Quote:
Originally Posted by nik-
At the same time, those soldiers are the ones actually flattening cities. So #### Russian soldiers, directly. The separation between leaders and soldiers was the first week. They're the ones still killing civilians when they can actually just stop.
|
Deserting in a time of war (or whatever euphemism the Russian gov't is calling this) can get you shot. Armies are set up to enforce discipline and obedience, the idea that soldiers can just say, "Welp, I'm out, cya doods!" is naive. It takes either opportunity (hey, I'm separated from my unit and nobody is going to notice me gone for days!) or extraordinary courage.
Humans are extremely good at rationalizing their actions to absolve themselves of blame. It's much easier to say "I just aim the artillery at some co-ordinates, it's not my fault that was a hospital" or "I just passed on the co-ordinates that I got from HQ" or "I just went on the intelligence data that said it was an armoury" or "My job as a general is to win wars, not humanitarian awards" than "What I am doing is wrong and the consequences of doing evil are worse than the consequences of disobeying orders".
Not to say that makes any soldier innocent, but people being people is an insoluble problem. We should be focusing on how to topple the hierarchies that gain from control and violence. Steps like freezing the assets of oligarchs, banning them from our countries, indicting them in international courts, and most importantly, not doing business with regimes headed by criminals. Unfortunately, we've built a world where we rely on thugs and oppression to keep consumer goods cheap, so we are rightly seen as hypocrites and have all the moral authority attached to that label, which is none.