Help Beny with his homework

[Beny]

But you have to say, Breaker Morant is extremely Anti-British. Note the timing of the movie as well Beny, post Vietnam War...Mylay Massacres.

Mai Lay.... They were Americans.

Acctualy, whilst I agree with you that the poor old poms are painted as snobby and biased, there are times when the film goes against that grain. Take for instance, Major Bolton (prosocution), Bolton changes compleatly after his disscussion with Thomas. We end up seeing a man who actualy has sympathy for the 'colonials'. So, whilst yes, it is anti-British you should be carefull how far you take that.

So if the actions by an army and its members are evil, the individual cannot hide behind the excuse of obeying orders.

I was thinking something along those lines today. Esentialy, war is an agreement between two or more nations to disregard what they normaly consider to be right or wrong. Therefore anybody who participates is being imoral or unethical.

I think it's also important to point out (especialy for those of us who have to write about this), Morant and Handcock dont kill boer prisoners because Kitchener ordered them to. They did it out of revenge. At no time in any of the 'execution' scenes does Morant make reference to orders. Rather he orders the execution himslef because he belived that they had been responsible for the mutilation of Captain Hunt.

[Rachael]

Originally Posted by Beny

Esentialy, war is an agreement between two or more nations to disregard what they normaly consider to be right or wrong. Therefore anybody who participates is being imoral or unethical.

Curious notion: I'd suggest that most recent wars involving western nations were fought with at least one side convinced they had a moral or ethical obligation to put their money where their mouth is and venture beyond toothless diplomacy. The paradigmatic case might be Britain's entry into the second world war.. but the notion of war as "obligation" or "ethcal imperative" was echoed here in the context of the Falklands... and you'll find some sort of similar notion to be at least one dimension of the justifications for a number of "cold war" conflicts.. and in relation to both confrontations between the US and Iraq.

I see a danger in your approach here.. in that you are already tending to reduce ordinary men and women to two dimensional beings facing "rational-choice" scenarios in possession of an adequate grasp of their predicament, confidence in that grasp and an absolute faith in the authority of their reasoning.

I doubt those germans who found themselves deeply embroiled in activities relating to the persecution of Jews in the 1930 and 1940s would recognise themselves or the predicament you might allege they faced if you extended your thinking to them: to do justice to their situation you would at the very least need to deal with the (perhaps, to you, deeply irrational) intuitive understandings of accepted practices that shaped their own perception of what they were being asked to do, what choices they understood themselves to have available to them, what factors they comprehended as pertinent, how confident they were in their own grasp of, or ability to analyse, their own predicament... and so on.

Bring all that in and the whole matter becomes far muddier... and certainty about anything can become elusive... but of course... your favoured humanities people are no less attracted than the rest of us to the notion that there's something about the way the world is.. or about their own approach to it.. that can secure an authoritative assessment.

Of course.. start dealing with such matters and you're on a life-times work not something to be completed in a bit of homework by a student of your tender years!

[Beny]

You notice that I say 'they normaly consider unethical or immoral'. You can be prosocuted in most countries for murder regardless of weather you had a reason for doing it or not.

[Paoli]

Hang on Beny, but what about when Morant states to Hunt. "I thought it were only Boer prisoners wearing Khaki that we were meant to shoot", Hunt replies "New orders from Kitchener".

Yes, i know you refer to the killing of Visser, "He was like a madman sir", is what Drummond said.

Look, my text response answers were on the side of Morant; saying that man can't be judged by war.

[Rachael]

If you've got as far as determining that something needs to be dealt with as "murder" you've perhaps alread gone too far: that's a loaded term and not one to be used lightly.

There was a practice in Asante in the 18th century that involved ritual dismemberment. The individual dealt with in this fashion did, of course, die.. but it's pretty clear that death was included in the punishment but only in a secondary fashion: the first principle was the "systematic dissolutionof the corporeal body"... in a "theatre of death" through which the State literally intervened in the intimate bond between corporeality and "being" to expel the victim from history.

Was that "execution"? Not really: terming it thus would reduce something complex to caricature. Your use of "murder" is in danger of being equally reductionist in the way it renders in black and white something that can barely be done justice in full technicolour.

[Maranello]

Originally Posted by Rachael 49723

I do think this needs to be handled with care: the US military is known for operating with frontline kids.. many of whom are pretty much fresh out of school.

Originally Posted by Occasional Fan 49724

I do have some sympathy for the poor squaddie who is ordered by his less poor, generally better educated and certainly, within the military chain of command, more responsible officer

So are we really saying that immaturity, illiteracy and poverty are excuses for criminal conduct? That vile behaviour under the guise of "warfare" can be excused on the grounds of the combatant's educational qualifications?

Originally Posted by Occasional Fan 49724

The drill which the squaddie has learnt as second nature, both for his own good and the good of his comrades in arms, is that orders are not to be questioned but are to be executed. The trouble is that the drill assumes that the order itself is legal.

Originally Posted by Lemming 49735

In my opinion whoever is a member of the armed forces is there to obey orders, it is their job regardless of whether the orders are correct, incorrect, insane etc., their job is to follow orders to the letter to the best of their ability.

I think the approaches suggested by you two are sensible descriptions of how the world operates and conducts warfare. However, is this how things ought to be? The excuse "I was only doing as I was told guv" might have worked when the infantry soldiers were illiterate peasants, and used as pawns by the aristocracy and the ruling elites. However now, in days of full or near full employment, voluntary militaries, near-full literacy, welfare states, etc, no soldier in the Western world is ever forced to join the army; he/she does it out of choice, and due to all the factors I have articulated above, the modern day soldier should ensure that the orders he follows are legal, and where they are not, he should question them, or disobey them if he has to. He will be court martialled, but that is the choice he made when he joined the army and went through the nihilistic training regime.

In any case, the sanctions facing such a soldier today are far fewer than those experienced by others in previous generations, and yet that did not stop soldiers from all backgrounds and races to sometimes assert their humanity and their morality. Even if he is court-martialled for doing what is right, today's soldier has recourse to a fairly Liberal House of Lords as the highest court in the land, and even more human rights' aware European Court, the highest court whose jurisdiction we are under. Yes it will be a ground-breaking legal trial, but I am sure court martialling someone who refused to follow an illegal order or refused to commit a war crime would eventally be found to be a breach of the European Convention on Human Rights. And how can it be any other way, when blindly obeying orders leads to concentration camps and genocide.

[Maranello]

Originally Posted by Rachael

There was a practice in Asante in the 18th century that involved ritual dismemberment.

Yes but such a practice, though perhaps acceptable under the cultural and societal norms of 18th century Asante peoples, would be wholly unacceptable under the legal, moral and cultural frameword of the 21st century EU. It would be silly to caricature that practice as mere murder, but that is only in that specific cultural context, now long gone, and in fact in that particular milieu, it can be understood and perhaps even justified by some. However, in the context that I operate in, London in 2005 CE, such a practice would indeed be vile, criminal and murderous. Similarly, whilst many actions by soldiers and armies were acceptable in Medieval Europe or even a century ago, they are not acceptable or legal now, and hence their repeated occurrence in prior history cannot be used as a justification.

[Beny]

Hang on Beny, but what about when Morant states to Hunt. "I thought it were only Boer prisoners wearing Khaki that we were meant to shoot", Hunt replies "New orders from Kitchener".

Yes he does Poali but that is irrelivent.

1. When giving reasons for killing the prisoners Morant says that they should die because of what they did to Captain Hunt, he never says that he is only doing it because Kitchener orders it to happen that way.

2. Even if Kitchener had made such an order, Morant was under no duress to obey it.

So are we really saying that immaturity, illiteracy and poverty are excuses for criminal conduct? That vile behaviour under the guise of "warfare" can be excused on the grounds of the combatant's educational qualifications?

Yep...

Come sit in a year 11 ethics class with me (I dident acctualy do ethics but it was included in philosophy which I did do), then tell me differently.

I'm not very good at explaining these sorts of things, but after Nurenburg some person came up with a theory called the banality of evil. How could the prison gaurds at Aushwitz have stood by and killed innocant Jewish wommen and children without remorse?? This person goes on to argue that it was the normality of their job and the fact that their ability to decide between right and wrong had been damaged due to the new ethics and expectations of their sociaty. Once again, you have to read this from somebody who knows what their talking about. (i.e not me)

Another thing that comes into this is the 'just war theory'. A generaly accepted convention that Soldiers are individuals and do not have to follow orders from officers which they think are unjust. Most western armies subscribe to this theory although it only came in as a result of Vietnam.

[Maranello]

but after Nurenburg some person came up with a theory called the banality of evil. How could the prison gaurds at Aushwitz have stood by and killed innocant Jewish wommen and children without remorse?? This person goes on to argue that it was the normality of their job and the fact that their ability to decide between right and wrong had been damaged due to the new ethics and expectations of their sociaty.

I believe that there are some minimum absolute standards of right and wrong and these cannot be negated by any amount of moral relativism. To put it simply, some actions are universally accepted as being wrong, and to argue they were justified by certain circumstances, or by the peculiarities of a situation, demeans not only the legal framework of that society, but also the tenuous moral fabric uniting the human species. Such moral relativism dressed as pontification might be useful in allowing us to understand why these things happen, but they should be used to 'explain away' or justify such acts.

[Beny]

Such moral relativism dressed as pontification might be useful in allowing us to understand why these things happen, but they should be used to 'explain away' or justify such acts.

Ethics and Morality fascinate me. It's a purely human thing, you must have a level of intelligence to percive it. So is a Lion who kills an animal for fun (I've seen it happen), evil? Assuming that a Human who does the same thing is.

If not then is a human who's concepts of right and wrong are different to ours, evil?