Wave Skipper

"So you......" - I take this to be a loaded question, rather than as it appears to be, an accusation. But I hope it is not meant in the spirit of web-pugilism. Obviously anyone reading what i wrote should have noticed my drift toward AVOIDING WAR. So returning your own style on style, I might say: So you think war is a good idea if fought by some rules that fat little men in suits agreed to while in Geneva, all the while never intending to follow them. I live in the USA, and grew up under the threat of constant all out thermonuclear destruction. Supposedly both sides were members of one body - the UN - and supposedly played by the same international rules for war. But the truth was, especially before the mid 70s, most of their vast fire power was aimed at cities full of women, children and old people - not troops. So I grew up in a M.A.D. (mutual assured destruction) situation. Our civilizations were basically MAD (insane). What prevented that nuclear war was the absolute terror of what those weapons had done in Japan (had Japan not been attacked by nukes it is more likely a nuclear war would have taken place between the Soviets and West sometime around the late 50s. In the same way it was the Chernobyl disaster that helped empower those who saw nuclear war as unwinable against those forces in both the US and Soviet militaries who saw nuclear victory as possible).

The terrible effects of war bring about a desire in civilian populations of AVOIDING war all together. Attempts at mitigating the dire effects of war usually don’t work and often only lead to extending the life of the conflict. Wars end rapidly only when one side or the other tires of the dying and privations. It is not pretty – I certainly suggested quite the opposite. How many mothers of civilized nations have questioned their sons about to go off to war with concerns about them killing? And what was the salve that these sons offered their mothers? “I’ll be in a civilized army mother. We’ll be following international rules. International ones mom! You hear that? INTERNATIONAL. That makes it all better.”

Of course armies did not follow those rules, they only screamed when the other side did not follow them either. The only way such rules can mitigate war would be to totally BAN war by a power arising from a huge mega-one-world-bureaucracy – One World Government – strong enough to enforce this rule. Of course the likelihood that such a government would be truly fair and not just the plaything of powerful nations and special interest groups, is nil and the idea that it can happen without a complete rewrite of the human genetic code is really Utopian.

You ignore that for the last century and certainly at the present, these laws have been mainly misused as I outlined before. And laws enforced unjustly are nothing more than provocations to the future.

I should point out also that mercy is actually in the best interests of the military units. Making your enemy believe that you will treat him well in captivity is the best way to get him to lay down his weapons.