Who is responsible?

[Cain]

The Milgram experiments.

The thing isn't that we aren't responsible for our own actions, the problem is that we are smart monkeys whose wiring too easily influenced to do terrible things because other people are doing them or because someone in charge said it was all right. Soldiers everywhere are going to act like soldiers, and that should scare you.

3/40 in the Milgram experiments refused, though.  It's not a high number.  But it shows resistance is possible.

Above and beyond that, the cultural cues soldiers are raised with can have a massive influence on the conduct of the conflict.  In the English Civil War, levels of violence were far lower than earlier models suggested they should be, and it wasn't until the models were revised for the cultural environment the war took place in.  In fact, the English Civil War is an ideal case study for how institutions, leaders and culture interact to constrain political violence. Leadership, could in fact be the deciding factor, as Neil J Mitchell has suggested, in explaining the incidence of atrocities.  As he notes, Cromwell and Sherman's armies, while having a reputation for ruthlessness in the field, were marked by exceptionally low incidences of rape, plunder and murder. 

And military leadership will come down to how the institution of the military is structured.  How are leaders selected?  What talents are they looking for, what backgrounds, what qualities?  The American Army, much like the British, had banned the buying of commissions, I believe, and instituted advanced officer training fairly early on, and such training was generally consummerate with the political environment of the nation in question.  In Germany, Junkers were made military officers.  No matter how incompetent or cruel, a Junker would be considered more suitable to lead troops than a commoner.  Modern liberal democracies select for leadership skill, mental stability and political loyalty.  The German Army selected based on aristocratic family connections and impressive mustaches.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

The Milgram experiments.

The thing isn't that we aren't responsible for our own actions, the problem is that we are smart monkeys whose wiring too easily influenced to do terrible things because other people are doing them or because someone in charge said it was all right. Soldiers everywhere are going to act like soldiers, and that should scare you.

3/40 in the Milgram experiments refused, though.  It's not a high number.  But it shows resistance is possible.

Above and beyond that, the cultural cues soldiers are raised with can have a massive influence on the conduct of the conflict.  In the English Civil War, levels of violence were far lower than earlier models suggested they should be, and it wasn't until the models were revised for the cultural environment the war took place in.  In fact, the English Civil War is an ideal case study for how institutions, leaders and culture interact to constrain political violence. Leadership, could in fact be the deciding factor, as Neil J Mitchell has suggested, in explaining the incidence of atrocities.  As he notes, Cromwell and Sherman's armies, while having a reputation for ruthlessness in the field, were marked by exceptionally low incidences of rape, plunder and murder. 

And military leadership will come down to how the institution of the military is structured.  How are leaders selected?  What talents are they looking for, what backgrounds, what qualities?  The American Army, much like the British, had banned the buying of commissions, I believe, and instituted advanced officer training fairly early on, and such training was generally consummerate with the political environment of the nation in question.  In Germany, Junkers were made military officers.  No matter how incompetent or cruel, a Junker would be considered more suitable to lead troops than a commoner.  Modern liberal democracies select for leadership skill, mental stability and political loyalty.  The German Army selected based on aristocratic family connections and impressive mustaches.

It was more than that; I believe it was close to 1/5, and after dissenters were planted, the number of subjects who refused to go further skyrocketed, which shows the power of public dissent.

[Cain]

Troof! You can't even completely blame the guys in charge. Chances are they believe that war is the only answer.

Sure you can.  Just because your belief is sincere, it doesn't absolve you of any responsibility.  "I sincerely believed rounding up the citizens of Lidice and killing every male over the age of 16 was justified, in revenge for the muder of Reinhard Heydrich.  I mean, one of his assassins came from there!"  Yeah, I'm not buying it.

Making them kill isn't as easy as it first might sound. You have to rewire their brains a bit. You do this by dehumanising the enemy. They're hun, they're gooks, they're towel heads...

Yes, every army has a tendency to dehumanise the enemy, to make killing them easier.  But not every army goes on to slaughter 12 million civilians.  Not every army grabs people off the streets, cuts the arms off of women, sets them on fire and then sends them running in the direction of enemy position.  Not every army bayonets babies and then displays the corpses to break the will of the enemy.  Not every army selects chosen ethnic groups for complete extermination, especially when they are not even ethnic groups doing most of the military resistance.

When you're done then, in the eyes of your footsoldiers, what they're dealing with aren't proper human beings. Why would you treat them like human beings? Just cos the rules say so but the rules also say kill the fucking things so there's no harm in flaunting those rules a bit.

Why?  Because you have orders to do so.  Because once looting and raping becomes endemic, army discipline breaks down.  Because if you don't follow the rules, the enemy has no reason to do so either, and they might be a lot fucking scarier than you.  Because your officer corps are even scarier than the enemy, and they'll sure as fuck hang you for engaging in such things.  Armies do not need psychopaths, do not want them.  They want people who follow orders.  Furthermore, there are good strategic reasons to keep a lid on any soldiers more base desires.  If the German Army had positioned themselves as liberators, rather than slaughterers, they would have faced less resistance.  Their supply lines would have been more robust.  Hell, Ukrainian crop yields could have supplied the entire Army, most likely.  They would have had more material and personnel for fighting the Soviets on the front line, and just maybe, they would have smashed through Stalingrad and gained access to the Caucasian oil fields, thereby winning a massive strategic victory and possibly knocking the Soviet Union out of the war.

[Cain]

It was more than that; I believe it was close to 1/5, and after dissenters were planted, the number of subjects who refused to go further skyrocketed, which shows the power of public dissent.

I'm using the only figures I have to hand, which are specifically for Milgram's 18th variation on the electrocution experiment, where the subject was the one taking notes from the actor being tortured.

[Cain]

I think what I was trying to get at is that genocide is a VERY human thing to do.

Depends what you mean by "genocide".  The deliberate wiping out of an entire ethnic group is actually a fairly modern phenomenon, and has a lot to do with pseduo-science racial theories and how they link into nationalistic myths (also a relatively recent pheomonenon).  Sure, human history is full of acts of massacres, cities being reduced to rubble and then salted (or not), but the concept of ethnic groups with innate characteristics simply didn't exist until a couple of hundred years ago, and so neither did the idea of wiping particular ones out.  Furthermore, most historical examples of warfare were part of the process of empire-building and, as we know, empires tend to be much more cosmopolitan that nation-states.  Genghis Khan, for example, was very keen that his subjects keep following their own native religions.

There is also the logistical aspect.  Unless you're dealing with a very small ethnic group, genocide is impossible for anything less than an industralised state to undertake.

It still may be a very human thing to do, but it's only actually been conceptually and logistically possible since about 1800 or so.

[Salty]

It looks as though, as with so many things, my view on this has been over simplistic. Perhaps partially to blame is the education I got in Germany re: That Stuff. The lectures I got were certainly apologetic, heavily focused on This Can Never Happen Again. With weary, slightly disdainful looks in my general direction when the US came up.

But it's kind of funny because they didn't really focus on the way in which civilians were murdered in such numbers. At all. But I imagine that's gotta be something hard to live with, even if, especially if, it's your own not-distant-enough family who did those things.

When looking for blame though, there seems to be enough to go around. It almost seems to grossly oversimplify things to even try. Yes those people that hanged. Yes also to the troops on the ground who got lost in the frenzy of a fucked up command structure. It seems, very worryingly, as though much blame goes to the people who allowed such a weak government to exist.

It also seems like it doesn't really matter if people failed to develop a government that could withstand takeover, or if that government built a society where those things could happen. Rather, even if every group of people have the capability to commit crimes like that as a whole, it doesn't matter if the Germans were "just people". It doesn't rationalize away their acts as a result of humanity run wild because the results of those acts don't go away.

What does that say for the way the US more or less eradicated the Native Americans?
What does that say for

NET:
It's silly to guess what someone like you or someone like me would do if we were soldiers in that war, we have experiences that can't have been had by those people. Namely, we can see exactly what the wrong kind of leadership can lead us to. We have an acute awareness of these things, which is why when we see the US government doing certain things we get edgy.

I'm starting to rethink what you quoted quite a bit though.

[Salty]

BTW, Cain, I sure hope I get to meet you someday, have a couple drinks in a noisy place, and talk loudly about the ways in which people harm one another.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

I think what I was trying to get at is that genocide is a VERY human thing to do.

Depends what you mean by "genocide".  The deliberate wiping out of an entire ethnic group is actually a fairly modern phenomenon, and has a lot to do with pseduo-science racial theories and how they link into nationalistic myths (also a relatively recent pheomonenon).  Sure, human history is full of acts of massacres, cities being reduced to rubble and then salted (or not), but the concept of ethnic groups with innate characteristics simply didn't exist until a couple of hundred years ago, and so neither did the idea of wiping particular ones out.  Furthermore, most historical examples of warfare were part of the process of empire-building and, as we know, empires tend to be much more cosmopolitan that nation-states.  Genghis Khan, for example, was very keen that his subjects keep following their own native religions.

There is also the logistical aspect.  Unless you're dealing with a very small ethnic group, genocide is impossible for anything less than an industralised state to undertake.

It still may be a very human thing to do, but it's only actually been conceptually and logistically possible since about 1800 or so.

Columbus managed it with the Tainos, but a lot of that was probably smallpox. 

[The Good Reverend Roger]

The Milgram experiments.

The thing isn't that we aren't responsible for our own actions, the problem is that we are smart monkeys whose wiring too easily influenced to do terrible things because other people are doing them or because someone in charge said it was all right. Soldiers everywhere are going to act like soldiers, and that should scare you.

And if you want to know whose fault it is, look around you.  It's the fault of the nation that committed the troops.  Not the policiticans, etc.  The people.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

The Milgram experiments.

The thing isn't that we aren't responsible for our own actions, the problem is that we are smart monkeys whose wiring too easily influenced to do terrible things because other people are doing them or because someone in charge said it was all right. Soldiers everywhere are going to act like soldiers, and that should scare you.

And if you want to know whose fault it is, look around you.  It's the fault of the nation that committed the troops.  Not the policiticans, etc.  The people.

I voted Obama. (Yeah, I know..) Otherwise we'd have had McCain and the stress would have killed him in like, 3 months and PALIN would be running the show now. So yeah. Obama. Drone strikes. Dead kids. Blood's on my hands. Not that my vote COUNTED, but the intent to support Obama was there.

Alternative du jour? Romney. FUCK NO. Two man con, etc. etc.

Options: Vote drone strikes, loony sociopathic GOP guy, throw away a vote on somebody without a snowball's chance in hell (Green Party, etc.) or just sit it out and say "I didn't vote for none o those motherfuckers".

Solution? SCRAP THE WHOLE MOTHERFUCKER. Revolution, y'all. Yeah, we'd all be dead. And they'd still be blowing up little kids.

It's like trying to boycott products from China. We're fucked. [/obvious]