Jeff McMahan probes the morally-provocative question, “is morally permissible for an individual to join the armed forces if he will thereby become an “unjust combatant?” I will present two arguments to debate this question, epistemic justification and pacifism. I will implore the use of Reserve Police Battalion 101 as a historical example to support my conclusion that epistemic justification, or the moral permissibility for a man to join the armed forces in defense of an unjust cause, as the stronger of the two arguments.
Before progressing any further, it is imperative to have a foundational understanding of “just combatants” and “unjust combatants,” as McMahan understands theses terms. A combatant is anyone who actively participates in war. A just combatant is one who is fighting for a just cause. A just cause is one that may permissibly be pursued by means of war and the combatants on the other side have made themselves morally
…show more content…
It is generally accepted that the German people felt they had been robbed of victory in WWI, and for various reasons the Jews were the reason to blame. Battalion 101 was deployed in 1939 and the average age of the men was thirty-nine. All of the men would have been old enough to be aware of Germany’s social and political situation at the end of WWII in 1918. There is reasonable belief these men truly believed they were fighting to reclaim justice for Germany, from the people who stole it from them. Therefore, the men were epistemically justified in fighting for the Nazi’s. Many people would argue the deportation and mass killing of the Jews, or non-liable, noncombatants, is an objectively impermissible act. However, deportation and mass killing did not begin until late 1940, thus at the time the men of battalion 101 joined the army they had no justifiable reason to believe they would later be expected to senselessly commit mass murder of non-liable,
1). Identify who is the writer and/or speaker. Margot Storm is the editor of this story, as she revised it and rearranged the piece. The main writer in “Reserve Police Battalion 101” was historian Christopher Browning, who created this piece by gathering his information from various interrogations. 2).
In general, many believed that the soldiers that killed the Jews as either brainwashed by the Nazi or forced to kill with their life on the line. According to the book Ordinary Men, it was not the case. Christopher R. Browning made it clear that they were not forced to kill the Jews. When the Reserved Battalion 101 was in Jozefow, Major Wilhelm Trapp clearly stated that “if any of the older men among them did not feel up to the task that lay before him, he could step down” (2). The claim that these men did not have a choice but to kill was wrong.
Have you ever wondered what has changed within the military in the last 50 years? In her non-fiction book “Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power,” Rachel Maddow unveils and discusses the major changes in how America now conducts its wars. Specifically, Maddow examines how military powers have been abused by presidents beginning with Lyndon B. Johnson and the Vietnam War to the more recent examples from the Obama administration’s use of private contracts and the CIA. Ms. Maddow’s book is a fascinating expose’ into american militarism and the ideals that America was founded upon.
In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, we are given a firsthand experience of the Nazi’s inhumane treatment of the Jews during World War II. This window into the treatment of the Jews is important to me as I pursue a career as an Army officer. As an officer it will be my duty to protect this country from our enemies and ensure that no people group is ever massacred or abused like the Jews were during World War II. The Nazi’s thought of the Jews as subhuman and wanted to cleanse Germany of them.
I’ve been trained in the military, and the military pays my bills. I’m out to do a job; maybe I don't approve, but as a military man when i’m told to march, I march.” [1]While some would not be satisfied with this answer, (understandable) it just shows that no answers in war are answered with such ease. Many may ask where all these accusations came from, the simple answer is the American Indian
Synthesis Essay – George A. Custer MSgt William F. Molnar Air Force Senior Noncommissioned Officer Academy George A. Custer There probably aren’t many Americans that wouldn’t recognize the name Custer. Conversely, there are probably very few Americans with a well-formulated opinion of him.
Night: Journal Writing Humanity consists of qualities that make us human, the way we love, care, and have compassion for others. In this novel, I can read about how people got tortured, and treated so badly that they were completely dehumanized. As I read how the Germans treated the Jews, for example, having little to no compassion for them, torturing them, making them live under the inexplicable circumstances they did. It rose upon me many questions based on how and why did this happen.
What perspectives do Michael Bess and Richard Overy bring to studying World War II? In Choices Under Fire Michael Bess explores the dimensions and perspective of morality in the time of war. Bess delves into moral choices made by soldiers, civilians, and all levels of government officials from the Allies to the Axis powers. We will see the stark reality of how war can change a person and expose parts of ourselves that we never thought possible.
All the orders Nazi soldiers obeyed are crimes that refuse forgiveness because these orders show us how evil soldiers’ hearts were when they killed millions of innocent Jewish people; consequently, we cannot forgive them because this action will go beyond our
One explanation proposed is that terrible things happen during war, the Americans at My Lai, the Japanese at Manila both slaughtered innocents. Browning describes a ‘battlefield frenzy’ where men are ‘numbed to the taking of human life, embittered over their own casualties’ but he notes that the type of brutality that these feelings might produce ‘did not represent official government policy.’ Another type of atrocity is the type that is calculated, it is ‘atrocity by policy’ and it is this that applies to Reserve Police Battalion 101. Most had not seen military service, ‘most had not fired a shot in anger or ever been fired on, much less lost comrades fighting at their side.’ Certainly ‘battlefield frenzy’ cannot be applied to that first morning at Józefów; Tom Lawson agrees that the war plays a part in explaining why these men committed these murders ‘but not [on] that first day.’ However, as the men’s jobs of killing Jews became ‘routine’ and hence ‘easier’ they did become more ‘brutalized’; ‘in this sense, brutalization was not the cause but the effect on these men’s behaviour.’
The Holocaust is still a heavily reviewed subject and is debatably one of the worst if not the worst atrocity that has happened on this Planet up to date. To think that the Nazi’s were able to kill millions of people it has made us question what kind of people they were and if they were anything similar to us. It is hard to think of a perpetrator to be a normal human being. The Holocaust has made us question if the Nazi’s had any sense of moral sensibility when killing innocent and defenseless Jewish men and women. In the book Ordinary Men, Author Christopher Browning argues that these Nazi’s especially referring to the Reserve Police Battalion 101 were normal people who had instructions given by Hitler and their government to follow through with by devaluing all Jewish life.
In Goldenhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, he explains that these ordinary Germans were fine with killing the Jews because of the historic culture of anti-Semitism and that they never had any moral in them in the first place. He starts off saying that when the Germans were drafted into this police battalion that there were three features that should be understood. The first, he says that Germans “were not selected because of military or ideological fitness. In fact, the men were often chose for service in a haphazard manner and were frequently the least desirable of the manpower pool, even considered unfit for military service.” He was saying that these men did not have a background check and they were just randomly picked.
The Holocaust is the most recognized genocide in modern history, claiming millions of innocent lives, and indiscriminately destroying the livelihood of everybody opposed to the monstrous Nazi party, regardless of whether or not you were of the blonde haired, blue eyed Aryan race that Adolf Hitler had sought to create. Naturally, with the dark tide of oppression, came resistance from the oppressed themselves, the Jewish partisans. This resistance group was formed from the many thousands of the threatened European Jewish, and whether or not they were escapees or the inhabitants of ghettos, deportation camps, and death camps hardly mattered when it it came down to their purpose, aiding their people both physically and spiritually. The Jewish partisan
The German officer shouted, “There are eighty of you in the car, if anyone goes missing, you will all be shot, like dogs” (Wiesel 24). This shows that the Germans thought nothing of them. Instead the Germans compared the Jews to being like “dogs”, which showed that the Germans thought Jews were not worthy of being treated like a human. In conclusion, in World War II, the Jews were dehumanized because of their beliefs, they were treated as unworthy objects that are a burden to
The clear blue sky, the scorching hot sun, and the thunderous noise of explosions has been my sole company throughout my days as a soldier in the Eastern front. Being forced by Nazi officials to enter the army to serve my Fatherland, I was left with no choice but to accept my fate. Despair, guilt, and disgust filled me hitherto, as I am instructed to fight, especially murder my fellow Communist supporters in Soviet Union. Instructed by Heydrich, we as soldiers shall not show any mercy in destroying the heartland of ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’ (Moeller 117). Bloodbath is what I see daily, torture becomes part of my job, and killing becomes my goal.