Trey Smith
I'm sure most of you are aware of the video that recently surfaced that purports to show 4 US Marines in Afghanistan urinating on 3 corpses. The video is causing all sorts of charges and outrage.
For one thing, it has been noted that this act represents a war crime as it violates the Geneva Convention. US military officials have promised an investigation and have indicated that charges could be filed against the soldiers, if they can figure out their identities.
Really? We would punish soldiers for peeing on dead bodies, yet we see nothing wrong with sending drones that kill and maim innocent civilians on a consistent basis. I'm sorry, but when I compare these two acts, they pale in comparison. One involves people who are already dead, while the other involves killing people who were just alive and many who were guilty of no crime.
I shouldn't be surprised. This often is how it goes. Authorities make a spectacle out of a minor incident, while turning a blind eye to major violations. It's far easier to go after a few grunts than it is to take on people in power. Individual acts of dehumanization are frowned upon; systemic acts of dehumanization are accepted as policy.
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Ya know, I'm sure acts such as these go on in war all the time -- it's just that such acts usually aren't filmed and posted for the public to see. When the enemy has been so vilified as a dehumanized monster, it's not hard to understand why some people behave in this way. It's their way of saying, "Take that, you SOB!"
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In all honesty, I don't understand why people make such a big deal about the proper way to handle corpses. The body merely is a vessel for life. Once life has been extinguished, the body that remains is an empty housing.
When folks get all up in arms over the way a corpse is dealt with, the person who lived in that housing doesn't care. He or she is dead.
When I die, I don't really give a damn what people do with the body that housed me. They could make a pinata out of it or stuff it to stick in a museum or they could grind it up to make tasty Trey burgers, though don't feed me to a vegetarian!
If I said to a group of people at work or anywhere else that:
ReplyDelete1) drones we being used to kill innocents.
2) a soldier pee'd on a dead body.
In case 1 I'd be deemed depressing and not spoken to much and in case 2 I'd get a conversation on how bad it was.
The media and governments seem to prey on this.
"When I die, I don't really give a damn what people do with the body that housed me."
ReplyDeleteI understand the point you were making about "war crimes". It's crazy making to ask someone to kill someone and then be respectful to their dead body.
I can also understand your feelings toward your own body after you have departed it. But would it be different if the corpse belonged to someone you loved and cared for deeply? I think funerals and such death rituals are more for the survivors than for the deceased; an acknowledgment of the grieving process. From that perspective, were the soldiers denigrating a dead combatant, or the people who loved them?
the geneva convention apparently doesn't consider a human being sacred until it's dead: you can kill them, but once they're dead, you MUST NOT desecrate their bodies... 8/
ReplyDeleteSee now that's funny. And we let them make our decisions.
ReplyDeleteA comedian did actually joke about this before "now of we're going to kill each other in the hundreds of thousands (well not us but poor peoples kids) we better make some rules about it. Ok, is it ok to shoot someone in the butt? Yep, ok, shoot in the butt is ok. Now, mace someone? Nah man that's chemical, that's for fairies. Slice a mans throat and spit on him? hmm, ok but not just after he's dead ok? Ok..."