this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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Yes, American soldiers would never do such things. They are distributing bananas and chocolate during war times to POW, have a lot of occasions to do so during the last decades.
Side note: The American army unofficially encourages their combat arms branch soldiers to shoot wounded combatants during combat and to double-tap the wounded and the dead while assaulting through killzones so they don't have to worry about 'bullshit rules' relating to capturing POWs including 'bullshit' things such as delivering life-saving first aid or the "hassle" of transporting them to a location to properly process them as POWs under the international rules of war.
Lemme put it this way. If I'm a brown person and I've made an enemy of both the Taliban and the U.S. military: which side do you think is better to be caught by? The side that will put a bullet in your head, or the side that will put an electric drill inside your head?
War is war. Either you are appalled that people are killing each other or you aren't, don't act like murderers not following "rules" matters to you.
Not so much.
What do American soldiers have to do with this? That is not even a good whataboutism.
this type of lazy between the ears thinking is making this worse for everyone; please consider stopping.
Shouting "whataboutism" every time someone brings up context isn't lazy?
You can judge governments against perfection, you can judge them against the governments they replaced, or you can judge them against peer governments. The two realistic options involve comparisons, and those types of comparisons happen to be a key component of what passes for international law, too.
Fascinating that you decided my comment was worthy of being called out for being lazy, yet the comment that does not engage with the discussion, instead discarding it as "whataboutism" gets no such scrutiny from you. It seems as though your issue isn't truly "lazy thinking" but instead wether or not I support your worldview.
I will stop as soon as the gut-reaction to context isn't to regurgitate an old thought-terminating psyop.
The only other tactic they have is ChatGPT generated word salad though.
Because the atomic unit of propaganda is not lies, it's emphasis. With any article about anything, the most important question to ask is "Why are they writing about this right now, instead of anything else?" Granted, prisoner killing strikes most of us as a ghoulsh thing, but that alone doesnt make this newsworthy in the context of a war. The newsworthy part comes when the western press chooses to amplify this story while quashing others, playing up the other team's crimes and ignoring our own,giving rise to the narrative of the enemy as universally inhuman and unworthy of mercy. Our war crimes are always accidents and mistakes, their war crimes are always the result of their inherent (perhaps hereditary) bloodlust.
The point of this "whataboutism" it to point out that this article is presenting the killing of prisoners of war as some kind of horrifying aberration from the norm, without actually saying what the norm is. Because the norm, for my entire life, has been the unnacountable mass slaughter by the US of not just POWs, but innocent people.
The killing of POWs is the norm, we set the norm, and now we're crying foul when our enemies follow this norm while sweeping it under the rug when our allies do the same.
Am I saying this makes the killing of POWs morally good? No. Byt what I am saying is that this article was written in bad faith to perpetuate a war where our ally has been shelling civillians and deploying death squads for nine years, with shells and death squad training we gave them.
Decrying the killing of noncombatants is fine and good in a vaccum, but it's a sick joke coming from the 200-year reigning Champion of Noncombatant Murder.
International law is one area where whataboutism is a perfectly valid and accepted line of argument. Unlike domestic law, there is no enforcement mechanism for stuff like war crimes and most laws aren't clearly written down. If a country like Russia or the US executes some prisoners of war, the war police isn't going to show up to write them a ticket.
International law only exists where countries agree it exists. Part of that agreement is treaties and the like, but most of it is what International lawyers call "state practice". Countries can say that a law exists all they want, but if they don't follow the law in their actions then the law doesn't exist.
Therefore, "America, you consistently fail to follow this law so I'm entitled to act as if it doesn't exist" is a totally reasonable argument as far as International law is concerned.