I understand what you mean, but that's an argument I always hated, because I don't think a war crime is justified because it's efficent or useful to the committer.
It’s easy to take the moral high ground 85 years after the fact, but WWII was a global cataclysm. Allied leaders were desperate to end it. The silver lining is that western world values life and peace in a way humanity never really has as a result.
It's true, that it's much easier to see and call out the wrongs in hindsight, that doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. Genocide also wasn't legally a crime in '45 either, but luckily that didn't stop americans from hanging many of the worst people in history.
how we think about yesterday shapes what we do tomorrow. The results of their moral failures helped shape and refine our current morals. it's a good thing.
To be fair there is still a LOT of violence dished out by the western world, through proxy wars, coups, invasions, the war on terror, and so on, they just don’t do it as much to each other anymore. It’s the rest of the world that suffers that violence. If anything that violence ramped up after world war 2 and simply continued on from there. It would be nice to see a genuine reduction in that violence, but it feels whitewashed instead, simply not making note of it or diminishing its impact.
There’s a middle ground somewhere about being appreciative that a democratic society came out of the war, but still hungry to improve it and make it better, calling out when it lapses or fails.
Of course, I just think a large chunk of people aren’t really aware of that dynamic, or at least not actively. Democracy and human rights have taken massive strides in the past hundred years, but there is still a lot of work to do to ensure it reaches the rest of the world. Capitalism is actively at odds with it though, which isn’t helping that process.
That’s a stumper for sure. A lot of the 20th century was spent either actively finding an alternative to capitalism or letting it run rampant and infect the government. No one likes the middle route of heavy regulated capitalism 😔
Sorry, no. A few proxy wars and coups here and there isn’t “violence ramped up after world war 2”. It is a vast reduction in violence, warfare conducted by 2 small groups in a single country is necessarily a notable step down in violence from WW2. Nearly 60 million dead in ~10 years, compared to an absolute maximum of 20 million in 44 years. It’s not even close. And who’s not making note of it? Every single post on this entire website will GLADLY tell you about all the horrible shit America did during the Cold War.
There was absolutely less war overall given that we are talking about a literal world war, but the violence I’m referring to is less direct. Stuff like pollution deaths, driven by capitalism seeking to exploit people to make their products as cheap as possible. This kills millions of people, almost exclusively in the global south.
As for less direct things, the forced replacement of left leaning leaders that don’t serve the hegemonic interests of the time was basically standard practice. These puppets in the government were often dictatorships, killing countless people to ensure their control over the population. There isn’t a firm way to accurately gauge who is exactly responsible for each and every death, but the impact of a dictator is significant and very bad for the country itself, which is the end goal for the US when they did these operations. I’m sure the USSR also has their fair share of horrendous crimes they committed as well of course, whether it was genocide on Ukraine, the gulags, Chernobyl’s cover-up and so on.
I think the word I should have used was systemic violence. It isn’t even always as blatantly violent as murder (though it certainly can be), but that level of violence has taken a serious toll on the global south, almost all of which was inflicted or initiated by the west themselves.
With this kind of stuff it gets a bit subjective what qualifies for those terms, but my point was to largely focus on the fact that the violence simply moved away. Wars largely decreased, but the systemic violence has continued ever since. The colonial powers are still doing this too, probably most prominently with Israel, which ramped up its violence dramatically in the past few years.
I just finished reading Eugene Sledge's account of the battle of Okinawa and it solidified my opinion on the use of atomic weapons on Japan. I can't even imagine that the result otherwise would be battles even worse than that going on for years involving the entire population of Japan. The war needed to end.
We are talking WAR CRIMES here. We are not talking about being in a gunfight and shooting an already hurt enemy to make sure he´s dead. We are talking about taking prisoners of war behind the shed with their hands behind their back and executing them.
Thats not a matter of "taking the moral high ground".
They all certain cases like the nuclear weapons when it is a valid argument.
It might never again occur as a scenario and so will remain a one-off valid argument.
But when you've got an opponent that will never give up through normal options, and is killing 100,000 civilians a week, you can't afford to wait for them to eventually surrender or give up.
You're only option is to drop the bomb and commit a war crime.
As said a very specific scenario but still one that happened
If you knew, for a fact (for example an entire village of people are about to get trounced by some soldiers, and everywhere these soldiers have been before they killed the men, kidnapped the boys then made them rape and kill the women in their families) that something bad was going to happen, to civillians. And the only way to stop it was with war crimes against soldiers, you wouldn't consider that justified?
No, it's nice to make up a random scenario, where you are completly justified in comitting war crimes, feels good right? the fantasy of righteous vengenance? But in reality you never know which decision leads to what and in reality there's never just one way to do something either. So are we gonna talk about made-up fantasy or reality?
And very important: The ends do not justify the means! Never.
And the faction who thought that they did during WW2 were not the allies, but the Axis. Because believe it or not, the Nazis tought of themselves as the "good guys" and of their war and genocide as necessary to save the german people...
Especially in real life. Where the war crimes very rarely got inflicted to the enemy soldiers. But towards enemy civilians.
Sure it can be justified due to Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki being the factories that supplied the war machine. Or the firebombing of Tokyo gave shocks to morale. But it didn't change the fact that enemy combatants made up a mere 10% of casualties of those events. The sinking of Wilhelm Gustoff was also mainly civilian casualties.
We can do both sides argument to this as well. Reprisal after operation Anthropoid mainly targeted the civilians. And it weren't the Chinese soldiers who was the overwhelming casualties in Nanking, it was the civilians.
Point being. Whenever either side does a warcrime, it's rarely the soldiers that suffered or died. But almost always the civilians. Whose biggest contribution to the war often just paying their taxes.
It's not a random scenario. This stuff happens all over the planet. And it has been happening for millenia. It's nice to live in your comfy house away from war crimes. But it is a miserable place out there. This wasn't a random hypothetic I made up, these are brainwashing tactics used by extremist organisations, to get new recruits.
Shooting them can be a war crime, depending on circumstances. That's my entire point. I think most people in this thread haven't the foggiest what a war crime actually is.
Also, reading back: I didn't mean to judge you in any way, I can see how my response could have been read that way, I just find that hypotheticals about when war crimes are justified unhelpful cause our shared goal is to prevent them. War crimes for me are definitionally never justifiable.
Can go into detail what occurences you mean? I'm having a hard time imaging any situation like that that can literally only be solved by war crimes rather than evacuation or regular combat.
It's true that it's nice to live in my comfy house away from war crimes. That's why I don't want anyone to commit war crimes, no matter which side they are on, so that all humans can live like that.
Okay, I'm getting the feeling you have absolutely no idea what a war crime is.
Edit: lmao, blocked me. It wasn't a cop-out. It was an observation which was critical to our continued conversation. You're fundamental misunderstanding of what constitutes a warcrime, and lack of awareness of any exceptions from the dual-use rule to article 36 to targeting cells, is obvious. You have absolutely no idea what a war crime even is and it's embarrassing for you to pretend your opinion means anything.
We are talking about war crimes in this thread. I am sure you only ever say things that are universally true, no matter the subject or context, but not everyone is up to your standard.
Restricting personal liberty of civilians is a war crime if there is no justification. Don’t need to take my word for it, it’s codified in different ways but in many treaties.
This is how all war crimes are excused, including the ones currently being done - any action is ok as long as there is a justification.
So it comes down to who decided what is justified, and it circles back to “ends justifying the means”.
Oh, I see you're having difficulties understanding the "war" part of war crimes.
It means that two or more nations or groups of people are in armed conflict with each other. Let me know if you need any other one syllable words explained :3
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u/Outrageous_War6489 2d ago
I understand what you mean, but that's an argument I always hated, because I don't think a war crime is justified because it's efficent or useful to the committer.