No worries. War is unavoidable at times - dictators exist, people get desperate, and so on. There are legalities involved, and they are a concern but aren’t my main concern. Morally, there’s a difference to me between killing someone because I hate them and killing someone because I’m a combatant and so are they. There are strict rules to war that help are supposed to keep things largely ethical - I understand war is never going to be “clean”. Policies like rules of engagement, being able to surrender, treatment of POWs, genuinely avoiding targetting civilians (the world could use more of that right now) and stopping when your country tells you to all matter to me.
Soldiers are not asked to make decisions about who they’ll kill (I mean which armies, not rules of engagement), thus these individuals are not being relied upon for justice. That is a big difference from vigilantism, where a person or mob of people decides who lives and dies. Ideally the leaders of the military and country are making sure war is a necessary last resort and conducted according to rules, and if that isn’t happening then other nations should be condemning and opposing them. It’s like how I think nations need prisons, but I don’t think I should be allowed to take someone hostage because I’m pretty sure they deserve it.
But haven’t you seen countless cases of examples where those strict rules for war have been completely ignored? Russia is just ignoring them completely in Ukraine, Israel is just straight-up conducting a genocide and no western country gives a shit apparently, for the US there are countless cases of shit like the My Lai massacre or the US sponsorships of terrorist organisations in South America…
States are just big systems that exist to give people a monopoly on violence.
No worries. War is unavoidable at times - dictators exist, people get desperate, and so on. There are legalities involved, and they are a concern but aren’t my main concern. Morally, there’s a difference to me between killing someone because I hate them and killing someone because I’m a combatant and so are they. There are strict rules to war that help are supposed to keep things largely ethical - I understand war is never going to be “clean”. Policies like rules of engagement, being able to surrender, treatment of POWs, genuinely avoiding targetting civilians (the world could use more of that right now) and stopping when your country tells you to all matter to me.
Soldiers are not asked to make decisions about who they’ll kill (I mean which armies, not rules of engagement), thus these individuals are not being relied upon for justice. That is a big difference from vigilantism, where a person or mob of people decides who lives and dies. Ideally the leaders of the military and country are making sure war is a necessary last resort and conducted according to rules, and if that isn’t happening then other nations should be condemning and opposing them. It’s like how I think nations need prisons, but I don’t think I should be allowed to take someone hostage because I’m pretty sure they deserve it.
But haven’t you seen countless cases of examples where those strict rules for war have been completely ignored? Russia is just ignoring them completely in Ukraine, Israel is just straight-up conducting a genocide and no western country gives a shit apparently, for the US there are countless cases of shit like the My Lai massacre or the US sponsorships of terrorist organisations in South America…
States are just big systems that exist to give people a monopoly on violence.