It's murder in anybody's book.Rogue 9 wrote:<snipped down to size>
1.) Why the hell are we even talking about this? The subject was the protesters/vandalists.
2.) It's not "mass murder," given that a shitload of the civilians who die are actively fighting against the Army (aka they are in the insurgency) or were accidentally caught in the line of fire. This doesn't make their deaths any less tragic or horrible, but it does make it not deliberate murder. Unlike, say, this:
Look, if I want to stop a serial killer, and I know he's in an apartment building, and because of the risk of him getting away I just blow up the building and kill everyone inside ... it's murder, isn't it? Doesn't matter that none of the residents were specifically my target -- I knew my actions would lead to the deaths of many innocents, whether I targeted each of them individually or not. I don't get to say 'Oh, well my actions were okay because society is so much better off with the serial killer dead.'
I don't give governments a different definition of murder just because they scale up and kill thousands instead of one or two, but I understand that they rely on that human inability to comprehend death at that scale to justify their actions. Any way you cut it in my book, doing things that you know will kill people is murder. When you win the war, you get away with it ... when you lose, you're tried for war crimes.
Great powers kill with impunity because they think they'll never lose badly enough to pay for their actions. Most of the time, regretably, they're right.
And, back on point -- anybody defacing a memorial is an asshole, especially in a country where you have any number of viable alternatives to express your dissenting opinion without pissing on the memory of those who sacrificed for their nation.
Go graffiti the Crawford ranch, you ignorant punks.
