some people are discussing the merits of calling presidents war criminals. here are my thoughts on this. (1) if people do this a...
some people are discussing the merits of calling presidents war criminals. here are my thoughts on this.
(1) if people do this a lot with American presidents only and never with other state leaders, other people might get the (true? false?) impression that the US is uniquely bad at having war criminal heads of state. this probably shouldn’t influence any one person’s actions but at least it seems worth mentioning.
(2) calling someone a war criminal has an emotional/moral valence, not just a legal meaning. it conveys disdain for someone’s character, evaluated as a whole.
I think that this is something to be careful of. yes, absolutely, if someone authorizes drone strikes on civilians as president, that’s a war crime and it’s an awful thing to do. and they would indeed be a war criminal.
but are they a person to be looked down upon?
(3) probably presidents will not be much affected by anything anyone here on tumblr says. probably future presidents will not be either.
but — the values of the ~rationalist community~ will be influenced by how we view presidents and how we judge them. do we say that they are war criminals (emotional valence: evil, Hitler-level, morally wrong)? do we say that they were great men, perfect and bereft of flaws? or do we say that they were a mixture of both, doers of good and evil in different measure?
(4)
the obvious objection to my last point is that different presidents are different people. George Bush II is not the same as Nixon is not the same as Obama.
and this is also something that has been missing: talking about Whether Presidents in General Are War Criminals is pretty fruitless.
I would personally prefer if presidents weren’t talked about as practically the same morally (all of them are war criminals, implying that their EVIL attribute is set to max). this is because there were real differences between presidential policies and motivations and so on. but this isn’t a strong preference.
(5)
do I think that people shouldn’t call spades spades?
I think that people should be careful about the emotive and moral implications of calling something a spade. an illegal immigrant is an illegal immigrant, but it’s hardly a neutral thing to call someone.
War crime isn’t real and I bet these diaper-pissing cowards think Nuremberg wasn’t a sham, which it was, and it’s not even a secret that it was, if you take the right law classes they tell you that in the first week and it’s in the textbook
Whenever someone accuses America/Americans of war crimes the comeback is “Oh no, better look out for the war cops!”
The joke being that America is the war cops
Anyway, “war crimes” require the predicate crime of losing a war, that’s why we drag our hopeless wars out into stalemate