Are We Not Better Than This?

Originally posted by Blacksword Can't watch the clip at work. Is this the soldiers urinating on Taliban corpses? Appalling. Almost as bad as the clip of marines throwing the live puppy off a cliff. Anyone else had the pleasure of seeing that? There really are some pieces of sh!t out there.

The live puppy? This shocked me.

That video of urinating on corpses is a sad, ugly thing, stupid, stripped off of human dignity. But, frankly, these are corpses. Pissing on alive POW would be incomparably worse.

Jody is right: making a necklace of human ears is, unfortunately, not unusual in warfare. Over here was black market for human ears, noses and fingers. Ring fingers with wedding rings still attached on them were the most expensive.


But  I never, NEVER saw/experienced/heard of anybody in military service, no matter how primitve or cruel, who would intentionally harm a kitten or puppy. It's just not happening. Such a person would be punished, court-martialed, and despised by his own brothers-in-arms first and foremost.

^The thing is, even these people who are trained to kill human beings aren't supposed to kill a puppy. Yes, it sounds stupid but it's just how we work. The analysis you do Pat is real but beyond the bear emotion that is used as the first reaction to something like that. It actually requires deeper thinking (nothing too ultra-deep anyway, but more than one-second at least). In the end, people understand soldiers will kill people. It's precisely what they are sent there to do. Puppies are seen as innocent defenseless creatures.

Instead, people should cry about the decision to send soldiers to fight useless wars. Wars bring the worst in people. Even against sysmbols of innocence like a puppy.

Useless wars.

I think the incidences of warriors or soldiers giving a dignified burial to those they have killed is rare throughout history for the obvious reasons.  People are always brutalized in war as are all living things.


Edited by Slartibartfast - February 29 2012 at 09:17

Originally posted by Slartibartfast I think the incidences of warriors or soldiers giving a dignified burial to those they have killed is rare throughout history for the obvious reasons.  People are always brutalized in war as are all living things.

There's some middle ground between a dignified burial and urinating on a corpse.

War sucks. Simple. The people who go out to fight get hypnotized into hating more than needs to be. Hell, this whole world seems like that.

Just another reminder that all progress is illusion.

Originally posted by Equality 7-2521 If the whole world were like that, you wouldn't be sitting on the internet complaining about it.

If my Dad's Dad had gone to the Pacific a couple of years before the end of world war II than he did my Dad might never have been born and I wouldn't be here writing this possibly and I say this with absolute certainty.


Edited by Slartibartfast - February 29 2012 at 14:36

But murder and killing has always been widespread and to this day quite a lot of people accept it if it's done to certain people in certain ways. The only people who really disapprove of murder are the people who say "Yes, I would not kill Hitler, even were it to avert the Holocaust. because you can't EVER EVER EVER EVER kill someone."

It probably wouldn't have but that's not the point, it's just a little story to illustrate a case of where it seems clear that killing this person is a good idea. You can swap him for Ted Bundy if you like.

Edited by Textbook - February 29 2012 at 20:58

WWI gave birth to WWII. That is a fact. Without Hitler, the Nazi Party would never have been less than a fringe party in the far right. Without Hitler, the Great Depression wouldn't have brought the Nazis to power but some other obscure figure in the midst of the chaos until probably the communists would have gained power if the vacuum that was the Reichstag by 1931-3 continued to be a non-entity. They would've lost it soon to the forces of the Weimar Republic. Without Hitler, even some fanatic Nazis wouldn't have been so antisemitic. Without Hitler, there might not have been a WWII, and the Holocaust was definitely linked to the conflict (Nazis purged jews and all before the war, but the actual systematic extermination came late, as a result of the war in the east and the overcrowding of Jews' ghettos and the economical burden they represented -even though they were used as forced labor-). Even if Hitler had gained power but had been killed before 1941 (before the invassion of Russia I would venture to say), the Holocaust would've been minimized (though Himmler and Heydrich were only too eager to start it) since the power would have fallen in the hands of someone less extreme and more akin to try to negotiate with the allies, namely Göring. In the end, many things explain the Holocaust, not one man caused it and not one country was doomed to cause it by force of its history (though yes by the force of a war and ridiculously excessive sanctions), but it's clear that Mr Adolf's elimination would've made things far less terrible for the sons of Abraham....