Ted Morgan wrote:
It seems that Jeff (Jerry?) draws the line re. war crimes at the wrong
place: i.e., whether or not the actor in question "knows" exactly what
he is doing..... I don't think that "truly believing one is saving
lives" in carrying out an act that is a crime against humanity makes the
act less than a crime against humanity.
JW reply:
It is easy to judge the bombing of Hiroshima (an act with which I
totally disagree, by the way) as a crime against humanity while sitting
in an easy chair 55 years later with the whole event in historical
perspective than it would have been in the middle of a brutal war where
people were dying on a routine basis. The bombing of Hiroshima was
certainly an act of war, and in perspective a crime against humanity but
unless you are willing to say that all war is a crime against humanity
and both the aggressors and defenders are criminals ipso facto, then it
becomes a stretch to expect people in 1945 whose lives are at risk in
the war to consider bombing another city in an effort to end that war a
war crime.
Ted Morgan wrote:
Would we excuse Nazis who believed the propaganda about being threatened
by Jews? Or even by neighboring Czechoslovakia? Do we excuse the guy
who broke into a family's home in Seattle some years back (featured in
Sam Keen's excellent film "Faces of the Enemy") and slaughtered the
family because he was brainwashed that they were communists seeking to
take over the world (and responsible for him losing his job!).
JW reply:
I think that there is a substantitive difference between doing things
that can be reasonably construed to be legitimate acts of war (as if we
should even think of considering war legitimate) and things that we know
are wrong under any circumstance. Where to draw that line obviously is
different places in the sand for each of us, and for most of us, at
least on this list who have expressed themselves, the tolerable area is
a lot smaller than that of our ancestors who were pretty brutal as a
whole.
-- Jerry West Editor/publisher/janitor ---------------------------------------------------- THE RECORD On line news from Nootka Sound & Canada's West Coast An independent, progressive regional publication http://www.island.net/~record/
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