The New Transparency of War and Lethality of Hatred 591
Hugh Pickens writes "Robert Wright says that if you had asked him a few days ago — before news broke that American soldiers had urinated on Taliban corpses — if such a thing were possible, he would have said 'probably.' After all if you send 'young people into combat, people whose job is to kill the enemy and who watch as their friends are killed and maimed by the enemy, ... the chances are that signs of disrespect for the enemy will surface — and that every once in a while those signs will assume grotesque form.' War, presumably, has always been like this, but something has changed that amounts to a powerful new argument against starting wars in the first place. First, there's the new transparency of war as battlefield details get recorded, and everyone has the tools to broadcast these details, so 'it's just a matter of time before some outrageous image goes viral — pictures from Abu Ghraib, video from Afghanistan,' that will make you and your soldiers more hated by the enemy than ever. The second big change is that hatred is now a more dangerous thing. 'New information technologies make it easier for people who share a hatred to organize around it,' writes Wright. 'And once hateful groups are organized, they stand a better chance than a few decades ago of getting their hands on massively lethal technologies.' It used to be that national security consisted of making sure all foreign governments either liked you or feared you; now it requires that as few people as possible hate you. 'I think we should reflect on that before we start another war.'"
Did this guy miss WWII? (Score:5, Informative)
US Marines routinely sent home Japanese skulls (they were photographed in LIFE). Someone sent Roosevelt a cigarette holder made from a Japanese femur. The Russians did crazy, unspeakable things to civilians on a large scale in Prussia and the Nazis were more than happy (desperate) to tell the world through even representatives of the Allied press.
And, oh yeah, the Nazis... no real need to go there.
And why stop with WWII? Vlad Dracul (yeah, that guy) made damn sure everyone knew why he was called "Vlad the Impaler" and he didn't even have a Facebook account.
So, in short, no, nothing new here.
Re:Bogus premise (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately it does work. Pick up Unbroken [amazon.com], a story about a downed WWII flyer who, amongst other fairly horrid episodes, got interred in a Japanese POW camp. He remained there till the end of the war and describes leaving the camp. The area had been carpet bombed previously (and hit with the atomic bomb). The civilian population - which previously had been ready to sacrifice themselves when the Allies invaded were basically shocked into submission.
Don't make the mistake of conflating how we persecute 'war' these days with all out and out military aggression which has not been seen on a large scale since WWII. We would have won in Vietnam, would win in Iraq and Afghanistan if we did that (and likely be set up for war crimes). War is really ugly business. We're just playing at low level conflicts for now. (Not that it makes it morally or politically correct). Hopefully we won't get there again, but with humans being the ugly little monsters we are, I wouldn't bet on it.
Re:Bogus premise (Score:3, Informative)
The other side of your example is that the population of British cities were not shocked into submission despite almost constant bombing (the London blitz) and entire cities levelled (Coventry)...
Germany fought to the bitter end despite acts such as the fire bombings of Dresden and other examples of wholesale destruction.
The Soviet Union fought to victory despite the complete destruction of Leningrad and Moscow.
Re:So they pissed on the enemy (Score:5, Informative)
The same "they"
The Al Qaeda operatives you're talking about came from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and UAE. The taliban and Iraqi insurgency GP was talking about came from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. Different people, different organizations, different nationalities, different motives; they are hardly the "same".
Re:Bogus premise (Score:5, Informative)
Machiavelli said a lot of stuff about what an autocratic ruler should do to keep power. But he intended it at least in part as an argument against autocratic rulers. He favored a Roman-style republic with power shared between the social classes (still pretty damn oppressive judging by our standards, but better than "The Prince").
Re:fool. (Score:3, Informative)
No. HELL NO!
Those who say that there was no terrorism in the USSR are blind to the lengths that Stalin & co went to to suppress dissent. He killed millions to starve the Ukraine into submission. Be born a member of an ethnic group Uncle Joe doesn't trust? The German speaking population in Byelorussia was deported thousands of miles to the east & build rudimentary cabins before winter or die in the cold. Protest a little against the government and get sentenced to 15 years of hard labor in a Gulag. There was little dissent in the USSR because Stalin beat it out of them. With little dissent there was little terrorism.
It took the breakup of the USSR for dissent to arise again and surprise, surprise, Chechen & other terrorists came out of the woodworks until Putin once again beat them into submission.
Re:Bogus premise (Score:5, Informative)
There's also some interesting emails that leaked years ago where Bin Laden is complaining about the UN. He hated the list of human rights because it treated all religions as equal - this was insulting because he 'knew' that Islam was the one true religion and it required a status superior to all other religions.
April 11, 2001
From: Osama bin Laden
To: Mullah Omar
Re:This is a growing global problem (Score:2, Informative)
But the economy is already being destroyed by structural unemployment resulting from robotics and other automation; see:
- aha, and the economy of subsistence farmers was destroyed when the industrial revolution provided the farmers with better implements, tools, automation, chemicals and knowledge for 5% of working people to be able to feed 100% of population.
It's not robotics in any way shape or form, it's government spending, rules, regulations and taxes that cause outflow of investment and of jobs.
The people distributing the viruses were lacking some sort of moral awareness.
- whatever. Good luck spreading 'moral awareness'. I know plenty of people who wouldn't give 2 fucks about moral awareness and would do what it takes to achieve their goals. Their parents may or may not have had anything to do with this, I believe I have seen enough evidence and history to suggest that there will never be enough 'moral awareness' to stop people from doing what they want.
More distributed wealth means more people can work on defenses or deal with emergent problems.
- sure.
A basic income is more likely to break the current world of (wage) slaves and masters we have than to create one:
- nonsense. The current world of slaves and masters has been created exactly by this desire to give up one's responsibilities in exchange for perceived security (be it security against 'terrorist' threats or be it security against economic problems).
People want others to take care of them cradle to grave, and that's where the problem today is - too many people produce too little in their lives to be able to trade for goods that others produce, and that's what poverty is.
Giving people free stuff does not reduce poverty, it creates poverty.
The only thing that people need to reduce poverty is liberty, freedom and rule of law, especially important is the rule of law above government, so that government cannot sacrifice people's liberties and freedoms.
Re:This is a growing global problem (Score:2, Informative)
"Plagues cannot and will not wipe us out because of the way we humans work."
For what it is worth, I was in a PhD program in Ecology and Evolution for a time. :-) But it's also true I am not expert in the field. I know about the tradeoff you are talking about, but there are ways in which it does not always apply.
See this recent slashdot article and think again:
"Paper On Super Flu Strain May Be Banned From Publication"
http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/11/29/0015216/paper-on-super-flu-strain-may-be-banned-from-publication [slashdot.org]
But yes, will it wipe out everyone? Maybe not. But even killing 10% of the USA's population would mean 30 million casualties. Is the US elite willing to risk that for some outdated notion of empire? Probably, but should the population let them?
For reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_flu_pandemic [wikipedia.org]
"The pandemic lasted from June 1918 to December 1920, spreading even to the Arctic and remote Pacific islands. Between 50 and 100 million died, making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history. Even using the lower estimate of 50 million people, 3% of the world's population (which was 1.86 billion at the time) died of the disease. Some 500 million, or 27%, were infected."
That was not a plague *designed* to do the most damage...
Consider the implications of the US Army now thinking they may have a way to survive Ebola, and what it would mean if the weaponized it now (perhaps spread everywhere in a region by drones?):
http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/08/25/222222/possible-treatment-for-ebola [slashdot.org]
Even if you were right about natural disease vectors (and the 1918 flu is a counter-example), diseases can be intentionally spread (like was done with smallpox contaminated blankets in North American by the invaders). Think about all the food the USA eats that now comes from China, for example...
Consider what happened to the Native Americans. They got hit by a rapid succession of various plagues imported by Europeans like Smallpox and Measles, to which they had not native resistance (most of those plagues coming out of European's associations with livestock). Each wave of plague wiped out some fraction of the population, wave after wave.
How many "Spanish Flu" attacks in a row do you want to see, each designed to wipe out 30% of the population as a delayed reaction? How many weaponized Ebola-variants dumped in water supplies by drones flying across borders? With then some misguided teenagers (or military professionals) in some country the USA has literally pissed on (as in the video in the article) in the past crowing on the internet about how l33t they are that they made it happen, and they think they and their family are safe from it for some reason (either having a cure or just being nowhere in the vicinity of a fast acting plague widely spread by a mechanical vector)?
And biotech is just one example. There can be computer plagues like Stuxnet that destroy critical infrastructure or even cause military system to attack local targets (like dams). There can be nasty nanotech or microrobotics. The issue is that our technological powers have increased greatly, but our politics and aspirations have not adjusted to that new reality. it is much easier generally to destroy than to create, especially when a group just picks the soft targets. Trying to run a civilization without a basic trust is much, much more expensive, and everyone loses if it gets to that point.
If you won't consider the biotech point (maybe I'm wrong, I hope so), here are some robot related comments I wrote to someone else the other day in response to them sending me a link about the Willow Garage PR2: