Well if your village suburb whatever was wiped out by some foreign country you had never heard of what would your response be likely to be.

McCain flew bombing missions against civilian targets.....he was shot down during one....the old, 'just following orders' stuff was the same idea that the Nazis used at the Nuremberg trials......It's probably half true, but it rightly didn't save them from the noose.

The winner gets to decide on what's justice and what isn't.

I have mixed feelings about it.

Essentially I've been in both camps....In this area of politics the reasoning of Timothy McVeigh the Oklahoma City bomber really fecked with my head about the myth of a 'good' side.....there is a better side perhaps, from an arguable worldview but mostly it's about power and my group against your group.

[Link]

I disagree with him of course because I pick a side...I accept the hypocrisy charge because I'm western and want my 'group' to win out in any conflicts....not totally 'my country right or wrong' but with an obvious heavy bias.....but I can't argue with McVeigh's reasoning.

You wouldn't have heard of this letter of course...because the media like to keep away the uncomfortable realities and instead focus on outrage.....which is a totally valid reaction of course when the enemy murders your children and people.

Still it changed my view on these things.....War is about murdering people because they are violently opposing you.....or just on the other side, regardless of how they feel about it.

It's about your group against the other group.

The idea that this can be done nicely or with rules....it a bit of a myth.....the Romans taught the Greeks and Carthage that war doesn't have rules....it only has the victor or the vanquished.....if you decide to have rules and the other won't....you lose in the long term.

The quote, 'all is fair in love and war' is one of the truest ones to exist.

Babies also die in rubble when those bombs drop with injuries that more closely resemble a high speed car crash.....and babies are the most innocent things in the human world.

That's what you have to be prepared to do if you go to war as a bomber pilot.

In the second world war we could defend it on the premise that they were doing it to us so they implicitly accepted it as a tactic.....though that's bulls*** logic for the average Joe or Jane who had no say over it.

Edited by Stirlingsays (10 Sep 2018 6.22pm)

'Who are you and how did you get in here? I'm a locksmith. And, I'm a locksmith.' (Leslie Nielsen)

The article talks about mainstream news sources. I wouldn't say Al Jazeera or Euronews are really mainstream.

I do have relatives who fought in the war, but I don't have relatives who time and time again thought war was a good thing and were good friends of Mohammad bin Salman and the Saudis and at the same time were lauded as a thoroughly good eggs.

The article is about the bias in the way things are reported. Why can't newspapers in a democracy say something like "McCain had a distinguished was record in Vietnam but was later a supporter of Mohammad bin Salman who is accused of detention and torture of human rights activists, intervention in Yemen, escalation of Saudi's diplomatic crisis with Qatar and the start of the diplomatic crisis with Lebanon." Rather that just churn out rubbish about how he was a great war hero when a balanced view would be that he was at least as much of a war monger.