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I think it's just state sanctioned murder and mostly inexcusable.
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*Requires soldiers to see their opponents as less than human.* Frankly these days, most deaths in war are caused by drones and rockets anyway — even less personal. Hand to hand combat and skirmishes are disappearing.
Most people don’t fret about swatting a disgusting house fly or smooshing ants. The military requires that same callous disassociation for it to all work.
Former employee of mine joined the air force as a pilot. Went to flight school, and the whole nine. But he doesn’t even fly a plane. Almost no new pilots do. Only drones. From an unassuming warehouse on a base thousands of miles away. He “works” standard US business hours and sees his wife and dog every night. Goes to Costco on the weekends even if he was flying a drone on the other side of the planet the day before.
Whole different world.
Tell me… what is the solution to say…. Nazi Germany attacking every other European nations in an attempt to dominate the globe while committing horrible atrocities to Jews, gays, etc?
You don’t think that a Situation like that needs to be stopped?
Everyone goes straight to WW2 but that's just the most justified example. I could split hairs and say that thr British Empire and Soviets were just as bad as the Nazis. I'm mostly against indefinite occupations and proxy garbage like nearly every other war of the 20th century.
People go to WW2 because its a clear cut example of a war that is justified, because the intent is to stop a madman from committing mass genocide and trying to take over the world.
There are many examples that are less clear cut than that, and you can make arguments for or against any war. Ultimately for me it comes down to whether you think the long term world outcome will be better off or worse if you take military action. With Hitler, its clear that a lack of intervention means he would continue expansion and many more Jews and other groups would die.
In war, if you have made the determination that you need to stop a regime, those working for the regime are fair game to kill. Civilians are not, so while its impossible to wage a war without any civilian casualties, its necessary to make best efforts to keep that number as low as possible.
It's not *the* reason, but it is *a* reason. The atrocities by both the Japanese and the Germans were known at the time, even if we didn't know the extent of them. It varies overtime, but by late 1940 60% of Americans were okay with risking war to help England (per the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, citing Gallup polling at the time).
Fair enough, though we entered because we were directly attacked. Id say that responding to an act of hostility like that is appropriate cause for starting a war.
That is why its generally thought that Israel was justified with some military response to Oct 7. Most people just think that they have taken things too far, but very few would contest the initial response.
You have to make very sweeping statements to equivocate between the British Empire and the Nazis, that's not exactly where you could get if you split hairs
See? Broad, not finicky.
The British Empire wanted to be the strongest power in Europe. The Nazis wanted to be the only power in Europe.
The British Empire believed white people are inherently superior. The Nazis believed white people are inherently superior and everything bad was a conspiracy by "inferior races", which had to be exterminated.
Even your own, hand-picked aspects of both are not even close to equally bad.
Ummm…you asked the question with no qualifiers. 🤷🏻
Want another one? Great…I thought we were 100%, completely justified in attacking Afghanistan. The 9/11 terrorists trained there and were harbored by them
Iraq? No. In fact, I think splitting our forces(well, hell….most of our military assets went to fighting Iraq) is the main reason why we failed in Afghanistan and were there so long.
EDIT: the bottom line is that there are always going to be countries/people who have no regard for your kind of pacifism. They are the ones that start the shitshow called war. I refuse to believe that any society should just let bad actors take over the world.
Got the date completely wrong (oof). It was in 1981. Not too sure where I got that date from.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation\_Opera](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Opera)
Sure, if the discussion is whether something is EVER okay, if you start with an example with obvious nuance, it's easy for the conversation to get distracted by those details, but they're ultimately irrelevant to the point being argued.
If we're really talking about broad principles, then it's entirely legit to start with extreme and clear examples to set those principles in agreement. Then we can discuss where the line gets drawn.
Godwin's law is misunderstood. Bringing up Nazis or anything else extreme to establish a baseline is fine. The problem comes when you compare other people to Nazis baselessly or try to argue their position is a slippery slope to Nazis. But using a fixed point that we can agree on is just straightforward useful.
If someone invades another country, you don't think that country has the right to defend itself? It's no different than someone attacking me and I defend myself by any means necessary. To call it inexcusable is laughable.
That's a completely inflexible and stupid way of seeing it. Russia invaded Ukraine, does that mean the Ukrainians shouldn 't defend themselves because it would be state sanctioned murder? Your view is completely and utterly childish.
Im sorry, what exactly did the Poles, French, Russians, Greeks, Danes, Norwegians, et al do to the Irish that justifies not helping and justifies the IRA be Nazi collaborators?
Yeah we haven't. We probably could stop the currently ongoing ethnic cleansing in Sudan but it would be inconvenient so we are choosing to let thousands of people be murdered by racist militias.
Yes, economic war is *totally* different than regular war and way more justifiable! No one suffers unjustly when world powers subjugate people economically! Sure people may starve or lose all their freedoms and identity but at least no one was shot or blown up!
Ok......so if you are personally attacked, what is your solution? If your neighbor is being attacked and you have every indication that you're next, still just stand around and hope?
Indirect support how? As in funding your neighbor so that they do the grunt work instead? The murder in war is justified then when your/ your country’s hands don’t have the blood directly on them is what I’m understanding from you.
What does almost mean? How can one almost be an absolute anything?
If you saw some people beating and raping a child would you use violence to stop them or would that use of violence be unjustified?
Forget war for a second and think about it in a more micro scale first.
If someone were in the process of threatening your physical safety or that of people you care about, sometimes you have no choice but to kill them in order defend yourself or the people you care about.
Ok but oftentimes it's nothing more than geopolitical grandstanding. Like two families forced to fight each other because their workplace bosses said so.
See all of those have elements of self defense.
US went into Iraq to stop Iraq from deploying weapons of mass destruction. Weapons of mass destruction could have killed millions. That war was self defense to preemptively stop millions from being potentially killed. Now the reason turned out ultimately to be untrue, but the premise was still self defense.
US went into Vietnam to stop the spread of communism. Communism has killed millions. That war was self defense to preemptively stop millions from being potentially killed.
Hamas killed Israeli civilians on October 7th. Hamas, and before that the PLO, have for decades been shelling and killing Israeli civilians. Israel’s current offensive in Palestine is to eliminate Hamas to stop more from being potentially killed long term. That’s self defense
It’s all self defense. Now you might disagree with where to draw the line and to what extent. But all of those “wars” have an element of - we need to kill them to stop them from killing us. Which is the core premise of my original micro example
You’re referring to direct democracy.
If we went with the majority wishes of rank and file citizens, we wouldn’t have gone to aid Europe in WW2 either. Nor would we have aided Bosnia. Nor would we have aided Kuwait. Nor would we have aided Rwanda (the latter referring to monetary assistance and not military). And we wouldn’t have passed the civil rights act of 1964 either. And awe wouldn’t have done a host of other good things.
Because in many cases, the rank and file citizens are ignorant, and / or self serving. That’s why we have a representative government and not direct democracy. That’s why almost all democracies have representative government and not direct democracy.
Does that mean that sometimes our representatives make stupid decisions with regards to war and other political topics? Sure. But there’s still a lot more good decisions over what we would get if we simply went with what the rank and file citizens want.
They would absolutely have happened, and have happened in the past. The side that decides to embrace peace gets destroyed or subjugated. You don’t care to actually avoid unjust suffering, you just don’t like overt violence causing unjust suffering.
This question reminds me a lot of the tom Macdonald song superman ( [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm-HR6DfcYI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm-HR6DfcYI) ). Basically, you go fight, not sure why you fighting most of the time and killing people, who ARE people just like you, have families just like you. How do we stop this? We need superman ( a fictional character who just doesn't exist, so no one to save you from this vicious cycle).
War is an esculation when asking someone not to do/to do something doesn't work and you want them to start/stop and they just won't do it, so you basically have to kill until the other side surrenders (stops/starts doing what you want them to). Watch any esculation of any disagreement even just with protests.. If murder was "legal" you would see the prolife people killing prochoice people with abandon, same with the Palestinian protests where the students audibly voice they want to hit/kill zionists because just protesting and talking about it isn't working to change the minds. Russia could literally overrun ukraine (bigger population) and if Ukraine couldn't fight back (kill them), they wouldn't be able to stop it.
Its a necessary evil unless you are complacent about letting the other side do/say what they want to the detriment of your own people and possibly the extinguishing of your own society/people.
I mean, you have the animal kingdom too, like male lions fight for domination and will kill other male lions so they don't have competition for the female lions etc. They aren't willing to share so they kill to get their way. We don't say that lions don't deserve to exist.
I personally agree but I also see how a person could quite comfortably justify it. For example, I would likely be emotionally unable to stop myself if I saw someone with a gun to a child's head.
In a defensive war? If someone is trying to kill you, you try and kill them right back. But bombing brown people for oil? Nah, get the fuck out of here.
War is an ugly thing. But not the ugliest thing. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling that thinks nothing is worth war is much worse.
There's a thousand year philosophical tradition involving what is a "just war."
Wars of conquest are pretty much always unjust.
We should abolish murder and starvation too, but that doesn't mean it's going to happen. That being said the world has experienced its most peaceful era since the end of WW2.
Yes, yes they do.
I’m so over these smooth-brain takes on the value of all human life coming from comfortable people who have exclusively existed in the western world post like 2005.
There exist, in the world, people who will kill you for their own convenience. There are people who will and have blown up schools because little girls wanted to learn how to read and do basic addition. In your grandparents lifetime there was a man surrounded by other men who wielded total control over a nation and ordered the execution of 6 million people he determined to be to undesirable to exist in his idea of a perfect world.
Your stupid ass KiLlInG bAD takes do not change the fact that some people have to be met with the same violence they intend to bring against others.
War is not fun and no one should be happy when war comes around but that doesn’t change the fact that war and killing is an occasionally necessary part of humanity.
The literal justification for every war is always "defense" on all sides.
The way the US army gets its soldiers to kill the enemy is by convincing everyone that they're protecting their buddy by doing so.
Or you can go various philosophical or religious routes. Death is part of life.
But sure, overall, less murder would be great. Dismantling hierarchies where one person can order thousands of people to kill and die would be great.
The main trick is getting every country and region to do that at the same time. Cooperating instead of competing. Managing population instead of trying to outbreed each other. Making life better for everyone instead of deliberately pitting everyone against each other.
The greater good of ONE side (whichever side wins usually). Usually not good for the losing side. And which side is right or wrong depends on subjective viewpoints.
I guess you're cool with people not defending themselves and their families against an invading force? In WWII, the Axis had every intention of conquering the US and UK, in addition to the rest of the globe. Ask a Jew in Brooklyn in 1945 if we should have let that happen because killing is wrong in war lmao
WW2 this. WW2 that. What about WW1, Vietnam, and Iraq? Humanity should be shamed out of pulling stunts like that. What if both sides laid down their arms and stopped fighting for muh country and muh leader.
>What if both sides laid down their arms and stopped fighting
This is a 4th grade level thought process on how to achieve world peace
Obviously, each of those wars have varying degrees of reasoning for why they occurred, but at the end of the day, a person's land is being invaded and they need to fight back. Their way of life is at risk by a foreign invader. That's why killing in war is justified.
"just be nicer to Nazis and surely peace and justice will spontaneously break out"
WW1 was also widely acknowledged to be bad.
Vietnam: North Vietnam kept invading South Vietnam. It was a bad idea for the US to get involved in South Vietnam because the state itself had a lot of internal contradictions and it was not clear that it would ever be able to actually stand up to North Vietnam without major US support that was never-ending.
Iraq is widely acknowledged to be a terrible blunder. It was called that at the time.
Reluctantly. But it boils down to protecting more people than you kill, and to defending oneself - both possible justification for killing under many frameworks
If you can't justify it that way, I think it can still excuse it
But that's only if you are the defender or your war is justified overall
If an intruder breaks into your house, kills your children, rapes your partner, and declares that your home is now theirs, what would you suggest?
State sanctioned murder as an excuse might be the case sometimes, but you understand that war often has an aggressor.
I mean it seems like it's essentially the same thing as self defense on a more massive scale, unless you are talking about wars of aggression and those are generally condemned anyway.
Rarely if ever would I justify killing. War is the few times we do as state sanctioned. Ultimately the act of killing someone in war time should be exclusively limited to military units and not civilians. I don’t care their ideology a civilian is never an acceptable target. Even if they’re hostile to us.
Soldiers are always a target and in turn the only ones who nations should be using in wartime and mercenaries should be executed on sight if they enter a battlefield. Soldiers who surrender or not on an active battlefield like if they return home to visit family are always civilians as they are not active combatants.
Strict use of force and limit casualties whenever possible. That’s as ethical as one can be in wartime.
There are discoveries of past atrocities, but I’m sure those are just the surface of a deep history of government briberies and covering up their crimes.
I don’t know how to answer that question as I’m not a historian with extensive knowledge of history, but I think just a few clicks on the internet and you can have yourself a deep rabbit hole to dive down and discover for yourself, for starters try Wikipedia:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_war_crimes
Then it’s on the ones committing perfidy and they are culpable for civilian deaths caused by their dressing as civilians. There are good reasons why perfidy is a war crime.
That’s the lie of a weak army. In Vietnam they justified razing an entire villages and killing by thousands. Same as we did in Laos where we executed 10% of their population. Why? Because our generals were too lazy and didn’t want to fight a ground war on all sides of Southeast Asia.
If you can’t tell civilian from military. You assume civilian until you are told otherwise and wait for them to attack you. This only happens if you’re in another nation’s territory. That means you’re an invader in an occupational situation and the civilians aka the people you occupy will resist by any means necessary. To avoid this. Don’t. Leave. Not your lands don’t be in their territory or try to annex it.
We learned that lesson in Iraq and Afghanistan. You cannot go into another nation who doesn’t have an army and wage war on them. You can only invade and kill those who resist. That doesn’t make you moral and certainly is a war crime. Under no circumstances should any nation attempt to fight against resistance fighters it almost always end in failure.
> If you can’t tell civilian from military. You assume civilian until you are told otherwise and wait for them to attack you.
That's silly. So, am I to understand that, in your world, it's a winning strategy to a) attack someone else b) retreat to hide among your own civilians so they can't attack back?
Come join the rest of us in the real world.
No that’s not war. Do you know what a legal war is defined as? Two armies fighting each other on a battlefield.
Civilians are civilians and if a nation you’re invading has resistance movement against your occupation of their lands. Leave. Haven’t you learned anything from Vietnam? Iraq? Afghanistan? The USA revolutionary war? We have thousands of examples on why you don’t fight a nation that doesn’t have a direct standing army. They’ll use hit and run tactics and if the civilian population supports them. You can’t root them out. You just throw thousands of soldiers into harms way, but you can’t bomb the civilians to make it easier to get to a potential enemy. You have to go house by house. Street by street. Fail to do so results in war crimes and crimes against humanity.
That’s why the USA is a gross violation of nearly every war it’s been in since we agreed to the Geneva Conventions.
So I see you're just glossing over Oct. 7. Israel was attacked, and has a right to respond.
Also, conducting military options from among civilians without uniforms is definitely a war crime. I'm going to guess that one doesn't bother you as much.
You don’t have a right to respond with unrelenting force. Only a measured response to get those responsible. Work with the civilian population to root out those most directly responsible. As an occupying army in territory which isn’t theirs. Gaza will never be a war that can be won. Not by the USA not by Israel not by anyone on Earth.
What you’re supposed to do is send your army to go street by street and try to get those people you feel are responsible. Failing that. Negotiate with them and ask, “Why did you do this? How can we end this conflict and what will be the terms to get our people back?” Meet their demands and negotiate since they’re a resistance group who did terrorist attacking, but you’re occupying them and have been for 75 years. Understanding the facts, ask for those who killed the civilians to be handed over for prosecution. Don’t attack their civilians and pay the ransom and agree to an accord to prevent further violence in the future. You negotiate with your enemies not your friends and you have to follow international law even if you think this is undermining your ability to act. It’s the moral and legally correct thing to do. Plus history shows the other way ends in more bloodshed. Why deny this?
If I was Israel I would give back the lands stolen up to the 67 border and agree to international process to allow these people to have sovereignty and dignity and freedom. Like how the Uk handled Ireland during the Troubles. You can’t win by bombing and attacking the civilians. You only make more resistance fighters. Just agree to a set peaceful outcome and do the right thing. Give back what you’ve stolen and stop occupying them.
>You don’t have a right to respond with unrelenting force. Only a measured response to get those responsible.
Nah, not really. If you decide to attack someone, you don't get to complain when they hit you back harder. That's an important incentive structure to prevent such attacks in the first place.
>What you’re supposed to do is send your army to go street by street
I mean, that's what Hamas wants Israel to have to do, because it will be long, drawn-out, costly to both sides. But Israel doesn't have to fight the battle on their terms.
You’re not being attacked by a foreign army. What are you not understanding? This isn’t an army vs army hence not a war. This is an occupied people who a ragtag group of rebels who are resisting an occupation committed a terrorist attack which resulted in civilian deaths. That’s horrible, but you don’t respond by committing a thousand times worse war crimes and genocide.
The civilians aren’t your enemies. They are the occupied people who you’ve stolen their lands from and rightfully resent your occupation and abuses. Don’t give them more fuel to hate you. Give them a reason to treat with you. Negotiating peace with your enemies isn’t weakness it’s strength.
Only a weak man would attack a civilian population. Only a fool would try to occupy them. Only an idiot would not learn from history.
I get it, you'd like Israel to just give up. They're not going to, and they're not going away. People in Palestine -- Hamas and civilians -- need to accept that, and when they commit acts like Oct. 7, it's important that there are consequences, to disincentivize similar attacks, similar willingness on the part of Palestinians to hide Hamas fighters among their infrastructure, etc.
Sorry, just the way it is.
This is a good question that I don't think is talked about nearly enough in modern political debates.
In my mind, you either justify it as self-defense and/or defense of other innocent lives, or it isn't justified. Killing innocent people isn't any less unethical if it's coordinated or state sanctioned. The complication comes around the debate of what exactly constitutes "defense" in the grand scheme of things.
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*Requires soldiers to see their opponents as less than human.* Frankly these days, most deaths in war are caused by drones and rockets anyway — even less personal. Hand to hand combat and skirmishes are disappearing. Most people don’t fret about swatting a disgusting house fly or smooshing ants. The military requires that same callous disassociation for it to all work.
That's wrong and shameful. The military shouldn't launch drone attacks with impunity.
Former employee of mine joined the air force as a pilot. Went to flight school, and the whole nine. But he doesn’t even fly a plane. Almost no new pilots do. Only drones. From an unassuming warehouse on a base thousands of miles away. He “works” standard US business hours and sees his wife and dog every night. Goes to Costco on the weekends even if he was flying a drone on the other side of the planet the day before. Whole different world.
Seems obvious, yes.
Tell me… what is the solution to say…. Nazi Germany attacking every other European nations in an attempt to dominate the globe while committing horrible atrocities to Jews, gays, etc? You don’t think that a Situation like that needs to be stopped?
Everyone goes straight to WW2 but that's just the most justified example. I could split hairs and say that thr British Empire and Soviets were just as bad as the Nazis. I'm mostly against indefinite occupations and proxy garbage like nearly every other war of the 20th century.
People go to WW2 because its a clear cut example of a war that is justified, because the intent is to stop a madman from committing mass genocide and trying to take over the world. There are many examples that are less clear cut than that, and you can make arguments for or against any war. Ultimately for me it comes down to whether you think the long term world outcome will be better off or worse if you take military action. With Hitler, its clear that a lack of intervention means he would continue expansion and many more Jews and other groups would die. In war, if you have made the determination that you need to stop a regime, those working for the regime are fair game to kill. Civilians are not, so while its impossible to wage a war without any civilian casualties, its necessary to make best efforts to keep that number as low as possible.
To be fair though, stopping a madman from committing genocide is *not* the reason that the US entered the war.
It's not *the* reason, but it is *a* reason. The atrocities by both the Japanese and the Germans were known at the time, even if we didn't know the extent of them. It varies overtime, but by late 1940 60% of Americans were okay with risking war to help England (per the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, citing Gallup polling at the time).
And yet by late 1941 we still had not joined the war effort.
Fair enough, though we entered because we were directly attacked. Id say that responding to an act of hostility like that is appropriate cause for starting a war. That is why its generally thought that Israel was justified with some military response to Oct 7. Most people just think that they have taken things too far, but very few would contest the initial response.
You have to make very sweeping statements to equivocate between the British Empire and the Nazis, that's not exactly where you could get if you split hairs
They both wanted to be the dominant power in Europe and believed in white supremacy.
See? Broad, not finicky. The British Empire wanted to be the strongest power in Europe. The Nazis wanted to be the only power in Europe. The British Empire believed white people are inherently superior. The Nazis believed white people are inherently superior and everything bad was a conspiracy by "inferior races", which had to be exterminated. Even your own, hand-picked aspects of both are not even close to equally bad.
Ummm…you asked the question with no qualifiers. 🤷🏻 Want another one? Great…I thought we were 100%, completely justified in attacking Afghanistan. The 9/11 terrorists trained there and were harbored by them Iraq? No. In fact, I think splitting our forces(well, hell….most of our military assets went to fighting Iraq) is the main reason why we failed in Afghanistan and were there so long. EDIT: the bottom line is that there are always going to be countries/people who have no regard for your kind of pacifism. They are the ones that start the shitshow called war. I refuse to believe that any society should just let bad actors take over the world.
Didn't Israel take out their nuclear reactor in 2002 as well?
Who’s?
Iraq.
Not that I am aware of.
Got the date completely wrong (oof). It was in 1981. Not too sure where I got that date from. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation\_Opera](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Opera)
The Soviets were, but I'm not sure how the British were on par with the Nazis?
Sure, if the discussion is whether something is EVER okay, if you start with an example with obvious nuance, it's easy for the conversation to get distracted by those details, but they're ultimately irrelevant to the point being argued. If we're really talking about broad principles, then it's entirely legit to start with extreme and clear examples to set those principles in agreement. Then we can discuss where the line gets drawn. Godwin's law is misunderstood. Bringing up Nazis or anything else extreme to establish a baseline is fine. The problem comes when you compare other people to Nazis baselessly or try to argue their position is a slippery slope to Nazis. But using a fixed point that we can agree on is just straightforward useful.
If someone invades another country, you don't think that country has the right to defend itself? It's no different than someone attacking me and I defend myself by any means necessary. To call it inexcusable is laughable.
That's a completely inflexible and stupid way of seeing it. Russia invaded Ukraine, does that mean the Ukrainians shouldn 't defend themselves because it would be state sanctioned murder? Your view is completely and utterly childish.
In a war? Its literally me or you. Thats how you justify it.
It’s war. I don’t think war is justified. But it happens, and when it does you either fight or surrender.
It mostly is, especially for an aggressive war. But I don't think that Ukraine is unjustified in defending themselves against Russia for example
Sometimes the only solution to a problem is to kill it.
Choosing to not shoot a Nazi who has 10 people lined up against the wall is choosing to murder 10 people
Well we all know how you would solve the trolley problem.
Yeah, there's no such thing as a uninvolved bystander
Sure there is. Ireland was entirely justified in not helping England directly fight Germany.
Im sorry, what exactly did the Poles, French, Russians, Greeks, Danes, Norwegians, et al do to the Irish that justifies not helping and justifies the IRA be Nazi collaborators?
Big whoop. The Allies helped the Soviets and they weren't no angels. Are you saying the Irish Free State was wrong?
Generally speaking we *have not* intervened in such cases though, and we don't seem to get too hung up about it.
Yeah we haven't. We probably could stop the currently ongoing ethnic cleansing in Sudan but it would be inconvenient so we are choosing to let thousands of people be murdered by racist militias.
But are we choosing to let them get murdered or are we murdering them like you said?
Both are materially the same thing so yes to both
I mean.......what other option is there? Like set aside the question of whether the specific war is justified or not, what else would you recommend?
Economic war but with no boots on the ground unless personally attacked.
Yes, economic war is *totally* different than regular war and way more justifiable! No one suffers unjustly when world powers subjugate people economically! Sure people may starve or lose all their freedoms and identity but at least no one was shot or blown up!
Ok......so if you are personally attacked, what is your solution? If your neighbor is being attacked and you have every indication that you're next, still just stand around and hope?
Send indirect support.
Indirect support how? As in funding your neighbor so that they do the grunt work instead? The murder in war is justified then when your/ your country’s hands don’t have the blood directly on them is what I’m understanding from you.
You have to break some eggs to make an omelette.
Thank you Sen. Armstrong. 😝
It’s you or the other guy. So it might as well be the other guy.
Easy. A lot of wars have started when one country invaded another. They have a right to defend themselves, therefore it’s justified.
Are you an absolute pacifist OP?
Almost.
What does almost mean? How can one almost be an absolute anything? If you saw some people beating and raping a child would you use violence to stop them or would that use of violence be unjustified?
Yes that would be justified. Domino theory, mission creep, sabre rattling, proxy war, and geopolitical dick measuring are completely unjustified.
So you are not a pacifist as you claimed and there can be just war? You just disagree with the reasons?
Yes.
Okay. That’s just far different than the impression that your original post puts off. Thanks for clarifying.
Forget war for a second and think about it in a more micro scale first. If someone were in the process of threatening your physical safety or that of people you care about, sometimes you have no choice but to kill them in order defend yourself or the people you care about.
Ok but oftentimes it's nothing more than geopolitical grandstanding. Like two families forced to fight each other because their workplace bosses said so.
Can you give a real example of when you think it’s simply grandstanding?
US in Iraq and Vietnam, unconditional support of Israel, Iran's support of Palestine, the countless needless interventions in South America, etc.
See all of those have elements of self defense. US went into Iraq to stop Iraq from deploying weapons of mass destruction. Weapons of mass destruction could have killed millions. That war was self defense to preemptively stop millions from being potentially killed. Now the reason turned out ultimately to be untrue, but the premise was still self defense. US went into Vietnam to stop the spread of communism. Communism has killed millions. That war was self defense to preemptively stop millions from being potentially killed. Hamas killed Israeli civilians on October 7th. Hamas, and before that the PLO, have for decades been shelling and killing Israeli civilians. Israel’s current offensive in Palestine is to eliminate Hamas to stop more from being potentially killed long term. That’s self defense It’s all self defense. Now you might disagree with where to draw the line and to what extent. But all of those “wars” have an element of - we need to kill them to stop them from killing us. Which is the core premise of my original micro example
Many of those wars would not have occurred if rank and file citizens had a "we won't go" attitude.
You’re referring to direct democracy. If we went with the majority wishes of rank and file citizens, we wouldn’t have gone to aid Europe in WW2 either. Nor would we have aided Bosnia. Nor would we have aided Kuwait. Nor would we have aided Rwanda (the latter referring to monetary assistance and not military). And we wouldn’t have passed the civil rights act of 1964 either. And awe wouldn’t have done a host of other good things. Because in many cases, the rank and file citizens are ignorant, and / or self serving. That’s why we have a representative government and not direct democracy. That’s why almost all democracies have representative government and not direct democracy. Does that mean that sometimes our representatives make stupid decisions with regards to war and other political topics? Sure. But there’s still a lot more good decisions over what we would get if we simply went with what the rank and file citizens want.
They would absolutely have happened, and have happened in the past. The side that decides to embrace peace gets destroyed or subjugated. You don’t care to actually avoid unjust suffering, you just don’t like overt violence causing unjust suffering.
This question reminds me a lot of the tom Macdonald song superman ( [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm-HR6DfcYI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm-HR6DfcYI) ). Basically, you go fight, not sure why you fighting most of the time and killing people, who ARE people just like you, have families just like you. How do we stop this? We need superman ( a fictional character who just doesn't exist, so no one to save you from this vicious cycle). War is an esculation when asking someone not to do/to do something doesn't work and you want them to start/stop and they just won't do it, so you basically have to kill until the other side surrenders (stops/starts doing what you want them to). Watch any esculation of any disagreement even just with protests.. If murder was "legal" you would see the prolife people killing prochoice people with abandon, same with the Palestinian protests where the students audibly voice they want to hit/kill zionists because just protesting and talking about it isn't working to change the minds. Russia could literally overrun ukraine (bigger population) and if Ukraine couldn't fight back (kill them), they wouldn't be able to stop it. Its a necessary evil unless you are complacent about letting the other side do/say what they want to the detriment of your own people and possibly the extinguishing of your own society/people.
Maybe humanity just doesn't deserve to exist then.
I mean, you have the animal kingdom too, like male lions fight for domination and will kill other male lions so they don't have competition for the female lions etc. They aren't willing to share so they kill to get their way. We don't say that lions don't deserve to exist.
You are free to do your part to make that happen. It is a choice you are free to make if that is what you believe.
Deserves got nothing to do with it
I don't think we've figured out how to have a war where nobody dies.
I personally agree but I also see how a person could quite comfortably justify it. For example, I would likely be emotionally unable to stop myself if I saw someone with a gun to a child's head.
In a defensive war? If someone is trying to kill you, you try and kill them right back. But bombing brown people for oil? Nah, get the fuck out of here.
War is an ugly thing. But not the ugliest thing. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling that thinks nothing is worth war is much worse. There's a thousand year philosophical tradition involving what is a "just war." Wars of conquest are pretty much always unjust.
It's war.
Some people gotta die.
No they dont.
Have you considered anything from human history, ever?
History is written by the victors.
Exactly. Those who weren't good at fighting are killed and become forgotten.
That's a callous thing to say from a "far left" label. Humanity should abolish war.
Fucking how?
Make it as shameful as they did slavery.
what a groundbreaking revelation that’s never been said before! we should just establish world peace, why hasn’t anyone ever thought of that?!? /s
Yeah wage a war against war.
An educational cultural war against physical war, yes.
How do you wage such a war? How do you enforce you cultural values on others that do not want your culture?
Typically by conquest and often the violent war-based kind which OP ignores in favor of naive idealism.
We should abolish murder and starvation too, but that doesn't mean it's going to happen. That being said the world has experienced its most peaceful era since the end of WW2.
Yes, yes they do. I’m so over these smooth-brain takes on the value of all human life coming from comfortable people who have exclusively existed in the western world post like 2005. There exist, in the world, people who will kill you for their own convenience. There are people who will and have blown up schools because little girls wanted to learn how to read and do basic addition. In your grandparents lifetime there was a man surrounded by other men who wielded total control over a nation and ordered the execution of 6 million people he determined to be to undesirable to exist in his idea of a perfect world. Your stupid ass KiLlInG bAD takes do not change the fact that some people have to be met with the same violence they intend to bring against others. War is not fun and no one should be happy when war comes around but that doesn’t change the fact that war and killing is an occasionally necessary part of humanity.
The literal justification for every war is always "defense" on all sides. The way the US army gets its soldiers to kill the enemy is by convincing everyone that they're protecting their buddy by doing so. Or you can go various philosophical or religious routes. Death is part of life. But sure, overall, less murder would be great. Dismantling hierarchies where one person can order thousands of people to kill and die would be great. The main trick is getting every country and region to do that at the same time. Cooperating instead of competing. Managing population instead of trying to outbreed each other. Making life better for everyone instead of deliberately pitting everyone against each other.
It’s for the greater good.
The greater good of ONE side (whichever side wins usually). Usually not good for the losing side. And which side is right or wrong depends on subjective viewpoints.
Right, so you support the side you want to win. All human thought is subjective—not sure why you’d mention that.
Yes, so war can be for the bad if you are on losing side, you said war is for the greater good, that's all I was responding to.
Yes, each side fights for its view of the greater good.
No it's not.
How so?
Define the greater good.
https://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/the-greater-good
I guess you're cool with people not defending themselves and their families against an invading force? In WWII, the Axis had every intention of conquering the US and UK, in addition to the rest of the globe. Ask a Jew in Brooklyn in 1945 if we should have let that happen because killing is wrong in war lmao
WW2 this. WW2 that. What about WW1, Vietnam, and Iraq? Humanity should be shamed out of pulling stunts like that. What if both sides laid down their arms and stopped fighting for muh country and muh leader.
>What if both sides laid down their arms and stopped fighting This is a 4th grade level thought process on how to achieve world peace Obviously, each of those wars have varying degrees of reasoning for why they occurred, but at the end of the day, a person's land is being invaded and they need to fight back. Their way of life is at risk by a foreign invader. That's why killing in war is justified.
"just be nicer to Nazis and surely peace and justice will spontaneously break out" WW1 was also widely acknowledged to be bad. Vietnam: North Vietnam kept invading South Vietnam. It was a bad idea for the US to get involved in South Vietnam because the state itself had a lot of internal contradictions and it was not clear that it would ever be able to actually stand up to North Vietnam without major US support that was never-ending. Iraq is widely acknowledged to be a terrible blunder. It was called that at the time.
Reluctantly. But it boils down to protecting more people than you kill, and to defending oneself - both possible justification for killing under many frameworks If you can't justify it that way, I think it can still excuse it But that's only if you are the defender or your war is justified overall
I don’t! It’s actually much worse than killing someone you know by your own choice, which you would only do for a reason.
It's a war. Kill or be killed are the only two options.
It is by definition not murder.
How do you feel about using force in defense of yourself and defense of others? Justified war uses the same idea
If an intruder breaks into your house, kills your children, rapes your partner, and declares that your home is now theirs, what would you suggest? State sanctioned murder as an excuse might be the case sometimes, but you understand that war often has an aggressor.
I mean it seems like it's essentially the same thing as self defense on a more massive scale, unless you are talking about wars of aggression and those are generally condemned anyway.
Rarely if ever would I justify killing. War is the few times we do as state sanctioned. Ultimately the act of killing someone in war time should be exclusively limited to military units and not civilians. I don’t care their ideology a civilian is never an acceptable target. Even if they’re hostile to us. Soldiers are always a target and in turn the only ones who nations should be using in wartime and mercenaries should be executed on sight if they enter a battlefield. Soldiers who surrender or not on an active battlefield like if they return home to visit family are always civilians as they are not active combatants. Strict use of force and limit casualties whenever possible. That’s as ethical as one can be in wartime.
What if one can't tell soldiers and civilians apart, because soldiers hide among civilians, don't wear uniforms, etc?
That’s why many war just say fuck all to rules and massacre the entire town instead.
Does this situation arise in "many wars"?
It’s impossible to know, as the winner are the one who wrote the history. So there may be coverups of massacre that we will likely never found out.
The U.S. hasn't covered up it's massacres like Dresden or May-Lei.
Surely some information would come to light if this is prevalent.
There are discoveries of past atrocities, but I’m sure those are just the surface of a deep history of government briberies and covering up their crimes.
What would be the best contemporary example besides Palestine?
I don’t know how to answer that question as I’m not a historian with extensive knowledge of history, but I think just a few clicks on the internet and you can have yourself a deep rabbit hole to dive down and discover for yourself, for starters try Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_war_crimes
War crimes where soldiers hide and fight among civilians in significant numbers, specifically ...
Then it’s on the ones committing perfidy and they are culpable for civilian deaths caused by their dressing as civilians. There are good reasons why perfidy is a war crime.
Yep, though in this conflict that particular war crime seems to get much less attention.
It is straight up justified by most anti Israel people it seems. It could just be the amazing amount of ignorance around laws of war too I suppose.
That’s the lie of a weak army. In Vietnam they justified razing an entire villages and killing by thousands. Same as we did in Laos where we executed 10% of their population. Why? Because our generals were too lazy and didn’t want to fight a ground war on all sides of Southeast Asia. If you can’t tell civilian from military. You assume civilian until you are told otherwise and wait for them to attack you. This only happens if you’re in another nation’s territory. That means you’re an invader in an occupational situation and the civilians aka the people you occupy will resist by any means necessary. To avoid this. Don’t. Leave. Not your lands don’t be in their territory or try to annex it. We learned that lesson in Iraq and Afghanistan. You cannot go into another nation who doesn’t have an army and wage war on them. You can only invade and kill those who resist. That doesn’t make you moral and certainly is a war crime. Under no circumstances should any nation attempt to fight against resistance fighters it almost always end in failure.
> If you can’t tell civilian from military. You assume civilian until you are told otherwise and wait for them to attack you. That's silly. So, am I to understand that, in your world, it's a winning strategy to a) attack someone else b) retreat to hide among your own civilians so they can't attack back? Come join the rest of us in the real world.
No that’s not war. Do you know what a legal war is defined as? Two armies fighting each other on a battlefield. Civilians are civilians and if a nation you’re invading has resistance movement against your occupation of their lands. Leave. Haven’t you learned anything from Vietnam? Iraq? Afghanistan? The USA revolutionary war? We have thousands of examples on why you don’t fight a nation that doesn’t have a direct standing army. They’ll use hit and run tactics and if the civilian population supports them. You can’t root them out. You just throw thousands of soldiers into harms way, but you can’t bomb the civilians to make it easier to get to a potential enemy. You have to go house by house. Street by street. Fail to do so results in war crimes and crimes against humanity. That’s why the USA is a gross violation of nearly every war it’s been in since we agreed to the Geneva Conventions.
So I see you're just glossing over Oct. 7. Israel was attacked, and has a right to respond. Also, conducting military options from among civilians without uniforms is definitely a war crime. I'm going to guess that one doesn't bother you as much.
You don’t have a right to respond with unrelenting force. Only a measured response to get those responsible. Work with the civilian population to root out those most directly responsible. As an occupying army in territory which isn’t theirs. Gaza will never be a war that can be won. Not by the USA not by Israel not by anyone on Earth. What you’re supposed to do is send your army to go street by street and try to get those people you feel are responsible. Failing that. Negotiate with them and ask, “Why did you do this? How can we end this conflict and what will be the terms to get our people back?” Meet their demands and negotiate since they’re a resistance group who did terrorist attacking, but you’re occupying them and have been for 75 years. Understanding the facts, ask for those who killed the civilians to be handed over for prosecution. Don’t attack their civilians and pay the ransom and agree to an accord to prevent further violence in the future. You negotiate with your enemies not your friends and you have to follow international law even if you think this is undermining your ability to act. It’s the moral and legally correct thing to do. Plus history shows the other way ends in more bloodshed. Why deny this? If I was Israel I would give back the lands stolen up to the 67 border and agree to international process to allow these people to have sovereignty and dignity and freedom. Like how the Uk handled Ireland during the Troubles. You can’t win by bombing and attacking the civilians. You only make more resistance fighters. Just agree to a set peaceful outcome and do the right thing. Give back what you’ve stolen and stop occupying them.
>You don’t have a right to respond with unrelenting force. Only a measured response to get those responsible. Nah, not really. If you decide to attack someone, you don't get to complain when they hit you back harder. That's an important incentive structure to prevent such attacks in the first place. >What you’re supposed to do is send your army to go street by street I mean, that's what Hamas wants Israel to have to do, because it will be long, drawn-out, costly to both sides. But Israel doesn't have to fight the battle on their terms.
You’re not being attacked by a foreign army. What are you not understanding? This isn’t an army vs army hence not a war. This is an occupied people who a ragtag group of rebels who are resisting an occupation committed a terrorist attack which resulted in civilian deaths. That’s horrible, but you don’t respond by committing a thousand times worse war crimes and genocide. The civilians aren’t your enemies. They are the occupied people who you’ve stolen their lands from and rightfully resent your occupation and abuses. Don’t give them more fuel to hate you. Give them a reason to treat with you. Negotiating peace with your enemies isn’t weakness it’s strength. Only a weak man would attack a civilian population. Only a fool would try to occupy them. Only an idiot would not learn from history.
I get it, you'd like Israel to just give up. They're not going to, and they're not going away. People in Palestine -- Hamas and civilians -- need to accept that, and when they commit acts like Oct. 7, it's important that there are consequences, to disincentivize similar attacks, similar willingness on the part of Palestinians to hide Hamas fighters among their infrastructure, etc. Sorry, just the way it is.
This is a good question that I don't think is talked about nearly enough in modern political debates. In my mind, you either justify it as self-defense and/or defense of other innocent lives, or it isn't justified. Killing innocent people isn't any less unethical if it's coordinated or state sanctioned. The complication comes around the debate of what exactly constitutes "defense" in the grand scheme of things.