Hello everyone,
So this goes back a little bit to the theme of "just following orders". In a blog discussion a while ago someone mentioned that it would be a good idea to train the military in human rights and what are human rights violations so that the soldiers will know when following orders is not ok. That made me wonder, "Do we have anything like that in place right now?" So I went to Amnesty International's website, and found this page, and it turns out that not only does the US military training courses "not include specific instruction in the human rights or humanitarian law obligations that soldiers must obey," but the US also "trains approximately 100,000 foreign police and soldiers from more than 150 countries each year," so all the lack of focus on human rights in military training is spread around the world. Do you think that this will make it easier for soldiers to use the "just following orders" justification?
That site linked to this page, which advocates that "The US government must improve oversight, transparency, and accountability of US training of foreign forces." Something I found interesting was the last paragraph on the CIA, which essentially says that during the Cold War the CIA was allowed to engage in "covert or semi-covert military operations," and the lack of transparency led to many human rights abuses. The Cold War was characterized by a fear of communism and communists (in the US), so this relates to the theme of fear of an "other" and how that can lead to certain groups of people being granted extended power, which in turn allows those people to commit crimes against humanity. Do you think the human rights abuses committed by the CIA during the Cold War would have been possible without that fear of communism? Are human rights abuses, including genocides, at all possible without some sort of fear being instilled in the general population of the country where they are being instigated?
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I do not think that human rights abuses are possible without some sort of fear of the "bad guy" represented by the victims. Right now in the U.S. there are major human rights abuses occurring in Guantanamo Bay due to the general fear of terrorists. In Darfur the genocide, according to H-block speaker Naomi, is largely due to resource competition (perpetrators' fears of depleting resources purportedly caused by the victims). In Turkey in WWI the Christian Armenians were killed because of fear that they were consorting with the enemy.
A major element of fear is present in all instances of genocide that I can think of
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