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Comment by gbhn | Hacker News Reader

True, true, but somehow that's never been much of an obstacle to totalitarian governments. Somehow there's always a soldier who will push the button.

In Nuremberg we developed a way to think about this: people outside the central circles of power have a tremendous amount of pressures they are considering. It's definitely the case that some are sadistic and horrible, but more are just following orders and trying to get by as best they can, and punishing them for war crimes is not appropriate.

The other side of that coin is that it isn't realistic to expect soldiery en masse to resist illegal orders. It's always more complicated than that.

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> Somehow there's always a soldier who will push the button.

And then there's always that soldier ready to denounce his camarads for having raped some poor Vietnamese women who had nothing to do with the war itself. Why risk such a PR disaster which might see your funding cut when you can use robots instead? Warzone robots don't snitch on their fellow robots in front of the press and they don't rape, they're only build to kill.

Unless you're talking about the Nuremberg Rallies, you've got your history screwed up: "just following orders" is NOT a defense against war crime accusations, and punishing those who commit war crimes "trying to get by as best they can" is completely appropriate, was the conclusion of the Nuremberg Trials.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Principles#Principle...

> True, true, but somehow that's never been much of an obstacle to totalitarian governments. Somehow there's always a soldier who will push the button.

Actually, the unwillingness of the Red Army to do any more invasions was arguably the precipitating factor in the fall of the Soviet empire. In 1988, Gorbachev gave a speech to the Warsaw pact meeting where he told them that the Brezhnev doctrine was no more. No socialist government would be able any longer to count on Russian aid in putting down popular uprisings. A year later, the empire crumbled. Of course, it wasn't the soldiers per se who refused, but the generals who were afraid of the potential mutinies (and the occasional actual ones).

It was Gorbachev who refused, not the generals.

He couldn't have refused without the support of the generals, who had just withdrawn from Afghanistan.

Very true.

And economic problems were a big incentive for everyone in charge to step back from wars. For country's with a strong economy there would be little incentive to stop, especially if AI makes war cheaper.

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