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Originally Posted by ubertuber
Will, you are romanticizing past generations of soldiers. Pinkos, gooks, Nips, ragheads, camel jockeys, Japs, etc... They've dehumanized the enemy for this entire century and likely all the ones preceding it. Hell, look at the portrayals of Japanese civilians in the old Loony Toons cartoons. An enlightened war has yet to take place. I think the gallows humor BOR speaks of is two-fold: it is both a protection of the sanity (through disengagement) of people in inhuman circumstances, and it is a measure of the psychological damage already sustained by those conditions.
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I was only speaking of my grandfather, not the entire generation that fought in WWII, Korea or Vietnam. Dehumanization has been a part of training soldiers for a lot longer than the past 60 years, as I understand it. It may very well be as old as warfare itself. That's hardly an excuse, though. I think that we can all agree that on a basic level that war is wrong. Yes, you can do it to stop other war, as a sort of 'fighting fire against fire' sort of last resort, but at the most fundamental level: war is wrong. These racial slurs and 'jokes' about killing people, whether they deserve it or not, serve to dehumanize the enemy, yes? And it's easier to kill someone who you believe to be less than human, yes? And you're more likely to kill someone you belive is less than human, yes? They say that war begits war, and if it's easier to go to war, then war is more likely to continue.
If you can't kill someone without pretending you're living in a video game you have no business being a soldier. If you can't put a human face on the people who you've been told to kill, you have no business being a soldier. I have a feeling that if more people felt the way I do about war, it'd happen a lot less frequently.