War

I'm admittedly out of my depths in knowledge about all of this, but my general thoughts are...

A just war is a war fought for justice. How many wars have been fought for something just? The only one I can say with any kind of confidence is WWII, and even then, many of us (not the soldiers fighting the battles, but the nation states as represented by their governments) stood by for the majority of it while millions of Jews were being massacred, and only entered into the fray for reasons that at the very least included a quite high dose of self-interest (I'm trying to differentiate this from self defense but I can't figure out how to word it properly). 

 
Landlord said:
A just war is a war fought for justice. How many wars have been fought for something just? The only one I can say with any kind of confidence is WWII,
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Really?

Revolutionary war was fought for our freedom from an over bearing England.

Civil War was fought against states who believed they had the freedom to keep slaves.

WWI was fought basically for the same reasons as WWII, a Germany that thought they could take over Europe.

I would even say the Afghan War right after 9/11 was started for the right reasons.  To go after a group that just attacked America and killed over 3,000 Americans.  I have no problem with us going in and kicking the Taliban's a$$.....most after that I can do without.

 
agreed . I supported the Afghanistan war believing its purpose was to capture or kill those responsible for 9/11. It turned into something else that I don’t support,  and I would love to it see ended ASAP . Other than that ,  I think the last justified war we fought was WW2. 

 
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Big Red 40 said:
I agree our service members should be treated with the utmost respect and I think more needs to be done to provide better mental and physical care, wheb they return home . The PTSD, homelessness, and suicide rates of our vets are way too high.
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This. So much this.

If we really honored and respected our vets and what they've done on our behalf, then we would never even talk about needed to provide them with more or better care.

 
Maybe if we weren't in the middle east in the 90's, 9/11 never happens. I tend to think the entire reason alot of places in the middle east "hate america" is because we went in there with our big bravado and Christian culture and basically told people who have been living one way for thousands of years that that is wrong and we are here to fix it. People don't take to kindly to being attacked and having your culture attacked simultaniously. Imagine if a foreign military from a very different culture was essentially occupying our country trying to change it and save us from say  Trumps leadership. Some people would welcome that, but there would be a large group of people fightin' mad without a doubt. 

 
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I don't know if waging a war against England for being "overbearing" is the best example of justice, actually. I think there were positive outcomes, but those on the receiving end of the injustices of colonialism were not the English settlers. 

Even wars of justice should be remembered for the horrors that came with, not scrubbed of their moral complexity. I think the Civil War often is, whereas Dresden and Tokyo and Hiroshima and Nagasaki are...more and more glossed over. We've been talking about Tolkien recently and how his work grew out of fighting or living through both World Wars. I think the philosophy of LOTR and its treatment of war and evil is resonant, and it's a really different tone compared with how WW2 has been portrayed more recently. 

To connect LOTR with the comic again, think about the contrasting lessons of a protagonist sparing an adversary. Frodo sparing Gollum (for that matter, Harry Potter sparing Pettigrew) and Upham's humanity towards the German soldier. 

 
zoogs said:
I don't know if waging a war against England for being "overbearing" is the best example of justice, actually. I think there were positive outcomes, but those on the receiving end of the injustices of colonialism were not the English settlers. 

Even wars of justice should be remembered for the horrors that came with, not scrubbed of their moral complexity. I think the Civil War often is, whereas Dresden and Tokyo and Hiroshima and Nagasaki are...more and more glossed over. We've been talking about Tolkien recently and how his work grew out of fighting or living through both World Wars. I think the philosophy of LOTR and its treatment of war and evil is resonant, and it's a really different tone compared with how WW2 has been portrayed more recently. 

To connect LOTR with the comic again, think about the contrasting lessons of a protagonist sparing an adversary. Frodo sparing Gollum (for that matter, Harry Potter sparing Pettigrew) and Upham's humanity towards the German soldier. 
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I didn't gloss over any horrors of these wars.

And....you don't think the Revolutionary War was an example of fighting for justice?

 
I think it was a war for independence. Was England evil? I can't put that in the same category as preserving slavery and Nazis.

As for glossing over, that of course wasn't directed at you. We're talking about the treatment of WW2 in culture and media in the 90s and beyond.

 
I tend to agree with zoogs on the revolutionary war. We are taught in school it was a fight against tyranny, but the average colonists didn't really have much skin in the game or care, and was probably ok with the status quo. The taxes impacted the wealthy more than the average man. The elites, land and plantation owners, etc. had to convince the common man that his interest lied with their own. It was really just another war fought to benefit those already well off. But I'm glad we got this country out of it.  ;)

I disagree with the interpretation of Upham though. I think it's pretty obvious he isn't some incarnate of the intellectual who can not survive in war. He symbolises the lost innocence of the everyman in war. He doesn't smoke, doesn't take sides, doesn't understand the military jargon, gets people killed because of his indecisiveness. Then like everyone else he succumbs to war and kills a surrendering man. The war broke him. Even Private Ryan a green, but steadfast soldier, breaks down and begins crying mid battle. The interpretation given in the article is pretty lazy. 

 
ZRod said:
I tend to agree with zoogs on the revolutionary war. We are taught in school it was a fight against tyranny, but the average colonists didn't really have much skin in the game or care, and was probably ok with the status quo. The taxes impacted the wealthy more than the average man. The elites, land and plantation owners, etc. had to convince the common man that his interest lied with their own. It was really just another war fought to benefit those already well off. But I'm glad we got this country out of it.  ;)
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Yep.  There are a lot of myths misconceptions and whitewashing of the details of the Revolutionary War.  For example, the number of Americans that were either proclaimed loyalists or neutral far exceeded the patriots actively supporting or fighting in in the war.  Estimates range from 20-30% Loyalist, 30-40% Patriot, and most colonists neutral.

There were a lot of horrible war crimes committed by both the British and the colonists that fail to get reported in the early histories.  In fact, I doubt that very many wars in human history have occurred without including some level of atrocities.  Senseless massacring of non-combatants, rape, torture, humiliation, looting, burning, evil acts: all of these are hallmarks of war in general.  Many histories like to gloss over the evil parts.

 
Hm. I had forgotten that he was the one who shot the German he'd previously let go at the end. I think you're right, ultimately. 

When I watched it as a kid he was the coward who caused the good captain's death. I remember really liking the movie, and really not liking this little s#!t and thinking he should've manned up about the whole gun thing. I think I would have seen this act as either making up for the cowardice, or ... well, the coward tried, but it was already too late, wasn't it. I like the "it's a tragedy that war broke the best man" angle, although it's pretty grim. This might have been an unfair treatment of Saving Private Ryan, even if it does capture cultural attitudes about that war and generation pretty well.

I think I prefer the less nihilistic angles, where for example Frodo is rewarded for his mercy; he preserves his humanity in doing so, and the lesson is front and center. "Many that live deserve death...can you give it to them?"

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I see the Revolutionary War as one faction wanting its own dominion over extracting wealth from this fruitful new land and its unwashed natives, on the backs of the slave labor, and seeing great advantage in getting out from under the British thumb in doing so. There are degrees of evil, and for all our salutary qualities we shared a lot of the more meaningful ones. Our love for country and freedoms need not be tied to adhering to an uncomplicated view of our origins; indeed, it should be cleaved entirely from it.

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Speaking of degrees of evil, and valorized national legends of war, Winston Churchill: https://jacobinmag.com/2018/01/winston-churchill-british-empire-colonialism/

This is the first time I'm encountering a lot of the aspects of Churchill, both earlier life and during the war. In asking why, I really think there's a strong element of not letting things get in the way of mythos. The fuller picture should not have been so absent.
 

 
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BigRedBuster said:
And....you don't think the Revolutionary War was an example of fighting for justice?
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I don't... I mean, not really, to be honest. It was a war for the self-interests of a minority amount of people, that also happened to coincide with some legitimate grievances they used to get others on board.

It was a relatively small group of wealthy, land-owning white men who were tired of not being free and saw an opportunity to literally create a country and shape it how they want. There's the famous, "no taxation without representation" bit, but from my understanding the colonists enjoyed the highest standard of living in the world, and were taxed much less than people actually in England. There's also a big contributing factor that England forbid westward expansion in order to protect the Indians as allies, while many Americans (I'd say motivated by greed), believed in a manifest destiny to conquer those lands and people.

Only about 1/3 of America supported revolution. The collateral damage being hundreds of thousands of people who probably didn't care all that much ending up dead. That's a war for "us" more than a war for "justice", even if there are legitimate grievances that can be used to support it.

Really, though, defining whether a battle is just is just as much about what battles we don't fight. How can self-serving wars be called just when we sit and do nothing as others are being massacred? 

 
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Wasn't the taxation due to a debt England incurred by defending the colonies against France during the Seven Years War? I'm not as well versed in the Revolutionary War period, but recall something to that effect. 

 
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