Interruptions: Acceptable losses?

how many people would be satisfied with a justice system where 9 out of 10 people excecuted were not guilty? And yet in modern warfare 90% of casualties are civilian.

I’m with Charlie on this one (among other things), and this thought I just read on his blog is a good question to put to the majority of people who think they are “just war” advocates (but really have no idea what “just war” really is, but it’s a good phrase to rationalize the atrocities of war, most of which they don’t “recognize” as legit anyway). Like that would be persuasive to them; the “separation” they invoke in those cases between ideas of justice and assumptions they’ve accepted about the “special case, “long-term” utilitarian “morality” of war is one of the most sophisticated exercises of denial and self-deception that you’ll ever see)

In the end, the final question is “how ‘acceptable’ would we find such arguments and talk about ‘long-term’ and ‘utilitarian considerations’ if the ‘sacrafices’ were our own families, our own neighborhoods and houses, our own ‘land’? My thought is that there would be quite a few more ‘dissenters’.

I have often brought up this thought here: there was an episode of the “Twilight Zone” movie where a bifoted individual with a big mouth was spouting racial epitaths in a bar, and a couple of black men nearby asked him to show some respect, and he refused, so the men threw him out of the bar. On the outside, as he brushed himself off, he found himself in Nazi Germany and was being hunted and was shot; then he was a shot as a VietCong, and was , again, being loaded into a train bound for a concentration camp. Often I have thought that many Americans need a dose of experience from the side of the victims of American imperialism; of Iraqi families, Vietnamese peasants, El Savadorian families and agrarian communties struggling to survive, Japanese inhabitants of Hiroshima and/or Nagasaki, or any one of dozens of other Japanese cities where tens of thousands in each were eliminated by bombing campaigns, or Native Americans during the onslaught of Western settlers who took the land, makig promise after promise that they apparently never intended to keep.

Whatever happened to actually taking to heart the command: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you?” Is this what we would wish upon ourselves? Is this where we would wish to find ourselves?