I don't really give a fuck about the psychological condition of the drone pilots except insofar as it puts their children at risk. They and their commanders should feel ashamed to look other people in the eye.
"Dehumanizing the enemy involves denying the enemy’s humanity by negating in the enemy the characteristics normally associated with human beings, such as morality and compassion, and instead associating the enemy with acts of evil and depravity that merit forceful action and retaliation."
https://sk.sagepub.com/reference/the-sage-encyclopedia-of-wa...
The irony here is pretty intense.
I think there's s difference between doubting humanity of someone because of skin color or sexual orientation or natinality or whatever, and someone who voluntarily became a murderer as a day job.
The pilots can stop killing people any day. They continually chose not to.
Perhaps a more profitable line of discussion would be: On what basis would you say that this constitutes murder?
Then goes the spectrum. Suppose someone is taking your property, can you employ violence to protect it? What if there is 1% risk of death to the thief? What if its 10%?
I'd prefer the people whose job it is to make those assessments on a daily basis to have a strong moral and ethical framework, and to have the psychological and institutional support to maintain a connection with their humanity.
I would say that even humans who decided to become monsters (say, Unit 731, Mengele, Breivik, various serial killers, etc) deserve human rights and humane treatment in eyes of the law, because taking those away is a bad precedent for society.
The state should consider them people because the state has to consider everyone people, and making exceptions is very dangerous.
That doesn't mean we as individuals have to morally consider them as anything other than the monsters they are.
When you cast people into the realm of inhuman monster, you're also telling yourself a story that there is no possible way that you could potentially commit the same acts.
Which is, 99% of the time, a total lie. Humans are exceptionally good at creating moral justification for whatever the hell we want to do.
If you're convinced you are constitutionally incapable of committing monstrous acts, then you're not likely to engage in the self reflection that would allow you to catch yourself if you start heading down that path.
Then think again about who is dehumanizing who.
Engaging in the same process and behavior damages the intellectual credibility of an argument because it allows you to ignore potentially relevant information. It also significant diminishes any moral authority you may be laying claim to.
As far as caring for them, I don't think anyone is obliged to care for anyone or anything (free will and all that). I do think that the more people that you choose to place into your own personal out-group of "gofuckthemselves", the more of your own humanity you lose touch with.
I choose to focus my ire on those responsible for creating the policies and making the decisions to create the situation, not the people at the bottom of the ladder who are responsible for enacting them.
I find your lack of empathy disturbing.
I don't think they recruit with "bombing Afghan farmers is great fun!"
Why would you not think that???!?! "Recruited at video game fairs by military leaders who know the value of games that glamourise 'militainment' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGA8RFB0VSw
So, what do you suggest instead?
> After Taraki was murdered the new Afghan Prime Minister Hafizullah Amin repeated requests for Soviet military support, at least to protect his residence. Finally, in December the Politburo decided to deal with the situation in Afghanistan,[8] and in early December sent special forces which attacked Amin's palace and killed him, putting the exiled Babrak Kamal in his place. These forces were subsequently reinforced by the 40th Army which entered Afghanistan on 24 December 1979. As the Kremlin foresaw, this intervention would cause problems around the world for the USSR, with the policy of detente and, not least, at the forthcoming Olympic Games due to take place in summer 1980 in Moscow.[9] The result was a far-reaching boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, supported not only by the United States but by many of the 65 other invited countries that did not take part.
> At its greatest extent the Soviet military contingent in Afghanistan numbered 100,000 personnel. This presence remained for a decade and kickstarted U.S. and Saudi funding for Islamic Mujahideen groups opposed to both the Afghan government and the Soviet military presence. The local Mujahideen, along with fighters from several different Arab nations (Pathan tribes from across the border also participated in the war; they were supported by the Pakistani ISI), fought the Soviet forces to a standstill. On 24 January 1989 Gorbachev's Politburo took the decision to withdraw most of the Soviet forces,[10] while continuing to provide military assistance to the Afghan government.[11] Eventually, in-fighting within the Mujahideen led to the rise of warlords in Afghanistan, and from them emerged the Taliban.[12] The Soviets left behind the only highway in the country as well as many concrete structures built in the major cities, and airfields that are still in use (e.g. at Bagram).
Then what would you call the 9,000 or so civilians killed by US and allied forces in the past 10 years. Or the 30,000 injured civilians?
O'Rly?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Afghan_War#Muja...
> The mujahideen favoured sabotage operations. The more common types of sabotage included damaging power lines, knocking out pipelines and radio stations, blowing up government office buildings, air terminals, hotels, cinemas, and so on. In the border region with Pakistan, the mujahideen would often launch 800 rockets per day. Between April 1985 and January 1987, they carried out over 23,500 shelling attacks on government targets. The mujahideen surveyed firing positions that they normally located near villages within the range of Soviet artillery posts, putting the villagers in danger of death from Soviet retaliation. The mujahideen used land mines heavily. Often, they would enlist the services of the local inhabitants, even children. Mujahideen praying in Shultan Valley, 1987
> They concentrated on both civilian and military targets, knocking out bridges, closing major roads, attacking convoys, disrupting the electric power system and industrial production, and attacking police stations and Soviet military installations and air bases. They assassinated government officials and PDPA members, and laid siege to small rural outposts. In March 1982, a bomb exploded at the Ministry of Education, damaging several buildings. In the same month, a widespread power failure darkened Kabul when a pylon on the transmission line from the Naghlu power station was blown up. In June 1982 a column of about 1,000 young communist party members sent out to work in the Panjshir valley were ambushed within 30 km of Kabul, with heavy loss of life. On September 4, 1985, insurgents shot down a domestic Bakhtar Airlines plane as it took off from Kandahar airport, killing all 52 people aboard.
> Mujahideen groups used for assassination had three to five men in each. After they received their mission to kill certain government officials, they busied themselves with studying his pattern of life and its details and then selecting the method of fulfilling their established mission. They practiced shooting at automobiles, shooting out of automobiles, laying mines in government accommodation or houses, using poison, and rigging explosive charges in transport.
In May 1985, the seven principal rebel organizations formed the Seven Party Mujahideen Alliance to coordinate their military operations against the Soviet army. Late in 1985, the groups were active in and around Kabul, unleashing rocket attacks and conducting operations against the communist government.
You barely hear about it because western media reports on western things, if a thousand people die in Kenya, they barely get a footnote.
Beyond that, what's the international opinion on Erik Prince?
It's almost as if you're looking for excuse to kill people.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Anglo-Afghan_War
(and so on and so forth..)
Sounds like you're describing warfare before Geneva conventions or the somehow permitted US war crimes to me.
"this Protocol must be fully applied in all circumstances to all persons who are protected by those instruments, without any adverse distinction based on the nature or origin of the armed conflict"
(Aside from the fact that the Geneva Convention doesn't work that way, as the other guy pointed out.)
Any cop would be in death row for pulling something like this in American Soil.
That’s a dubious claim.
Because they have entirely different jobs, in entirely different contexts, with entirely different rules, serving entirely different purposes.
Soldiers in an active military zone would almost certainly not be subject to any scrutiny or investigation for fatally shooting someone who they believed to be armed in the same situation.
Thanks for the supporting evidence!!!!
I would be more concerned with the classification of any male over 16 killed in a strike as an automatic combatant than a single given operation gone wrong. This is an unavoidable aspect of war.
And this isn't a single operation gone wrong, there's been 10s if not 100s of these incidents. Framing it as a "single operation gone wrong" is ignorant at best.
Total war was justified in WW2 when the Allies were facing a potentially existential threat. It was us or them. That has never been the case in Afghanistan.
If you want to assassinate people outside of regular military conflict, do it in person.
If you care about them so much, maybe you should bend your efforts to reducing their moral culpability and think about the strategic logic of the entire mission, which has now killed 10 times more Afghan civilians than died on 9/11, in a country with 1/10 the population of ours, so as to lower the probability of their being selected as a target.
How much longer is the US going to continue trying to win hearts and minds by throwing the most highly equipped military force on the planet at lightly armed peasants, while ignoring the fact that they probably feel just as pissed off about their friends, family, and selves being blown up as we do about ours, and by now have suffered far more than the original injury we are still attempting to retaliate for?
There are now kids old enough to sign up for the military who were born after 9/11 and for whom the US has always been at war with Afghanistan, and your moral gymnastics serve only to perpetuate that while foreclosing any inquiry they might conduct as citizens rather than soldiers.