as civilian casualties are, it is militarily difficult to solve the problem. First off since the advent of fast moving columns in the post blitzkrieg years armies can move faster than civilians can run (also since civilians have more fat people, children, and senior citizens among them speed is further hampered) and even when they can run some for various reasons choose to stay put or are abandoned, speed being a critical to the success of any campaign seizing the objective is going to take precedence over letting every civilian get a good enough head start. Secondly moving all civilians into camps away from the baddies only sounds good in theory even if they don’t die from bullets they can still die from neglect. Thirdly the Jihad-kuns of the world do like to hide out amongst civilians and since Mao wrote the latest best selling book (to get rich is glorious) on guerrilla warfare every revolution in the making makes a point to get civilians involved in a People’s War. You can make a smart bomb but even then it still relies on a kill radius and there is no guarantee that civilians won’t simply get in the way. Then there is the issue of a huge amount of dumb ordinance that militaries all over the world use, and sadly bullets are very democratic in that they generally don’t give a toss about what they pass through or what they end up in. More often than not any killing of civilians is almost always portrayed as a deliberate act, when the reality is that accidents do occur and a slight shift in the wind can result in unintended consequences.
Sure they look magnificent, but we all know how tough they really are…
Then there are the mild misanthropes like me who consider the entire concept of innocent civilian to be a farce, it’s not so much that the civilian label is disagreeable but the notion that humans are in any way innocent is something I for one consider blatantly disingenuous. In Gundam and most series dealing with war there are plenty innocent civilians to be killed by the forces of evil they are little more that objects to be killed and then mourned for so that the forces of evil can be made all the more abhorrent and ultimately easier to kill while remaining “noble” and “just.” Truth is in war civilians will screw each other over to get what they need, crime doesn’t stop, theft goes up during duress, misdemeanors are committed, felonies continue, and for the most part a declaration of war does not put an end to the petty squabbles and crimes of non-combatants. Profiteering also occurs, so I fail to see how every civilian can be considered innocent when you can have Ann Coulters, Al Frankens, Bernard Madoffs, Charles Mansons, and Josef Fritzls amongst the civilian population. You also have the Janjaweed Rifle Association and the Hamas Rocket Society under the aegis of civilian organization, even then even if captured the members of such associations can’t be shot as spies without some controversy. Lastly I am sure most if not all of you have bought stuff with the Made in China sticker and even with Made in USA the truth is perhaps it too was made in a sweatshop, so if you think about it the ubiquitous presence of Chinese goods means that most of us have taken advantage of sweatshop labor at some point. Given the complexity of the civilian label and the general treatment of most civilians as innocent civilians, most shows dumb it down any anti-war message is already compromised.
Freedom means different things to different people.
While the average mecha protagonist in the recent Gundams is an idealist, the prevalent cynicism within most formal all volunteer militaries, is absent. (I’d imagine that it be much worse for a conscript, but I wouldn’t know) It’s fairly easy to become a misanthrope, I used to believe in human decency and the notion of innocent civilian, but 9/11 changed everything (doesn’t it always). I remember clearly, I woke up at about 0630 local time heard about he attack over 106.1 FM, thought it was bullshit, turned on the news to see the second plane go right into the tower, went to school, attended my advanced algebra class, and then the announcement at about 0830 is made to go home. To my shock and surprise I hear the loud cheers of high school students at the early dismissal, only one girl was crying in that class showing any hint of grief her name oddly enough was Mary (who I am sure was a virgin at the time, the Virgin Mary), and it was then I came to the conclusion that humans are savages.
War ages people in unexpected ways.
It’s my belief that decency was only possible when people were given the chance to be decent and if that loud cheer I heard was indicative of anything it was that not all of us even choose to be decent when given the choice. After that I had no doubt in my mind what I was going to do after high school and in 2003 I started the enlistment process. Having venerated Prussians and reading books about war, and now that a war was inevitable, I answered the call that I had felt for most of my life. The question of whether or not I could live with myself after having participated in so cruel (and uniquely human) an endeavor that might harm innocent civilians was answered with a thunderous cheer, which resulted in a general loss of faith in the human species. I think that is something no one else can understand and as a result most character development from civilian to ace is, to me, fanciful. Fundamentally my reasons for enlisting were irrational, and perhaps that is the thing that is glossed over, humans are irrational. While everyone wants peace the caveat is that we all want it on our terms, and that’s the point of violent disagreement across the globe. It’s easy to say you will die to protect your countrymen, but if given the choice to take a bullet for David Duke…I’d rudely decline. Moreover no one ever won a war by dying for his country, he won it by making the other poor bastard die for his, as such the issue is not whether one is willing to die to protect people, but if they are willing to kill to ensure their safety.
Pretty much sums up Pumpkin Scissors, the setting is depressing, but her antics are odd to say the least.
While Gundam and mecha are not anti-war, what does come to mind when I think of anti-war themes is Pumpkin Scissors, though admittedly not the best series in the world, it nonetheless went to a place few anti-war themed works go, the post war period. It’s a romantic notion that once the guns fall silent that the worst is over, on the contrary, the widespread destruction of infrastructure, displaced persons, the break down of order, botched demobilizations, and in the case of the defeated nations that signed a mildly Carthaginian peace, occupation or reparations. Most worryingly of all is the emotional ill will and anger of the populace after a war, if it is long perhaps the feeling of relief will allay the worst of it, but in a short war hatreds persist because the sacrifices more often than not were simply minimal. Unless of course the victor was waging war in someone else’s backyard in which case the post war period needn’t be painful at all. Even if it was not handled superbly Pumpkin Scissors at least covered many aspects of the shitty post war period, wide spread unemployment, loss of infrastructure, meager harvests, continued rationing, banditry, women turning to prostitution, a generation of women who may not even find a husband, disease, illicit drugs, organized crime, etc. Had it been GRIMDARK it certainly could have succeeded in that regard, but a bubbly happy overtone makes it more digestible since the any overly serious treatment of it might have been to depressing to slog through for 24 episodes.
Tl;dr C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre. C’est de la folie.
60 Comments
@SDS
No,you’re here to argue. You just said you wrote your posts to stimulate discussion, and by the fact that you have an opinion and are willing to defend it– you are intending to argue.
First off, let me say that I agree. You may be a sociologist, but I’m a biologist, and even through my point of view, the idea that morality is so inherent to our species so as to not be abandoned in war under any circumstances I think is incorrect. From a purely material and evolutionary point of view, the animal brain developed first, the part of the brain that tells us to beat other member of our own species to death in competition for food, mates, whatever. The frontal cortex, in which conceptual thinking like modern social interactions and ‘morality’ developed relatively late.
What does this mean? To be blunt, human morality, ethics, the whole shebang are the most superficial part of our composition. Go lower than that, as is required by a human living on the edge of society, and you have the human as a social animal. Go lower than that and you have the human as an absolutely selfish animal. Morality is defined by a doctrine determining what is ‘right and wrong’. In a broad sense that pedantic and semantic, you are right, ‘everyone follows a moral code’, because right decisions lead to survival and wrong decisions lead to death for some. But in any sense that is worth talking about, and you yourself pointed out that war temporarily relieves moral concerns, you’re not there.
To be a soldier does not mean to juggle morality and duty. I’ll disagree there. The very existence of military and paramilitary personnel is itself a compromise in traditional ‘morality’, as they are in the very business of death and obedience. It is widely accept that what motivates a soldier is not overarching ideal, goodwill or ill-will, or even military chain of command but the man next to him and his own life. In effect, a soldier is lowered to a social animal in the context of war.
Does this mean that morality should be absent from the practice of war? In my opinion, no, because for however many encounters a soldier might survive on the battlefield, it is for the civilian, who has the luxury of ‘morality’ on a daily basis, that they fight, and without a connection to the civilian base, war becomes counterintuitive, as I have already stated.
What I mean to prove, however, is that morality as a human concept is not so pervasive. It has, and it will continue to be, shed when unnecessary because at our bones we are animals, and what we do not need we discard. Christopher McCandless went into the Alaskan wilderness to ponder the meaning of life and to find himself, and by the end, his diaries indicate he was much more interested in what he ate every day than the meaning of life.
Now here’s where I’ll question you a little. Your posts imply that you look down upon war as a social force, as well as the ‘social machine’ that generates it. I question this particular point of view, again, as a biologist. We still war because it still benefits us. Because in some way, it is required for our overarching drives of success. Whether or not these drives are in tune with one another from the government to the soldier to the civilian is irrelevant; as a society, we still require war to relieve the pressures caused by our ‘religion, misunderstanding, egoism, and obstinancy’. You said it yourself, war is a social force.
We ARE religious (some of us, anyway), egotistical, obstinate and prone to misunderstanding, and these flaws are inherent in our design. Any attempt at snobbery with lines such as ‘If only we weren’t so callous!’ or ‘If only we weren’t so selfish!’ or ‘If only we could work together!’ are hilariously misguided, unrealistic, and as dangerous as raw aggression. It’d be the equivalent of trying to build a tower and saying to yourself, ‘I’m just going to ignore /gravity/’.
Sure, there have been ‘wrong’ wars, wars where the benefit was negative, but in evolution there are missteps too, there are dodos, and trilobites, and dinosaurs.
So to wrap this all up, morality is not inherent to humanity, and war serves a purpose more basic than morality (which is why we still have it). I disagree with your tone (yeah, I know, a little stupid) in your overall take on war as a social force, and I believe that in its necessity, humanity should not blanch from the duty of war.
@SDS, Skoll
Gents, giving me brains a work out. Yes, ethics and morality are inevitably roped into a discussion of war. I will stir the nest further, though, in suggesting that war may serve a need (Skoll), it can be strongly argued it does so pathologically. And it terms of benefits, I suggest it does not do always do so across a broad spectrum of society. It may serve to drive innovation, but I’m not sure war is a necessity per se. Other “problems” such as the financial meltdown and environmental degradation can do the same. Humans are indeed animals, but they have demonstrated an ability to organize societies that behave in specific ways to regulate conflict. The Dobe Ju tribesman in South Africa created and continue to live in an egalitarian society: although they were aware of the outside, they made conscious decisions to live a certain way to avoid large scale organized violence (i.e. war). Granted there are difficulties in extrapolating this to other contexts, but I think it illustrates the degree of choice in human behaviour. While humans have some ballistic, stereotyped behaviours, the ones involved in modern armed conflict (I think) the social science literature has amply shown, is far more influenced by learned behaviours. Indvidual human aggression, while subject to many biological influences is still mediated by experience.
As an aside, if war is an evolutionary misstep, it’s been a protracted, painful one.
War is a social phenomenon (see above, you guys and gals =) ). I think SDS was getting at the point that morality OUGHT not be abandoned even in the extremis of war, as you yourself agree. Whether this is sustained is a different story.
@SDS
Yeah, ethics/morality/epistemology wasn’t really my cup of tea (did peace and conflict studies/psychology/anthropology in undergrad). As a fellow social scientist you have to know taking a position = argue, placing facts together to express an opinion =). Or are you one of those hardcore empiricists =)
@THAT readers
Back to our beloved animu: in a sense it may be a comment on Japan’s good fortune that the current generation does not know war (or a whitewashing/willful ignorance job for those so inclined). Having renounced war in its Constitution, I guess one could say making anime with lasers and cool robots as entertainment isn’t seen as hypocritical, as they all understand, it’s make-believe. It’s one thing to make art about something you know nothing about, and another to do so as if you do. Perhaps Crusader-kun was concerned that either act would contribute to a distorted view of warfare, or that it reflects the (possibly poor) understanding of war in Japan. Remember folks, it’s cartoons. You’d need a lot more research to ascertain the public’s view on warfare.
TL;dr war is complicated, Japan may or may not know war, it could be reflected in anime. As you can see, responding to comments are a welcome distraction from school work
@SDS
I don’t think it’s too much or presumptuous to ask that civilians do their best to runaway from the axes of advance, rational people don’t stick around or try and get themselves killed in useless efforts of resistance. So long as the ugly truth of war is mired in an idealized version of it the horror will never be realized. I don’t want to deal with them as a factor at all it almost always ends in a mess, it’s why I don’t advocate occupation as in anyway desirable, it’s no longer a matter of choice at this point but TE Lawrence was right about one thing, better they do it tolerably than you do it perfectly when he referred to the Arab revolt.
@Anon
They did cheer, I wish it were otherwise, but what I heard made me sick.
@Eej
Like Haesslich I don’t think VOTOMS is anti-war, it takes excellent advantage of the setting, and the Scopedog is simply a tool. It is the pilot that makes it deadly. For VOTOMS war is hell, but no one seems to actively try to put an end to it, merely survival is the greatest victory they can hope for.
@cspdelta
My degree ain’t official until June, meaning I can’t claim it on a job application, yet. Then there is the issue of not having planned for an early completion of college…I am trying to get orders for whatever is available, suffice to say unemployment grants plenty of free time.
In between rates right now hoping to make HS but we shall see.
@Keith
It’s not that I advocate the wholesale slaughter of them, rather I find the label of innocent to be misleading and to be honest an outright lie. The term is thrown around so often that we all too often forget that these victims were just as fallible as anyone, The horror of war is not that is merely death on industrial scale but also the fact that under duress civilians will tear each other to pieces and sell each other out to survive. That I think is a better argument against war than merely a body count.
@mareo
I think that it is a grand illusion that people can remain aloof from national issues, but ultimately one may have no interest in the War on Terror (or whatever term is fashionable these days) the War on Terror is interested in you. It’s easy to forget that we all contribute to policy even if all we do is pay our taxes, I know that the people who died that day from the Towers were not innocent, they were civilians but they did contribute to the circumstances that led to the planes hitting, every American shares that responsibility. Even if I thought that the 2003 was unnecessary the consequences of defeat for me are too disgusting to allowed to be realized IMO, it’s not right but I don’t think that here is much right in the world to begin with.
@Versus
IF given the choice between me or the other guy I am fairly certain I would pick me, but in your scenario I have never been, I hope to never have to face it, though my most common foe is usually no draftee or conscript.
A newborn is by and large innocent, if the mother is smart she will do all she can to keep her child alive, that’s where things get real iffy and the mother might well screw someone over to feed her kid, as to the kid’s guilt in regards to the people who got screwed to ensure he/she came of age I think will vary from person to person. Still if the mother left jilted people alive I cannot say the kid can expect all that much mercy if discovered. For the landmine kid I feel sorry, but what business does the kid have poking around a minefield? If it was long term certainly the locals would have known about it, and the UN does raise a hubbub about clearing ordinance. Certainly the parents would have to bear some of the blame for allowing their kid to run free. Even so if your old enough to walk around your old enough to be mean to other kids, so it would have to be on a case to case basis. Honestly if it was the local bully who got his leg blown off I probably wouldn’t care.
@Dorian Cornelius Jasper
Thanks for reading.
@skoll
I agree that the front line is disappearing though judging by recent events in Georgia I would not rule out conventional war anytime soon. Even when you have infantry and tanks rolling around in come cases like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict not all civilians run at the first sign of trouble even after a rocket launch some people just didn’t know that a retaliatory shell was inbound. Even with heavy armor rolling around it seems not everyone wanted to run assuming they were able to run. I agree that most nowadays are from the flyboys, but the image of smart bombs gives the false illusion that they don’t kill unintended targets. Even during the 1991 Gulf War you still had blue on blue because instruments were off and the featureless desert resulted in people getting lost. At the height the USAF A-10 operates on it’s hard to get a good ID night time just makes things worse.
Even with ROE the illusion is that soldiers are behaving like policemen when it is not the case, not in terms or armament and generally crooks don’t actively go looking for cops. ROE doesn’t solve everything you still have to factor in human judgment which I think we can all agree can be fallible to a startling degree.
@Crusader
Well in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I’m not exactly surprised. The Israeli army bottled the place up and rolled, the hell did they expect to see? Let’s not forget the now-generations of ill-will the civilian populace, what, two infitadas? You’re right, of course. We still do kill civilians because sometimes they don’t run from infantry and armor, but that doesn’t change the fact that airstrikes and indirect fire are probably the largest factor in Western civilian kills. You’re never going to be as precise as a trained infantryman, that’s just the fact of the matter. You can fin-stabilize your artillery, or laser sight your bombs and just because you’re not actually there, inevitably you’ll kill more people you didn’t want to.
Now I wasn’t claiming that ROE is always followed. I WAS claiming that ROE exists for a good reason. It’s breaking news, but maybe you’ve heard that there’s a gun battle a police academy in Pakistan right now? In Mexico, policemen get hunted and killed all the time. In Iraq, people sneak in as recruits and blow themselves up. Really, only in the Western world do we think it could possibly be sensible to arm our police with Glocks and not ARs, because cops are targets.
@ skoll
Firstly giving an opinion and arguing in its strict sense is quite different, there’s issues of intent, sentence structure and interpretation. Expressing an opinion but not directing it as an attack to another persons opinion is a discussion of ideas. But yes you can interpret it as an argument.
Secondly I don’t know what you are ‘agreeing’ to in the first sentence of the second paragraph. To be a soldier does not mean to juggle morality and duty.
Thirdly I’m not a sociologist or biologist but I’m aware the pre-frontal cortex has a lot to do with controlling aggression, planning and assorted judgment tasks and morality is in essence about ‘controlling’ action. Having studied developmental psychology I am aware also that moral judgment may not develop at all for some people! I also never said a soldier or anyone must juggle with morality. The point/opinion I tried to make is this: humans have acquired ‘morality’ and however they did it a world with it is better than one without.
Fourthly, I don’t see a ‘question’ in your 7th paragraph. I never said people must be saints either. Also, however hard you try, you cannot build a tower devoid of gravity. But you can act courageously, fairly, cooperatively, honestly, and/or altruistically. Its about transcending your mere birth nature, the instinctively causal impulse that distinguishes us from mere animals. The point is no you can’t sit around and ‘wish’ “if we weren’t” – you shut up and just try to get there as best as you can. So you fall along the way, so what? You don’t just give up.
Lastly, you disagree with my take on war as a social force or just the tone? You know by social force I do mean: society as a whole including the humans in it, its institutions run by humans with human traits + instincts + urges, the global economy, religion etc. As in I am looking AT, not down on it, as a feature of HUMAN society. You call it SOCIAL because society has embody forces humans have created but fail to properly control, e.g. economy.
@ cspdelta
I think I forgot to mention that some courses in Equity (law school) will help too with this discussion
Well at least you picked out one of my points. It wasn’t an ‘argument’ as such because it was not directed to ‘convince’ but to enlighten. It can’t ‘convince’ because it is written so sporadically. There is a difference. But I do confess it may have been more charged in certain points.
@ Crusader
I can understand your opinion. I don’t think anybody wants to deal with irrational civilians. By the way I just want say again that I do respect your opinion because I understand everyone shares different experiences etc. and I did not mean to antagonize if I did in any way.
@Crusader:
“It’s not that I advocate the wholesale slaughter of them, rather I find the label of innocent to be misleading and to be honest an outright lie. The term is thrown around so often that we all too often forget that these victims were just as fallible as anyone, The horror of war is not that is merely death on industrial scale but also the fact that under duress civilians will tear each other to pieces and sell each other out to survive. That I think is a better argument against war than merely a body count.”
Ah, thanks for the clarification. I agree with your general sentiment that civilians are not just helpless bystanders who want to be left alone, at least not all the time. I would argue, though, that there are many cases where some of the people caught up in a war had minimal if any control over starting or prolonging it; the obvious examples would be children (and I would include at least some examples of child conscripts in that, though I certainly wouldn’t fault soldiers on the other side who shot child soldiers in combat), social groups who have no power in their society (like slaves, or women in some cultures/places/times), and third parties unaffected by the war (such as civilians in Country A killed when terrorists from Country B launch an attack on soldiers from Country C who happen to be in Country A).
@skoll
If I were the IDF I would have declared a safe zone and opened up for a sea lift (could have been useful as a test of wider Arab resolve on taking in refugees and dealing with them) to evacuate the civilian population, even if Hamas got out or got stuff in clearing out Palestinians from the Gaza Strip would have had some long term payoffs. Even if you have them all bottled up a safety valve could still be of use if properly used. I no longer believe in the Palestinian cause, all the Arab world seems willing to do is bank roll Hamas for no real change. Israel will never be abandoned simply because of their nuclear ambiguity, more over I am a vicious critic of Arab Solidarity which seems to me illusionary given what has happened in the past.
Cops are targets, but it seems that in the less safe places of the world they certainly need more than a side arm. That or they could simply wear ski masks to work, but that brings up other issues… Most cops in the US have ARs only they can’t carry them off duty and are limited to pistols.
@SDS
Don’t worry no offense taken.
@Keith
War can get messy. I think that in principle if a slave found that his/her master were losing in a war I can see them rising up and would not rule out retribution being meted out. Not everyone stands to lose when the existing social order is broken down.
@Crusader, that kind of plan is normally called genocide…
The GMs looks magnificent =D