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wait---this has grown terribly simplistic very quickly.
first off, if one is a pacifist, it follows that one rejects the validity of the legal category "war" and extends an ethics rooted outside that framework across it.
this has nothing to do with being naive--it is a political position which, like it or not, is every bit as legitimate a political position as any other. so there are no grounds--at all--for ruling a pacifist argument against war in general out of political debate. sorry, but there isn't.
secondly: if you accept that the legal category "war" entails an ethial shift--and it has to if you accept it--it nonetheless is the case that war in the modern period--which like it or not we live in--happens according to certain rules--and so it is ENTIRELY possible that a soldier can be in a war zone and be a murderer at the same time--for a killing that falls outside the rules which circumscribe war. the paradox is only superficial--that there are and are not legitimate killings in the same general environment--but these are the consequences of the rules of war, and it is a far better thing that those rules exist than it would be were they not to exist. i don't see any argument against them that would not be naive, unaware of how the world works, etc.
the question of whether a particular act is inside or outside the rules is a legal matter. obviously, since the courts which would adjudicate this sort of question are military themselves, one can expect a certain latitude to be in place--but given that the legitimacy of the military itself can be in question in such contexts--and given that the military is itself an institution based on adherence to rules and hierarchies which shape what they are, how they are relayed, etc., it follows that there is ALSO an institutional interest in upholding the rules. so these courts are not in a simple position under the best of circumstances--and the bush administration is not the best of circumstances.
so the issue of what is and is not a legitimate act, and by extension what is or is not murder in the context of war, is not in any way a problem that preoccupies the naive alone. it preoccupies alot of people, and it should preoccupy them.
the problem here is not the question, then, but the consequences of posing it in a sloppy manner in the context of a community that includes a divers population, including alot of folk with investments in the military.
given that, it seems to me that the way to go is to proceed thoughtfully and carefully if we are going to head down this road--so i disagree with the jazz in his more general point, but agree with him on the substantive issue concerning the inflammatory nature of these sorts of questions--but i would (again) argue that these questions are fair game so long as they are done with purpose and consideration. absent that, however, i think jazz and i would be in a race to see how could shut the thread down faster.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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