FSTDT Forums
Community => Politics and Government => Topic started by: Rabbit of Caerbannog on January 15, 2012, 02:46:23 am
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Four Marine snipers were videotaped urinating on the corpses of Taliban members (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/13/marines-urinating-on-taliban-identified_n_1204653.html) in yet another PR nightmare for the U.S. (Don't worry, there's no actual video in the link and everything is censored.) The four are pretty much guilty of not only monumental stupidity (seriously, having it filmed and putting it online?!) but also breaching the laws of armed conflict which prohibit "defiling, desecrating, mocking, photographing or filming for personal use insurgent dead." Oops.
As disrespectful and disgusting as this was, however, Hamilton Nolan of gawker.com puts everything in the proper perspective (http://gawker.com/5875468/piss-on-war).
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Gotta go with what Mr. Nolan said.
Ironbtie-war is disgusting and the sooner we leave this quagmire the better.
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Well a corpse is essentially just an inanimate object, and as such I don't have any ethical/moral issues with this. It is, however, monumentally stupid since these people are essentially representing America over there and since the locals largely don't share my views on the (lack of) importance of dead bodies. In any occupation, endearing yourself and by extension your country to the locals is just as, if not more important than fighting insurgents.
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Yeah, when I first heard about this I couldn't help by slam my head against a wall. THESE are the people the insurgents will remember. Not the soldier that kicked around a ball with some of the local children. Just another way the idiots in our country just give these people more ammo.
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Well a corpse is essentially just an inanimate object, and as such I don't have any ethical/moral issues with this.
Dude. A corpse is not the same thing as a brick. You do not disrespect the dead. Even if they were your enemies in life, once they die, they are what YOU will eventually become. To defile a corpse is to doubly defile yourself.
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Dude. A corpse is not the same thing as a brick. You do not disrespect the dead. Even if they were your enemies in life, once they die, they are what YOU will eventually become. To defile a corpse is to doubly defile yourself.
A corpse is just dead meat. There is nothing clean or respectful about a corpse; they twitch, burp, fart, shit, sit up, slough off their skin, and otherwise embarrass themselves perfectly well on their own. Whatever there was of the person within dissipated with the cessation of brain activity; respect for the memory of the dead is one thing, but the corpse itself is insensate.
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Dude. A corpse is not the same thing as a brick. You do not disrespect the dead. Even if they were your enemies in life, once they die, they are what YOU will eventually become. To defile a corpse is to doubly defile yourself.
A corpse is just dead meat. There is nothing clean or respectful about a corpse; they twitch, burp, fart, shit, sit up, slough off their skin, and otherwise embarrass themselves perfectly well on their own. Whatever there was of the person within dissipated with the cessation of brain activity; respect for the memory of the dead is one thing, but the corpse itself is insensate.
I must politely disagree with you. How we treat our dead is a reflection of who we are as a society. How we treat the "enemy" dead even more so. What they did was extremely taboo in the society they are currently in. It reflects badly on the United States as a whole. Even if it didn't reflect badly on us politically it was still insensitive and down right inhumane in the eyes of the people of the region.
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I'm pretty sure that if the snipers viewed the corpse as a pile of meat, they wouldn't have urinated upon it. Even if you believe that it's just an inanimate object at that point, it's pretty clear the soldiers in question intended to insult the deceased (and possibly their family and friends).
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How dare you disrespect our troops! These are all necessary strategic maneuvers and sacrifices needed to keep our country safe from Islamists! You don't want the Islamists to take over, do you? /freeper
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Pissing on the corpse doesn't cause much direct damage, but it's a powerful symbolic gesture (much like, say, burning a few copies of a book in the post-printing press era). And people being what they are (that is, stupid), they can attribute more meaning to (and be more outraged about) pissing on the corpse than turning a person into the corpse.
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Well a corpse is essentially just an inanimate object, and as such I don't have any ethical/moral issues with this.
Dude. A corpse is not the same thing as a brick. You do not disrespect the dead. Even if they were your enemies in life, once they die, they are what YOU will eventually become. To defile a corpse is to doubly defile yourself.
If you want to actually prove otherwise (with actual logic and/or evidence), I'm all ears.
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Well a corpse is essentially just an inanimate object, and as such I don't have any ethical/moral issues with this.
Dude. A corpse is not the same thing as a brick. You do not disrespect the dead. Even if they were your enemies in life, once they die, they are what YOU will eventually become. To defile a corpse is to doubly defile yourself.
If you want to actually prove otherwise (with actual logic and/or evidence), I'm all ears.
This is a brick: (http://earth911.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/single-brick.jpg)
This is a corpse: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadaver (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadaver) (linked to err on the side of caution)
The first is a brick. It has been a brick from the moment of its creation. It is nothing more than a building block.
The second was, at one point in time, a living, breathing human being. When it was alive it had friends and family that loved it. When it died it was mourned by those it left behind. Social species that we are, no one dies truly alone. There will always be one other human being who noticed their passing. Who now misses them.
When you piss on a corpse you are symbolically saying "Your loved one is unworthy of respect. This person that you cared about is now no more than my latrine."
And the L was correct. You might never be a brick (some freaky cremation aside) but we will all one day be a corpse. To disrespect your fellow man in such a manner is to disrespect yourself.
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Throw the book at them. Preferably the hardcover large print version.
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Question: has there been any known incidents of Taliban doing the same or similar to American corpse?
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2 wrongs don't make a right.
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Question: has there been any known incidents of Taliban doing the same or similar to American corpse?
quite possibly, if so, so what? Are you suggesting that because some Taliban somewhere may have done something disrespectful to Americans that Americans are justified doing the same thing? So much for the moral high ground.
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Because we totally should piss and spit on the corpses of our enemies. By this show of disrespect you are showing the monster you truly are. These soldiers are the representatives of the United States, not just of the military, in the eyes of those in the Middle East. You will never win support if you do shit like this. You'll just make people hate you more. Have more people call you sick, horrible monsters who don't even know how to respect the deceased. Even Neanderthals we have recently found respected their dead.
They don't just make the Marines look bad, but the entire US military and the US. Why this can be forgivable to anyone is beyond me.
Though I'd be interested to see those who say 'the corpse is just a piece of meat or a pile of bones' react to me chopping up their family members then tossing them in a sewer THEN pissing and defecating in that sewer. It would make me look like a complete monster, right? If you cannot respect your dead you cannot be considered someone I'd like to think to share my species. If mere animals respect their dead, why can't you? That makes you less than much of anything.
War may be sickening and horrible but we can try to make it less so by being a bit more respectful to the dead.
You don't need to believe in anything like life after death or a God or anything to show basic respect to someone who was once a family member, a friend, or just a God damn human being.
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I guess that analogy doesn't really work since Art's family members probably aren't terrorists, so he probably would view the situation differently. I think killing people is worse than pissing on their bodies.
I have to agree with Vene though. These people probably have a similar view to Shane, but subverted their conscience for the sake of it, and that is just repulsive.
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Well, Lexi, if you are an honorable person then one would think that you should afford enemy dead the exact same respect you give your own family.
Which tells me that these men are not honorable nor are those who agree with what was done.
Or maybe my views of honor are drastically different from other peoples' in this day and age. I would not be surprised.
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Well, I think it varies. If someone really hate another person, they probably wouldn't give them the same treatment.
I think that the dead should all be treated the same; Organ donors and worm food. There's no reason to give them special treatment good or bad.
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If I were to kill someone I really hated I would not desecrate their corpse. Nay, I would give them a proper burial. Their dead body has done nothing to me. They are gone and cannot bother me anymore. I will be judged by others for what I do to my enemy. So it is doubly important I am the more honorable, the bigger person, and offer what I can to the dead body of my enemy that has so grieved me. Though my enemy may not have afforded me the same I will do to them what I would desire from them.
But I suppose that is just me, my honor, and my belief system talking.
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Dude. A corpse is not the same thing as a brick. You do not disrespect the dead. Even if they were your enemies in life, once they die, they are what YOU will eventually become. To defile a corpse is to doubly defile yourself.
A corpse is just dead meat. There is nothing clean or respectful about a corpse; they twitch, burp, fart, shit, sit up, slough off their skin, and otherwise embarrass themselves perfectly well on their own. Whatever there was of the person within dissipated with the cessation of brain activity; respect for the memory of the dead is one thing, but the corpse itself is insensate.
...respect for the memory of the dead is one thing, but the corpse itself is insensate.
So we should respect the dead but not their bodies?
(http://i3.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/005/545/OpoQQ.jpg)
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I don't personally think of corpses as anything special, but for those of us who've been dragged from funeral to funeral, it's hard to say that what I think should be done with corpses should be forced on everyone else.
Consider this-- the corpse is the most tangible reminder of who that person was. While to our soldiers it may be a reminder of a disgusting human being or a war they want to get the hell out of, to the dead person's family that corpse is the only physical thing they have left of their loved one. These people were not terrorists to their families (or so I would hope), they were husbands, sons, fathers, cousins, friends. These were not universally terrible people, so to expect everyone, including their loved ones, to treat them as such is self-centered and moronic.
Back to the corpses themselves. Since the body itself is the best reminder of who the person once inhabiting it was, the treatment of the corpse is often tied to how one would treat that person in life, albeit symbolically (I hope no one would bury or burn loved ones while they're alive :P). It really is an issue of respect, not for the pile of dead meat and bones but for the person who once inhabited said pile.
And for those would say "sentimental symbolism is moronic", consider this: we use symbolism EVERY SINGLE DAY. Words themselves are mere symbols; we can't transmit our thoughts to one another directly, so we've manufactured and agreed upon the rules of usage of phonemes and alphabets (in English, mind, not speaking for other languages here) so that we can try our best to communicate what we really think. When we tell people that we love them, do we have a concrete object called 'love' to give to them? No, not really, so it's an abstract idea we've tried to put into relatively concrete terms through language and, hopefully, actions.
Additionally, as someone else already noted, these soldiers did NOT view the bodies as mere hunks of meat. They attributed symbolic meaning to their actions, too. I doubt that these people go about their daily lives pissing on roadkill and ground beef.
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So much for winning the "hearts & minds"...
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If I were to kill someone I really hated I would not desecrate their corpse. Nay, I would give them a proper burial. Their dead body has done nothing to me. They are gone and cannot bother me anymore. I will be judged by others for what I do to my enemy. So it is doubly important I am the more honorable, the bigger person, and offer what I can to the dead body of my enemy that has so grieved me. Though my enemy may not have afforded me the same I will do to them what I would desire from them.
But I suppose that is just me, my honor, and my belief system talking.
But you already killed them, so whatever you do can't really top that.
But what you're saying is that the members of the Talisban probably would take this worse, so it is a bad idea. And that we better think about what the others side would think rather than what we would. If they find it honorable to bury the bodies, then we do that. If they find it dishonorable to pee on the bodies, we shouldn't. And vice versa. It isn't our perspective we should be taking into consideration theirs.
...respect for the memory of the dead is one thing, but the corpse itself is insensate.
So we should respect the dead but not their bodies?
Nobody is calling for a book burning.
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How can I not do anything worse than cleanly kill somebody? That's rather odd. How is it not worse for me to be disrespectful to the corpse of my enemy by voiding my bowels or pissing on their corpse? Like I said, it's probably just my honor code talking. Unless of course you're trying to say killing someone is disrespectful which is just a cause for confusing the fuck out of the subject. And I'd rather not get into the ethics and the like of actually killing someone.
If we tried to show a sign of good faith by doing Muslim death rites for Bin Laden and quickly burying him at sea, then why can we not at the least stop from using someone's body as our personal latrine?
These marines are not honorable.
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If we get there in time, yeah.
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Yeah, speaking as someone getting ready to actually go over there and get shot at, fuck these assholes. Even forgetting the fact that this was a horrible, disrespectful thing to do, this is just giving them more propaganda to inspire more people to come and shoot at us. I don't like getting shot at. I'd rather not add to the number of people doing it.
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Who thinks Karma will bite them in the ass?
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How many of us here have expressed a desire to desecrate Fred Phelps grave? I see to recall a thread on the old board where quite a few people came up with rather creative ways to give Fred a nice little post mortem 'fuck-you, you piece of shit' message when the time comes.
Fred is just a troll that most, if not all of us, really only know by reputation. Those marines on the other hand, have actually fought the Taliban; they actually have a reason to hate them.
Is it right?
No, but it is human nature. And for that reason I can't get overly annoyed at the marines. What annoys me is that they are compromising the mission. They should have known better. (i.e. not got caught)
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...respect for the memory of the dead is one thing, but the corpse itself is insensate.
So we should respect the dead but not their bodies?
(http://i3.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/005/545/OpoQQ.jpg)
Maybe I worded it wrong, but what I was intending to say is that the respect due to the dead is directed at who they were as a person - their consciousness, in other words - and not directed at the meat they're situated in. The corpse is just organs, muscle, and other flesh; it itself is insensate and does not house (whether you believe in the soul or, like me, believe consciousness is a bi-product of biochemistry) the person who died anymore. Ultimately, it's not any different from the corpse of any other animal.
I don't agree with what the marines did, for the record. I just hold no illusions about the sanctity or even cleanliness of death.
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How many of us here have expressed a desire to desecrate Fred Phelps grave? I see to recall a thread on the old board where quite a few people came up with rather creative ways to give Fred a nice little post mortem 'fuck-you, you piece of shit' message when the time comes.
Fred is just a troll that most, if not all of us, really only know by reputation. Those marines on the other hand, have actually fought the Taliban; they actually have a reason to hate them.
Is it right?
No, but it is human nature. And for that reason I can't get overly annoyed at the marines. What annoys me is that they are compromising the mission. They should have known better. (i.e. not got caught)
Well there's saying and doing.
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How many of us here have expressed a desire to desecrate Fred Phelps grave? I see to recall a thread on the old board where quite a few people came up with rather creative ways to give Fred a nice little post mortem 'fuck-you, you piece of shit' message when the time comes.
Fred is just a troll that most, if not all of us, really only know by reputation. Those marines on the other hand, have actually fought the Taliban; they actually have a reason to hate them.
Is it right?
No, but it is human nature. And for that reason I can't get overly annoyed at the marines. What annoys me is that they are compromising the mission. They should have known better. (i.e. not got caught)
Well there's saying and doing.
Yes. Many of us talk about committing acts of violence that are physically impossible. Just because I have the urge to castrate Phelps with the spur of a platypus doesn't mean I could actually do it. Even if we could, most people have the ability to conduct ourselves despite our urges. That's what distinguishes us from a crab or a spider or something else that relies on instinct and not actual thought.
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The important thing to remember about this particular act is that, regardless of whether you think corpses deserve more than this or believe them to be nothing but pieces of meat, this gesture makes our soldiers and our nation look horrible. It's no way to win people over to your cause, especially when that is a major priority in Afghanistan, where many people don't even know why we're there:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1YAv_tPmho
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Naturally Rick Perry is defending the Marines and using this as an excuse to attack the Obama Administration for its "disdain for the military."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/15/rick-perry-marines_n_1207350.html?icid=maing-grid10%7Chtmlws-main-bb%7Cdl2%7Csec3_lnk2%26pLid%3D127844 (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/15/rick-perry-marines_n_1207350.html?icid=maing-grid10%7Chtmlws-main-bb%7Cdl2%7Csec3_lnk2%26pLid%3D127844)
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While I agree with Lex, that once a person is dead, the body is just a piece of carbon waiting to decompose (Never understood open casket thing, with the loved ones sobbing all around it), I do understand that many people may not share my views. That's why even if my most hated person at the moment (Looking at you, crazy psychopathic step-sister) were to suddenly drop dead, I would not drop my pants and take a wiz on her body. Besides I'd probably end up aiming wrong and wet my pants. Damn men, you've got a built-in firehose.
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A dead body is dead, therefor nothing can hurt it, but we should hold our soldiers up to a higher standard than this.
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How many of us here have expressed a desire to desecrate Fred Phelps grave? I see to recall a thread on the old board where quite a few people came up with rather creative ways to give Fred a nice little post mortem 'fuck-you, you piece of shit' message when the time comes.
Fred is just a troll that most, if not all of us, really only know by reputation. Those marines on the other hand, have actually fought the Taliban; they actually have a reason to hate them.
Is it right?
No, but it is human nature. And for that reason I can't get overly annoyed at the marines. What annoys me is that they are compromising the mission. They should have known better. (i.e. not got caught)
Well there's saying and doing.
Yes. Many of us talk about committing acts of violence that are physically impossible. Just because I have the urge to castrate Phelps with the spur of a platypus doesn't mean I could actually do it. Even if we could, most people have the ability to conduct ourselves despite our urges. That's what distinguishes us from a crab or a spider or something else that relies on instinct and not actual thought.
What Smurfette said.
Though I may say something that doesn't necessarily mean I'll do it. I may hate some people with the fire of a thousand suns but that doesn't mean I'd go thru with my idle fantasies. They're just that, idle fantasies.
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Naturally Rick Perry is defending the Marines and using this as an excuse to attack the Obama Administration for its "disdain for the military."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/15/rick-perry-marines_n_1207350.html?icid=maing-grid10%7Chtmlws-main-bb%7Cdl2%7Csec3_lnk2%26pLid%3D127844 (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/15/rick-perry-marines_n_1207350.html?icid=maing-grid10%7Chtmlws-main-bb%7Cdl2%7Csec3_lnk2%26pLid%3D127844)
Oh Rick Perry...always trying to score some sort of political point somehow.
Ironbite-good for you Perry...good for you.
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Might as well. His career is over after his little forgetful incident, "Strong" video, and claiming we should go back to Iraq.
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How many of us here have expressed a desire to desecrate Fred Phelps grave? I see to recall a thread on the old board where quite a few people came up with rather creative ways to give Fred a nice little post mortem 'fuck-you, you piece of shit' message when the time comes.
Fred is just a troll that most, if not all of us, really only know by reputation. Those marines on the other hand, have actually fought the Taliban; they actually have a reason to hate them.
Is it right?
No, but it is human nature. And for that reason I can't get overly annoyed at the marines. What annoys me is that they are compromising the mission. They should have known better. (i.e. not got caught)
Well there's saying and doing.
Yes. Many of us talk about committing acts of violence that are physically impossible. Just because I have the urge to castrate Phelps with the spur of a platypus doesn't mean I could actually do it. Even if we could, most people have the ability to conduct ourselves despite our urges. That's what distinguishes us from a crab or a spider or something else that relies on instinct and not actual thought.
What Smurfette said.
Though I may say something that doesn't necessarily mean I'll do it. I may hate some people with the fire of a thousand suns but that doesn't mean I'd go thru with my idle fantasies. They're just that, idle fantasies.
But, that thought is in the back of your mind. That's the problem. Humans are civilized, not domesticated. Take away the things that make us (or at the very least allow us) to play nice, and we don't. History has shown us time, and time, and time, and time (ad nauseum) again that we are nasty little pieces of work.
We ask these men to kill for us and we train them to do it damn well. Unfortunately, part of that effectiveness comes from dehumanizing the enemy, and when you do that, shit like this can happen.
My irritation is reserved for the system that put these men in this situation since this is hardly the first time we have seen the rules of war utterly disregarded with, lets face it, presidential approval. If we're not telling them to play nice and are in fact demonstrating the opposite, how can we expect them to?
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Yet somehow soldiers ages past have been able to give their enemies respect when they have been killed. I really can't excuse it.
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Yet somehow soldiers ages past have been able to give their enemies respect when they have been killed. I really can't excuse it.
No.
Some have, some haven't. The difference is that in the past what happened on the battlefield tended to stay on the battlefield.
I remember watching and old series on WWII when I was a kid (I can't remember the name and it was pretty old when I was watching it). There was one scene where a Soviet soldier was smashing the crosses marking German graves because of his hatred of them due to the atrocities they, not them specifically, but the German army as a whole, committed on his countrymen. It was filmed on 8mm, or the Russian equivalent, by a soldier who's job was war reporter, processed and developed in a military facility, and was only released because the military wanted it to be released. That's why the past seems so much more sanitary, it was filtered and spoon fed.
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This is a brick: (http://earth911.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/single-brick.jpg)
This is a corpse: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadaver (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadaver) (linked to err on the side of caution)
The first is a brick. It has been a brick from the moment of its creation. It is nothing more than a building block.
I was referring to L's claims of "do not disrespect the dead (just because, seemingly)". I know full well bricks and corpses are both different objects.
The second was, at one point in time, a living, breathing human being. When it was alive it had friends and family that loved it. When it died it was mourned by those it left behind. Social species that we are, no one dies truly alone. There will always be one other human being who noticed their passing. Who now misses them.
When you piss on a corpse you are symbolically saying "Your loved one is unworthy of respect. This person that you cared about is now no more than my latrine."
All that is simply symbolism and cultural values. All of which is highly subjective at best.
And the L was correct. You might never be a brick (some freaky cremation aside) but we will all one day be a corpse. To disrespect your fellow man in such a manner is to disrespect yourself.
We'll also all most likely be a bunch of carbon dioxide atoms one day too, but you don't see people getting their panties in a twist about respecting those little guys. Like I said, "pissing on corpse = disrespect of self" is a purely subjective concept.
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Google really is your friend. The series I was thinking of is 'The World at War.' It was made in 1973, produced by Jeremy Isaacs and narrated by Sir Lawrence Olivier. I haven't found any you tube episodes yet, but I'd imagine it would have been the Stalingrad episode.
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Yet somehow soldiers ages past have been able to give their enemies respect when they have been killed. I really can't excuse it.
No.
Some have, some haven't. The difference is that in the past what happened on the battlefield tended to stay on the battlefield.
I remember watching and old series on WWII when I was a kid (I can't remember the name and it was pretty old when I was watching it). There was one scene where a Soviet soldier was smashing the crosses marking German graves because of his hatred of them due to the atrocities they, not them specifically, but the German army as a whole, committed on his countrymen. It was filmed on 8mm, or the Russian equivalent, by a soldier who's job was war reporter, processed and developed in a military facility, and was only released because the military wanted it to be released. That's why the past seems so much more sanitary, it was filtered and spoon fed.
Smashing crosses is a bit different than say, digging up the dead (which he could've done) and pissing on it (which he also could've done). So it really doesn't exactly compare.
You're fighting a losing battle here. You're really not going to convince me that it's somehow okay to desecrate the corpse of your enemy just because someone else did it or it might have happened in the past.
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That is not an argument anyone has made in this thread.
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That is not an argument anyone has made in this thread.
...uh...
Question: has there been any known incidents of Taliban doing the same or similar to American corpse?
Could be wrong, but it does SEEM to be making one of those arguments. As for the other one, Canadian Mojo has, essentially, been saying that we shouldn't get pissed about it because it's happened before.
I can't find fault with the idea that this bullshit happens because of how soldiers are trained, though...I DO find fault with soldiers being trained that way, but.
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I might be wrong about KXNO2, but neither Canadian Mojo nor Art Vandaley said anything about desecrating a corpse being okay. Art just said that what counts as desecration is context-dependent & Canadian just said he blames the system.
I also think it's a sign that the thread has spun into silly semantics territory when it's now looking like we're about to start arguing what the worst form of desecration is:
Smashing crosses is a bit different than say, digging up the dead (which he could've done) and pissing on it (which he also could've done). So it really doesn't exactly compare.
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Smashing crosses is a bit different than say, digging up the dead (which he could've done) and pissing on it (which he also could've done). So it really doesn't exactly compare.
It was in the middle of a Russian winter, I don't think digging them up was really an option, and I doubt he really wanted to whip it out and risk a case of frostbite. ;)
You're fighting a losing battle here. You're really not going to convince me that it's somehow okay to desecrate the corpse of your enemy just because someone else did it or it might have happened in the past.
I'm not trying to convince you it's okay. It's war. There is nothing okay about about war. There are only differing layers of suck. At its heart it is killing people and destroying things to get what you want. It has always been this way, and it always will be. I'm just saying that I can't condemn them too harshly when we stick young men in a war zone and expect them to play the white knight in a live fire zone when everybody back home, including their bosses, refuse to do the same.
DPD, I just saw your post when I went to post mine (Yay new forum software). I'm just saying that wars have always been like this and they always will be. If we have a problem with this sort of thing then we should address the root cause; having wars and pretending that they are nice neat tidy little affairs.
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I can and I will judge them harshly for making it harder for themselves and their peers to come back home safely and not be seen as utter monsters by the other side.
There are ways to do things properly and honorably and there are ways not to. This is an example of a way not to. Just because it's war doesn't mean you become some sort of uncivilized creature towards your enemy. We don't want them to do it to us. Don't give them another reason to hate you, your buddy, your organization or your country and we'll be cool.
@Lithp- it has been all along about the desecration of a corpse or bodily remains. So I don't see where you get 'silly' semantics. Bashing a cross is not desecrating the corpse itself. It is still a lousy thing to do though.
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I personally find it a bit perverse that urinating on a corpse (or smashing their headstone, whatever) is seen as worse than actually putting a bullet into his body and depriving him of life in the first place. But, people are fucking weird and I stand by my former statement that the damning aspect here is the intent behind the action.
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Question: has there been any known incidents of Taliban doing the same or similar to American corpse?
quite possibly, if so, so what? Are you suggesting that because some Taliban somewhere may have done something disrespectful to Americans that Americans are justified doing the same thing? So much for the moral high ground.
No no, I was just wondering. Sorry for asking.
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I personally find it a bit perverse that urinating on a corpse (or smashing their headstone, whatever) is seen as worse than actually putting a bullet into his body and depriving him of life in the first place. But, people are fucking weird and I stand by my former statement that the damning aspect here is the intent behind the action.
I can't think of a way to explain this without applying mathematical values to it, so we're going to do just that.
Simply urinating someone = slightly bad, unless you're both into that sorta thing. Let's give this a bad value of 5...
Someone dying = very bad. Let's give this a bad value of 40.
Someone being killed = also very bad. Let's give this a bad value of 44.
Let's say that any bad value including and beyond 45 is considered "beyond justifiably bad".
Let's say someone dug up your loved one's corpse and urinated on it. This would be a 45. There would be nothing to justify doing it. So it's horrendous.
Or, let's say, you killed someone and urinated on them. This is now a 49. Once again, there's nothing to justify the bad of what you've done.
Trying to separate death and urinating on a corpse is like trying to separate grapes from wine.
EDIT:
People can claim "it's just symbolic", and they're right... but it's also useless saying that. People will take offense to symbolic gestures. Repeating 'It's symbolic it's symbolic' doesn't accomplish a damn thing. It's about perception. And until you change everyone's perception, it's pointless.
Humanity practically thrives off of symbolism. Just because you recognize that something is symbolic and thus doesn't have a good cause... doesn't mean that it stops existing, even in spite of the lack of a good cause. Saying "People shouldn't get upset over it" isn't a good argument because people DO get upset over about it. It's like seeing a dragon attack your city, kill half of its population, and say "Well, dragons shouldn't exist." It's not going to vanish in a puff of logic, it's going to eat your face.
Deal with the problem, instead of saying that the problem shouldn't exist... because the problem DOES exist.
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I don't think it works that way.
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I don't think it works that way.
I don't think your face works that way, but it does. And that's my point.
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I can't think of a way to explain this without applying mathematical values to it, so we're going to do just that.
**snipped for length**
That makes sense. For the person who was unfortunate enough to get snuffed, however, being killed trumps whatever happens to them post-mortum. Violating the body afterward certainly makes things worse, but of the two actions, killing someone is far worse than peeing on their body. Maybe more outrage should be generated for the fact that people died, rather than that someone used their leftovers as a toilet.
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I imagine for the families of the victim, yes, the dying is worse than the being urinated on, but the urinating is just, as it's said, adding insult to injury.
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People can claim "it's just symbolic", and they're right... but it's also useless saying that. People will take offense to symbolic gestures. Repeating 'It's symbolic it's symbolic' doesn't accomplish a damn thing. It's about perception. And until you change everyone's perception, it's pointless.
Humanity practically thrives off of symbolism. Just because you recognize that something is symbolic and thus doesn't have a good cause... doesn't mean that it stops existing, even in spite of the lack of a good cause. Saying "People shouldn't get upset over it" isn't a good argument because people DO get upset over about it. It's like seeing a dragon attack your city, kill half of its population, and say "Well, dragons shouldn't exist." It's not going to vanish in a puff of logic, it's going to eat your face.
Deal with the problem, instead of saying that the problem shouldn't exist... because the problem DOES exist.
I completely agree with this. What I said was that I personally don't see anything objectively wrong with the act of pissing on a corpse, so I've no issue with the action itself. However, the fact that these soldiers' jobs are just as much to win the approval of the local population (largely impossible, but that's the nature of a military occupation) as it is to kill insurgents, and given the prevailing local beliefs and ethics, they most likely between the seven of them (or however many it was) added enough material for the insurgents to work with to gain recruits to easily last them until everyone still present gives up and withdraws. As such, they've completely failed at what they've been trained and are being paid to do and I believe should be punished most harshly for their pretty much single-handedly undoing what little progress had previously been made (if any) and then some in the winning the approval of the population of America's military presence and new democratic (somewhat) government.
I'm not accusing you of misinterpreting my first post as me saying "desecrating corpses itself isn't inherently wrong, therefore these marines did nothing wrong", just that your post seems to articulate the logic behind my own quite nicely. Hope that clarifies things to those who did.
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The important thing to remember about this particular act is that, regardless of whether you think corpses deserve more than this or believe them to be nothing but pieces of meat, this gesture makes our soldiers and our nation look horrible. It's no way to win people over to your cause, especially when that is a major priority in Afghanistan, where many people don't even know why we're there:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1YAv_tPmho
There's a reason why many people haven't heard of 9/11- on a global scale it was insignificant. Objectively, it wasn't a big deal. There are two reasons we consider it so meaningful: constant propaganda from the Western Media and politicians and because it has the near-unique status of an attack on Americans, not by them. That's the only difference between 9/11 and, say, the massacre at Mazar-i-Sharif, which noone in the West has heard of.
As to the OP, I think we can start worrying about mistreating the dead once we've stopped mistreating the living. It'd sure be harder to disrespect their corpses if we didn't kill so damn many.
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Meh, it lacks class, but its hardly the worst atrocity we should be worried about. While I'm not actually that worried about the sensibilities of terrorists, I believe the Golden Rule should always apply to combatants... i.e. don't do stuff to their guys you wouldn't like to see done to ours. Therefore, no torture, cruel or inhumane treatment, or corpse desecration, unless you are happy to see it done to your own guys when they are casualties or PWs.
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Meh, it lacks class, but its hardly the worst atrocity we should be worried about. While I'm not actually that worried about the sensibilities of terrorists, I believe the Golden Rule should always apply to combatants... i.e. don't do stuff to their guys you wouldn't like to see done to ours. Therefore, no torture, cruel or inhumane treatment, or corpse desecration, unless you are happy to see it done to your own guys when they are casualties or PWs.
Yeah, it is bad enough when the enemy is making up things about how atrocious you are in order to drum up support. But then to go and make all those atrocities true? Not gonna help at all.
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Just reading an article in my local newspaper stating that we shouldn't be bashing these Marines since the bodies were of 'mass murdering terrorists', and that Obama should be ashamed for not supporting these troops. It was the Left-wing Media that was blowing this out of proportion (Like they did with Abu-dahb prison) This newspaper also stated that Obama was horrible for cutting spending .....to the Defense budget.
Guess where I live? Texas, Alabama? Nope...
Canada...
Sometimes I hate my town.
EDIT: Took me a while... but I found a link
http://www.torontosun.com/2012/01/16/tempest-in-a-pee-pot-fascinating-response-by-media-party-to-marines-urinating-video
This is basically an editorial by our country wide 'true voice of the people' newspaper chain. I'd actually read it more if they were actually civil, like the National Post.
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Do they have a website by any chance? I'd love to read this article.
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I realize I'm probably not going to garner much love when I say this, but I actually did support the war in Afghanistan. Why? It's quite simple: Osama killed my countrymen and I wanted that fucker dead. Naturally, the only source of information we were given (the idiots in GWB's cabinet) told us he was there, and I wanted revenge, so I supported it. Even when Bush started severely fucking up the search for bin Laden, I was hoping that at least the soldiers, who were more competent than their Commander in Chief, would find him even by accident. Well, 10 years after the fact, he's dead. I'm satisfied, and I'd like to see the troops pull out as soon as doing so won't finish ruining the country we invaded. Unfortunately, as some random asshole with an internet connection without being privvy to the info Obama gets from the CIA, I have no friggin' clue when that'll be. Hopefully soon; we've been at war for just under half my life now, and I'd like it to end.
As for the troops in general: I have a ton of respect for the men and women who volunteer to fight for the US, much more so than I have for the wars we're fighting. Basically if I could sum up my thoughts on the military situation, I consider the wars Bush got us into "a damn waste of incredible talent". If only we had committed to fighting real enemies instead of the imaginary ones we've been chasing for a decade... maybe we'd actually get shit done somewhere. Don't get me wrong, Saddam was a fundie dictator and murderer, and I'm not sorry he's gone, but... goddamn did we fuck up two countries (three if you count our budget now) that did not need the kind of "strategy" Bush used.
As for these soldiers in particular... I do not support them. Call it a holdover from my childhood indoctrination, but I do have more respect for a dead body than that, even if it was an enemy. Doing that just inspires an equal lack of respect from them should they kill our troops, and it brings us no closer to ending the conflict... why would you even bother with it? You killed the bastard; move on.
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I supported the war in Afghanistan, and the one in Iraq. You're allowed to rethink these things or disagree with the way they're conducted when more data become avalailable.
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Enilad, he was in Afghanistan. We know because, among other things, the Taliban told us he was there. He just didn't stay there after we went in.
The intel on Iraq is, of course, another matter entirely.
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Enilad, he was in Afghanistan. We know because, among other things, the Taliban told us he was there. He just didn't stay there after we went in.
The intel on Iraq is, of course, another matter entirely.
... ... ... ... ... ...
We know because, among other things, the Taliban told us he was there.
...........
told us he was there.
(http://www.build-my-home-computer.com/image-files/bsod.jpg)
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Blows your mind eh?
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You have to understand, when the US was attacked I was 10 and still living with both my parents, in my father's fact-proof conservative fundie bunker as it were. So some of my actual knowledge of the era when the wars began consists solely of old Daily Show/Colbert Report episodes. So facts like that were sadly lost on me when it was all happening.
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I think most people in the West supported the war in Afghanistan. I did, as well as the war in Iraq. Now, I'm unsure about Iraq. I still think Afghanistan was both justified and necessary. Should we be out by now? Yes, because 10 years is enough time for the United States military to finish beating the crap out of just about anyone.
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I was against both wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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I'm with Rabbit. I was against both wars.
With Iraq there was never any real justification. The Saddam was a bad guy justification was an ex post facto one given that no one gave a shit until they figured out the Weapons of Mass Destruction were a complite lie. (A complete lie that killed the career of one of the few Republicans I respect in Colin Powell).
Afghanistan, we knew he was there but really is getting one guy sufficient reason to go to war against a whole country and fuck it up badly. Personally I think the bad guy justification was much more warranted in Afghanistan where the Taliban were fucking awful. Including the destruction of statues carved into mountains which were thousands of years old with RPGs because they represented idolatory. But war is never going to improve things. At least Saddam took care of all the Babylonian artefacts which were in his possession - which is more than you can say for the allied forces.
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I am/was against both wars as well. The Taliban offered to give up bin Laden to a third party, but the US refused. Now before people talk about how shit the Taliban is, their enemy (and the side the US helped), the Northern Alliance, were no better. The Taliban weren't really popular anyway among the Afghans as most of the Taliban were foreigners imposing a theocracy. But Afghanistan borders China and Iran, another airbase can't be a bad thing.
The Iraq war was complete bullshit and everyone knew it. The WMDs did not exist, Al Qaeda and Saddam hated each other, Iran and Iraq hated each others. But another airbase next to Iran and near Russia can't be terrible.
http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-who-won-iraq-answer-anyone-who-stayed-out/
As regards to the Marines desecrating the corpses, I'm not surprised, neither are the military establishment.
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I would just like to add my two cents here.
I am not suggesting that I am ok with the actions of these Marines.
There are factors that must be taken into consideration. We take young men and train them to be killers. Standard Infantry, especially Marine Infantry, is by no means soft in any way. They teach you to be able to become monsters. We cannot be surprised that out of our entire Armed Forces that there will be some that will behave in this fashion. It's just a matter of statistics.
Additionally, in regards to the urination on the corpse, that could be a case of severe disrespect or it could be a way that these soldiers are dealing with the trauma they experience on the battlefield. Obviously, this isn't a healthy or appropriate vent, but I know that when I was in the shit and dealing with getting shot at and killing I had things I did to vent.
We had games we would play among different units. These were always in the form of stories from being out on patrol...Funniest Sound at Point of Death, Most Surprised Expression at Sight of a Flash Bang. Most Embarassing Kill. Stuff like that. Some of you may view that as sick, but frankly, I don't care. When you're in that situation you MUST add humor to the situation. Anything to take away from the fact that you're dealing with incoming fire, killing and seeing close friends die in explosions and gun fights. In short, these men are traumatized. They need help. Everything they did was still very inappropriate though.
On the subject of corpses. To me, a corpse is just a sack of meat. If someone called me right now and said someone had dug up my grandmother and was having sex with the remains, I would be more concerned about the guy getting captured so he could have his head examined. Once the brain stops, and the central nervous system shuts down...it's just a pile of organic mass that will decompose. I don't like the idea of grave yards. I feel they are a bit uneccissary.
If you want to remember someone, do it with the memories you had and shared with that person. Tell your friends, children, anyone...That way, the memory of that person lives on for as long as the stories are told. While I understand that people want to be able to visit a specific spot to "visit", I would rather they go to my favorite spot in Gambril State Park and sit on the rock I always sit on. I definitely wouldn't want to be buried in a field with a bunch of other people in caskets after being pumped full of chemicals.
When a corpse decomposes in a coffin, it's a very slow process. In the end, it winds up being this horrifying black sludge that just fills the container. I truly don't understand why we do this. If I could be just tossed in a forest somewhere to decompose or be eaten by scavengers, that would be just delightful. At least my corpse would give something back at the end of my existance. Yet, since we have actual laws stating how we can be disposed of, I will have to settle for cremation.
After that, I don't care what they do with it. Throw it away. Bake it in a cake and give it to someone you don't like and don't tell them. Shoot me out of a cannon. "Antique" someone with me. I don't give a hoot.
But, that's just my opinion and like assholes, everyone has one and they all stink.
-Joe