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This is a bit extreme, even if you were going for hyperbole. I mean, WW2 ended with the US dropping two nukes on Japan lol
Let me rephrase that for you, @Skibboleth, @quiet_NaN and @JTarrou. (Yeah I should have written that differently. I was wrong.)
Since this post was inspired by a TV show, I was mostly thinking of the stuff that happened in the show. Which yeah, I know, isn't real, but it seems to portray itself as "based on true events" or something. All the episodes have comments saying things like "Scary how accurate this is" or "It's like I'm home again". The audience seems to really love it. If the events didn't happen, they wish it did.
Obviously nothing can compare to the sheer overall size of WW2. 50million+ dead is just mind boggling. But the US at least didn't have to do much counter-insurgency there. The places we occupied were pretty friendly to us. The strategic bombing, while it kill a lot of civilians, was at least nominally aimed at military targets and done in an impersonal way.
The stuff they show in "A Grunt's Life" is just straight-up war crimes. Any court would agree. Bombing Nagasaki certainly wasn't nice, but it was legal. This stuff would just get you sent to prison. That's the sense in which I think it's worse.
edit: here's another interesting comment i just saw on an episode from a paid subscriber: "Gotta love War Crimes 2/7. Some of the guys who were around for the 08 deployment told us how fucked up it was. Guys from 3/7 and 3/4 called us War Crimes when I was in the unit from 2012-2015." Granted just some anonymous internet comment, but... it raises my suspicions.
From acoup:
The difference between dragging a civilian out of their house and shooting them in the head and dropping a bomb on the from the air is that for the former, there is no ambiguity of intent. Luckily for us, Sir Harris has left no doubt about his intent. WP estimates peak around 350k dead Germans from the air raids, while the total number of civilian deaths in GWBs Afghan adventure is given as 46k.
Both of these numbers include casualties which were genuinely unintended. Some civilians will always die in war. But in my world model, the median Afghan civilian death was unintended while the median German air raid death was intended.
(Lest there be any confusion about me whining about dead Germans, let me also state that the conduct of the Western Allies in WW2 was the least war-criminal of all the parties involved.)
That being said, I agree that any intentional killing of civilians is terrible. Ideally, it should happen very rarely and the perpetrators should be punished similarly to civilian murderers. For the US troops in Afghanistan, I do not think that there existed a directive to kill as many civilians as possible, but GWB was obviously not very concerned with human rights. So I think that there was a widespread culture of commanders turning a blind eye to any human rights violations their unit might commit.
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"War crimes"
Jesus. Son, you need an education.
Read up on the US civil war, especially the "irregular" areas. Go look up Canadian war trophies, WW1. Go read the history of the Red Army's advance to Berlin in WW2. Go read absolutely any actual memoir from any actual soldier in any actual war, and see how much of it you've been taught to think is "war crimes". Then go read the actual history and definition of war crimes and the incidence of prosecution (or not).
And when you're done, come back and tell the class what you learned. Right now, you simply don't know enough about the subject to even ask the right questions.
Why do you put war crimes in scare quotes like it's some kind of joke? Your argument is "it's OK for US soldiers to commit murder and rape because other armies in other wars did even worse shit." Think for a second about how stupid and fucked up that is.
This is the 3rd time now that you've just straight insulted me. We're just two nerds on the internet typing words, so there's not much point to that. But if we were two grunts this is the point where I'm supposed to punch you in the face, right? Establish dominance by physical violence and all that shit. What a great system.
So imagine we've done that. I've punched you, you've punched me, we've both got some brain damage but we're best buds now. I'll also buy you a shitload of booze if that helps.
Are you willing to admit that maybe... just maybe... the rank-and-file of the US military did some bad stuff in Afghanistan? Or are you still going to be like "no we were perfect angels! We did nothing wrong! It was those evil officers and stupid civilians who caused all the problems!"
Most people have no idea what actual war crimes are. They think any random fucked up thing that happens in a war is a war crime. Real war crimes are defined by the Hague and Geneva conventions. They are things like "fighting out of uniform" and "pretending to surrender" (e.g., Gabi's destruction of the armored train in Attack on Titan is definitely a war crime; she should have gotten hanged for that, along with her commander for authorizing it, but they won, so they just killed the witnesses and called it a day).
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I'm saying if you want to use civilian definitions that every single platoon that has ever deployed to a hot zone commits "war crimes". Fuck me, even pictures are "war crimes". People have cell phones. Even soldiers. It's a meme in the vet community for a reason. There's war misdemeanors and war felonies. Even a few war capital crimes, but if you don't have a single technical "war crime" to your name, you've never seen combat. Bet.
Also, the laws of war are a bit like the laws of politics. It matters who wins.
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I think you might be doing a little WWII-washing of what wars are like. Everything you described seeing in A Grunt’s Life is stuff that occurred in WWII, and received much more of a wink and a nod or a slap on the wrist at the time. On the topic of body part collections, in 1944 a sitting U.S. Representative (D - Penn) presented President Roosevelt with a letter opener made from a Japanese soldier’s arm. That’s way higher level than an Lt hiding his tooth collection or whatever.
Fair enough! But those acts were also condemned at the time by most people. And it's not like they helped the war, they actually made things much worse by making the Japanese public more angry. Even the Greeks in the Iliad understood that desecrating dead bodies was not justified.
I think what you are seeing is less a difference in kind between WW2 and WiA and more that a) the memory of WW2 is heavily sanitized b) there are marked values dissonances within American subcultures.
In a modern context, compare and contrast reactions to, e.g. the Haditha Massacre and the Eddie Gallagher case. Nobody was like "actually the Haditha Massacre was good". There were excuses and denials, but approximately nobody was pro-massacring civilians. By contrast, the Gallagher case was divisive. Plenty of people were appalled, but no small number took the view that Gallagher did nothing wrong. Sure, he murdered a prisoner and desecrated the body, but the victim was ISIS so the whole thing was really an act of justice.
To be honest, I had actually never heard of either of those cases. Maybe I heard about them in passing but I don't remember. So I assume the general public was the same. They're both bad, but not enough to be an extended major news story in the US.
Reading up on it now... they seem pretty similar? In both cases you've got enlisted men going way over the line, committing multiple war crimes. Murdering civilians and prisoners. They're caught red-handed, and either let off with a warning or given only a minor punishment. I... don't see how that's supposed to make me feel good? It seems like the military has learned nothing from its 20 years in the war on terror and is still playing coverup to people who would have been hung in the Nuremburg trials.
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100% agreed. Obligatory acoup on strategic airpower, aka morale bombings.
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