Killing survivors: some historical points. [View all]

[malthaussen]

In WW2, it was pretty much SOP to kill Japanese airmen and sailors who were left as survivors when their plane was shot down or their ship sunk. The argument was based on a number of documented cases of Japanese POW survivors attacking and often killing their rescuers. Everyone knew it was a war crime, and nobody cared. There are any number of documented or attested instances of American troops killing POWs for one reason or another, and getting away with it.

Several points immediately occur, but the most significant to my mind and the one that is becoming lost in all the noise is this: we are not at war. Those people in the water were foreign nationals and civilians. We murdered them. The legalists may try to obfuscate this as they wish, but they cannot erase the fact. They can only make the fact irrelevant, as in the case of the Japanese survivors or other war crimes committed by US forces over the years.

Personally, I have zero tolerance for anyone, pundit or politician or random Internet Yahoo, who tries to sell the point that these murders were anything other than state-sponsored piracy on the high seas. And insofar as I am a citizen of the State which has committed this crime, I am furious with every official in the chain of command who passed on this indefensible order. Less so with the figurative 19-year old seaman with his figurative finger on the figurative trigger: he was between a rock and a hard place, and his superiors are supposed to protect him from this shit.. You may blame the top of the chain-of-command as much as you like, and may try to paint Admiral Bradley as an innocent scapegoat as much as you like, but responsibility for this act is not compartmentalized: every single link in the chain failed, and betrayed their oaths to the Constitution, to say nothing of betraying common human morality.

-- Mal