Quote:
Originally posted by Donut:
quote:
Originally posted by johnny:
Unfortunately for them, they are not ordinairy human beings. They are armymen, and armymen have to follow orders. If they have a problem with that, they should have never joined the militairy.
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Isn't that what the German military said after WW2? [/QUOTE]I don't know whether a German soldier under the Nazis could disobey an order concerning civilian population or war prisoners. But the "I was just following orders mantra" doesn't certainly apply to the Holocaust, which is one of the main reasons why the criminals of Nurenberg were trialed and condemned: according to Goldhagen D.J., Hitler's Willing Executioners, 1997 the majority of those who perpetrated the Holocaust did it on their own will and were overzealous in their "duty". There are confirmed reports that, towards the end of the war, Himmler ordered the Holocaust to be ceased, to ease the treatment of the regime by the Aliies after the war ended. Many germans clearly disregarded that order and did their best to kill the most Jews they could by moving them around aimlessly in conditions known to be fatal to any healthy prisoner, let alone human skeletons comng out of Auschwitz or Treblinka.
And even back in 1939, when Poland was invaded, and Hitler was at hids glory, refusing to take part in the pogroms was by no means impossible or dangerous. You would simply get transferred to other equivalent units without ethnical cleansing duties.
Anyway, back to Skunk's question:
My opinion: guilty. 100 civilians would have died. But what if "Iran" had won the war? thousands of soldiers died, and thousands of civilians in the resulting political persecution - we are talking about a regime which decided to use chemicals first, I doubt they would be real keen on such things like fair trial and freedom of speech. War is wrong. But once you are in it, you can only try and choose the lesser evil. In this particular case the 100 civilians dead would be the lesser evil. Collateral damage they call it. Besides, it's the commander's call, not the pilot's. The pilot reports the civilian presence, the commander decides and gives an order. It is not an illegal order because it doesn't deliberately target civilians. However, I admit I wouldn't want to be there and pull the trigger. Rationality is one thing, conscience entirely another.
The "real" outcome of the trial:
IMO it would depend on the public:
in a normal martial court the pilot would be found guilty: military is based on orders: a sentence allowing to evade them cannot be pronounced in any case.
The sanction would depend on the public opinion: in a democracy he would simply be discharged. The public would not agree and ask for innocence, but in the end a "guilty but not punished" sentence would be a compromise satisfactory to anybody. In a dictatorship he would be shot.
[ 09-26-2003, 04:11 AM: Message edited by: B_part ]