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PittTheElder posted:Do you pronounce the P in corps in French? I could have sworn that it isn't pronounced in English (it's said as "core") but that might also be a regional thing / something I made up?? The German pronunciation is also with a silent "p" and sounds similar to an English speaker saying "core."
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Jul 28, 2022 18:24
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Do you spell the pee in cop?
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Jul 28, 2022 19:28
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Blowing my mind that anyone would say "five corps" instead of "fifth corps" for "v corps"SlothfulCobra posted:I think there is somebody to stop you if you're hanging around the military and publishing things about them because there's all those people with weapons that you're hanging out with who may have thoughts about what you're doing. Again they can stop you but its very ad-hoc. Esp since, again, the press guys might also say good things about the job you're doing, and they're being very flattering and all... Saukkis posted:Have you looked at Vietnamese texts, they have so many diacritics it's painful to look at. In the case of English we have two answers to this that together create something of a nightmare - one is that phonetic writing seems to slow drift, as people correct their pronunciation back to the standard. The other, worse thing is that we end up with words like "knight" that used to be phonetic and we just live with it
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Jul 28, 2022 19:44
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Nenonen posted:English needs umlauts. Words 'car' and 'bat' don't contain the same vowel. Eam þe Bæt-Mæn PittTheElder posted:Do you pronounce the P in corps in French? I could have sworn that it isn't pronounced in English (it's said as "core") but that might also be a regional thing / something I made up?? Of course you don't say the p. It's spelled exactly as it sounds silly, corps. Edgar Allen Ho fucked around with this message at 19:53 on Jul 28, 2022 |
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Jul 28, 2022 19:48
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Remulak posted:I can’t believe that Heston was taken seriously on this just due to the yellow bandana. Charlton Heston was a radio operator on B-25s in the Aleutians during WWII, he earned the right to wear a bandanna if he felt like it. https://www.military.com/undertheradar/2017/03/314-charlton-hestons-world-war-ii-service As far as the photo from Vietnam is concerned, the point is that that particular killing garnered a ton of coverage because it's a dramatic photograph, but the crimes of the man being shot are ignored and forgotten because there isn't a picture of it. Take the photo of the flag raising at Iwo Jima. Fairly simple story, right? The Marines plant the US flag on Mt Suribachi after defeating the Japanese on the island. Except the flag wasn't planted at the end of the battle. And the flag in the famous photograph wasn't the first flag planted. And the names of the guys in the photos weren't accurately reported, but the press didn't make an effort to clarify any of this till long after the fact, did they? And who would really have known much about it if Clint Eastwood hadn't made a movie about it? 
Scuffy_1989 fucked around with this message at 21:23 on Jul 28, 2022 |
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Jul 28, 2022 21:17
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Scuffy_1989 posted:As far as the photo from Vietnam is concerned, the point is that that particular killing garnered a ton of coverage because it's a dramatic photograph, but the crimes of the man being shot are ignored and forgotten because there isn't a picture of it. Aparr from anything else we have just pointed out that without a trial this is very much 'alleged crimes'. Also trying to both-sides a literal on camera war crime is perhaps not a good look. The people fighting on the side of Truth, Justice and the American Way or w/e are not supposed to be doing this, that's why the picture is famous. And what on earth does Iwo Jima have to do with it? A staged flag raising photo bears no relation to murdering an unarmed, bound human being on camera. Please explain why you think that is an appropriate comparison. feedmegin fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Jul 28, 2022 |
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Jul 28, 2022 22:34
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Scuffy_1989 posted:And who would really have known much about it if Clint Eastwood hadn't made a movie about it? dogg i can assure you that this was probably in the top 5 most famous WWII photos in  It's like this, the sailor and girl kissing in times square on VJ day, the shot over the ramp of the Higgins boat on D-Day, photo of the gate of Auschwitz, and pick'em for the last one since I'm probably forgetting something good.
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Jul 28, 2022 22:53
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feedmegin posted:And what on earth does Iwo Jima have to do with it? The island was no angel.
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Jul 28, 2022 22:57
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Nenonen posted:The island was no angel. 
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Jul 28, 2022 23:09
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feedmegin posted:Aparr from anything else we have just pointed out that without a trial this is very much 'alleged crimes'. Also trying to both-sides a literal on camera war crime is perhaps not a good look. The people fighting on the side of Truth, Justice and the American Way or w/e are not supposed to be doing this, that's why the picture is famous. Dad History books are full of apocryphal stories of GIs summarily executing a bunch of concentration camp guards and those at least had the potential to be tried after the war. An infiltrator murdering a bunch of civilians is a very different problem, but how bad does a war crime have to get before we collectively decide not to care about a summary execution? Does the likelihood of any actual war crime trials change that math, does it matter if they are regular troops or allied forces or some angry civilians doing the killing? Either way, you sure don't want to have any cameras around.
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Jul 28, 2022 23:37
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Also, perhaps not consider doing a war crime to avenge a war crime too.
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Jul 29, 2022 00:00
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norton I posted:Dad History books are full of apocryphal stories of GIs summarily executing a bunch of concentration camp guards and those at least had the potential to be tried after the war. An infiltrator murdering a bunch of civilians is a very different problem, but how bad does a war crime have to get before we collectively decide not to care about a summary execution? Does the likelihood of any actual war crime trials change that math, does it matter if they are regular troops or allied forces or some angry civilians doing the killing? You don't need to wait for any war crime trials . He's a nominal civilian who allegedly committed murders and is in custody on friendly soil. You can and should put him on trial immediately. Not yknow ice him on the spot. Drawing an equivalence between that and the literal Totemkopf is....not a good idea. By that argument every time someone shoots a relative in a domestic dispute we should be ok with cops gunning them down. feedmegin fucked around with this message at 00:31 on Jul 29, 2022 |
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Jul 29, 2022 00:25
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The discussion was about media presentation of warfare, and I used the flag raising at Iwo Jima as an example of how a photograph can seem to tell a story, when the actual details of what it purports to show are wildly different things. The background is the flag raising took place during the Battle of Iwo Jima (19 February – 26 March 1945). Iwo Jima is a small island near Japan that was defended by Japanese forces who were eventually defeated by combined US forces, principally US Navy and Marines. Early in the battle, on February 23rd, a group of Marines made it to the top of the highest point on Iwo Jima, Mt Suribachi, and hoisted a flag as a morale raising endeavor. The flag was replaced by a 2nd flag, and a photograph of the raising of the 2nd flag became an icon of the US Marines Corps as well as one of the most famous images of WWII. The first flag was raised 1030 on February 23rd, and that flag and those who raised it are shown in the following photo:  James Bradley's book Flags of our Fathers describes why a 2nd flag was raised. book posted:The Secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal, had decided the previous night that he wanted to go ashore and witness the final stage of the fight for the mountain. Now, under a stern commitment to take orders from Howlin' Mad Smith, the secretary was churning ashore in the company of the blunt, earthy general. Their boat touched the beach just after the flag went up, and the mood among the high command turned jubilant. Gazing upward, at the red, white, and blue speck, Forrestal remarked to Smith: "Holland, the raising of that flag on Suribachi means a Marine Corps for the next five hundred years".[23][24] So, a small unit was sent up with a 2nd flag, which was raised in place of the 1st one. It was filmed and photographed, though I would not call it "staged," just documented. As it was a very distinctive photograph, some of the Marines who helped raise the flag were sent back to the US on a tour to sell war bonds, even though the identity of the people who raised the flag was not 100% certain.   The true story of the flag raising was not disseminated till years after the fact, and the myth was more important than the facts. My point in comparing the flag raising to the picture from Vietnam is the background and circumstances are not reported and pictures are presented as story without context. If you want to condemn the ARVN General for a crime, go ahead, but let people know about the man being shot as well, instead of just presenting it without background or context.
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Jul 29, 2022 00:33
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feedmegin posted:You don't need to wait for any war crime trials . He's a nominal civilian who allegedly committed murders and is in custody on friendly soil. You can and should put him on trial immediately. Not yknow ice him on the spot. Drawing an equivalence between that and the literal Totemkopf is....not a good idea. By that argument every time someone shoots a relative in a domestic dispute we should be ok with cops gunning them down. Nguyễn Văn Lém was a captain in the Viet Cong, he was hardly a nominal civilian. You seem much more concerned about his death than his victims. Incidently, one of the people he shot, Huan Nguyen, survived and eventually became a Rear Admiral in the United States Navy.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huan_Nguyen wiki posted:Huan Nguyen was born in 1958 or 1959 in Huế, South Vietnam. His father was an officer in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. During the Tet Offensive of 1968, Nguyen's parents and six siblings were killed at their Saigon-area home by Viet Cong guerrillas. Shot in the arm, thigh, and skull, nine-year-old Nguyen stayed in the house for two hours—while his mother bled to death—and then escaped after dark.[1]
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Jul 29, 2022 00:38
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Scuffy_1989 posted:Nguyễn Văn Lém was a captain in the Viet Cong, he was hardly a nominal civilian. You seem much more concerned about his death than his victims. And the Viet Cong are...? By nominal I mean he was South Vietnamese and not a member of a recognised military. So, could be trialled as a civilian I tend to think that the authorities murdering someone unarmed and helpless in their custody is a matter of especial concern yes and absolutely gently caress you for saying I don't care about his alleged victims. That's why there should have been a trial! I will note the very wiki page you link doesn't say that guy did it. Whereas you kicked this off talking about his crimes like there is no doubt about it whatsoever. feedmegin fucked around with this message at 00:52 on Jul 29, 2022 |
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Jul 29, 2022 00:49
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O look, war crimes chat. That's always fun. Saukkis posted:Have you looked at Vietnamese texts, they have so many diacritics it's painful to look at. Vietnamese, like all sane orthographies, is trying to be phonemic not phonetic. So it's only dealing with phonemes, sounds that actually have meaning in the language : there's not much reason to track allophonic variation that speakers of the language don't care about. Phonemes change over time, but it's slow and regular for the most part, with sounds changing in relation to each other, e.g. a chain shift. Yes, new phonemes occur, but after the several hundred years it takes for that process, I'm assuming you'll have ample time to update your orthography. Also I'm guessing a few other things might have changed too that would be bigger than inventing a slightly different symbol. Also uh what else are they supposed to do? Should they instead have a weird non-phonemic system that doesn't distinguish the vowels that reflect daily Vietnamese native speech? That seems like it would suck poo poo for, you know, the people who actually use the language as part of their normal life. Tulip posted:
The latter is just sound change without updating your orthography, e.g. lol French, and the former I have no idea what you mean. Can you elaborate? Writing calcifies phonology to some extent, is that what you mean by "slow drift...back to the standard"? That's a very weird way to phrase it since it's kind of backwards, so I'm not sure I understand you. Regardless, English isn't uniquely bad in those ways : those are just how things happen when you don't bother to keep your writing system adapted to the spoken language. English's problems aren't unique ; English does perfectly normal dumb things extremely hard.
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Jul 29, 2022 01:31
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Xiahou Dun posted:The latter is just sound change without updating your orthography, e.g. lol French, and the former I have no idea what you mean. Can you elaborate? Writing calcifies phonology to some extent, is that what you mean by "slow drift...back to the standard"? That's a very weird way to phrase it since it's kind of backwards, so I'm not sure I understand you. Right, knew you'd set me straight. "Calcify" was what I was going for but figured that would be too abstract and then I guess I wrote bad. And no I definitely do not think English is unique at all, just figured it was handy to illustrate since people know it and can recognize that we haven't preserved the differences in pronunciation between "know" and "no" for example.
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Jul 29, 2022 01:37
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norton I posted:Dad History books are full of apocryphal stories of GIs summarily executing a bunch of concentration camp guards and those at least had the potential to be tried after the war. An infiltrator murdering a bunch of civilians is a very different problem, but how bad does a war crime have to get before we collectively decide not to care about a summary execution? Does the likelihood of any actual war crime trials change that math, does it matter if they are regular troops or allied forces or some angry civilians doing the killing? Just ten pages back there was a discussion of reprisal killings/summary executions of Germans performed by Americans. zoux posted:Yeah I'm reading the wikipedia accounts of some of these POW reprisals and how seriously were Allied forces really investigating these executions of German troops? For Chenogne you have elements of the 11th Armored Division lining up and machinegunning 80 German POWs and Ike demanding an investigation and the 11th Armored telling him no dice, we already disbanded these units and sent everyone home and apparently that was that. The same article notes that the 90th Infantry was executing so many Waffen-SS prisoners that the CO had to give express orders to knock it off because they needed some people alive to interrogate. The Dachau reprisal killings seemed to be pretty exhaustively investigated but Patton had dismissed the initial charges against the US officers charged with misconduct in his capacity of military governor of Bavaria, so there was never any witness testimony. An IG report concluded they probably happened but that it would be impossible to sort out who did what and who to punish.
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Jul 29, 2022 01:41
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Tulip posted:Right, knew you'd set me straight. "Calcify" was what I was going for but figured that would be too abstract and then I guess I wrote bad. Word, but there's a lot of bullshit English exceptionalism that needs to be beaten down, preferably with a stick full of nails, so I kind of had to make that 100% unambiguous. And onset /kn/ is a cool little phoneme that English should get back. It's a personal favorite for when English monolinguals are learning German, just like it's always funny when people hear a new (knew???) affricate fo the first time.
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Jul 29, 2022 01:54
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norton I posted:Dad History books are full of apocryphal stories of GIs summarily executing a bunch of concentration camp guards and those at least had the potential to be tried after the war. An infiltrator murdering a bunch of civilians is a very different problem, but how bad does a war crime have to get before we collectively decide not to care about a summary execution? Does the likelihood of any actual war crime trials change that math, does it matter if they are regular troops or allied forces or some angry civilians doing the killing? Even the ones where we 110% know the guy is an absolute fucker who deserves 230 grains of 1911-delivered justice behind the ear it's still a really poo poo decision. The entire thought process behind the post-WW2 war crimes trials (and there were many, Nuremburg is just the most famous) was to not only seek justice for the heinous poo poo they'd done, but to rigorously document and prove not only that they had done it, but what, exactly, they had done. When some dipshit Holocaust denier comes along we have literal mountains of evidence to haul out and say, no, these people did some awful goddamned poo poo, and here are the receipts. Would we have some evidence absent the trials? Absolutely. But taking the time to spell it all out and lay out all the evidence is very valuable. Even when there aren't criminal consequences and retributive justice it's still worthwhile to have a judicial process that clearly establishes that record. This is the whole point behind things like Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. One of my best friends from grad school is a Holocaust scholar who has done a LOT of work with post-war trials, and if you're trying to find out about some of the less well known poo poo they are invaluable. In particular the poo poo that regular army units did in the field was low level enough that the big, headline trials right after the war tended to not catch them, but there are a ton of judicial processes in the 60s and 70s that started sweeping those guys up. It's a process that continues to this day. It's the whole reason why they bother putting 90+ year old camp guards on trial when they track down another one. There's literally nothing you can do to a nonagenarian war criminal. Nature is going to take care of that before long, and putting him in jail just makes his final medical expenses the responsibility of the state. But clearly recording what he did makes it much, much harder for people to deny later. So even if we assume that Nguyễn Văn Lém was guilty as sin (and let me point out that it is VERY much debated whether he was the actual shooter or just an unlucky dude who got grabbed) it was STILL a gently caress awful decision specifically from the point of view of the people who would want to record and investigate the crimes of the Viet Cong. For a much lower stakes example, this is also why people groan when some big corporate lawsuit gets settled rather than going to court, and why they ALWAYS loving GET SETTLED. Having all that poo poo dragged out into the light in and made a matter of public record in a courtroom is a big loving deal, and every corporate lawyer in the world has long since figured out it's way better to write a big loving check now and bury that poo poo than have whatever corners you cut or inhumane business practices you employ tied to your brand indelibly.
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Jul 29, 2022 03:35
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I'm going to make this a separate post because it's a separate issue from why war crimes need to be documented and why public investigations leading to trials are a great vehicle for that. You also can't separate Heston's video from the political and cultural context that it emerged from. It was very specifically the product of a particular kind of post-Vietnam culture war bullshit that wanted to lay claim to the US having been 100% in the right and paint the protestors back home who dared question the war as the real enemy. It's part of a very ugly fracture in American politics that has resonated for almost 50 years and is in no small part responsible for the current bullshit we're looking at now. It's not the only thing, of course (Southern Strategy, Goldwater. Gingrich, and embracing a particular flavor of religious conservatism off the top of my head, but there are others), but it's a really loving prominent thread. So if someone is making the larger point that the VC and NVA did some awful, horrible poo poo: why yes. Of course. That's a near trivial statement. South Vietnam also did some really hosed up, heinous poo poo. It was a civil war and there were a ton of atrocities committed by everyone involved. And that's not "both sidesing" it, that's just a statement of fact about a very ugly war fought between two pretty lovely governments. But that's not what Heston's doing. He's utilizing a famous moment to try and make his own point that, ultimately, isn't about the Vietnam war but about American politics. In no small way it's a reflection of the conflict itself. The US waded in hip deep into someone else's civil war for reasons that were purely about American Cold War foreign policy. The plight of the Vietnamese mattered only in so far as it could be leveraged to further American interests. In a parallel way Heston's argument about this specific execution isn't about who killed who in a fratricidal war among Vietnamese, he's just leveraging that moment to make his own point about liberal American media. In summary, gently caress Heston. I don't give a gently caress if he flew bombers in WW2, having served in one good war doesn't make you a moral authority for the rest of your life. He was the ur-culture warrior and this is just one example of his gross schtick.
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Jul 29, 2022 03:49
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Kylaer posted:Just ten pages back there was a discussion of reprisal killings/summary executions of Germans performed by Americans. Others might be more familiar withe the case of Lt. Ronald Speirs of Band of Brothers fame. There's a running theme in the series about a rumor going around that he had gunned down X number of POWs. The thread is resolved with the scene in the church between him and Sgt. Lipton, where Speirs says that he's fine with people thinking that stuff because he knew the value of being the toughest son of a bitch in the unit. The resolution being basically, “print the legend” and we'd never realllllly know what happened. In reality, Speirs openly admitted to executing the POWs. When Dick Winters was finishing writing his memoirs, he said Simon and Schuster got a little squeamish about the implication that Spiers had in fact probably shot prisoners, and maybe they should edit it out. Winters and Speirs had remained friends over the years, but in all that time, he'd never asked him directly if he'd done it. You can find the interview on Youtube, but Winters said Speirs had no problem admitting that he did it and even offered to write a letter to the publishing house affirming it - which he did. I gather Sparky Speirs was a rather singular officer, and the series certainly made him look like a psycho, but he obviously wasn’t afraid of any kind of consequences. True, it was decades later but we're still putting 100 year old Nazi prison guards behind bars today so we certainly don’t put a statute of limitations on war crimes. Not that I'm saying we should stop rounding up Nazis or prosecuting they very last of our vets who are suspected of misconduct but as always these things are determined by who wins the war. Correction: it was Ambrose's book and Winters reached out to Speirs on his behalf zoux fucked around with this message at 04:12 on Jul 29, 2022 |
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Jul 29, 2022 04:05
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Scuffy_1989 posted:The true story of the flag raising was not disseminated till years after the fact, and the myth was more important than the facts. You probably won't find a more mythologized version of Marine Corps history than what is taught in USMC boot camp, and even there it is taught that the photo is of the second flag raising. Scuffy_1989 posted:You seem much more concerned about his death than his victims. What disingenuous bullshit.
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Jul 29, 2022 04:06
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Would lurk more be appropriate here?
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Jul 29, 2022 05:44
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In this case I think a  would be more fitting.
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Jul 29, 2022 05:49
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I think every single individual soldier's account of the Western Front has included a passage that strongly hinted that while they generally played a clean war, they made exceptions for the SS. There's also accounts from the Panzer forces that they fretted about their black uniforms because of the risk of being mistaken for SS if they were captured. So the impression is that Speirs was an outlier for shooting German regulars, but it was common knowledge on both sides that the SS were shits and the rules of war were not going to be extended to cover them.
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Jul 29, 2022 07:26
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Xiahou Dun posted:Regardless, English isn't uniquely bad in those ways : those are just how things happen when you don't bother to keep your writing system adapted to the spoken language. English's problems aren't unique ; English does perfectly normal dumb things extremely hard. To tie this talk back to milhist, written Russian and Chinese were modernised only through armed Marxist revolution. I am not suggesting anything but 
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Jul 29, 2022 08:52
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Cyrano4747 posted:I'm going to make this a separate post because it's a separate issue from why war crimes need to be documented and why public investigations leading to trials are a great vehicle for that. Yeah, Heston's video was based on some.. interesting visions of what the Vietnam War was. Yes, indeed, the Tet Offensive was conducted in such a way that crimes went all the way to the top, but then, Le Duan was never going to see the inside of a war crimes trial courtroom, even though he was the one who approved the PLAF commands launching the offensive having lists of people who needed to be eliminated- you can see the results in Hue, where they were mostly successful in taking the city. But then, of course, shooting a guy in the street brought no real justice for anyone- if he was who they said he was, that would be in line with ARVN post-Tet reprisal attacks, which were also war crimes. Le Duan led the winning side, and thusly, was excused from any kind of war crimes trial. Heston did pick an example of the media failing, and I think there's probably a good report to be had on the US reporting on Vietnam failing to live up to standards of reporting, but it won't come from someone with an axe to grind like that. Very often, media in the country let themselves get jerked around by NLF intelligence assets, ARVN hacks, or whatever story seemed most sensational. That comes from their own lack of understanding of Vietnam in general- a gold rush of people who had no real business being there trying to make a name for themselves.
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Jul 29, 2022 10:29
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:dogg i can assure you that this was probably in the top 5 most famous WWII photos in that famous kiss was nonconsensual for another top5 famous ww2 photo i'd suggest the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_a_Flag_over_the_Reichstag it was also staged like the iwo jima flag photo, and it was doctored to remove a looted watch and to add more smoke
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Jul 29, 2022 11:33
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Cessna posted:You probably won't find a more mythologized version of Marine Corps history than what is taught in USMC boot camp, and even there it is taught that the photo is of the second flag raising. 1. I'm talking the general public, not what's taught in Marine boot camp. Sands of Iwo Jima doesn't mention 2 flags, it just shows the 2nd one. 2. More disingenuous that saying an officer in the VietCong is just a civilian? Cyrano4747 posted:But that's not what Heston's doing. He's utilizing a famous moment to try and make his own point that, ultimately, isn't about the Vietnam war but about American politics. That's the point, the whole video is in response to a PBS documentary about the Vietnam war and the central idea is that the perception of the war was shaped by the US media.
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Jul 29, 2022 12:32
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Scuffy_1989 posted:
Yes. If you wanna argue he's a POW then you can do that too. Still doesn't make it okay to summarily execute him. "Look at this poor (alleged) victim! That should mean there's no rules on how you deal with the accused" is absolute garbage war crime apologia. It's the exact argument used to justify a whole host of horrible actions up to and including the Holocaust and you should be loving ashamed. quote:That's the point, the whole video is in response to a PBS documentary about the Vietnam war and the central idea is that the perception of the war was shaped by the US media. The central idea isn't that, because that point is utterly obvious and inane. The central idea is that people should trust, instinctively, the conservative part of the US media (that Heston represents) and not any other part. Fangz fucked around with this message at 13:36 on Jul 29, 2022 |
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Jul 29, 2022 12:57
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Scuffy_1989 posted:1. I'm talking the general public, not what's taught in Marine boot camp. Sands of Iwo Jima doesn't mention 2 flags, it just shows the 2nd one. are you a keldoclock rereg edit: the posting style isn't quite right but maybe you had a TBI or something
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Jul 29, 2022 13:00
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Alchenar posted:I think every single individual soldier's account of the Western Front has included a passage that strongly hinted that while they generally played a clean war, they made exceptions for the SS. There's also accounts from the Panzer forces that they fretted about their black uniforms because of the risk of being mistaken for SS if they were captured. The SS also did a pretty good job of getting themselves killed if my grandfather is to be believed. He was alongside some 1. SS Leibstandarte AH dudes in the 1943 Kiev offensive and wrote that they were worse than useless suicidal compared to Heer troops. And dude was an unrepentant nazi so if he's poo poo talking first SS I'm inclined to believe him.
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Jul 29, 2022 13:07
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Scuffy_1989 posted:2. More disingenuous that saying an officer in the VietCong is just a civilian? The logical conclusion of this is that you think it is perfectly fine to shoot combatant officers with no trial after they've been captured. If that's your take, well, okay, but I want no part of that. The fact is, the police chief in the photo did not know for sure if Nguyen Van Lem was a civilian terrorist or an NVA officer. He just shot him - with no trial, no interrogation, and no regard for even the most basic laws of war. The reaction of the American public was entirely justified - "do we want to be allied to people who do this?"
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Jul 29, 2022 15:07
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Scuffy_1989 posted:2. More disingenuous that saying an officer in the VietCong is just a civilian? I don't care if you have Hitler himself in custody and you just watched him eat your own grandmother and he explicitly told you it was great and he regrets nothing, summary execution of prisoners is wrong, inexcusable, evil, and a war crime. The (alleged) crimes of the captive are irrelevant. Don't do war crimes, don't excuse war crimes
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Jul 29, 2022 16:27
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Cyrano4747 posted:
The vast majority of civil suits have actual professional attorneys on both sides who understand they are there to argue over alleged damages and would rather not roll the dice. Plaintiffs tend to want reliable payouts instead of swinging for the fences, and defense would rather spend a small sum than accept a 1/50 risk of a jury finding your client's free wifi caused some kid's leukemia or just voting to give someone money. This doesn't help people doing Journalism or History, but that's not who non-appellate courts are there to serve. To a non-historian it seems like many of these older stories seem to be driven by impunity, either by soldiers believing that they can cap some rear end in a top hat with no blowback, or feeling it might be their last chance to get some guy before they go on to cut a deal or just slip away into history. Now we have a whole bunch of guys doing some real bad poo poo after putting years of pictures on LiveJournal or something and getting identified via human flesh search in days. Are we going to get a steady stream of war criminals getting popped on facial recognition at airports or whatever over the next few years? Does a modern Nguyễn Văn Lém get caught decades later after a poorly planned connecting flight? norton I fucked around with this message at 16:42 on Jul 29, 2022 |
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Jul 29, 2022 16:30
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Isn't fighting in civilian clothing without some kind of marker of your status as a fighter one of those things that can get you assigned unlawful combatant status where summary execution is potentially legal? Similar to being a spy or fighting while wearing an enemy uniform? I don't know much about the specific rules of war in this area. I should be clear that I think summary execution is probably basically always the wrong action both morally and tactically, but I'm asking legally speaking.
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Jul 29, 2022 17:11
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glynnenstein posted:Isn't fighting in civilian clothing without some kind of marker of your status as a fighter one of those things that can get you assigned unlawful combatant status where summary execution is potentially legal? Similar to being a spy or fighting while wearing an enemy uniform? I don't know much about the specific rules of war in this area. It was illegal under South Vietnamese law of the time and you generally aren't supposed to summarily execute a soldier in disguise as a civilian unless you confirm they're not a civilian first.
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Jul 29, 2022 17:18
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The press in vietnam had a bad habit of reporting every gossip story about the RVN government as true but this was absolutely not one of those times.
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Jul 29, 2022 17:20
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glynnenstein posted:Isn't fighting in civilian clothing without some kind of marker of your status as a fighter one of those things that can get you assigned unlawful combatant status where summary execution is potentially legal? Similar to being a spy or fighting while wearing an enemy uniform? I don't know much about the specific rules of war in this area. No, absolutely not. Wearing civilian clothing to conceal combatant status is considered a war crime. But that DOES NOT make someone who does it subject to summary execution; it makes them subject to a fair trial and potential punishment as a result of that trial. Edit, from a US Army manual on Law of Land Warfare, p107: https://irp.fas.org/doddir/army/fm27-10.pdf quote:504. Other Types of War Crimes And that is followed immediately by: quote:Section III. PUNISHMENT OF WAR CRIMES So, no, you don't get to just execute people. Cessna fucked around with this message at 17:24 on Jul 29, 2022 |
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Jul 29, 2022 17:20
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