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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

At the end of the day a slim win by voting is enough in a democracy. However it would usually be considered poor form to use even a solid majority as justification a program of cultural eradication. Not to say it doesn't happen from time to time.

Besides, military action is kinda special. You need soldiers to have confidence that even if the orders are terrible they will get respect for obeying them - that is part of the deal they get for risking their lives in the army. It isn't wise to put that aside and ignore it.

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> At the end of the day a slim win by voting is enough in a democracy.

No. That is a feature of a specific form of democracy, first part the post voting, which apart from anglophone countries most Western democracies do not share. They almost seem to be missing many of the type of problems that anglophone countries have nowadays, which have been linked in literature to the style specifically.

> You need soldiers to have confidence that even if the orders are terrible they will get respect for obeying them

Absolutely not, that is how you get wat crimes. Modern German conscripts are explicitly taught that they have a constitutional duty not to follow immoral orders. For obvious historical reasons.

Modern Germany is a product of a post-WWII occupation and re-education plan designed to make them unable to carry out offensive wars. I wouldn't pick them as my first case study on how to create an effective morale in the armed forces.

There is a pretty good argument that armies shouldn't be used offensively full stop, but looking at what America did after the civil war it is pretty clear that isn't the dominant philosophy. I've got no data, but by their nature invading foreign forces will tend to commit war crimes.

US soldiers (who haven't carried out a defensive war since, what, 1812?) are also taught not to obey immoral orders. (see recent memo from the JCS)

As to war crimes, these days there's the ICC.

The US has specifically excluded itself from the ICC and pardoned one of the few war criminals it managed to prosecute domestically, a soldier who was killing so many civilians so gratuitously that his colleagues would de-adjust the sights on his rifle because they were uncomfortable.

We've gone further than that. Here in the US, our current government has sanctioned the ICC, and restricted travel for anyone affiliated with it as retaliation for the ICC investigating war crimes (by all parties) in Afghanistan.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/11/politics/icc-executive-order/...

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