"Victory diminishes the significance of war crimes; defeat magnifies them into defining events"
MaxBoot/LATimes 07.Jun.06
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That's a little more profound than Boot seems to realize. And it doesn't lead quite so directly to sending more troops into the valley of death, either.
If you loop it back in to what that semi-anonymous neo-con said back whenever it was that he said it - that they're creating the reality we're responding to - and extend it to morality's most particulate elements, you end right back where so many of our heroes started.
You have to grab some plank and insist that it's enough.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident..."
Something outside and beyond the immediate, something universal or close enough to it.
Otherwise anything you did to win becomes good, and whatever the losing enemy did in his failed attempt to win becomes bad.
And that's it, there's nothing else going on.
So executing children, and worse, becomes a regrettable necessity if you're on the side that did it, and then won.
And it becomes a war crime if it was done by the losers.
It's pig morality, the moral code of sentient swine.