Neanderthals

[domer]

In his floridly imaginative but unoriginal way, Michael has the knack down pat as to how to rankle a well-earned repose (mine) regarding matters of war and peace. Mixing a potent tonic of moral superiority and outrage, Michael condemns US and Israeli (mainly) military ventures with the indignation of the Avenging Angel herself. Her virtue threatened by the spectacle (one, indeed, any feeling person can find a full quota of revulsion in), the angel blasts away at what no one champions: the gore and horror of war. Yet this virginal attitude, transferred to responsible nations, would leave the world a sea of Auschwitz's in short order, for, like it or not, there is real evil in the world (and, beyond that, real heartache and pain no matter how grand a utopia one tries for). The angel of Michael's dreams simply wants to stamp her foot and make it all go away. Yet, a rudimentary appreciation of human nature and political science imparts the valuable lesson of mutuality to any elimination of threat, which often must be "negotiated" with recalcitrant "partners." We all know how that turns out: much more often than we like, in a shambles. That's why "Neanderthals" (in my book, a blood libel) have been celebrated since at least Plato's time as guardians of all that is treasured and true. In the exercise of their duties as God and nation can be construed as placing upon their shoulders, the crucial element of judgment is all-important, separating triumph from fiasco and the cause of goodd from the cause of evil. Only in a simpleton's mind can the most perplexing complexity render out to clear platitudes. The testament to our troops, and often to our leaders, is that in carrying their unprecedented burden, the "weight of the world," they so often get it right. And for their mistakes, short of the ones frankly criminal, the gift of human intelligence sees their actions for what they are: good faith execution of the terrible tasks they embrace, not perfectly but necessarily. Slower than most would like, when needed correction is slow to develop. But the self-scrutinizing system never ceases its rounds.

[Xavier_Onassis]

Angels are never female. There are only three mentoioned in the Bible, and all are male: Michael, Gabriel, and Lucifer. Della Reese and John Travolta are not strictly canonical. The Holy Mother Church tends to think that God (who knows all things) knew how many he needed (there are a lot of angels, at least enough to form a Heavenly Host, but only three are named), and made that number. Angels don't die or wear out, so there never was any reason female angels.



Although most theologians in the cultures mentioned above (Latter-day Saints excepted; see above) would agree that angels are technically genderless in the normal human sense, all references in the Jewish, Christian and other holy writings mentioned above give angels a masculine aspect; for example, angels are given tasks such as warrior, herald, guard (at the gates of Eden), wrestler (of Jacob), mover of large stones (at the tomb of Christ), which in traditional societies would all have been tasks typically performed by men. The few canonical names of angels (e.g., Michael, Gabriel and Lucifer) are recognized in most cultures as masculine names. In languages with gender markings for nouns, the word "angel" is uniformly a masculine noun, including in the original Hebrew, Greek and Latin texts referred to above. In cultures where the proper name "Angel" is given to children, the name "Angel" is typically given to boys (girl's versions of the name include "Angela" and "Angelica").[20] The word "angel" in English, French, German, Spanish, and many other European languages is derived from the Latin angelus, a masculine noun.

In art, however, angels are always beautiful, which tends to mean their features are often rather feminine - even for warrior archangels, their hair is usually long, and their figures somewhat slight. In European medieval and Renaissance paintings of the Annunciation the archangel is usually depicted as noticeably more attractive than Mary - she could not be painted in a way that might inspire lustful thoughts, whilst no such problem arose with a genderless angel. Angels in art become more sexually differentiated from the nineteenth century, after which breasts and masculine figures and haircuts appear. In modern Western culture, many angels are depicted as having female figures, facial features and names, and many New Age practitioners speak of masculine and feminine angels.

[edit] Other religions

Angel-like beings called Tennin and Tenshi appear in Japanese mythology.

There are a number of New Age -type books describing various ordinary people's encounters with angels or angel-like beings.

Occult tradition lists the seven Angels of Revelation and our Solar System as Gabriel (the Earth-Moon), Raphael (Mercury), Uriel (Venus), Michael (Sun), Samael (Mars), Zachariel (Jupiter) and Orifiel (Saturn). The Angel of the Earth is Melchizedek.

[Michael Tee]

I guess since my manhood has been impugned once again (sigh!) for attacking war, killing, massacres, torture, etc., I ought first to direct myself to the obvious errors that beset this unconsciously hilarious tirade.  The Avenging Angel, domer, is not a woman - - it is, by some wondrous serendipity, the Archangel Michael, usually depicted as the Angel with a Sword.  (Mi - cha - el, who [is]called[by] God to give the literal Hebrew translation.)  You can see a good representation of the Archangel at the Place St. Michel in the Latin Quarter in Paris, brandishing his sword over the fountain there.  Although I'm somewhat flattered to be compared to the good Archangel, nothing feminine in him or in me (not that there's anything wrong with that!) and yet we're both 100% opposed to torture, murder, war (when it's based on lies) and massacres.

Oh, and we (the Archangel and I) have no problem at all with the elimination of threats.  That's what the Archangel's sword is for, after all.  That's why I'm not a pacifist and that's also why I believe in the need to maintain an army of Neanderthal killers the same way a junkyard needs its dog.  What you need to do is to stop your snake-oil sales routine and give up wholly and forever on convincing any rational individual that Iraq - - Iraq! - - constituted or ever could constitute a threat to the U.S.A.  It's only the dumbest snake-oil salesmen who sell somebody else's snake oil.  And try to remember, if you ever go into the scrap business, that it is you and not the yard dog who is supposed to be running the show.

Plato had to be dragged into this, I guess, sooner or later, given the level of intellectual pretension we are dealing with here it was inevitable, but, nevertheless, oy!  And I say oy! with respect, for we all must respect Plato.  However, Plato's appreciation of the armies of Greece was perfectly understandable, rooted as it was in the defence of Greece against the Persians, and the Persians, as we all know from watching 300, were seriously evil and outlandishly freaky-looking dudes, downright UGLY, in fact, and had to be, like, destroyed?  So I'd leave Plato out of it, just on grounds of relevance, domer, because he wasn't really talking about an all-volunteer army of low-hanging fruit, Green Card wannabes and petty criminals.  He had the citizen and/or aristocrat armies of classical Greece in mind, a different breed of army.

I also want to address the false issue of "complexity" raised in your little screed.  There is nothing "complex" about a war of pre-meditated aggression.  Country "A" has something that Country "B" wants; oil in this case; or maybe somebody just wants to score a point or two for Israel  in the Israeli-Palestinian struggle.  So Country "B" makes up the most outrageous bullshit lie it can think of, either the Gulf of Tonkin howler or the WMD fantasy, and the invasion is on.  When the first lie is exposed another one (building Iraqi democracy) quickly replaces it.  When that lie fails, there will be another.  The lies come and go, the aggression and illegality continue.  Complex?  Only to those stupid enough to take the lies seriously and pursue their ramifications as intensively as one might have pursued the implications of Hitler's "reasons" for invading Poland or exterminating the Jews, had anyone been dumb enough to take them seriously.

Finally, I have to say it:  the weaker and more tenuous the case, the heavier and more Olympian the pomposity of its defenders.  domer, you just set a record.

[domer]

The lecture on the provenance of the Avenging Angel is interesting but not germane. I made my points and stand by them. But your outrageous, bilious torrent of crap has to be called for what it is. Who else would term our fighting men and women "an all-volunteer army of low-hanging fruit, Green Card wannabes and petty criminals?"

[Plane]

When has there evr been an army with a higher advradge age, a better rate of education , a better record for behavior?


Never has ours been better than now , not by a long shot.


This may not seem so , but when a GI would punch up a Natzi for info it didn't make the papers .

[Michael Tee]

<<When has there evr been an army with a higher advradge age, a better rate of education , a better record for behavior?>>

Bullshit.


<<Never has ours been better than now , not by a long shot.>>

Bullshit.


<<This may not seem so , but when a GI would punch up a Natzi for info it didn't make the papers .>>

And more bullshit.

[Plane]

<<When has there evr been an army with a higher advradge age, a better rate of education , a better record for behavior?>>

Bullshit.


<<Never has ours been better than now , not by a long shot.>>

Bullshit.


<<This may not seem so , but when a GI would punch up a Natzi for info it didn't make the papers .>>

And more bullshit.

I take it that you do not know of an army with a higher advradge age .

I take it that you do not know of an army with a higher rate of education.

I take it that you do not know how to find any army in any war , includeing this same one in previous times , more willing to prosicute misbehavior?


I take it this way because you have offered "bullshit" as your best answer.

[Michael Tee]

<<The lecture on the provenance of the Avenging Angel is interesting but not germane.>>

Thank you.  I was only making the important point that I am not now and have never been in touch with my feminine side.  Honest.  Swear to God.  In case you were wondering.

<<I made my points and stand by them. >>

More accurately, you failed to make any of your points but stand by them nevertheless.  Attaboy, domer.  THAT'S determination.

<<But your outrageous, bilious torrent of crap has to be called for what it is. >>

Good idea, finally.  You can call it irrefutable logic, then.

<<Who else would term our fighting men and women "an all-volunteer army of low-hanging fruit, Green Card wannabes and petty criminals?">>

I was only trying to be nice to them.  I thought they'd appreciate a little flattery.

[Michael Tee]

<<I take it this way because you have offered "bullshit" as your best answer.>>

I offered bullshit as my best answer because not only were your allegations unsubstantiated but I gave a specific example of an army which DID prosecute malefactors to the point of executing the bastards, and that army was the army of the United States of America in the Second World War, Franklin D. Roosevelt Commander in Chief.  An example which, without any countervailing fact, you chose to flatly deny.

[domer]

My points are plain, provocative and politic, the last of which you should try yourself. They will stand the test of both time and Michael Tee. And before I leave for the night, I feel compelled out of Christian charity and human kindness to advise you of this thunderbolt, of which you are evidently unaware: You're making an ass out of yourself.

[Michael Tee]

<<My points are plain, provocative and politic . . . >>

Funny, I would have said they were turgid, conventional and . . .

politic?  Is that a synonym for "sell-out?"

<<I feel compelled out of Christian charity and human kindness to advise you of this thunderbolt, of which you are evidently unaware: You're making an ass out of yourself.>>

Awww, shit!  I'll never be able to express myself in pubilc again.  Damn!!!

[Plane]

<<I take it this way because you have offered "bullshit" as your best answer.>>

I offered bullshit as my best answer because not only were your allegations unsubstantiated but I gave a specific example of an army which DID prosecute malefactors to the point of executing the bastards, and that army was the army of the United States of America in the Second World War, Franklin D. Roosevelt Commander in Chief.  An example which, without any countervailing fact, you chose to flatly deny.

This was when?  I missed that one sorry.

When has there ever been an army with a higher average age, a better rate of education , a better record for behavior?

The higher ad varage age is a fact, a demographic that helps explain the maturity of their behavior.

The better record is kinda subjective ,I take it as evidence that there are many fewer reported incidents though this doesn't indicate directly the number of potentially reported incidents  since the eagerness to report might be very diffrent. I have spoken to a veteran of the Philippine campaign who told me that his unit took almost no Japanese prisoners , even when they were surrendering. I have read accounts of officers working for Patton who routinely punched German officers till they got information this was not considered much of a problem nor was it considered a problem when a captured general was forced to ride on the hood of his own captured staff car as the unit rolled into territory that was prone to ambush.

Our Army is now watched  lot closer ,I expect it is a lot harder to get away with stuff than it used to be , so the high rate of prosecution of reported incidents may not indicate so much .


Never has ours been better than now , not by a long shot.

I was a member myself of the Navy , I am in constant contact with the Air Force  , as far as this goes I am a direct source myself.


This may not seem so , but when a GI would punch up a Nazi for info it didn't make the papers .

I am pretty sure of this , if ever a GI ever did get a repremand for punching up a German or  Japanese prisoner I imagine the public response would have been outrage at the repremand.

There were a lot of bad incidents involving prisoners of war that I could refer to , many that would approach the class of Abu Garab , have you heard of the Island of Prisoners revolt that happened during the Korean war?

I am not sure that either of us can actually prove these points since there are unfindable variables to be accounted for , mainly the difference that I ought to prove is that it is definitely harder to get away with much now than it was then.

[Plane]

http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/army/csi_gebhardt_road.pdf

I have written this study to inform Army leaders, from platoon level to the Pentagon, about the Army’s history of detainee operations. Iraq is not the first war where the Army has struggled with applying the Geneva Conventions
to insurgents. A similar struggle occurred in 1965 as President Lyndon B. Johnson was sending increasingly larger forces to Vietnam, a situation then viewed by many as an insurgency. Operation IRAQI FREEDOM
is not the first war where EPW divided themselves into competing groups, rioted among themselves, and committed murder. That same phenomenon
occurred in the Korean prisoner-of-war camps in 1951. And Abu Ghraib is not the first detention facility where the MP and MI missions, detention and interrogation respectively, came into conflict. Similar tension,
albeit in a more subdued form, occurred on a smaller scale in a joint detention/interrogation facility in Haiti in 1994. This study explores these and other experiences in the interest of saying to the current generation of leaders, “The Army has been there and done that before. Now what can we learn from it?”

[_JS]

Domer,

To address your original points and to stick with a more philosophical theme, I think there are a few schools of thought for which many come to their views of both war and importanly, their views on good and evil. These are the definitions of an acquaintance of mine for simplicity sake and are therefore somewhat simple in and of themselves, but I hope describe how many come to their conclusions.:

Modernism: the view that reality is accessible to the human mind in a manner unmediated by any tradition. Or, as Stanley Hauerwas would put it: "the story that you have no story except the story you chose when you had no story."

Relativism: the view that nothing is true in and of itself, but that everything may be true or false depending on the context, so that to assert any universal truth is both irrational and arrogant.

Post-modernism: the view that we can only know reality as constructed by some particular narrative. There is no neutral way to describe anything--at most, we can reach a consensus to some extent insofar as our rival narratives have points of contact. No one is unbiased, and anyone who claims to give you an objective description of anything is trying to pull one over on you (and perhaps also on themselves).

Radical post-modernism: postmodernism (as above) without any qualification. I.e., the view that all reality is "constructed"--nothing exists except as a part of some narrative, and there is no standard by which to judge that one narrative is truer than another. See "relativism."

Does that makes sense as an approach, the continuation would be to define the opposite views, which would be the non-relative schools of thought.

[Michael Tee]

plane, no apology necessary, but I did point out in a previous post that the U.S. had hanged dozens of soldiers for crimes against civilians during WWII.  You yourself made some kind of comment that I was the most pro-capital punishment Canadian you knew of.

I don't know if this story ever made it into the history books but I once worked with a vet who claimed to have been a prison guard in Quebec City during the war, when German prisoners transported to Canada were temporarily housed in old civilian jails before being shipped out West by rail.  According to this guy's story, a prisoner spat on a guard who was bringing food to the cell.  The guard immediately killed all three guys in the cell in revenge.  This was considered a huge scandal, total security blanket over the prison, nobody allowed in or out and General Eisenhower himself came up to Quebec City to straighten out mess.  Meaning that prisoner abuse was taken very seriously then.  (The vet didn't know what punishments if any were meted out for this.  He was transferred to Europe immediately afterwards and lost touch with everybody from his old unit.  They were all split up.)

My dad's first cousin served in the Pacific as a private in the U.S. infantry and he says exactly the same thing about taking Jap prisoners.  If you had any idea how those fucking bastards treated captured Allied soldiers, you'd understand why.   A friend of mine was a Royal Marine Commando whose unit was the first to liberate POW camps in the Tokyo Bay area after the surrender.  He's one of the toughest men I ever met, but I saw him break into tears when he described the condition of the prisoners as he found them.

There are instances of U.S. abuse of prisoners during WWII.  The convictions of the German guards in the Malmedy massacre - - when American prisoners taken during the Battle of the Bulge were massacred by German guards - - were overturned on appeal because confessions had been beaten out of them.  But there is nothing like the sadism and sexual humiliation, the use of electricity, waterboarding, dogs, anal rape and similar atrocities perpetrated on Arab prisoners by the U.S. military.  It's unprecedented.  And there is worse, stuff that is still under wraps - - the 90% of Abnu Ghraib photos and videos that the Pentagon refuses to release, the tortures being used in the secret torture chambers maintained around the globe by the CIA.

The final measure of official acceptance of torture and atrocity, of course, is in the punishment meted out for it.  In WWII, Americans executed other Americans for their crimes.  In the whole Viet Nam War, not a single American was executed (by Americans) for crimes against the Vietnamese people.  Lt. Calley, convicted of 27 or 28 murders in the My Lai massacre, got off with a few months of house arrest.  You will see no severe penalties today for America's crimes against the people of Iraq either.  As the Human Rights First report that I linked to makes clear, FIVE MONTHS is the highest jail sentence imposed for torture and murder of prisoners (I think this must have come out before Charles Granger was sentenced for the high-profile Abu Ghraib abuse - - he got a few years, I believe.)  NOBODY will be executed, not for rape, not for murder, not for torture.  Nobody above the rank of major has even been prosecuted.

Your other comments about the age and education of the U.S. military arent' verified by any comparative data and are only tenuous indicators of their propensity to commit crimes.  The chief factor is command control.  When the very top of the command claims the right to decide for himself what is torture and what isn't torture (in other words, declares himself outside the law) then this is not a convincing precedent to set in fighting torture at lower levels.  When the Attorney-General of the U.S.A. claims that the Geneva Conventions are "quaint and old-fashioned," it is ludicrous to expect the troops to ignore that opinon.  A lawless administration has begat a lawless army.  Contrary to your unproven speculation about G.I.'s punching Nazis, the FACT of the matter is that despite the millions of men who served, the enormous amount of time that has elapsed for whistle-blowers to come forward etc. there is no single shred of evidence to indicate that the army of Franklin D. Roosevelt committed any of the criminal acts and atrocities on its prisoners as does the army of George W. Bush, and further that no member of Bush's army has been or will be executed for rape and murder of civilians, whereas dozens of such executions were performed under FDR's command.  So your claim that today's US army is the best-disciplined and least atrocity-committing of any army in history is pure HOGWASH.