I'm not sure how it was in Butler's time, but I've read that the overwhelming majority of casualties in modern warfare are civilians. It would seem to me that they are the ones who pay "the biggest part of the bill".
Not that I would deny that the people doing the mass murder can themselves become the victims of war. But I'd personally have more sympathy for civilians who are not trying to murder others but are themselves murdered.
Remember all those stories a couple of years back about drone operators being psychologically traumatized by their job? (In between calling children they'd killed "fun-sized terrorists", of course.)
Anyone unwilling to go to some effort to avoid prosecuting an unjust war can't really be said to be a victim like the people they shoot...
If we give them a pass we remove all moral requirement to make sure you're fighting for a just cause.
Otherwise, your option is only for those who are economically, and mentally prepared for such an undertaking. Economically of course including things like important connections.
And your other option which I think is jail for draft dodgers isn't exactly fulsome and charming.
So the soldier either loses his way of life through exodus, forced incaceration, or being sent to fight.
And seriously, you're suggesting buying arms is a way for conscripts to avoid the horrors of war?
This subthread is like a magnet for untenable arguments.
Gosh, pardon me for talking about the countries on the continent I was born on.
> A civilian population which regardless of how bad things have got has a bit more freedom to leave the country than those [about to be] drafted into the army.
Historical history fail. American draftees had the ability to cross the borders legally before their reporting date, and the borders were porous and easily crossed anyways. Vietnamese civilians would have had to walk hundreds of miles, crossing mine fields, into even less friendly countries, if they even knew a war was declared before the bomb destroyed their village.
> And seriously, you're suggesting [...]
No matter how hard the conscript has it, their victims will have it worse.
I'm not suggesting, I'm flat-out saying that if you don't take extreme measures to avoid shooting innocents, you're a murderer.
When you're drafted it's too late to avoid some horror but you can keep from making it worse for everyone.
That's not the best line of argument I've come across.
Although when it comes to Vietnam, I did once chat with an older Vietnamese person in Vietnam who said his worst experience of war was seeing banged up American GIs in the hospital next door. Other Vietnamese civilians' worst experiences were food shortages as the war largely passed their particular inconsequential valley by. Others died agonising deaths under bombardment, which was disproportionately likely and certainly no less painful if they happened to have [been] signed up for one of the armies and sent to guard something. Not all experiences of war are the same, but as a general rule you're going to spend a lot more time being shot at if you're a soldier, and probably don't feel better for shooting back, especially if you're a conscript.
Do you see the part of the earlier message where I said "literally every war in every country?" No? Maybe because I didn't write that...
> That's not the best line of argument I've come across.
You need to read the entirety of my messages and not add anything of your own, otherwise you're just arguing with yourself.
> people called up to the military can easily avoid the trauma of being shot at and having to take other human lives by.... buying a gun and starting a firefight.
Sigh, no. Where did I say easily?
It's your responsibility to not be forced into murdering innocents. If you can more-easily leave the country, great. If not, even jail is better than killing people, but if all else fails - it's better to shoot the people conscripting you than be forced to kill innocents.
> probably don't feel better for shooting back
Who said it was enjoyable? But the conscripts still have more agency than the civilians they're firing at.
Sorry, but taking out the word "easily" doesn't make the argument that prospective conscripts have more agency to avoid the unpleasantness of potentially having to shoot people because they can buy a civilian firearm (unlike civilians?!) and fire first any less silly.
And no, soldiers generally ordered to follow a particular course of action on pain of death generally don't have more agency than civilians who generally aren't under such orders. In particular, civilians are far more likely to be allowed to permanently leave the war zone(s) at any given time than soldiers, and far less likely to be intentionally fired at.
Uh huh.
You're the one trying to go down a rathole. The point is soldiers have it better than the civilians because they have more choice, more is always better even if it isn't great.
> conscripts are obliged to murder the people conscripting them in order to avoid
You see, this is you moving the goalposts. This is merely one of the choices, the extreme one.
And it's not as much an obligation as a right. Slavers are morally abhorrent and conscripts are slaves. Slaves always have a right to escape and no number of slaver deaths is ever a bad thing.
The obligation comes in when they're actually given the illegal orders as nothing forgives the crimes they commit. Ultimately all responsibility for their actions is theirs.
> hypothetical future scenario in which they might be ordered to kill civilians
In the Vietnam example that wasn't hypothetical - it was evening news. And the war was started on false information from our own government so it wasn't legitimate even if the targets were military.
> Sorry, but taking out the word "easily"
You aren't sorry, the whole "easily" was your invention in the first place.
> doesn't make the argument that prospective conscripts have more agency
Actually, it does. In the American wars where we've drafted people the draftees have always had considerable rights (travel, etc) before actually being inducted. And certainly more than the Vietnamese - even taking wealth into account.
> can buy a civilian firearm (unlike civilians [in the victim country]?!)
Had Americans taken up arms to stop the war it would have stopped without going to Vietnam, or would have come home quickly. If Vietnamese had taken up arms ... we'd have burned their entire village to the ground anyways.
Our conscripts have more agency.
> any less silly.
Or any less right.
> And no, soldiers generally ordered to follow a particular course of action on pain of death
At worst they're holding a gun. They can take their officer out - the one ordering the illegal actions, rather than performing the illegal actions.
And they usually have a lot of advance warning before being inducted, let alone shot at. Time to flee, or shoot themselves in the foot, or just protest and go to jail, or - yes - to fight back at home rather than abroad. But if you force the discussion to the ridiculous point where they're already on the battlefield, being ordered to fire into a village, before they consider any of this, then yes they're morally required to go to ridiculously painful lengths to avoid killing.
If someone kidnaps you and orders you to kill someone else, or he'll kill you, you're still morally and legally culpable if you pull the trigger.
Why do you think soldiers shouldn't be held to the same standard?
It's nice of you to reiterate the largely irrelevant point that soldiers shouldn't shoot civilians in the unlikely event of them receiving an order to (unless the civilians are slavers?) so for the avoidance of doubt I agree that shooting civilians is bad.
I'm afraid I can't go down your ratholes any further than that because I'm still none the wiser as to whether your argument that soldiers have greater agency to avoid bloodbaths because "at worst they're holding a gun" and possess the option to "fight back at home" before they even join up is actually intended to be taken seriously...
Of you dodging such a obvious truth, I agree.
> If your argument relies on the edge case of a country doing the conscripting being a liberal democracy thousands of miles from the actual fighting
Yeah, only the wars my liberal democracy has participated in, all of which have been thousands of miles from home. What an edge case!
> countries where the civilians are based not to have any natural refugee escape routes
By your reckoning there were escape routes from Vietnam so nobody was actually killed!
> I'm pretty sure that even then the average American soldier's experience of combat was more unpleasant than the average Vietnamese civilian's wartime experience
Even if you were right the point is the soldier's agency in choosing a better future. Peasants have very little, the soldiers have much more at every stage especially the beginning.
An american soldier could choose to go home at any time "simply" by refusing to fight and being sentenced to, at most, twenty years in prison. Their family wouldn't be face retribution or anything. Ask someone about to be burnt to death with their family which they'd prefer.
> I'm pretty sure I've listened to and read more Vietnamese accounts of the war than you.
You can't read the memoirs of the dead.
> because I'm still none the wiser
That would require not trying to dodge the point.
> as to whether your argument that soldiers have greater agency
Draftees, particularly before they become soldiers. And it's a fact, not an argument, in all modern cases in my country.
> actually intended to be taken seriously
Oh gosh, of course not. It troubles you so of course it was meant for you to dismissively chuckle at in passing. No more.
Yeah, borders are hard to find (they're on the outside of a country?! How inconvenient!) and it would suck to lose your important connections and your facebook account.
Not worth it. The murder option is way easier - you should totally just do that.
> And your other option which I think is jail
Hah! "My option". Yeah, I invented sending soldiers to jail right after I invented the draft.
> So the soldier either loses [...]
I'm glad you see the draft as the bad thing here. But they can choose not to kill for the people who drafted them.
I know plenty of ex-military and nearly uniformly, those who have served (and saw action) considered it to be a mistake regardless of whether they were shot at or did the shooting.
Then I don't really follow you either.
I had thought my response - that while war sucks for everyone, conscripts generally have more chance to avoid the war than the civilians they end up killing and it's their duty to take those options rather than being a murderer - was pretty clear...?
And yes, I 100% agree that the people who sign the law are doing the worst thing, and the people who vote for them without being at risk of being drafted themselves, etc. The draft is the bad thing, not the conscripts for being drafted.
But, once drafted they still have choice and power, and must use that before victimizing others.
> those who have served (and saw action) considered it to be a mistake regardless
Exactly, so if they had run away, or done their fighting in their own country against their own draft, they'd have spared everyone that mistake.
The only way the mistakes happen is if soldiers go.
So yes, he didn't witness a truly modern war. 19th century conflicts were brutal, but weren't exactly the city-destroying conflict WWII was, nor the guerrilla wars of modern times.
"The [Taiping Rebellion] [...] ranks as one of the bloodiest wars in human history, the bloodiest civil war, and the largest conflict of the nineteenth century with estimates of war dead ranging from 20 to 70 million dead, as well as millions more displaced."
WWI eventually defined total war, and no doubt its legacy was the primary reason France just surrendered to the Germans in 1941. The entire population had simply had enough.
Hell, Sherman was fighting total war in 1864.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio#World_...
> According to most sources, World War II was the most lethal war in world history, with some 70 million killed in six years. The civilian to combatant fatality ratio in World War II lies somewhere between 3:2 and 2:1, or from 60% to 67%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio#World_...
From wikipedia:
"To maintain morale, wartime censors minimized early reports of illness and mortality in Germany, Britain, France, and the United States;[9][10] but papers were free to report the epidemic's effects in neutral Spain (such as the grave illness of King Alfonso XIII),[11] creating a false impression of Spain as especially hard hit[12]—thus the pandemic's nickname Spanish flu."
and
Investigative work by a British team led by virologist John Oxford[15] of St Bartholomew's Hospital and the Royal London Hospital identified a major troop staging and hospital camp in Étaples, France, as almost certainly being the center of the 1918 flu pandemic. A significant precursor virus, harbored in birds, mutated to pigs that were kept near the front.[16]
In some ways WW2 was the last of the wars of colonisation to be attempted. Assert racial superiority, a need for land, define the "natives" already occupying it as subhuman, invade and kill them, extract resources and colonise. This time in Russia since Africa was already taken and the Americas already liberated.
Now go back a couple hundred years, back to when cities were occasionally put to the sword, but that is beyond even this guy's memory.