Warcrimes and crimes in War

[Exarch]

Take a look at the not so recent US invasion of iraq where there were widespread reportings of looting (not necessaily conducted by the troops themselves) and even rapes. or the horrors perpetrate by soldiers on viet civilians during the vietnam war. now compare these to King Edward III's 'Chevauchee' in Normandy and the sack of Rome perpetrated by t\he huns and Vandals.
warcrimes such as looting, pillaging, and the raping of womenfolk (or even menfolk, in the case of sparta) upon the civilian population have existed since the first rock was thrown by a shaggy homo sapiens.

what i want to know is, why we even bother to give war a 'decent face' and try soldiers for warcrimes using civilian standards of morality?

Secondly, the Geneva Convention, while a good idea in theory, is impractical considering how ppl go crazy in a warsetting with bloodlust all too commonly enveloping one. i think it's a good idea to have a geneva convention. but i know that few ppl would follow the 'rules of war' out in the field.
are we being too idealistic thinking soldiers should be boy scout types rather than the killers we need them to be?

[Captain Blackadder]

We do not hold soldiers accountable to a civilian sense of morality but to an absolute morality. The major reason for the Geneva convention is a kind of everyone saying treat others the way you would like to be treated if we do not hold soldiers to this absolute morality there can truly be no "good guys" in war. Exrach do you feel that the Japanese treatment of POWS was right that is a war crime and if there was no Geneva convention the allies would have had no reason to execute them after the war. With the Geneva convention all tht is asked is that soldiers be human and not willfully kill rape and pillage.

[mongrel]

Take a look at the not so recent US invasion of iraq where there were widespread reportings of looting (not necessaily conducted by the troops themselves) and even rapes. or the horrors perpetrate by soldiers on viet civilians during the vietnam war. now compare these to King Edward III's 'Chevauchee' in Normandy and the sack of Rome perpetrated by t\he huns and Vandals.
warcrimes such as looting, pillaging, and the raping of womenfolk (or even menfolk, in the case of sparta) upon the civilian population have existed since the first rock was thrown by a shaggy homo sapiens.what i want to know is, why we even bother to give war a 'decent face' and try soldiers for warcrimes using civilian standards of morality?

The examples you gave are irrelevant, as they predate the precedents set by the Nuremberg trials and legislation under Article 51 of the UN Charter.

[Exarch]

The examples you gave are irrelevant, as they predate the precedents set by the Nuremberg trials and legislation under Article 51 of the UN Charter.

what i'm trying to get at is, just how applicable these laws might be given how constant things like lootings, rapines, sacking of cities and collateral damages are during any sort of human war.
it is all and well to have these laws while we're sitting around in a secure civilian setting but they(war vets) say all that goes out the window once the first bullet whizzes past you.
take torture for eg. something which i'm sure the Geneva convention and amnesty international take a strong stance against. However, troops in the field may feel compelled to torture captives with the goal of saving the lives of their own men. Read any book by the ex-navy SEAL Richard Marcinko who formed the famous SEAL team 6; and u'll see him condoning the use of torture to save his men's lives.

laws and charters are all very well, but to be quite honest, how often are they applied to the victors of a war who've implemented human rights atrocities? How come we havent executed that idiot Calley for the exact same crimes we executed Tojo and Eichmann? it should be noted that both have applied the same defence of 'we were only following orders'.
The examples i've given are representative of strategies and doctrines employed by armies against the civlian population of an enemy-all of which would be classified as warcrimes according to the Nuremburg trials and ARticle 51 of the UN charter.

Exrach do you feel that the Japanese treatment of POWS was right that is a war crime and if there was no Geneva convention the allies would have had no reason to execute them after the war. With the Geneva convention all tht is asked is that soldiers be human and not willfully kill rape and pillage

of course i dont agree with the way allied POWs were treated by the japanese; that's a classic warcrime right there, just as, objectively speaking, the allied firebombing of Dresden is a warcrime.


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[Ragabash]

of course i dont agree with the way allied POWs were treated by the japanese; that's a classic warcrime right there, just as, objectively speaking, the allied firebombing of Dresden is a warcrime.


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And regarding this assumption we should abandon "rules" (in very lightly used term) of war? Because someone commits a war crime, another one should be tolerated?

[Chlodwig I.]

These soldiers are humans and citizens of your country
To demand that they are mindless murders and rapers is a bit strange also to allow them actions that would be when done in your country be major crimes sounds a bit strange.

Whats would be the diffrence then between the rapers and murderers in your prisons and a soldier ?

How can fighting for or defending your Country mean killing civilians and rapeing women?


...
Hm my answer was a little late
so torture

I mean Torture is a bad joke....
If you believe that torture could help you also believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fary and Whiches?
A person will tell you anything under torture just to stop you from hurting him, how will you know that it wasn't a lie, or how will you know that he knows anything at all?

Rules are necessary
you can't always enforce the laws there are situations where officers will commit warcrimes to save the lives of thier soldiers, there will be always colateral damage

But in 2nd WW no one cared about colateral damage, ss divisions just killed whole villages out of fun.

So whats better to have rules that are sometimes broken or to have no rules at all?

[Icefrisco]

In my opinion the only times that countries commit war crimes are through genocides committed by large numbers of their soldiers(Armenians, Holocaust, Bosnians, ect.). Individuals may commit war crimes but honestly I wouldnt advocate strict punishment unless the crime was horrendous(e.g. My Lai) where more then 20people were affected. Many soldiers still rape women in war and if we were to punish all these men then many armies would be without skilled soldiers.

[Exarch]

[quote=Chlodwig I.;2520072]These soldiers are humans and citizens of your country

To demand that they are mindless murders and rapers is a bit strange also to allow them actions that would be when done in your country be major crimes sounds a bit strange.

Whats would be the diffrence then between the rapers and murderers in your prisons and a soldier ?

How can fighting for or defending your Country mean killing civilians and rapeing women?

of course there's no excuse for raping,torturing or massacring anybody; i know that. but to the man on the ground, those ethics and mores become flexible when it's him and his men's lvies in danger. Remember that scene from Platoon (1986) in the viet village where sergeant Barnes was interrogating the villagers and threatening the woman's daughter with a gun; not dissimilar to Marcinko's description of his experiences.
The difference between that and Calley's My Lai massacre was that the former served the purpose of obtaining info tht would've saved his men's lives. the my lai massacre was just that. a massacre.

as for the crimes of rape and looting, such aspects have been an unfortunate part of war since time memorable. some ppl justify them as 'spoils of war' and some troops have even gotten away with it: like the mass rape of german women by the red army in Berlin for eg. who's been indicted for those warcrimes since then? why do we even have a nuremburg laws if those soviet troops can live to an old age and even, in one documentary, boast about a generation of germans having soviet blood in them?





...

Hm my answer was a little late
so torture

I mean Torture is a bad joke....

i agree

If you believe that torture could help you also believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fary and Whiches?
A person will tell you anything under torture just to stop you from hurting him, how will you know that it wasn't a lie, or how will you know that he knows anything at all?

i remember reading somewhere about how torture was like an art for medieval torturers and how they had to get it right with trhe amount of pain inflicted so that ppl wouldnt start saying anything. even so, yes, ppl who are being waterboarded and tortured ad liable to say anything.

Rules are necessary
you can't always enforce the laws there are situations where officers will commit warcrimes to save the lives of thier soldiers, there will be always colateral damage

But in 2nd WW no one cared about colateral damage, ss divisions just killed whole villages out of fun.

So whats better to have rules that are sometimes broken or to have no rules at all?

of course rules are necessary but i cant help but think that the rules are just there to help make us sleep better at nights, or even to make it esier to 'erase' troublesome dictators who dont kowtow to US interests eg Milosevic, saddam hussein while ppl like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz saunter into another blameless department.
what's the point of it all then?

[mongrel]

Whatever the mitigating circumstances, the law is the law. 21st century soldiers are, for the most part, the best educated and trained soldiers the World has ever seen, and their officers are more than conversant with the rules of war. There is no excuse.

[HorseArcher]

In my opinion the only times that countries commit war crimes are through genocides committed by large numbers of their soldiers(Armenians, Holocaust, Bosnians, ect.). Individuals may commit war crimes but honestly I wouldnt advocate strict punishment unless the crime was horrendous(e.g. My Lai) where more then 20people were affected. Many soldiers still rape women in war and if we were to punish all these men then many armies would be without skilled soldiers.

If you think of it, according to the Geneva conventions, any war dating back all the way to the first wars between homo sapiens or even homo erectus are loaded with genocides, rape/torture and mass killing and even exterminating entire populations (Carthage).

It's an animal instinct, pre-programmed , just like a new male Lion kills off all the kitties of the defeated previous male-lion , which is pretty much a little genocide, because he wants his "genes" within the new generation of lion-kitties.

When the so called soviet "liberators" swept back the germans in WWII, they also mass-raped a lot of women, hence the european "baby boomers" having their sons and daughters from unkown russian soldiers.


Rape and extermination based on race was always part of the human instinct, it's pretty much trying to dominate and spread your own genes over the conquered population.

Of course, I still think that anyone who follows his animal-like instinct of doing genocide or extermination or mass rape and torture should be categorized as animals instead of humans.

[humvee2800]

There is a point where philosophy comes into play as well. By going to certain extents in ones attempt to save themself and there supposedly better morales they may in fact destroy in themselves the very little which makes there fight right.

[Exarch]

There is a point where philosophy comes into play as well. By going to certain extents in ones attempt to save themself and there supposedly better morales they may in fact destroy in themselves the very little which makes there fight right.

some ppl can live with having 'destroyed themselves' via atrocities by rationalising it. eg firebombing dresden and hiroshima, just as the US admin is attemptin gto justify Gitmo.

[Heinz Guderian]

I think its quite simple. Kill the enemy which are armed and resisting you and DONT rape the women. I said DONT rape the women. Or steal their money. They should put it in the handbook.

[Exarch]

I think its quite simple. Kill the enemy which are armed and resisting you and DONT rape the women. I said DONT rape the women. Or steal their money. They should put it in the handbook.

does that mean they're allowed to rape the men and boys?

despite putting it in rulebooks and laws and statutes, the thing is that military training attempts to break u and ur civilised self down and recreate u into a killer.
and despite all that, i suppose the power goes into the ead of some of these troops and they break discipline and commit the chevauchee

[Heinz Guderian]

does that mean they're allowed to rape the men and boys?

I've heard the descriptions of the unreleased Abu Ghraib pics, i guess some US guards thought it a no brainer

despite putting it in rulebooks and laws and statutes, the thing is that military training attempts to break u and ur civilised self down and recreate u into a killer.
and despite all that, i suppose the power goes into the ead of some of these troops and they break discipline and commit the chevauchee[/quote]

I dont think officers are trained like that at Westpoint or Sandhurst. Even the grunts arent trained like, well not in Britain anyway, but thats where the officer earns his extra pay. Raping a local woman (or boy), torturing, murdering will give rise to resistance and justification for resistance. This is bad for the occupying policy makers. So training should produce discipline. Training has moved on from Apocalypse Now.

E.g. If the americans didnt put down a peaceful demonstration in fallujah early in the war (killing 22 unarmed people), they probably wouldnt have needed to expend so many lives and material putting down the local resistance which followed. Bottom line is war crimes produce stiffer resistance.

[mongrel]

does that mean they're allowed to rape the men and boys?

despite putting it in rulebooks and laws and statutes, the thing is that military training attempts to break u and ur civilised self down and recreate u into a killer.
and despite all that, i suppose the power goes into the ead of some of these troops and they break discipline and commit the chevauchee

My military training enabled me drive light armoured vehicles, lay down effective fire and maintain the regimental radio net. I can't see where rape, loot and murder featured in it.

[removeduser_426582376423734]

Wait, do average civilian rapists get army training? Or do soldiers get rape training?

Exarch, when on a topic with no background experience whatsoever, we shouldn't jump to conclusions.

[Exarch]

Wait, do average civilian rapists get army training? Or do soldiers get rape training?

Exarch, when on a topic with no background experience whatsoever, we shouldn't jump to conclusions.

i'm not saying that soldiers get trained in looting and/or raping, jsut that these things can occur among soldiers because of the thin layer of civility being wiped away as a result of the anarchic chaos of warfare, as well as being driven to kill-somethign i'm sure would drive some ppl over the edge.

for eg, say ur with a company of troops, and u come across a village of iraqis. now u dont know whether they're harbouring terrorists, whether they're terrorists, or whether there's going to be an ambush any moment. u've heard stories about ur mates getting blown apart and/or maimed/killed via IEDs. human nature for self preservation and fear would compel one to take the safest option which is devoid of any civility at all: kill them all, and let god sort it out. of course, soldiers dont have such a loose grasp on their nerves i should hope. and with that attitude one can probably understnad how easy it would be for one to torture a captive for info that could save lives, namely ur own and ur mates.
well the above scenario was typical of a patrol in vietnam. feel free to correct me, but this is the impression i got from studying vietnam back in yr 12, so i might be missing somewthing

[mongrel]

Properly trained soldiers ought to transcend their personal flaws and pursue the best option to meet their unit's objectives.That is what basic training is about. Self preservation is not necessarily the overriding motive. In a close action there will be casualties. Wiping out the locals is not the safest option at all, it's the laziest one and the most dangerous, as it justifies the aims of your enemies whilst simultaneously undermining your own. Dead and mourning people cannot benefit from the fruits of democracy after all.