Were N. Korean civilians justified...

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

So, when bombing civilian targets, the idea is to:

1)Increase Terror. Death is not necessary in this case.
2)Deplete reserves of able-fighting persons. Death is only necessary for a portion of the population.
3)Decrease production capabilities. Death is not necessary or is very specialized since all you need to destroy is infrastructure.

But it seems to me as if the goal is very often precisely to kill large numbers of civilians. For example, Curtis LeMay is quoted as having said that US air raids burned down every single town in North and South Korea. They even blew up one or two major dams in the north, the kind of thing the West/Allies almost had a moral heart attack over when Arthur Seyss-Inquart(sp.?) threatened to do so in Holland during WWII. Now was this all just to damage infrastructure, etc. or was the US military trying to simply butcher civilians as much as possible in North Korea during that war? (I read somewhere once that in North Korea, like Laos later, it was impossible for civilians to survive by living on the surface. Like they'd even be shot if they were just walking/biking around and stuff. In Laos I know the bombing was so constant relative to such a small population that it was like an ordnance monsoon at times. And in North Vietnam for instance, the USAF raided this one leper colony 30+ times.)

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

I think that what perhaps ought to be obvious is simply this: the US Army Air Force perfected the mass destruction of civilians from the sky during WWII, and the US government wanted to be able to get away with having its own prestigious way to murder people during war, so it perforce nullified any attempt to criminalize certain forms of air war. So in Korea, the US military did this: drop almost 700,000 tons of bombs, compared to about 160,000 (aside from the nukes, I think) on Japan, including 30,000+ tons of napalm (compared to I think 14,000 on Japan). The largest estimates for total civilian dead in North and South Korea are two to three million. Now granted, North Korea murdered a bunch of civilians, and so did South Korea, but the order of magnitude for these together is only in the hundreds of thousands. So we have a mass left over that must be substantially attributable to the "United Nations." --And in Vietnam, et. al., 2,000,000 tons of bombs were dropped on Laos; 2,750,000 on Cambodia; possibly 2,000,000 on North Vietnam; and almost 4,000,000 on South Vietnam. There were almost 400,000 tons of napalm used then. You do the math.

In other words, the US tried to set international legal precedent that when someone is the most helpless in relation to you that they could ever be--for that is the degree of power some US pilots have had between themselves and the civilians they've killed--you yet have the right to kill them and everyone they know in this extreme way. Now of course others have done the same thing on a wider scale. The special thing wrong about US air wars has often been their ecocidal character. It kept using tactics of such destruction as never before had been unleashed upon the Earth. So that's another problem with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The threat of nuclear war was a very peculiar threat to desecrate reality, then.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

At least now you are being truthful with your agenda: you believe that the United States is evil.

Other than that, what is your point? That we shouldn't have done some of the things we have done in the past? I agree with you there--many of our political and military leaders have been shitheads in the past and some of them are shitheads right now.

What are you going to do about it? What can anyone do about it? I can't make them make better choices and I live here.

I feel no guilt about things we have done in the past, though. None whatsoever. I didn't make those choices--I wasn't even alive for most of them, given that I was born in 1969. I offer no apologies for anyone else's past mistakes, either--I never apologize for what someone else did.

[Obi-Wan Nihilo]

The only obligation in war is victory.

Or, to shine the true light of reality upon it: justification is but one more prize that is contingent upon victory.

People say things like this all the time, but I have yet to see sufficient evidence for these propositions. Is it okay for me to kill my fellow troops during war, on a whim, as long as it doesn't get me killed? (Let us suppose we are all out on a mission deep in the jungle, and the fancy takes me to murder my squadmates, seeing as I'll be able to get away with it in this instance.)

If you are victorious and subsequently establish your own society that recognizes your act as one that is morally justifiable, then the answer is yes. If you fail and are captured and tried and convicted, then the answer is no.

[Obi-Wan Nihilo]

So, when bombing civilian targets, the idea is to:

1)Increase Terror. Death is not necessary in this case.
2)Deplete reserves of able-fighting persons. Death is only necessary for a portion of the population.
3)Decrease production capabilities. Death is not necessary or is very specialized since all you need to destroy is infrastructure.

But it seems to me as if the goal is very often precisely to kill large numbers of civilians. For example, Curtis LeMay is quoted as having said that US air raids burned down every single town in North and South Korea. They even blew up one or two major dams in the north, the kind of thing the West/Allies almost had a moral heart attack over when Arthur Seyss-Inquart(sp.?) threatened to do so in Holland during WWII. Now was this all just to damage infrastructure, etc. or was the US military trying to simply butcher civilians as much as possible in North Korea during that war? (I read somewhere once that in North Korea, like Laos later, it was impossible for civilians to survive by living on the surface. Like they'd even be shot if they were just walking/biking around and stuff. In Laos I know the bombing was so constant relative to such a small population that it was like an ordnance monsoon at times. And in North Vietnam for instance, the USAF raided this one leper colony 30+ times.)

Is it supposed to be news that humans are hypocrites?

[Avatar]

The only obligation in war is victory.

Practically speaking, I agree. It's not nice, it's not ethical, it may not even be "right." But it's absolutely true in pragmatic terms.

--A

[Avatar]

...though a strong case against that can be made...

I would never say they deserve to die. But nobody necessarily deserves to live either. What you deserve never comes into it. What happens is what you get. Whether you deserve it or not doesn't affect that.

--A

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

Is it supposed to be news that humans are hypocrites?

My litany of accusations was not meant to show that the US is hypocritical in some way, but to show that it seems often as if the US bombs and strafes civilians for the sake of killing them. Indeed, in South Vietnam so many villages were incinerated by napalm, shredded by cluster bombs, and detonated by traditional explosive ordnance (B-52's would use this trio of firepower day in and day out, I think, firing them off either at the same time or shortly after one of the others) that probably no one survived many air raids. Indeed, it seems almost as though this triplex method of destruction, used so much as to involve twice as much bombing, almost, as all of World War II--keeping in mind that South Vietnam was roughly the size of New York state--was especially designed for mass extermination (not necessarily of civilians, granted, and 1,100,000 communist military personnel did die, and 300,000 go missing in action, during the Vietnam War).

[Obi-Wan Nihilo]

Why else would one bomb or strafe civilians, except for the sake of killing them?

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

At least now you are being truthful with your agenda: you believe that the United States is evil.

Well, I'm evil, too, and so are a lot of people, maybe everyone somewhere inside them, but I'm good, somewhere, too, and so is the US, but its government just the same has committed a peculiar moral crime that to this questionable day manifests even in the issue of unmanned drone warfare.

Other than that, what is your point?

Well, in the abstract, that the proof that it is wrong to murder someone is that it is right for someone to try to survive attempted murder. Now it is also a violation of methodological individualism to explain my offense as participation in the supermind of a criminal nation by my association with the nation.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

Well, I'm evil, too, and so are a lot of people, maybe everyone somewhere inside them, but I'm good, somewhere, too, and so is the US, but its government just the same has committed a peculiar moral crime that to this questionable day manifests even in the issue of unmanned drone warfare.

Here we are in agreement--although there is a certain logic in using drones to save lives on our side, most of the drones are striking people who are probably not combatants and thus is equated with good old-fashioned cold-blooded murder.

Well, in the abstract, that the proof that it is wrong to murder someone is that it is right for someone to try to survive attempted murder. Now it is also a violation of methodological individualism to explain my offense as participation in the supermind of a criminal nation by my association with the nation.

"Methodological individualism". *sigh* You are falling into the trap that foils most educators--they try to string together intelligent-sounding words into phrases that make them sound significantly more erudite than they really are; unfortunately, what happens is that they wind up sounding as if they do not know what they are saying.

Being associated with the United States does not imply culpability on your part...unless you are one of the military commanders ordering the deaths of non-combatant civilians.

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

"Methodological individualism". *sigh* You are falling into the trap that foils most educators--they try to string together intelligent-sounding words into phrases that make them sound significantly more erudite than they really are; unfortunately, what happens is that they wind up sounding as if they do not know what they are saying.

This is what I was referring to: plato.stanford.edu/entries/methodological-individualism/

Being associated with the United States does not imply culpability on your part...unless you are one of the military commanders ordering the deaths of non-combatant civilians.

I know that, but not everyone does.

[Obi-Wan Nihilo]

At least now you are being truthful with your agenda: you believe that the United States is evil.

Well, I'm evil, too, and so are a lot of people, maybe everyone somewhere inside them, but I'm good, somewhere, too, and so is the US, but its government just the same has committed a peculiar moral crime that to this questionable day manifests even in the issue of unmanned drone warfare.

Other than that, what is your point?

Well, in the abstract, that the proof that it is wrong to murder someone is that it is right for someone to try to survive attempted murder. Now it is also a violation of methodological individualism to explain my offense as participation in the supermind of a criminal nation by my association with the nation.

Murder is a civil offense. War is not a civil act.

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

Murder is a civil offense. War is not a civil act.

Don't you think that counterargument suffers from the fallacy of equivocation? I wasn't talking about the legal concept of murder but the everyday one where we can say that governments murder people (was Auschwitz no site of mass murder because mass gassing "is not a civil act"?).

[Obi-Wan Nihilo]

Murder is a civil offense. War is not a civil act.

Don't you think that counterargument suffers from the fallacy of equivocation? I wasn't talking about the legal concept of murder but the everyday one where we can say that governments murder people (was Auschwitz no site of mass murder because mass gassing "is not a civil act"?).

For the purposes of ethics, murder refers to the killing of a human that is proscribed. Whom can proscribe a killing? A society able to enact moral proscriptions via one political (consensus-building) method or other. Thus, in a context that lacks society as an element, i.e., the killing of international persons during war, murder cannot be said to exist in an objective sense, merely in a subjective sense inherent in the proscriptions of whatever society is adjudicating the matter. Auschwitz is considered mass murder simply because a victorious society has decided to label it that way.

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

For the purposes of ethics, murder refers to the killing of a human that is proscribed. Whom can proscribe a killing? A society able to enact moral proscriptions via one political (consensus-building) method or other. Thus, in a context that lacks society as an element, i.e., the killing of international persons during war, murder cannot be said to exist in an objective sense, merely in a subjective sense inherent in the proscriptions of whatever society is adjudicating the matter. Auschwitz is considered mass murder simply because a victorious society has decided to label it that way.

Suppose instead that we defined murder as a profound act of disrespect towards another person that leads to death as an intended direct consequence; or better, that people who are not physically attacking us, who are defenseless in relation to us, would be profoundly disrespected (in the Rawlsian sense perhaps) if we were to seek them out to end their lives. Can you imagine walking up to a foreign family, informing them that in ten minutes they were all going to die fiery deaths watching each other scream in pain and horror when an incendiary swept through their city, then getting in a plane and circling back in time to fulfill your promise? (This actually happened early on in South Vietnam at least: early Marine involvement in that country included calling in air strikes after having warning leaflets dropped on a village, informing them that they would be destroyed if they did not surrender in advance.) You think most people would do that out of a sense of mercy or compassion or some other virtue?

Moreover, if the laws of a country enjoin its soldiery to abstain from massacring hapless foreigners, then it is still a matter of domestic law that to dissent from this abstinence is to commit murder, yet something involving the people of countries outside the first preconceived in this paragraph. That is, if it is within the legal power of a domestic nation to punish its own personnel for atrocities (of absolute power corrupting absolutely, even--the power of mighty nations over individuals of great number throughout the world, that is), then doesn't that mean, even by your standard of what murder is, that the legal standard of murder implicitly accepted by the United States, as it applies to its armed forces, covers (in principle, even if prosecution of offenses has not been forthcoming and various members of various executive branch rotations throughout the American generations have broken these laws) actions done in other states?

Doesn't a pirate murder me if he seizes me in international waters and shoots me? What else do you call taking people to a room, telling them they were about to take a shower and have to report if they were sick to the infirmary after, having them strip (kids in front of countless adults, for instance), then summarily executing all of them by gas in a chamber where they often must've been overwhelmed with terror and other suffering such that you and I are perhaps infinitely lucky only to have to witness in our worst nightmares if ever? Now I've had a nightmare where I had to watch the people marched into the camp (I think), but I don't think they forced me to watch the killings. But I have never dreamt that I was trapped in one of those forsaken rooms. I think there's a scene in the film Event Horizon that kinda would be what it was like to be there, then, but I don't know. And for something like three million people to have been killed like that in the Nazi death camps seems almost like an intuitive proof that there are objective evils that transcend partial humanity and partake instead of moral impartiality. (You have to recall that many Nazis were horrified nearly beyond conception by what they were doing, I think Bach-Zelewski was his name almost went insane thinking of how the Jews were being rounded up and murdered throughout occupied Europe. They tried to incinerate their own consciences as much as the dead they manufactured in their special treatment factories, if you'll recall one of Himmler's speeches; and Eichmann tried to justify himself on Kantian grounds, which just goes to show I think that if Kant's theory does not somehow imply Nazism, then Eichmann was one of the most morally corrupt people conceivable.)

[Obi-Wan Nihilo]

When you speak of objective evils, I think you have a point when considering a society per se, as a society cannot exist without the agency of norms that proscribe the capricious killing of others within that society. When considering the killing of persons outside of that society, however, there are no objective reasons to consider it murder, only aesthetic ones. Those killings fall under the lowercase heading "war," just like those achieved by pirates -- themselves hostis humani generis, the enemies of (civilized) mankind.

Since the enlightenment there has been a growing trend towards a heightened global conscience, though far from universally, to regard mankind generally as a meta-society that ought to recognize universal human rights. Perhaps this trend will lead to some genuinely centralized authority and magistracy when it comes to these matters, but as it stands now war is still the final arbiter, and its exigencies must trump aesthetics. So for now, only those with the will to be victorious have the wherewithal to determine the norms and set the rules; and victory is never going to be tidy or bloodless. "Innocents" will continue to die as long as there is war, and the platform from which you stand in opposition to this reality is the chattel of past conquest and the grace of contemporary military preponderance. Change either one in some fundamental way and we will have neither the leisure nor the standing to enjoy a highly refined morality.

[Avatar]

For the purposes of ethics, murder refers to the killing of a human that is proscribed.

Murder is just illegal killing. From which follows that killing is ok, as long as you kill within the law. And since governments make laws, they get to decide when killing is ok, (when they do it), and when it's not. (When I do it, unless I'm doing it because they tell me to.)

I've always thought that was a bit specious myself...

--A

[Obi-Wan Nihilo]

Bellum omnium contra omnes:

Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man.[13] [...] In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

This is what I was referring to: plato.stanford.edu/entries/methodological-individualism/

Thank you for the link. You and DonEx are both more well-versed in the minutiae of the intersection of sociology and philosophy than I am.

Why do people always make "murder" more complex than it is? "Murder" is the intentional killing of another human being--you want them dead and so you do what it takes to accomplish your goal. Yes, you may be irrationally blinded by rage or jealousy (as in the case of a cheating spouse) but you still acted in a way that ended the other person's life.
Soldiers killing each other is not technically murder--this is more a case of self-defense because the other guys are shooting at you so you are defending your life. Soldiers killing civilians is murder--they are not combatants shooting back. Of course, a civilian who picks up a gun and begins firing becomes a combatant and return fire is allowed.
Mass killings of captured civilians or POWs? That is also murder--they have been captured and thus disarmed, preventing them from being a lethal threat to anyone under most reasonable circumstances.

Planning to kill someone either by picking up a gun and going on a rampage or blowing up a building....that does not make you a combatant because you haven't actually done anything yet.