Backstage - OOC Forums
General Discussion => The Speakeasy: OOG/Off-topic Discussion => Topic started by: Gottii on 09 Mar 2013, 12:01
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http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/09/living/higher-call-military-chivalry/index.html?hpt=hp_c1
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Thanks
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(http://i.imgur.com/SQOLJJo.gif)
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Somedays I don't mind being human.
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Simply beautiful.
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The problem is that these examples were connected to the most evil thing that we humans do.
War.
As long as there is war, these abnormalities are meaningless.
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Is it evil? Can animals be evil?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/science/22chimp.html?_r=0
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I will now ruin all of this for you.
Every single one of these that deals with an individual had that individual killed in their respective war.
You may now commence crying.
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The problem is that these examples were connected to the most evil thing that we humans do.
War.
As long as there is war, these abnormalities are meaningless.
I would argue that it makes them even more meaningful. To be surrounded by (what you describe as) the most evil thing we do on all sides and yet still maintain the integrity and humanity within to be capable of compassion and mercy places even more value on your actions.
It is easy to be unkind to the unkind and to show mercy to the merciful, it is significantly harder to be kind to the cruel and show mercy to your enemies.
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Showing mercy to your enemy is overall a good thing, I agree. Actively assisting your enemy back to his own lines, especially right after said enemy has conducted an attack on what may well have been a civilian target, is a different story entirely. If that B-17 was so helpless, wouldn't it have made more sense to force it to make an emergency landing, taking both the plane and the crew out of the war entirely, hopefully without killing them in the process? I have to wonder if the bombardier on that B-17 showed the same restraint that German pilot showed, the next time he looked down his Norden bombsight at a city.
I don't know. If that had been a story of two fighter pilots, I'd feel a lot less ambivalent about it.
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If that B-17 was so helpless, wouldn't it have made more sense to force it to make an emergency landing, taking both the plane and the crew out of the war entirely, hopefully without killing them in the process?
The germans were not taking those bombers out of the war, they were repairing them and using them for special missons, themselves.
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enemy has conducted an attack on what may well have been a civilian target
For the most part, USAAF Bomber Wings, or 8th Air Force focused on attempting to hit targets with military relevance (unlike the Italian airpower advocate Douhet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giulio_Douhet)). Since the ability to accurately hit targets was limited this required large groups of bombers dropping bombs in the general vicinity of the target. The Norden Bombsight actually meant that 8th Air Force flew day-time missions to accurately hit the intended militarily relevant target.
If that B-17 was so helpless, wouldn't it have made more sense to force it to make an emergency landing, taking both the plane and the crew out of the war entirely, hopefully without killing them in the process
A largely crippled B-17 limping along would be making an emergency landing regardless of whatever airfield it landed at. Forcing a landing at a non-airfield would likely have been more of a controlled crash.
A fighter pilot forcing a bomber to land sounds simple enough, but it is not as if he can very well hold 8 men at gun point until an army unit arrives to take custody. Any Americans or Brits on the ground in western Europe would make every effort to evade capture and make contact with non-Germans, preferably partisans/resistance movements.
The plane was likely stripped for any useful parts and merely replaced by a new one freshly flown via Canada & Iceland to the UK.
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Yes, the USAAF were more conscious (or conscientuous) about their targets than the RAF were by comparison, and conducted their bombing in daylight as opposed to the Brits. Even so, the event described took place after such raids as Operation Gomorrah, which inflicted huge civilian casualties and included American bombers. To be fair, I don't know how many of those casualties were inflicted by the Americans, but then again, would the German fighter pilot know?
As for the other comments, my point stands. This really seems like crossing the line of treason, to me. It's precisely as if a Spitfire pilot should have seen a damaged German bomber safely back across the channel after it was done dropping bombs on London.
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I think that's the point, though. It technically was treason, and possibly more damaging in the long run. And yet, in spite of that, he decided to send the bomber crew home anyway.
We're not celebrating strategic sense or valor. We're celebrating humans being human. Because in that moment, when said German pilot realized the bomber was shot up beyond repair and most of the crew was either dead or wounded, he didn't see a plane full of the enemy. He saw a plane full of people. People just like him. And yes, it is exactly like if a Spitfire ace spotted a German bomber limping away, realized it was barely flying, could see the crew, wounded, through holes in the fuselage, and lingered long enough to stare the pilot and co-pilot in the face, and decided to fly them home instead of shooting them down. Again, that's kind of the point of the story.
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The problem is that these examples were connected to the most evil thing that we humans do.
War.
As long as there is war, these abnormalities are meaningless.
Why is war evil? Yes, it kills us. Yes, people die. But people die anyway, and wars have forced innovations and creations that, to date, have probably saved or will save more lives than the wars took. And wars have, many times, forced us to re-evaluate or destroy ideas that might otherwise have caused much more harm than they did.
If your argument is that war is inherently evil, it might be noted that ants and chimpanzees also conduct wars. Are they evil too?
In the long, long term view, as long as we can avoid nuking each other, war may be one of the things that has most benefited us.
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I would temper that with the statement that war is also not good. It's costly and violent, and however much good may come out of it, the war itself still ends with far too many people dead or maimed.
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I have kind of a similar story on one of my great grand father side. Not that spectacular mind you, but it was not so uncommon that we might think, or at least that's what he told.
Anyway he was a commanding officer of a tank squad in 1940 when Germany invaded and due to mistakes in comm and poor radio he finded himself and his tank alone against a panzer squad, where his squad should have followed. While he was sure to be able to handle the threat (french tanks were generally a lot tougher at that time of war, the new panzers III put aside, and germans usually avoived them with blitzkrieg), it actually backfired due to all these factors. So well, his tank took an AP shot directly into the driver section. Him and the gunner were left stranded in the crushed hull and unable to get out, wounded or unconscious.
The enemy tank commander stopped to help them and see if there were any survivors. He helped them to open the hatch and dragged them both out of the vehicle. They were sent to a german military hospital and then sent back to France. According to him it was not very uncommon when it was still the Werhmacht that was fully in charge with a certain code of conduct. Officers in both sides used to see the war in a more traditionnal way, where it started to change drastically after.
Would the german commander have known that they were actually 3 of them in the tank instead of 2 - they were supposed to be only 2, but this was the flag tank with the commander - he told that he would have taken the time to look for the driver too. He was probably instant killed though, but well.
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It stands to reason whether ants and chimpanzees wage war or show behavior patterns that are from a human perspective similar enough to what we call war, that we describe it as such.
Being a biologist, I think it's dangerous to ascribe uncritically things like 'language' to bees or 'waging war' to ants and chimpanzees. Not because it's leading to humans looking like animals, but rather because it's anthropomorphizing animals.
War, as we know it among humans, is something else than the behavior of bonobos and ants. War as humans wage it has to be understood as an actual, intentional and widespread armed conflict between political communities. The kind of conflicts over territory that chimpanzees fight out aren't really of the same category. Biologists describe them as 'wars' in analogy to human behavior. Just like physicists used to explain the Atom as a 'small solar system' back when Bohr's atom model was sota.
I know that nowadays there is a prevalence for using such analogies in the life sciences, but there is a problem with that: While only very few, confused, people would take the sentence "An atom is a really, really small solar system." to be meant literal, people do so if it's a sentence like "Chimpanzees wage war." and that's a problem. Still biologists go for such descriptions of animal behavior because they are popular, probably because otherwise very complex phenomena are thus broken down to a state where the usual listener thinks that he understood what chimpanzees are doing there.
So, do chimpanzees and ants conduct war? Not in the same sense as humans do. War is not only a category that describes a certain behavior of the animal species 'homo sapiens', but it's a term that implies an ethical dimension because it's meant to refer to something in which ethically responsible actors engage in. Thus, it has to be assessed from an ethical perspective.
Ethically speaking, war has little merit in itself. If we ask what is good about war, then we will inevitably come to the conclusion that everything we come up with to answer this question is something that war might lead to, but is external to war: Innvoation and creation? Nothing that is an exclusive feature of war. Re-evaluating (bad) ideas? We can have that without war as well. Interestingly in both cases we reap the real benefits only after the war ceased to be, that is, after peace has been established.
It turns out that war itself isn't something to be desired, even if some of it's effects might be desirable: Chiefly among these effects is the establishment of peace. Still, already having peace is indubitably better than establishing it.
So, while I wouldn't subscribe to the idea that war is 'the most evil thing humans do', as it can be under certain conditions be an ethical means to ethical ends, I'd say that war is never an ethical ends and thus should be avoided whenever possible.
It's evil to pursue war, even though it might be good to pursue peace through war. War, thus, might sometimes be what one might call "a necessary evil". One has to pay close attention to the conditions under which it is really necessary, though. I don't think that some elusive and speculative 'long, long term benefits' constitute such a necessity.
Tl;Dr: What Matoko said.