When is a "war" really a war?

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

Oftentimes enough I've read excuses for acts of extreme mass murder (like the firebombing of Tokyo) that go, "But it was during a war," or suchlike commentary. However, I doubt most if any of these excuse-ridden folk would accept a soldier randomly deciding to kill members of his (or, rarely, her) own unit, on the grounds, "But it was during a war." So it is clear (enough) that merely being a soldier during a war does not grant one license to kill without all possible compunction.

There are several branches in the abstract debate, at this point. One is to say that during a war, it is permitted to kill, at will, all who are the enemy. Killing the enemy is the definition of war, to an extent (one might claim, though whether this is another male kind of excuse for getting away with rape and torture and murder I do wonder...), so that there is something fundamentally irrational about speaking of restraints on operations in which enemies are to be killed. Now technically, though, we must admit such restraints in the end, since it is not permissible to destroy the world, for example, merely because this would be an extremely effective means at destroying an enemy. This prohibition does, though, appear to default on a prohibition against killing one's own, so far as the debate has been presented in this paragraph.

Another option is to say that killing one's own would not be an act of war. Thus it is killing, and since not part of a war proper, this is why it is not justified. If, for some reason, one could kill one's comrades as an act of war, it would be morally good to do so. Unfortunately, this suggests that if a soldier sincerely commits treason against his government, he (or she) has carte blanche to start killing his (or her) own nationals. So if a soldier stationed within the US, for instance, adopted an attitude of treason towards the US, it would be right for him, if he so wished it, to march into a nearby town and painfully kill children as an act of war against the US. (At least, this would be so, if the soldier had a reasonable chance of escaping capture after committing treason.) Do we really believe this?

Now the above two strands in the debate may be woven together in the shape of this idea: a killing is not an act of war if it is not a killing of an enemy, but that "an enemy" is not a label we can just stick on whomever we please, anymore than we stick the label "war" to just any mass violence that we please. And an enemy cannot, then, just be anyone from a nation with whom one is at war, since then the American children hypothetically flayed alive by an intelligent and malevolent American traitor (in the previous paragraph) would be thinkable as enemies of said traitor. But we cannot then say that simply because someone lives in a foreign nation with whom we are at war, that person is our enemy. A five-year old girl on crutches in a Tokyo hospital is not an enemy of the USAAF military personnel who are deciding to burn her alive. Killing her is not an act of war, it is not part of a war--we call it that, but such is an illicit use of words, to excuse evil (since evil pleads to be excused so much, and Japanese fanatics do the same re: China or various Turks do re: Armenia, and so on).

Proof of this, such as the word "proof" applies, can be found in the workings of the Nazi holocaust. Long overemphasized as a project of the SS, it was significantly supplemented by the Wehrmacht. In fact the Nazi soldiery not only aided the SS in the perpetration of the Shoah, they directly participated in it upon plentiful occasion. Now we can be patriotic little hypocrites and say that when a US soldier rapes and murders hundreds of people in Vietnam, his act is not part of a trans-war genocidal program, whereas a congruent act by a German would be; or we can just admit the truth, such as it is, and accept the blood on all the world's hands, the sin of the world even. We can accept that if the German and Japanese governments of WWII deserved to collapse (as they did so deserve), so did the American, British, Chinese, Soviet, and French governments also. And, reflecting on the constitution of the UN Security Council, we can then accept that WWII was not a war between good and evil but evil and evil.

That evil won.

[Which would then imply that WWII was not a good war at all.]

[Worse, it would imply that the world was ruled by the forces of evil after WWII after all.]

[But for those who are not nihilists or perhaps relativists or what-have-you on the morality-theoretic spectrum(s), why would it not be obvious to us that the world was under evil's power? Worse, if we are Christians, we have perhaps the least excuse[!] of all in this matter, for our very damn book tells us that the dragon of perdition holds sway over the creation, reigning from the skies, raining down fire from the skies to destroy the helpless upon the Earth (recall Christ's rebuking of Apostles for asking that destruction be called down from above in revenge against unbelieving villages).]

[Hashi Lebwohl]

Technically, "war" is supposed to be when the officially-sanctioned military forces of two or more countries are engaged in actual fighting against one another. That, however, is the old definition. The new definition of "war" needs to include any collection of armed groups engaging in shooting matches with each other (in this context the verb "shooting" can be extended to include "shelling", "bombing", or any other similar active verb) with the express purpose of killing members of the opposing side, whether the groups are officially sanctioned by an established government or not. By extending the definition we are able to include quasi-Islamic militants, armed mobs, roving gangs led by a warlord, or the crew of a ship engaged in piracy as groups which are able to conduct warlike activities.

The first problem with war is that it has always resulted in innocent casualties. You cannot name any conflict which did not result in the unintended deaths of children, the sick, or the elderly. The second problem with war is that it makes it really easy for any side to have members who engage in atrocities which we will group under the title "war crimes". The best way to psych people up to shoot at other people is to dehumanize them with terms like "gook" or "kraut" but that very dehumanization results in the ease of committing atrocities: "so we used a flamethrower on the village, what of it? It doesn't matter--they were just chinks".

In short, if we have armed group A fighting against armed group B then we may as well go ahead and call it a war. If it doesn't end relatively quickly and both sides put it behind them, though, the war takes on a life of its own. After the first generation of fighters between A and B come and go the subsequent generations are fighting because the earlier generations were--your grandfather killed my grandfather so I am justified in killing you. See Israel v Palestine for an example of this.

[wayfriend]

Technically, "war" is supposed to be when the officially-sanctioned military forces of two or more countries are engaged in actual fighting against one another. That, however, is the old definition. The new definition of "war" needs to include any collection of armed groups engaging in shooting matches with each other (in this context the verb "shooting" can be extended to include "shelling", "bombing", or any other similar active verb) with the express purpose of killing members of the opposing side, whether the groups are officially sanctioned by an established government or not. By extending the definition we are able to include quasi-Islamic militants, armed mobs, roving gangs led by a warlord, or the crew of a ship engaged in piracy as groups which are able to conduct warlike activities.

I would qualify that a bit further. It's only a war when lethal force is used to achieve political goals, be they offensive or defensive. Groups, as you describe them, need not belong to a recognized government, but they can be recognized as a political organization, even if self-appointed as such.

Rumbling biker gangs in Texas isn't a war, in my opinion, for these reasons.

On the other hand, deaths are not necessary to have a war. For example, one side might immediately and universally surrender. The 'threat' of lethal force is as good as the execution when it comes to warfare. In any good war, you plan for far more battles than you actually engage in, and if the enemy retreats before your advance, you are executing a war nonetheless.

One might expand the concept of lethal force to include the destruction of critical assets. A war might be a war if two sides are destroying each others' oil wells (for example) despite no persons being harmed.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

I would qualify that a bit further. It's only a war when lethal force is used to achieve political goals, be they offensive or defensive. Groups, as you describe them, need not belong to a recognized government, but they can be recognized as a political organization, even if self-appointed as such.

Excellent point--the political aspect needs to be there. Couldn't we also allow for economic and religious goals, as well? This would let us account for disasters such as killing people for their land (or oil or gold or whatever) as well as "they don't believe what we believe so we shot the heathens".

[wayfriend]

I would say that economic and religious organizations that are not also (and foremost) political organizations don't do those things. Political organizations that are attached to religion or economics are still political organizations, even if they claim that they act for religious or economic reasons. Let me suggest that it is taking such actions that reveals their political nature. Controlling land, for example, is an inherently political issue, since it is about who rules that land. A religious organization which promotes controlling land has become a political organization.

[Rawedge Rim]

war is actually one group engaging in activities that reduce another groups ability to resist.

Now killing enormous amounts of people and breaking things is usually a fairly effective way of reducing your enemies ability to resist your aims, but it's not necessarily the only way (remember the Cold War), there is also of course economic stratagies, propaganda, etc. Pretty much all but the first stratagy takes lots of time and patience, and my be much less effective.

Speaking to Wayfriends example of biker gangs; if two or more groups, especially the bigger gangs (outlaws, angels, etc), or inner-city gangs (crips, bloods, m13, etc), engage in open conflict with each other, I'm quite will to call it a war.

As to what is permissible during war, that is a concept that seems to change with the times. During the period of the Roman Empire, killing everything that moved and salting the earth wasn't too extreme apparently, will now we wrestle with whether it's better to send in battalions of ground troops supported with airstrikes, or to use a drone to kill certain individuals.

[Vraith]

As to what is permissible during war, that is a concept that seems to change with the times.

I know it's a thing unlikely in the extreme...
But what if we all just agreed that War is NOT PERMISSIBLE?
Everything else is just rationalization of evil---but seems ingrained, perhaps inherent.

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

I'm reminded of a remark I've read attributed to Voltaire: killing is forbidden, unless in large numbers to the sound of trumpets (or something). Somewhat anciently, Augustinian theorems pertaining to military justice have been accepted throughout the Catholic and derivative worlds, and I imagine other religions have contained allegations of principles distinguishing good from evil wars. With respect to the US, I think there is something of indoctrination to valorization of the Revolutionary, Civil, and Second World Wars, as if these were all examples of "good wars" that prove Augustinian theorems right. Thus trying to prove that WWII especially was a "good war" is central to this militaristic doctrine.

Normally enough, no one sits back and reflects on one's standards of right and wrong, or moreover (and even moreso) standards for proving whether something that already happened was right or wrong. I suspect few people say in their heads, "The Holocaust really happened," and base this judgment on the evidence. They believe it more because they have been told such by reliable people, and an airy belief in it supports the "good war" image of the Allied opposition to the Axis. If we knew what kind of evidence there was for the Holocaust, it would be easier for us to see the evidence there is for other mass crimes, too, though. (A blindingly useful instance of this pertains to the Belsen camp: a relevant trial set the precedent in international criminal law that a pattern of behavior on an organization's part sufficed to prove organizational intent, regardless of what internal memorandums supposedly would or would not reveal about an organization's intent. Also, of course, we know that the Nazi regime cloaked their policies in phrases like "resettlement" and "final solution," the latter of which is only obviously ominous after we know what it really meant. Thus when declassified US military documents supposedly reveal that the rules of engagement and suchlike during the Vietnam War called for restraint in relation to civilians, we can pretty much dismiss this fact out of hand, since we also know that Germany and Japan also maintained a pretense of humane-seeming ROE that had virtually nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that these nations' armies butchered helpless people--unarmed, tied-up, etc. kinds of people--by the millions.)

It would also be rather burdensome, perhaps, to believe that the world is dominated by evil men and women, rather than morally neutral such folk (or even some shining samples of the human spirit!). But psychologically speaking, I think that wanting to be a major world leader indicates a lot of potential perversity in and of itself--that is to say, it seems like an inherently authoritarian or undemocratic kind of attitude, even within a democracy--so it makes sense that most world leaders are depraved, since mostly it would be politically depraved individuals who would gravitate towards global offices.

But bearing this burden: does that mean going into revolt against the major world powers? Does that mean civil war in the US and China is the right thing? Besides the often much greater vehemence of civil wars, plenty of things don't recommend such a course of action. And anyway this is all supposed to imply that there is no "good war," not even a war to overthrow governments who constantly wage other wars.

[wayfriend]

Speaking to Wayfriends example of biker gangs; if two or more groups, especially the bigger gangs (outlaws, angels, etc), or inner-city gangs (crips, bloods, m13, etc), engage in open conflict with each other, I'm quite will to call it a war.

Certainly. But something may be called "war" in a metaphoric sense (a war against poverty), and something may be "war" because of similarities to war (a war between police and drug cartels), and something may be called "war" as matching a specific geopolitical definition of the term. I've been speaking about the latter idea. Gang brawls would be the second sense I would think.

[Rawedge Rim]

I'm reminded of a remark I've read attributed to Voltaire: killing is forbidden, unless in large numbers to the sound of trumpets (or something). Somewhat anciently, Augustinian theorems pertaining to military justice have been accepted throughout the Catholic and derivative worlds, and I imagine other religions have contained allegations of principles distinguishing good from evil wars. With respect to the US, I think there is something of indoctrination to valorization of the Revolutionary, Civil, and Second World Wars, as if these were all examples of "good wars" that prove Augustinian theorems right. Thus trying to prove that WWII especially was a "good war" is central to this militaristic doctrine.

Normally enough, no one sits back and reflects on one's standards of right and wrong, or moreover (and even moreso) standards for proving whether something that already happened was right or wrong. I suspect few people say in their heads, "The Holocaust really happened," and base this judgment on the evidence. They believe it more because they have been told such by reliable people, and an airy belief in it supports the "good war" image of the Allied opposition to the Axis. If we knew what kind of evidence there was for the Holocaust, it would be easier for us to see the evidence there is for other mass crimes, too, though. (A blindingly useful instance of this pertains to the Belsen camp: a relevant trial set the precedent in international criminal law that a pattern of behavior on an organization's part sufficed to prove organizational intent, regardless of what internal memorandums supposedly would or would not reveal about an organization's intent. Also, of course, we know that the Nazi regime cloaked their policies in phrases like "resettlement" and "final solution," the latter of which is only obviously ominous after we know what it really meant. Thus when declassified US military documents supposedly reveal that the rules of engagement and suchlike during the Vietnam War called for restraint in relation to civilians, we can pretty much dismiss this fact out of hand, since we also know that Germany and Japan also maintained a pretense of humane-seeming ROE that had virtually nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that these nations' armies butchered helpless people--unarmed, tied-up, etc. kinds of people--by the millions.)

It would also be rather burdensome, perhaps, to believe that the world is dominated by evil men and women, rather than morally neutral such folk (or even some shining samples of the human spirit!). But psychologically speaking, I think that wanting to be a major world leader indicates a lot of potential perversity in and of itself--that is to say, it seems like an inherently authoritarian or undemocratic kind of attitude, even within a democracy--so it makes sense that most world leaders are depraved, since mostly it would be politically depraved individuals who would gravitate towards global offices.

But bearing this burden: does that mean going into revolt against the major world powers? Does that mean civil war in the US and China is the right thing? Besides the often much greater vehemence of civil wars, plenty of things don't recommend such a course of action. And anyway this is all supposed to imply that there is no "good war," not even a war to overthrow governments who constantly wage other wars.

I cannot say that war is ever "good", I would say that the alternative to war may be a worse solution than refusing to go to war sometimes. Certainly the Axis powers in WW2 match this discription of a war better fought than leaving the Axis unchecked.

Sort of the like haveing to have a toe removed to save a foot. It's not good to lose the toe, but it beats losing a foot, or a leg, or a life.

Now certainly even better would be not to let the toe get into the condition where it needed to be removed, but the human animal is very contrarion.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

But bearing this burden: does that mean going into revolt against the major world powers? Does that mean civil war in the US and China is the right thing? Besides the often much greater vehemence of civil wars, plenty of things don't recommend such a course of action. And anyway this is all supposed to imply that there is no "good war," not even a war to overthrow governments who constantly wage other wars.

There would have to be some obviously overwhelming circumstances for force the citizens in an established country like the United States or China to engage in a civil war.

No, there is no such thing as a "good" war but sometimes you may find yourself in a war whether you wanted it or not. If your neighbor kicks in your front door, wields a gun, and begins taking your belongings then you are justified in pulling out your own gun and fighting back.

No one ever asks themselves how many lives they are willing to lose--or take--when they are considering going to war. Perhaps people should answer that question first--is stopping some warlord worth losing 10,000 soldiers? is invading our neighbor worth 25,000 civilian deaths?--before engaging in military action. Unfortunately, thinking before acting has never been a prevalent characteristic of our species.

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

The main reason we have for thinking an Axis world would have been hideous is our knowledge of (A) what the Nazis and Japanese imperialists especially (but also to a lesser extent Italy, Spain, Croatia, Hungary, etc.) had already done, and (B) what the Nazis were planning to do. Although it probably would have taken quite a bit more time for Japan to consolidate power in Asia, having done so, I don't think it would have established a system of mass murder anywhere near what the Nazis were already forging in Europe. (There is some reason to think that slave labor regimes might have continued, and that the Kempetai would have kept killing people, but the vast majority of Japanese atrocities were perpetrated by the military.) That said, up until such a cut-off point (if you will), the military would've kept killing lots and lots of people, millions or so perhaps. But so did all the enemies or opponents of Japan in Asia, e.g. Korea, split into a North and a South, was a country ruled by tyrannies imposed by the USSR and the USA, one of which killed hundreds of thousands of people in cold blood, the other millions (northern communism, that is). Indonesia eventually came to be dominated by a megamurdering regime, Vietnam's various overlords (to say nothing of the French and American wars) killed many, many, many people, and so on. China itself... Well, that's where the argument gets more involved.

Because the China question, as it goes, colors away the truth of the notion that an Axis world would have been worse than the world ended up being anyway, had the Axis not been defeated by the Allies in war. (Had the Axis been defeated in some... other... way... a way no one usually knows works, though...) The Nazis were premeditating the extermination of tens of millions of people in Poland and the USSR, to say nothing of other such plans, except to add all of what I've seen reputable historians write about this and make the claim that the Nazis would have murdered about 100,000,000 people had they taken over Europe completely (this above the 20,000,000 to 30,000,000 civilians and prisoners of war they had already deliberately killed as of 1945).

I discovered, however, that something happened in communist China that matched up to this premeditated holocaust--or, Mao's PRC was itself that match-up. There are many, many scholarly sources of varying ranges of credibility pointing to tens of millions of people being executed or tortured or worked to death under Mao--perhaps something like thirty or forty million or so (or more?), I don't know, the numbers variously overlap and the like, but collaged together they are malevolently suggestive. And then there was that damned famine...

Apparently, it has come to light that not only did the Great Leap Forward fall flat in the bloody mud of the land because of the absurdities of the program in and of itself, but when its leaders discovered it had effectively failed, they covered it up, kept special reserves from starving victims, and even manipulated or encouraged it somehow, to help them fulfill their goal of executing 10% of China's population for being theoretically genetically anticommunist.

Now China upon the takeover had as many as 600,000,000 citizens (roughly). So for Mao, et. al. to be doing something like planning to kill 10% of the country meant 60,000,000 deaths from mass murder--which apparently they pulled off. And this idea of killing 10% of countries for being intrinsically anticommunist is not unique to the PRC. Similar things seem to have been done in the USSR under Lenin first of all, as well as later in North Vietnam to some extent if not elsewhere.

Since Stalin did in fact continue to murder millions of people after the war, and since communist movements in Asia as well as in Africa (specifically, in Ethiopia) collectively murdered a number that is not too far off what the Nazis seem to have been planning--and, since I am not biased in favor of the US during either WWII or the Cold War, I will also point out that the US itself, in Korea and Vietnam in particular, committed war crimes and crimes against humanity by deliberately firing upon and killing millions of civilians and prisoners of war in those regions, indeed in the Vietnam War most particularly using a tonnage of bombing that an article in an Air Force magazine had in 1961, right before the US began destroying South Vietnam,

• (I can't get over this fact... the US utterly raped the very nation it constantly told news media it was trying to save from tyranny--and I mean "raped," since after reading Nick Turse's relevant book, I've gotten the impression that of the many hundreds of thousands of US soldiers who fought during the war, an enormous percentage turned out rapists by the ends of their tours of duty--I mean I'm talking sexual aggression on the scale of what Japan did in WWII)

calculated as the requirement for the destruction of the Soviet Union... since those things transpired...

I think if I, for myself, were not very literate, I would still not be deceived if someone told me, "The US dropped 10,000,000 tons of bombs on Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, or 63 times as many bombs as were dropped on Japan, including 28 times as much napalm, of a much higher grade, along with lakes of poisonous chemicals." I think if I knew what numbers mean, and if I were an alien from beyond Jupiter or wherever, with no latent Cold War ideology to hamper my judgment on the matter, it would be ridiculously plain to me that for the above sentence to be true, would very plainly mean that everyone who estimated the US to have killed millions of civilians, with no regard for their lives, in fact in a lot of cases for the sake of killing them, during that war: I would know that those people were right, and now we know from medical evaluations and theories that a rational argument can be made for 4,700,000 people dying in Vietnam alone during the war--of these, at the most, only 1,650,000 soldiers.

But are such things all that are to be spoken of? No. The US left such ruin in its wake back then that many people died from the infernal residue of the war later. The US sponsored Indonesia's holocausts, and the Rwanda-esque genocide in 1971 Bangladesh. The entire post-WWII global policy program of the US government directly or by proxy resulted in the mass execution, massacre, death-by-torture, death-by-obliteration, and so on mass murder of so many people that, paired with the communist democide of the times, supplies us with a figure perilously approximate to 100,000,000, which is the hypothetical order of magnitude (not an exactly scientific estimate, please!) supposed re: the Axis victory over the world. Which is to say that the world ended up dominated by a system of mass murder of the same scope as would have been inflicted upon it had the Axis won, so that military triumph over the Axis, by the Allies, was not justified as a matter of making good war.

_____________________________________
OTOH...

Some people, I feel (from having watched certain fictional movies or having read synopses of certain fictional alternative history books), think that the Nazis would have used their institutional killing machine--their genocide factories--to exterminate almost the entire population of Europe first, if not to go on, then, to do similar things in Africa or during a hypothetical Cold War with Japan. For now, whether these forebodings are reasonable (in inverted historical retrospect) I'm not gonna try to say I know...

[Hashi Lebwohl]

But are such things all that are to be spoken of? No. The US left such ruin in its wake back then that many people died from the infernal residue of the war later. The US sponsored Indonesia's holocausts, and the Rwanda-esque genocide in 1971 Bangladesh. The entire post-WWII global policy program of the US government directly or by proxy resulted in the mass execution, massacre, death-by-torture, death-by-obliteration, and so on mass murder of so many people that, paired with the communist democide of the times, supplies us with a figure perilously approximate to 100,000,000, which is the hypothetical order of magnitude (not an exactly scientific estimate, please!) supposed re: the Axis victory over the world. Which is to say that the world ended up dominated by a system of mass murder of the same scope as would have been inflicted upon it had the Axis won, so that military triumph over the Axis, by the Allies, was not justified as a matter of making good war.

So what is your point? That World War II shouldn't have happened or that we shouldn't have gotten into it? A lot of things shouldn't happen but they do anyway, which is why everyone needs to learn how to deal with reality and then get over it. As far as whether we should have gotten involved....well, on the one hand Hitler's aggressive land grabs were none of our business and even the early implementation of the Final Solution wasn't our direct problem but then Hitler wasn't the one who attacked us, either. Japan attacked us so we were right to declare war on them *but* all those pesky alliances and treaties meant that declaring war on Japan also meant declaring war on Germany and Italy, as well as their minor partners Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and, strangely enough, Thailand. Things just spiraled out of control after that.

I am the always willing to criticize this country because we aren't the country we are supposed to be but that doesn't mean that all the current problems in the world were caused by us. We don't make other people fight with each other and we don't cause local warlords to engage in ethic cleansings or mass abductions--those people bear the responsibility for their own actions.

[JIkj fjds j]

Japan attacked us so we were right to declare war on them *but* all those pesky alliances and treaties meant that declaring war on Japan also meant declaring war on Germany

Germany inventing better and better Buzz Bombs was the reason America entered WWII. Sooner or later rockets would've been capable of reaching New York. America had to act.

Japan must've known their back door was no longer secure, and so attacked.

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

At the very least, I would say that if a country goes to war, even in self-defense or in defense of another nation being invaded or something, they ought not kill unarmed, helpless people intentionally en masse (or individually, for that matter). It has been said that trying to judge past governments by modern civilian-friendly morals is silly; but are those morals really modern? (You could say: of course they are, for if they weren't, wouldn't states in older times have refrained from atrocities? Wouldn't they have followed the moral code of the era? However, aside from starting from the POV of past killers, instead of the POV of their victims, this sentiment ignores the fact that cultural relativism about morality is a poorly supported thesis, especially in its historical-period-relative form--and in turn, given the will to evil that is rampant in this world, it also ignores the fact that people can knowingly violate the moral law.)

EDIT: I think I know some of what I'm trying to get at, per an example. I have read posts (not here, mind you) or essays or books or whatever, in which people say, "The genocide of Native Americans should not be judged on a par with the Holocaust because when Europe killed the American natives, there was a different standard of morality in play." Even if this were true at all (which protests/critiques from Spaniards (Las Casas(sp.?)) and Germans (Kant), for instance, proves false), the standard of morality in question was the killers', not the victims'. So if we judged the genocide of the natives from the natives' POV, wouldn't we conclude that the moral law was the same (so to speak) back then as now? Why would we take the killers' POV as, relativistically speaking, our own? That would be like saying the Nazis were morally justified in the Holocaust, since relative to Nazi culture, genocide of Jews was among the highest priorities.

EDIT 2: There is this school of philosophy based on a notion of "embodied cognition," which means that philosophical principles might be reflections of the structure of body modules related to cognition. Thus the folds and loops in the brain, for example, are not incidental to abstract logic (as a function performed by the brain) but constitute forms of logical order in their own right. Extrapolating fairly far outward from this kind of idea, I wonder whether the entropy of the world is coded in us subconsciously, as some kind of impulse towards destruction--if entropy, that is, is embodied within our motivational structure?

Suppose, then, that many or most humans, for quite natural reasons, have a pre-rational desire to destroy things for the sake of destruction. This might explain the propensity of governments to engage in mass killing whenever and wherever they have concentrations of political power that are out of line with a democratic or republican distribution scheme: the archetype of ruin inside politicians starts influencing them to come up with rationalizations for using their power to increase entropy, motivating them to the otherwise irrational causes of indiscriminate war and genocide? I'm not quite sure. Everyone has "Lord Foul" or something similar inside them, supposedly, though, and this might be how/why/w/e.

[Vraith]

given the will to evil that is rampant in this world, it also ignores the fact that people can knowingly violate the moral law.)

I object to the given that the will to evil is rampant.
If it were, then those who perform evil wouldn't rely so heavily on the strategies of:
Hiding their evil acts.
Inventing ideologies that deny their acts are evil.
Justifying evil acts by claiming they're really just necessary [survival] responses
to things much worse.
etc.
Evil, innate, is fairly uncommon.
It just has a very large toolbox, and a very long lever.

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

I suppose using the word "evil" might be too strong for normal discourse. (It's not so, from the Kantian "radical evil"-theory perspective, but that's an aside...) OTOH, although genocidal/similar regimes often try to cover up their crimes, surprisingly, many people upon finding out about these things, end up defending their regime for having done so. At least, that is my impression of the US and Japan (for example). Of course, it could be that most American and Japanese citizens object to the things their governments have done, but are not quite so public about their objections...

(Now you, Vraith, also pointed out the issue of rationalizations. The idea would be that if such fake political rationalists (so to speak) were inherently motivated to evil, they would just kill without explanation. But I think the problem is more subtle; there is this perhaps widespread desire to kill for killing's sake, but people also realize that acting on this for its own sake would be frowned upon, so they invent rationalizations to publicly cover for their subconscious depravity.

I read somewhere once that 4% of Americans are sociopaths. That's millions of people, and if enough of such people got into the government, well... This would create an appearance of broad public malice, whereas the truth would be that normal people are mostly too apathetic to get involved in public affairs, for better or for worse.)

[Hashi Lebwohl]

Germany inventing better and better Buzz Bombs was the reason America entered WWII. Sooner or later rockets would've been capable of reaching New York. America had to act.

Japan must've known their back door was no longer secure, and so attacked.

No, the only reason we entered was because of Pearl Harbor. People had been wanting us to enter the war since England got into it in 1939 but we were still too isolationist for that, despite not quite so secretly sending weapons to England.

I read somewhere once that 4% of Americans are sociopaths. That's millions of people, and if enough of such people got into the government, well... This would create an appearance of broad public malice, whereas the truth would be that normal people are mostly too apathetic to get involved in public affairs, for better or for worse.)

87.3% of all statistics are made up as needed. Sometimes your "the United States is evil" bias shows a little too much.

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

TBH I don't myself know how many Americans are sociopaths, and I don't even know how well-formed a concept "sociopathology" in itself is (I find myself highly sympathetic to Thomas Szaz(sp.?) for example). OTOH, is saying that 4% (or some other conjectured number) of Americans are/might be sociopaths an example of anti-American bias? Presumably the rate would average out and be similar for all countries, reflecting a broad human problem. (Certainly in the Vietnam context, for instance, America's communist opponents in Vietnam itself and Cambodia especially ended up perpetrating extremely massive crimes.)

[I'm also not a statistician, and I know statistics are often viewed as if they were mostly made up--which is to say, Hashi, I've seen a remark like yours made before... But, since, again, I am not a statistician, I'm not just going to assume that everyone in the field is making a game out of guessing such things. With respect to democide in particular, bias does tend to cloud things a lot, which is why I don't tend to emphasize specific estimates of democide--even the Holocaust ranges, technically, from 4 to 7 million victims, not just the 6 million normally reported--but OTOH some numbers are the result of over-extrapolation, but others of decades of research with various qualifications or admissions of imprecision.]

Also, how deep is my anti-American bias? Because for all my antagonism towards my government, I would yet say that the American antiwar movement not only helped limit the degree to which the US ended up ravaging Indochina, but was perhaps the only substantial example of a country standing up to its government when its government embarked on an utterly malevolent course of action. Germany didn't do that; neither did Japan; and so on. Also, John Rawls, the philosopher who is at the heart of my image of the antiwar movement, was an American. So ultimately I look at America as simultaneously infected with enormous evil, but also containing a counterforce of enormous good. (Stephen R. Donaldson, we might want to remember, is an American who also was extremely opposed to the war in Vietnam...)

[Hashi Lebwohl]

Why the focus on the Vietnam War, then? It ended 40 years ago and the things we have been doing in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan are just as bad. There are Pakistani people who now fear mostly-sunny skies because the lack of cloud cover means that drones may strike at any time. We are inflicting psychological damage on at least one country and yet I don't see anyone protesting that. There isn't anyone standing up against the things we have been doing because no one wants to look like they are helping the terrorists win.