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Comment by Aeolun | Hacker News Reader

It’s reprehensible for sure, but I’m fairly confident it’s not all that uncommon in war.

It’s just the first time in history that the whole world sees the horrors of war streamed live.

Which is a good thing I guess, there’s a whole new generation now that might learn ‘never again’ without actually having to go through the experience.

Edit: Of course we always had the news, but a reporter showing the aftereffects from a safe distance are a bit different from the single soldier streaming the images of the Russian warship before telling them to go fuck themselves.

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This.

In Vietnam, Americans (a small minority) collected ears of those they killed. The Viet Cong held barrels with rats to stomachs and burned the other end, forcing rats to eat through stomachs.

In Rwanda, neighbors killed neighbors with their bare hands.

In World War 2, +150,000 civilians were wiped instantaneously.

In former Yugoslavia, neighbors lined neighbors up and executed them.

There is no war without war crimes. And as usual, it’s the citizens that suffer, rarely the elite.

Don't forget the now proverbial bombings of Afghan, and Pakistani, marriages. War crimes happen, they suck, and cannot be measured against each other.

> Of course we always had the news, but a reporter showing the aftereffects from a safe distance are a bit different from the single soldier streaming the images of the Russian warship before telling them to go fuck themselves.

The reporting isn’t like that here either though. Here’s a video of the Sky News UK team getting ambushed: https://news.sky.com/story/amp/sky-news-teams-harrowing-acco...

SkyNews literally just said, "We are used to wars far away, but now the refugees are at our shores." Let that sink in.

I’m not sure why that’s relevant to them getting ambushed but do you have a source for that? The Google results for “We are used to wars far away” are pretty barren, I suspect your comment might be the top search result when they get around to indexing it.

Well, more at our land borders. Europe didn't give a rats ass about the refugees at the actual shores before.

Ignoring my inner cynic, it is good that we, the European countries, help Ukraine and the Ukrainian refugees, very good. But yes, I think the West is very much used to start wars in far away countries where we can ignore the consequences in our daily lives. Now someone else started it, close to our homes, and all of a sudden we cannot ignore it anymore. Comes as quite a shock to some, it seems.

Which, long term, may bring benefits to mankind for generation or two, in form of stronger objections to any war. I agree, this war feels much closer and real than any other war in recent decades, and for me it actually is (coming from Slovakia).

Not happy about this myself, we are all equal humans and it shouldn't matter how people dress, speak or religion they have, this reaction should be present in all cases of war.

> Europe didn't give a rats ass about the refugees at the actual shores before.

Europe took in millions of refugees from a different continent.

Syrian/Afghan refugees took a longer route to Europe instead of Saudi Arabia. That's what an economic migrant does.

I think the person who said that was Ben Wallace, Secretary of State for Defence

Well, the first fully coverd war was Vietnam. Which played a huge role in the US public loosing faith in that war.

All the other social media covered wars were, well, covered by the parties fighting the West. Which is a different story.

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