@SimonBirch said in #1:
> It's funny that there a things in war that are not allowed, like there are rules to who you can and can't kill. Is war not a crime in itself? Thou shall not kill is the second commandment. I don't understand,, war crimes ?
> War is a crime xxx
I suggest you look up and read the "law of war" article on Wikipedia. Might provide some helpful context. War was basically an unstoppable fact of life many centuries ago, so they thought, at least, lets try to regulate it and make a push to leave innocent civilians out of it, amongst other rules against pointless and wanton destruction. Because state actors saw war as an important if negative reality of the world, and could not agree to abolish it, but did agree to abolish some of its crueler internal practices.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that this thread was pretty non-political. I was not surprised, however, to read some well-written and thoughtful comments within it.
This forum is a blessing worth much more than the cost of admission. Via this forum one may encounter, although at a distance, a great many thoughtful, articulate people.
The regulation of war is an interesting topic. It's too bad we can't regulate war itself out of existence. But although it is nearly 2026, war still seems to serve a purpose under some circumstances -- but seems morally valid, perhaps and not without fear of contradiction, only to halt a greater evil that cannot, realistically, otherwise be halted.
War crimes are chill
@SimonBirch @fin34601473braunpaul
Aside from the very amusing hypocrisies of "war crimes" such as the Americans accusing the "nazis," after WWII, of war crimes while a few decades previously the Americans were wrapping up a 9-million man-woman-and-children genocide against the Native Americans, the notion of "war crime" is in fact very problematic as war itself is often times rushed into and therefore a crime in and of itself. The Americans call the nazis criminal. The Americans call their own actions, from what I can see, somewhere between "manifest destiny" and "practical joke" that went horribly wrong. But other than that little piece nonsense in history.....
I think the distinction we're aiming at here isn't going to be found on wikipedia, which is NOT an academic source. The distinction we're looking for is on one hand Augustine, and on the other hand Tolstoy. Augustine's "just war premise" allows for war under certain parameters. On the hand, we have Tolstoy who rests heavily on Matt 5:39 "Resist not Evil." In terms of Augustine, I don't think it's worth exploring too much because it's basically extreme common sense. He allows us to defend ourselves without allowing us to torture or involve women and children. In terms of Tolstoy, I think there's a lot of merit to what Tolstoy's pacifism advocates, and I think the best world is the world without war. Where Tolstoy goes wrong, I think, is a misinterpretation of Matt 5:39 which he takes to an extreme indicating that any evil whatsoever you don't have the right to fight against. I think this bible verse is actually saying something far less extreme just dealing with day to day occurrences of things like lying and cheating in one's society.
However, it's an essential aspect to study both sides. If you don't know Augustine and Tolstoy, then you're likely not "fully" human!
@fin34601473braunpaul said in #7:
> >An eye for an eye
>
> That's good. "A life for an eye" is worse, so "an eye for an eye" is "progress".
Eye for an eye is NOT talking about criminal punishment, but rather civil liability.
@fin34601473braunpaul
Extremely well put!!!!
That's I think the best understanding of Old Testament studies pertaining to "eye for an eye" that I've heard. Good Job!
@SimonBirch said in #1:
> It's funny that there a things in war that are not allowed, like there are rules to who you can and can't kill. Is war not a crime in itself? Thou shall not kill is the second commandment. I don't understand,, war crimes ?
> War is a crime xxx
An interesting point is that, depending on the culture, waging war didn't have the same consequences as our current perception. The peoples of the Six Nations, for example, valued a warrior based on the number of enemies captured alive, and wars of mourning aimed to replace a member of one community with someone from another. Of course, we can debate the nature of the ritual required for acceptance within the community and whether such rites would be considered war crimes by modern standards, but the objective of these wars wasn't to massacre the "enemy" .
Private wars were even the norm in early medieval Western Europe. They served as a form of local justice between noblemen and fueled the economy and diplomacy by taking as many prisoners as possible. Again, the victims of these wars were more often attributed to poorly treated wounds than to any intent to kill.
>Eye for an eye is NOT talking about criminal punishment, but rather civil liability.
Thanks for the info. Turns out the criminal punishment thing seems to be from later latin church traditions...
@CountDorio
Your preface seems hypocritical to me-- in your dismissal of the concept of war crime, you accuse Americans and Germans of breaking rules and norms about war. Isn't that what a war crime is?
PS: Apologies for following up a short post with an absurdly long postscript, but I do feel like the oft-used equating between the Holocaust and the Indian Wars is more than a little lazy (it's a pet peeve of mine). I get that both were barbaric, but it ignores a whole bunch of important context behind both atrocities, to the point that it's begun to create it's own distorted narrative of history wherein the Indian Removals were initiated by a bunch of evil calculating American colonists to get kill of all the Native Americans over a short time. To be clear:
The Nazis sought to purge a number of minorities from their populace because they were deemed undesirable and a liability to national identity, and thus launched a campaign of terror that escalated for around a decade. It was a short term, highly targeted, explicit campaign of genocide, where genocide was the end goal.
The Indian Wars were a series of campaigns and expeditions that started in the early 1600s and lasted for roughly 300 years, perpetrated at various times by various combinations of the French, British, Dutch, Spanish, Americans, Canadians, Confederates, Mexicans, Texans, and Native Americans. Wikipedia mentions the Russians as well, which wouldn't surprise me (since they were involved slightly in the New World), but I don't really know much about their involvement. It sometimes took the form of massacres, sometimes of wars, sometimes of forced removals, and sometimes it was just land purchases. The goal in most of these (not all-- to be fair, there were quite a few massacres where the goal was just to kill natives, and on the other hand, there were quite a few to stop attacks by Native tribes and whatnot) was the acquisitionand protection of land-- unlike Europe, the Americas were not filled with empires fielding grand armies jostling for every inch of available land, so the colonists from Europe (and later, Americans) decided to grab as much as they could. This type of conlict has been going on since the dawn of recorded history, and continues to this day. Yes, it was a genocide as well, but this genocide was not carried out at any point with the intention of purging all Natives.
In fairness, there really *aren't* a whole bunch of great comparisons for the Holocaust-- maybe the Circassian Genocide?
@clousems I believe it's related to the seven years war, since Russia participated in it, plus, Alaska was a Russian property from the 1740-50s until the 19th century.
I think it's very probable that the Russians merchant that were there participated directly or not in the war, maybe in arms deal