Comments by "John Roberts" (@view1st) on "History on YouTube" channel.

@micksherman7709 War is inherently cruel so all those military 'heroes' who participate in it are by definition also cruel.
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@micksherman7709 I think you are creating a strawman out of what I said. All I'm saying is that all societies live by a moral code and in the twenty-first century in Europe and the Americas that moral code (morality, ethics, moral philosophy, etc.) is pretty much universally understood and paid lip service to. And whether you like it or not people judge other people by their adherence or deviation from that common morality. Soldiers, however heroic, shouldn't get a free pass when they commit acts of obscene — and in my opinion, inherently cruel — violence just because it's state sanctioned.
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@micksherman7709 What I'm saying is that anyone who knowingly and willingly becomes part of an organisation whose principal purpose is causing mass death and destruction, inflicting physical and emotional suffering on their fellow humans, sentient creatures like themselves, is, by simple virtue of being part of a such an organisation, cruel. It is not their personal feelings and inclinations that matter, but rather what they do that makes them cruel. And war is in my personal opinion cruel because it causes wanton suffering to others. A person doesn't have to be cruel themselves or to have a natural predisposition to cruelty, merely indifferent to or in other ways supportive of such cruelty.
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@micksherman7709 Risking one's own life in the process of taking another's does not detract from the innate cruelty of the act. The cruelty lies in the act itself and not necessarily in the one who engages in it and a person who commits an act that they know with absolute certainty is going to cause physical pain or mental suffering to other sentient beings is, intentionality aside, still being cruel. Cruelty is as much an act as it is a feeling, indeed even more so. Just because you personally have no ill‐will towards someone as you snuff out there life, and just because you snuff out their life as painlessly as possible, does not free you from the charge of cruelty because it is the nature of war to be cruel and of logical necessity those who engage in it. Less cruel depending on circumstance perhaps but still cruel. And what is the purpose of the military? At bedrock it's all about raw, naked, in your face power. The power to impose by sheer brute force one's will upon others. Pomp, pageantry and propaganda aside, war and the military are all about killing people. You can dress it up as justified and righteous defence of an idea, a cause, a nation... but a pig with lipstick on is still a pig by any other name.
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@micksherman7709 On that we can both agree. They are both necessary evils.
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Perhaps he was one of the organisers of the 'stay behind' terrorist network in eastern Europe created by the USA or was useful in counter-insurgency work. Or he was simply a spy or informer. At the very least, a useful asset in some way.
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@micksherman7709 You are not being logical. Cruelty is cruelty and if cruelty is an inherent characteristic of war then there is no getting around the fact that those who engage in it are engaged in cruelty, hence cruel. Attempting to extenuate by placing cruelty on a spectrum or making distinctions between personal cruelty and impersonal cruelty, between intentional cruelty and incidental cruelty does not change that.
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@micksherman7709 Well you could say that the whole concept of morality, of moral philosophy, is an abstraction and yet where would we be without it? If morality says you should not be cruel then you can choose to ignore it but you can't say that morality and the standards it sets don't exist, nor can you stop others applying it to your actions and judging you accordingly.
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@micksherman7709 Interesting.
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