----- Original Message ----- From: "Justin Schwartz" <jkschw at hotmail.com> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Monday, October 15, 2001 9:02 PM Subject: Re: civilian casualties
> Uh, yeah, I guess I am a softy who believes in international law, which
> prohibits the killing of civilians.
International law shouldn't necessarily serve as the moral sanction obligating any given state towards one course of action as opposed to another any more than is the case with any given individual in the nation in which he happens to reside. Some laws should not be obeyed. This is clear enough to most.
> I don'tthink we should be "at war" at
> all.
Who said we should be?
> It's an odd sort of war, basically the deployment of overwhelming force
> against people who can't fight back except by terrorist attacks--
I think you do a rather grave disservice to the innocent people who've died in Afghanistan by implying that they're the ones who may fight back by terrorist means. It's the sort of blurring of distinctions that allows some to think that killing these people is not only an unfortunate bit of collateral damage inflicted in the quest for justice, but an ingredient in said quest.
> not, at
> least, untill we get our choppers within range of the leftover Stringer
> missiles we gave them a decade ago. And, yeah, I think it more gruesome to
> blow people to bits than to kill them in other ways, and so do you. It's
> also worse to burn them and bury them alive, or to kill in ways that are
are
> painful, disfiguring, lingering, etc.
> Does this need to be explained? jks
>
Any such death agonies (usually) pale to the point of triviality in comparison to the horror of a life snuffed out before its time. Does this require a detailed exposition?
-- Luke