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the thread seems still be to stuck with a basic division between folk whose experience led them through the military (directly or indirectly) and who tend to see in the clip something well inside the realm of ordinary experience and those who do not see killing unarmed civilians and a couple children as being part of the realm of ordinary experience, not even in a combat situation.
what's curious about this is the extent to which this division then feeds into a strange inside/outside game. the relativist position argues in the end that no-one but themselves could possibly understand so no-one but themselves is in a position to pass judgment about what you see as a technical glitch, a mistake.
others, looking at the same footage, see unarmed civilians being mowed down and a heap of rationalizations piled up for that---most of which read to me like "ooops" or, better, "it's the civilians fault."
from there it is possible to have discussions about rules of war and whether there really are any---from the relativist viewpoint in this thread, it almost seems like there is only one rule and that is dont end up like the civilians and children do in this clip so that the fact that you're alive indicates no rules could be violated in this or any other situation. but that's fucked up, i think.
if you back away from this level, it seems to me that if this "war is hell" line is the case--and i do not doubt it for a second as making the world into an approximation of hell seems a project that nation-states devote special creativity to, which makes you wonder about nation-states and the capitalism for which they stand, but that's another matter----if this it is case that once war starts there are no rules, anything goes anything at all (which is a very bush administration line)----then it should fucking well be the case that the machinery that is war is put into motion for the right reasons. and in iraq, the machinery was not put into motion for the right reasons.
this kind of killing of civilians has been alarming routine in the colonial adventure in iraq. of course it's the other guy's fault (i learned that in this thread).
but if the reasons for the unfolding of the war-is-hell machine in the first place are not correct, then it seems to me that every last one of those deaths is murder and that responsibility for those deaths rebounds back onto the people who put the machinery into motion in iraq in the first place.
and it seems like this is the kind of position that all sides could agree on in this thread...
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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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