Are all soldiers like the Nazis?

S.A.M. said:
Rick:

Actually I am not implying anything of the sort, as I have reiterated before, I am asking if all soldiers kill on orders and justify it by <insert ideology of choice>

People are discussing methods of killing so I simply stated if the choice of method matters when killing. Is it "better" to kill by some means rather than others?

If your family was at the receiving end, which method of killing would be acceptable to you?

Would you prefer it if they were hacked to death, torn to shreds by cluster bombs, ripped apart by flechettes or melted by white phosphorus?



Data I could find:


As you can see, no numbers

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-schirch/the-costs-of-drone-strike_b_319318.html
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It says the brookings institution estimates this number. Do you believe a organization that is based in washington dc is correct? I don't remember them being in iraq or afghanistan.

And there was number. 9/20 key leaders killed by drones.
 
RickyH said:
It says the brookings institution estimates this number. Do you believe a organization that is based in washington dc is correct? I don't remember them being in iraq or afghanistan.

And there was number. 9/20 key leaders killed by drones.
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I usually believe the victims over the perpetrators. Kinda like in the case of the Nazis.

Especially when the official policy is not to maintain records. That reeks of dishonesty right there.

Can you imagine an official government policy of not counting victims in national crimes?
 
S.A.M. said:
I usually believe the victims over the perpetrators. Kinda like in the case of the Nazis.
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The Nazis were following orders and if they received different orders they would have acted differently . That is my concern with the army : they follow orders and not their conscience which means maybe they have no conscience to start with .
 
Enmos:

Sorry I consider it free thoughts, not an issue of justice or morality, just an observation of what it means to be a soldier. I'm merely making observations on patterns of behaviour here.

Its your call.
 
S.A.M. said:
Enmos:

Sorry I consider it free thoughts, not an issue of justice or morality, just an observation of what it means to be a soldier. I'm merely making observations on patterns of behaviour here.

Its your call.
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I think it's very much an Ethics thread.
'Ethics, Morality, & Justice' it is then.
 
mike47 said:
The Nazis were following orders and if they received different orders they would have acted differently .
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Isn't that true for all soldiers?

Ours is not to question why, ours is but to do or die?
 
S.A.M. said:
I usually believe the victims over the perpetrators. Kinda like in the case of the Nazis.

Especially when the official policy is not to maintain records. That reeks of dishonesty right there.

Can you imagine an official government policy of not counting victims in national crimes?
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No, I don't just imagine these things.

Official policy? Where is the policy letter, and who signed it?
 
“We don't do body counts”. General Tommy Franks

"We don't do body counts on other people," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in November 2003, when asked on "Fox News Sunday"

Or you could correct me instantly by providing the official records; I would love to see them.
 
Lucysnow said:
I'm not sure about the casualty numbers by drones but could find out. The reason why there are so many innocent casualties is because there is a lot of poor intelligence from the ground, civilians are often confused with insurgents.

Not too long ago special forces where going through a mountain path that went through a village and were ambushed by insurgents. Now they knew people of this village and knew that they were mostly 'friendly' but for some reason the young men went out and got their rifles and entered the fray against 'western forces'. Once the insurgents were fought off the villagers were asked why they had turned on them during the incident. The men who were not in favor of the Taliban said...and I kid you not...that they were bored as not much happens in their village and that even though they dislike the Taliban they couldn't very well fight on the side of the foreigner. With incidents like that happening you can see why its difficult to know exactly who an insurgent actually is.

Generally civilian deaths are mostly caused by pro-government forces (which are us).
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Special forces huh... I don't know of special forces operations or what they encounter. So I have no comment.

So, a predator which gathers aerial intel gets bad ground intel and kills civillians in the process. This does sound like an army thing. But, I don't see the evidence.
 
S.A.M. said:
“We don't do body counts”. General Tommy Franks

Or you could correct me instantly by providing the official records; I would love to see them.
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That could easily be out of context. A policy is written in DoD standards. Inproper letterheading makes it invalid. A quote from a general definitely isn't a policy.
 
RickyH said:
That could easily be out of context. A policy is written in DoD standards. Inproper letterheading makes it invalid. A quote from a general definitely isn't a policy.
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Feel free to show me the records at any time I want you to prove me wrong .:)
 
mike47 said:
If I have to serve I will serve with men and women of conscience, justice and fairness NOT robots who just take orders and worry about their wages....:shrug: .
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So, you've never served? I figured you knew a ton about soldiers. How they are robotic and how they follow orders and such. Guess I had you all wrong. I guess you don't know nothin' about the military huh?
 
Do I need to have served with the Germans to know what they did was wrong? Do I need to have served in Iraq and Afghanistan to know what they are doing is wrong?
 
You cannot. You can show me I am wrong by showing me the real records
 
RickyH said:
Are you implying nazis were robots?
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I'm not implying all soldiers are, I'm stating it. They follow orders to kill other human beings. Are you claiming they want to do this?

Here is an experiment that may interest you:

The Milgram experiment was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience. Milgram first described his research in 1963 in an article published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology,[1] and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.[2]

The experiments began in July 1961, three months after the start of the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised his psychological study to answer the question: "Was it that Eichmann and his accomplices in the Holocaust had mutual intent, in at least with regard to the goals of the Holocaust?" In other words, "Was there a mutual sense of morality among those involved?"

Milgram's testing revealed that it could have been that the millions of accomplices were merely following orders, despite violating their deepest moral beliefs.[3] Milgram summarized the experiment in his 1974 article, "The Perils of Obedience", writing:

The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.[4]

The original Simulated Shock Generator and Event Recorder, or shock box, is located in the Archives of the History of American Psychology.
Contents
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
 
S.A.M. said:
You cannot.
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So is this why you won't show me they exist? Because of a policy you made up that apparently exists in the military makes you look correct.

Well if we just made stuff up you could make anyone look bad, which tends to be the problem here. I do not have to prove the document exists. You do. I am not going to go on a wild goose chase because you made up a document and refuse to prove it exists.
 
Actually I'm claiming they don't do body counts ie the records don't exist.

If you claim they are doing body counts then there should be official records of deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan

What is confusing you?
 
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