Culpability for murder.

 This is from a Twitter post:

This is Viktoriia. Today she died in Kyiv. Her colleagues write that her body was found in her beloved husband Bohdan's embrace, their cat was with them in the building attacked with the Russian drone. She was pregnant. They had been expecting for child.

11:00 AM · Oct 17, 2022·Twitter for iPhone

Recently, on an email list I'm on, the topic of the individual culpability of Russians for the war in Ukraine came up.  Most of the people who posted on the topic, not surprisingly, held that individual Russians had no culpability, it was all Putin, or Putin and his cronies.  A few held the opposite view.

I tend to hold that opposite view.

Now, it is not the case that some babushka in Vladivostok just trying to get by really has blood on her hands, but rather at some level, and I'd but that level fairly low, responsibility for actions in wars vests.  

After the Second World War, and even continuing on to the present day, thousands of Germans were put on trial from crimes during the Second World War.  "I was only following orders" was held not to be an excuse.  Crimes, we supposedly learned, are crimes no matter what.

Of course, it's easier to see those crimes if you are ordered to shoot civilians, but what about bombing them?  That's effectively what's going on.

Well, it's no different.

Bombing of cities was once a controversial subjected in a way that it always should have been, but which after World War Two it wasn't.  In 1939-40, both sides in Europe stuck to bombing military and industrial targets, but the Germans actually accidentally hit civilian targets during the Blitz that seemed to observers to be calculated acts.  The British, who rapidly went to nighttime bombing, fairly quickly quit worrying much about collateral damage, and things were off and running.

Theoretically, most Allied bombing in Europe was targeted, but the targeting was relatively loose.  American daylight bombing was conducted during the day for precision, but even it hit a lot of residential areas.  British nighttime bombing was much looser by default.  Frankly, at some point at least the British passed over to where the Germans had already been, and were effectively bombing civilian targets, or at least bombing so cavalierly that they knew that they were killing a lot of civilians.  Lest Americans feel too good about this, the US deliberately went to the same tactic against Japan, bombing highly flammable civilian housing on the theory that making workers homeless would wreck Japanese production, even though it was effectively already wrecked.

The US is the "good war", as Studs Terkel put it, to Americans, and it's practically the high point of modern British history.  But in truth, the areal bombing campaigns crossed over into the criminal and immoral.  And in both instances they had no discernible impact on shortening the war by way of loose targeting.

The exception to that last statement, of course, was the atomic bombing of two Japanese cities, which directly ended the war with Japan.  The US has been struggling to justify destroying two Japanese cities in what was a terror attack ever since, but it can't be justified.  Excuses have ranged from it was no worse than the firebombing of Tokyo, which was also immoral, to it hypothetically saving the lives of a lot of Japanese soldiers and civilians, as well as allied ones.  We don't know that, of course, and at the time of the bombings, that was only a theoretical possibility.  

We've basically found it impossible to reconcile with ushering in the age of atomic weaponry ever since, but we have abstained from its further use in spite of it being urged from time to time.  Indeed, it was urged during the Korean War, the French Indochinese War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and even during the Vietnam War.  Most of the civilians and military figures in authority always said no to the suggestion.

The fact that the US blazed the trail on this has been used recently by Putin as an excuse for suggesting he might go nuclear.  It doesn't provide one, as we've abstained.  Indeed, since World War Two the Western Way of War has become more and more precise, and excuses for collateral damage of any kind less and less tolerated.  Single USAF bombs to neighborhoods have been regarded as inexcusable by the US.  On the ground, photographs by Marines with Afghan dead combatant bodies have been regarded as criminal, when their grandfathers in arms routinely cut the ears off of dead Japanese soldiers and nobody thought anything of it.

Putin's war has stripped the band aid of the noble Russian combatant off and showed to us an ugly wound that goes back at least as far as World War Two.  The Red Army was effectively a large armed mob that committed at least the crime of rape on a massive scale.  The current Russian army doesn't seem much better.  Indeed, it seems as the crude vulgarity of Russian servicemen that came in with the Russian Revolution just won't go away.

Nobody has let the Germans get away with supporting the Nazis and all that meant.  Nor should they. The Third Reich tarnished the reputation of the Germans in a way that will take at least two centuries to change.  The Russians are working on the same thing.

One of the reasons that the July 20 plotters attempted to kill Hitler in 1944 is that they wanted to show the world that not every German was fully invested in the evil, although even those in on the plot were to some degree.  Russia's reputation now can only be saved for generations to come if some brave Russians refuse to cooperate in the evil and do something, whether that means voting with their feet and leaving Russian ranks in Ukraine, to parking a tank in front of the Kremlin and declaring Putin's regime over.

Whether or not that happens is yet to be seen.  But what we can say is that every Russian missile crew that points a missile towards Ukraine and helps fire it is complicit in murder to some degree.