Indiscrimate Death Dealing
War represents the incapability of nations to compromise, to make the effort to understand underlying causes and suspicions between themselves. A human failing that is not about to be solved anytime soon. Nations that value the strengths of their military apparatus spend inordinately massive amounts of public funds on armaments, on training their military. They convince those whom they represent from their seats of government that arms are a requirement for defense.
One understands that countries going to war construct armies of young men and women to battle one another for honour and country and principle and protection of the integrity of a country's boundaries, and even on occasion, marching them out for the purpose of protecting the people of countries with whom they go to war. It is not, however, only the members of the military who find early death in the prosecution of war. Civilian casualties are always high, and often little discussed.
Modern warfare is as cruel as hand-to-hand combat when soldiers face an enemy and realize that each is trained to see the other as lesser, undeserving of life, and if the other is not dispatched, then they will themselves be bereft of life. It is a humanely alienating process to perceive the 'other' as deserving of death. We understand that. While deploring it. With the understanding that there are times when that most brutally inhumane of human practises really does become unavoidable.
What should be avoidable, however, is the death visited on civilian populations, by default. There are few countries that would boast the death numbers of innocent civilians. Yet the most cultured, advanced, civil societies on earth develop and construct lethal devices which they strew over an invaded countryside and which, when detonated, take innumerable innocent lives, leaving countless other victims horribly injured, thousands of children among them.
Cluster bombs represent a type of weaponry whereby tiny bomblets are detonated. A cluster bomb can contain up to 600 bomblets, incapable of distinguishing the fighting enemy from an innocent child. Children, in fact, see them lying about innocently, unexploded, on the ground, pick them up, construing them as intriguing objects like toys, and become instant victims. Or they take them along and share them as playthings with other children, until their lethality is released and all die. Or they bring them home to proudly demonstrate their new free toy to their parents, bringing tragedy home.
A country's farm fields and general countryside can be littered with thousands of these lethal weapons, most of which do not detonate on impact, but lie there awaiting detection and activation; for someone to step on one, or pick one up from a spirit of curiosity, all too soon assuaged. Britain is working overtime to destroy its stock of 30 million bombs. France, Germany and Norway have begun destroying their stocks. The United States, Russia and China, all manufacturers of such bombs refuse to, though they're by no means the only countries to maintain their use.
In Oslo, over one hundred countries have signed on to a global ban on cluster munitions. The Oslo Treaty has been modelled on the Canada-led Ottawa Treaty to ban landmines, signed eleven years ago. The new treaty will become international law once 30 countries have ratified, a legal process requiring countries to pass their own legislation. That milestone is expected to occur early in 2009. And none too soon.
The destructive capacity of humankind's inventiveness is beyond reason.
One understands that countries going to war construct armies of young men and women to battle one another for honour and country and principle and protection of the integrity of a country's boundaries, and even on occasion, marching them out for the purpose of protecting the people of countries with whom they go to war. It is not, however, only the members of the military who find early death in the prosecution of war. Civilian casualties are always high, and often little discussed.
Modern warfare is as cruel as hand-to-hand combat when soldiers face an enemy and realize that each is trained to see the other as lesser, undeserving of life, and if the other is not dispatched, then they will themselves be bereft of life. It is a humanely alienating process to perceive the 'other' as deserving of death. We understand that. While deploring it. With the understanding that there are times when that most brutally inhumane of human practises really does become unavoidable.
What should be avoidable, however, is the death visited on civilian populations, by default. There are few countries that would boast the death numbers of innocent civilians. Yet the most cultured, advanced, civil societies on earth develop and construct lethal devices which they strew over an invaded countryside and which, when detonated, take innumerable innocent lives, leaving countless other victims horribly injured, thousands of children among them.
Cluster bombs represent a type of weaponry whereby tiny bomblets are detonated. A cluster bomb can contain up to 600 bomblets, incapable of distinguishing the fighting enemy from an innocent child. Children, in fact, see them lying about innocently, unexploded, on the ground, pick them up, construing them as intriguing objects like toys, and become instant victims. Or they take them along and share them as playthings with other children, until their lethality is released and all die. Or they bring them home to proudly demonstrate their new free toy to their parents, bringing tragedy home.
A country's farm fields and general countryside can be littered with thousands of these lethal weapons, most of which do not detonate on impact, but lie there awaiting detection and activation; for someone to step on one, or pick one up from a spirit of curiosity, all too soon assuaged. Britain is working overtime to destroy its stock of 30 million bombs. France, Germany and Norway have begun destroying their stocks. The United States, Russia and China, all manufacturers of such bombs refuse to, though they're by no means the only countries to maintain their use.
In Oslo, over one hundred countries have signed on to a global ban on cluster munitions. The Oslo Treaty has been modelled on the Canada-led Ottawa Treaty to ban landmines, signed eleven years ago. The new treaty will become international law once 30 countries have ratified, a legal process requiring countries to pass their own legislation. That milestone is expected to occur early in 2009. And none too soon.
The destructive capacity of humankind's inventiveness is beyond reason.
Labels: Human Relations, Miscellaneous
posted by Pieface @ 7:40 PM
2 Comments:
At 9:36 PM,
ignorant redneck said…
Cluster bombs are actually an improvment on what they replaced: Tactical Nukes. Cluster bombs were developed to cope with massed armor and hardened materiel targets. It wasn't until after the cluster bomb was perfected and in the inventory that the major powers worked to reduce and remove tatical nukes from their arsenal.
I really want to point something out, two things really.
The first is, there is not nice way to kill people. combat is a horrible thing, and shouldn't be undertaken blythely.
The second is that I keep hearing people talk about the cruelty of modern combat, and how hard it is on civilians. this is balderdash: compare the ammount of "collateral damage" in WWII, and the very high number of civilian casualties, to a modern conflict--the WWII model was much more brutal to non-combatants than the modern model.
At 6:13 PM,
Pieface said…
The cruelty of modern combat is that technical devices removes armed conflict from a sense of personal responsibility; death at a remove. Unless you're a tribal member fighting in Africa and then you can just prey on helpless women, engaged in mass rape and slaughter. Perhaps you're right in claiming that modern warfare is no more bitter than what preceded it. I suppose as long as humans are human there doesn't exist any methodology by which we can sanely settle conflicts before they escalate into full-fledged war. But flooding a countryside with bombs that mostly don't go off until some time much later in the future, and in so doing, victimize continually we're not exercising our full intelligence as human beings...oops, not that we ever really do.
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