The Banality of Urinating on Taliban Corpses

[xchrom]

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/01/the-banality-of-urinating-on-taliban-corpses/251356/

If you had asked me a few days ago, before news broke that American soldiers have urinated on Taliban corpses, whether American soldiers have ever urinated on Taliban corpses, I would have said: Probably.

You send hordes of young people into combat, people whose job is to kill the enemy and who watch as their friends are killed and maimed by the enemy, and the chances are that signs of disrespect for the enemy will surface--and that every once in a while those signs will assume grotesque form.

War, presumably, has always been like that. But something has changed over the past couple of decades--two things, actually--and they amount to a powerful new argument against starting wars in the first place.

First, there's the new transparency of war. Infinitely more battlefield details get recorded, and everyone has the tools to broadcast these details. So it's just a matter of time before some outrageous image goes viral--pictures from Abu Ghraib, video from Afghanistan, whatever. These images will make you and your soldiers more hated by the enemy than ever--and hated by civilians who may identify with the enemy, whether because of national, ethnic, or religious kinship.

[Lint Head]

1. War in society started 10,000 years ago as a concept after mankind stopped being nomadic.

It is not standard human nature nor something that can't be stopped but an aberration. Slavery was outlawed.
Demons as the excuse for disease has been debunked long ago. War can also be ended as a remedy for horrendous acts by despots and terrorists.

The glory in killing other human beings by the thousands is a false glory.

I think this new book by John Horgan will be a great read.

[sad sally]

2. As long as our government has a vision of the world as

“battlefield earth,” they are behind one set of lines and have placed an increasingly enormous group of other people on the other side, including us - its own people.