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Posts: 7802
Jun 9 11 4:24 AM
Not to be contentious and no offence intended to Dearlenbaugh, but Carabimero are you saying that principle that every conscripted soldier sent to a combat zone is courageous? Often, as Dearlenbaugh and Binecon have stated, it was just the path of least resistance and there was no real choice involved.Defy the prevailing social mores and face the vitriol and abuse of your peers or sign up and hope for the best. No real choice at all.
Of course the Vietnam vets had no way of knowing that there choice would eventually lead to widespread condemnation and alienation.
16 years after the fall of the Muslim safe haven of Srebrenica in Bosnia, Dutch society is still grappling with the failure of the Dutch UN Blue Helmets to do anything when Serb General Mladic rolled over them and subsequently slaughtered 7000 Muslim males there.
The Dutch soldiers were sent to protect the local Muslim population and they failed miserably. Most of them were poorly trained and armed conscripts who found themselves in a situation in which they were completely out of their depth.I feel they - and the Dutch government which send them and the UN that mandated the mission - are partially culpable for those deaths.They weren't courageous for going. They were short-sighted, failing to exercise a real informed choice, mainly motivated by monetary concerns because going abroad rendered huge bonuses. and ultimately the Muslims paid for their lassitude.
You can't really blame the Dutch troops; they were young and inexperienced and they didn't have the means (or the will) to carry out there mission.But to call them courageous......no.
I'm preaching I know, but war will only end when the ordinary people of all nations recognise they are all on the same side and collectively say: "hell no, we won't go!"That would be truly courageous.
I always thought it was a sad statement about the state of the world when after the first world war, the international trade unions and workers federations solemnly agreed that they would no longer heed the call to arms of their masters and if war threatened they would collectively say NO, call strikes and cripple their country's ability to wage war. It was a great show of international solidarity and it could've worked.But what happened?Once the war drums started beating, the blood got up, nationalist sentiment was whipped up in a frenzy by bellicose propaganda and the international solidarity evaporated. It wasn't long before everyone was back in the trenches doing their duty as good little tin soldiers. So sad.
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