@BillRM,
BillRM wrote:
Going to be interesting to perhaps find out if our military would obey orders from Trump to commit clear and no question about it war crimes under international laws.
Are we and our military in other word any better then the 1930s German military or not?
This is the old Nuremburg Trials concept that subordinate officers, etc. are responsible for disobeying orders when they are wrong;
but I think there is another problem that goes beyond the potential for obeying bad orders, which is when a concerted effort is made to propagate the idea that orders are criminal, unethical, or otherwise bad in order to stimulate people to disobey them in order to aid an enemy who is equally bad or worse.
So, for example, if some regime is committing genocide or the like and the US or other military steps in to do something about it, then it is possible for friends of the genocidal regime to argue that the US or other intercedent is an evil empire, war criminals, etc. in order to create a propaganda distraction from their own clandestine activities.
It's basically a liar calling the person questioning them a liar to shift attention back away from their own lies and scapegoat someone else instead.
Contemporary politics seems to involve a lot of blame-shifting and abuse of institutional procedures to generate smoke screen to hide what's really going on.
Criminals always benefit from creating confusion about who the real criminals are by calling the police criminal. Chaos benefits crime and war more than peaceful society.
Of course, when peaceful society has become a similacrum that covers up forces of corruption and criminality that operate below the radar, you would expect the forces of good to form a resistance, and then part of the corruption would be to paint the resistance as a subversion of peaceful society.
The question is how to discern right from wrong and how will it be possible to get back to a situation where 1) corruption, deception, and manipulation have subsided; and 2) people feel free to question orders and are also able to do so independently of whatever ethical propaganda might be trying to trick them into doing so as part of a misinformation campaign to protect a corrupt regime from accountability.
