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It is not a simple matter of “blame”…concious vets are quite cognizant of the blame they have, in fact sometimes too cognizant. My larger point is that if one does what what needs to do to defend against those shooting at you, but one doesn’t go out of one’s way to comitt war crimes and crimes against civilians, then one is blameless. There are countless examples from every US Imperial war of those who took exception to the tactics, and were punished, but kept their conscience.

IT is murky. But in the last analysis, if I comitt manslaughter I still go to jail.

real people make decisions based on social expectations, the limited scope of information available to them, and their mostly biased and unrealistic expectations. This is particularly true of war, something which no one ever talks realistically about and which is the topic of more romanticization and misleading propaganda than perhaps any other humnan activity.

A semiliterate 19 year old farm boy is drafted and believes he is going to Vietnam to kill cartoon villains and fight Communism, which he thinks is inspired by Satan (I mean that literally, come down here and check out a couple of church services in Kansas or Alabama.) He has never heard anything that would question these assumptions.

What he actually finds is that he is dropping poison on rice fields and napalming women and children to prop up a puppet regime whose own soldiers defect to the enemy at every opportunity. By the time he finds this out, his own life would be in severe danger if he refuses to fight.

When could he have made a different decision? At what point do you start blaming him?

>..when he killed his wife…
just the kind of cheap shot I love to take, so I’ll let it slide

By what logic? Are you talking in the context of some such Althusserian anti-humanism, in which humans have no agency therefore do not deserve blame? Althusser took this to a logical extreme when he killed his wife. It is sad that this is what many people see as Marxism, but the Marxism I believe, informed by the formerly great philosopher N Geras, among others, does take into account notions of justice.

McCain deserved his imprisonment for the reasons that you seem to agree (even adding that his imprisonment saved lives) - but you have a problem with the phrase “deserve”. All is fair in polemics and I admit it was inflammatory, and that was the reason I phrased it in such a fashion.

Certainly, no one could reasonably claim that the Vnese should not have shot down enemy bombers. I’ve been to the spot where McCain landed, adjoining the most densely populated part of Hanoi. The gunner who shot him down saved numerous lives. Nor would anyone in their right mind say the Vnese should have turned loose captured GIs, let alone trained bomber pilots who would go back and massacre them again. But that’s not what you originally said. You said McCain “deserved his imprisonment.” I think that’s not only unnecessarily inflammatory, but it ignores real human context. It’s also unmarxist, but that’s another argument.

By the time he was a prisoner, the NVese tortured American POWs occasionally rather than routinely. McCain was not an average prisoner, though. He was known by the NVese to be a high value POW because his father was an admiral, and this may have given him some extra protection or may on the other hand have made him a target for abuse.

Perhaps someone can tell us if McCain himself explicitly states that he was tortured. If he does, then we are going to have to assume he is telling the truth unless fellow prisoners or former guards say otherwise.

>…SS…
The SS was an explicitly ideological party organ. People joined it because they were Nazis. Those who committed war crimes because they joined the SS deserved to be shot. That’s different from the US Navy.

I don’t ignore the context of poor kids who got sent to Nam - or Iraq for that matter. I simply state that it the defense of Vietnamese sovereignty required the capturing of enemy forces.

Allright, a debate on ethics on a Friday afternoon! If we are judging the ethical standing of an individual, this approach is completely wrong.

You might argue that John McCain, an intelligent man who grew up in a military family and received a rigorous education at Annapolis, would presumably have been exposed to various points of view and therefore is somewhat responsible for his decisions (but *deserved to be a POW* is going too far.) What about the average GI in the VN war, a poorly educated working class 19 year old who got drafted in 1967? He would likely never have been exposed to any dissident ideas, as you will agree if you understand how narrow the political spectrum is down here. Would you expect him to develop his own critique of imperialism? His ideas of war would come from John Wayne movies. It would never have occurred to him that war involves, say, napalming villages, shooting women, or poisoning crop fields, until he was already in combat, where his life depended on following orders. How can you judge him on the grounds of “results, not intent?”

>to accept the sacredness of militarism
I am not suggesting we do this, only that we be a little more wise about the way we attack it.

I suggest reading Tony Judt’s latest piece in NYRB:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21311

I don’t look at intent. I look at results. People who don’t go join in an Imperial war, for whatever reason, are objectively more moral than those who do.

When minorities become majorities, their sensibilities will be of greater concern. Unfortunately for Barack Obama and those of us who see him as a potentially great President for our time, he is currently associated with a guy who seems weird and threatening to the white majority. Even more unfortunately, that guy doesn’t mind being rejected, so long as he is noticed.