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Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

That was such a disturbing video. These men controlling these weapons are just entirely dehumanized. After they mow down the journalists, an unarmed van appears to try and load up the wounded and take them to safety. Then they beg for clearance from command to blow up the van "Come on, let us shoot!" a direct quote; they literally beg to kill them. Then they get their clearance and just blow it all apart.

War is truly the worst thing there is.

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From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24786278 on "authoritarian followers":

> "Authoritarian Aggression. When I say authoritarian followers are aggressive I don’t mean they stride into bars and start fights. First of all, high RWAs go to church enormously more often than they go to bars. Secondly, they usually avoid anything approaching a fair fight. Instead they aggress when they believe right and might are on their side. “Right” for them means, more than anything else, that their hostility is (in their minds) endorsed by established authority, or supports such authority. “Might” means they have a huge physical advantage over their target, in weaponry say, or in numbers, as in a lynch mob."

on a lighter note:

> "Believe it or not, researchers are not allowed to organize murderous mobs to study hostility. So we have to study authoritarian aggression in subtler ways."

There were two children inside the van. There needs to be harsh accountability for these professional murderous psychopaths.

Instead, those responsible for revealing it have spent considerable time, and still are, in jail.

> Instead, those responsible for revealing it have spent considerable time, and still are, in jail.

Not entirely true: Chelsea Manning was released in 2017.

> Chelsea Manning was released in 2017.

After her sentence was commutated by Obama, otherwise she would be in prison until at least 2045.

She was recently placed back in jail for refusing to testify against Assange (instead referring the prosecution to her prior testimony), though she was released again after a year.

I wouldn't take a bet against her ending up back in jail for a similar attempt at intimidation once the sham court in the UK sends Assange to the US to be executed for distributing the above video to the world.

I don't think the fact that there were children there materially changes the nature of the crime. The adults were innocent as well. Growing older should not mean your life is automatically worth less.

Anyway, holding the soldiers accountable won't actually fix the problem. I think what happened here is the natural outcome of conditions created well before that group of soldiers arrived in the scene.

Holding the soldiers, individually and their superiors, accountable would not make the problem worse.

Agreed. To me the most disturbing part of the video is how the soldiers have become distended and desensitized from killing. They talk as if they are playing a video game.

I mean, they are, since murdering a human has exactly the same consequences to them as playing a videogame (none).

Even in the old days, I believe Lyudmila Mikhailovna was fairly desensitised, at least after the first hecatomb.

Bonus clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuPX8mjeb-E (IIUC the song backing this patriotic video was, as composed in the 1980s, anti-war)

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