While I’d say conscripts are easier to forgive than volunteer forces, they are still culpable. They offsetting the suffering they’d endure in prison onto other people, with which their respective fascistic armed forces are targeting. I’m more understanding of their position but they are still guilty.
Also, while the individual soldier may have themselves not conducted any crimes, by serving in a fascist military, you are still aiding them in committing crimes. By providing gains for that military through your service, it gives the force more opportunity and power to commit atrocities.
NihilsineNefas@slrpnk.net 18 hours ago
“Just following orders” does not hold up in court today nor did it hold up in the Nuremberg trials.
FishFace@piefed.social 17 hours ago
That is a quote about clearly illegal orders, which I specifically treated differently in my comment.
NihilsineNefas@slrpnk.net 7 hours ago
Please tell me which of the nazi’s orders were moral.
FishFace@piefed.social 7 hours ago
“Go clean out the toilets”
“Dig a hole over there”
“Listen on this frequency and write down what you hear”
etc.
But for actual action, there is also an over-simplification of the moral that, “just following orders” is not a defence: it has only ever been applied to clear violations, like crimes against humanity. Nobody is looking to prosecute individual Russian front-line soldiers for carrying out Putin’s orders to advance in the Donbas, even though ultimately those orders are illegal and immoral, because they are in aid of carrying out a war of aggression.
I believe this is because of exactly the feeling that I have, that it doesn’t make sense to make individual soldiers responsible for working out that their orders are wrong except in the most obvious circumstances. Any grunt with a conscience can understand that executing civilians, or bombing apartment buildings, should never happen. Expecting them to break through the propaganda that is telling them that the war they are fighting is a just war is stupid, unrealistic and does not achieve anything. Ordinary Russians who keep fighting and dying in Ukraine aren’t doing it because of some unique moral failing that the rest of us upstanding human beings don’t have. Same with ordinary Germans in the Wehrmacht. But some Russians, and some Germans, and some Israelis, went/go beyond all that, and actively take part in atrocities. That’s the dividing line.