Postby Andrew Adams » Wed Feb 22, 2006 7:35 pm
Duels:
Do you apply 21st century American values to people who lived a thousand years before us on a completely different continent? We often try to apply American standards and values to other people in US Foreign Policy today and that is why we often misjudge our adversaries. All the way up till about 1890 in the US it was customary for a western man to walk around heavily armed. Wild animals, outlaws, renegades, Indians, or just a contrary domesticated animal could all pose threats.
If you tried to bully, cheat, or rob from a Western man he was expected to defend himself. It might be a hundred miles to the nearest lawman. So you had to go ride for say three or four days to get the law. If he was there, you than had a three or four day ride back. The lawman than arrested the criminal, if he was still around, and either had to transport him back the three or four days to jail or hold him in town until the circuit judge came around which might be up to a month or more. All this time the taxpayer is flipping the bill to feed the lawman and criminal and for maybe a week the guy who rode to fetch the lawman is not working.
Often the law took to long to do anything or else the lawbreakers simply went someplace the law couldn’t go. So it was much easier for you to take the law into your own hands and hang or shoot the culprit. If you didn’t, the people around you would start to think you a coward and all the criminals and riff-raff would begin to try and take advantage of you. If it was thought you were a coward shop-keepers might not sell to you, your neighbors might stop doing business with you, and if you needed it no one would hire you to do a job. In the “Old West” you were expected to be brave and loyal. If you carried a gun you were expected to know how to use it and be willing to as well.
This tradition can be traced all along the US’s history and is some of the logic behind many states Right to Carry Laws. You have the right to protect yourself, your loved ones, your property and even the responsibility of protecting those who cannot or will not protect themselves, if you can.
In the Medieval Ages anything went. Might made right. A lord, freeman, or merchant traveling through another lord’s lands depended upon him to be honest. If he wasn’t he might attack you or charge you exorbitant tax rates to cross his lands. (Minor taxes were allowed especially if it was known that the local lord paid for the roads upkeep and kept the surrounding lands free of bandits.) But robber barons were all too common. To keep yourself safe you needed to go armed with the idea that attacking you was either futile or to costly to be worth it. Around the time of the Third Crusade merchant companies were forming. Poor knights and out of work soldiers suddenly found a lucrative relatively safe way to earn a living, caravan guards. (Often mocked in fantasy literature, merchant companies, and therefore caravan guards, tended to be well equipped and well trained.) They had to be. The merchants were carrying veritable fortunes. An arms race was on. Bandit forces needed stronger and stronger forces to defeat the merchants. If a bandit force grew too strong it needed to be tended to by a great lord or even the king himself! These merchant caravans supplied the goods of the world and provided for cities to form and the Renaissance to happen.
As the Renaissance took on strength nation-states formed and feudal armies transformed into professional standing armies. The aristocracy was loathe to lose their power to the new bourgeois class. In the Middle Ages duels and tournaments took the place of raiding or warring against your neighbor’s insults to your honor. In the Renaissance the obsolete nobility had to manage a way to keep their honor (and power) intact. One way was to join the army as an officer. Another was to become an essential government servant. Yet another was to go into business for yourself. However, if you had a title whether it was squire, lord, or prince you were expected to keep your honor. Honor could be besmirched in so many ways I will not list them all here. Something as small as talking to the wrong person at a party to saying something that we today would think was inoffensive could be cause for a duel. Duels were an acceptable way for the martially minded man to handle questions of honor. “Sally and I are good friends.” That could be interpreted by Sally’s other male friends or relatives that Sally and I are a bit too friendly and a duel to the death could ensue!
Today honor doesn’t really count for a whole lot. Respect for the law or fear of it keeps most of us in line. If someone cuts you off in traffic a honk of the horn and a rude hand gesture are typically enough to satisfy your “honor.” (Although I would maintain that such a reaction would be dishonorable.) If you track them down and kill them or even start playing cut-off games the police will very quickly more than likely intervene and punish you the victim.
Today the acceptable, and much overly used, method of “getting even” is the lawsuit. If someone does something so harsh to you that you want to kill them the best way is to sue them. So a trial of champions, where we use lawyers as our champions, in lieu of a big strong guy who’s good with a sword, duels out our case. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose but generally nobody has to get hurt or die. (Although I would maintain that tort reform really needs to happen in this country and that we have too many lawyers but that is a different discussion best suited on another website’s forum.)
So is it okay to kill someone else in a duel? In 1250 sure, I’d even say in 1885 “Old West” it is. Killing someone was accepted if not actually expected when someone did something “wrong.” Today we can take a life to save a life but the “moral” line is drawn there for individuals. We do things differently now. Maybe it’s better. Maybe it’s worse. But it’s the way we do things today. Maybe if the threat of a sword through the ribcage or a bullet to the head was a real possibility there would be fewer jerks in the world and we would treat everyone more civilly but I doubt it.
War:
Most people think that we are commanded not to kill. Actually a better way to look at it is that we are commanded not to commit murder. Each society has its own particular definition for what constitutes murder. Most people would agree that at the bare minimum murder is the unlawful taking of a human life by another human especially with premeditated malice.
Snipers save lives. Most people think of a sniper as a murderer. They often get to pick and chose which enemy target they will “service.” But the real fact remains that a sniper is a military or law enforcement weapon used to gather and collect intelligence and if possible take that one shot that will “save” lives. Some lunatic hiding in the trunk of a car killing random people to instill terror because he thinks “Allah” told him to is not a sniper. He’s a serial killer. Again if a sniper does his job right he SAVES lives.
Innocent people die in war. You can make the smartest bomb in the world but as long as evil people live among the innocent, or even use them as shields, innocent people will die. As a soldier you have to accept the fact that sometimes the guy you just killed or maimed might have been your best friend given the right circumstances. Some guys can’t deal with that. Some can. As a soldier you pray that your leaders will use your talents at killing sparingly. Sometimes you have to fight and sometimes you have to kill. And sometimes you have to kill people you don’t want to. Maybe in hindsight you think you didn’t have to kill so many people or that your leaders were wrong to send you to go kill but all you can ever do is be your best. If you have ever talked to a war hero they seldom, if ever, talk about how many people they killed or what they had to do to earn their status as hero. When I was very young I asked my dad if he ever killed anyone. He said he fired and they fell. When I got older I realized that you should never ask a soldier if he ever killed anyone. More than likely he doesn’t want to be reminded of it. Most men who see combat feel guilty. Guilty that they are still alive while their buddies aren’t. Guilty that they were “so good at killing.” Some men become better because of that guilt. Some worse. But once you kill some one you can’t take it back. It changes you. You no longer feel innocent. You’re no longer a kid.
Killing someone is the ultimate theft. You take away everything they had and everything they ever would’ve had. You end all their dreams and aspirations. Soldiers who have killed will think about it. They will have to come to terms with what they did. Like I said some deal with it in a positive way some in a negative. But deal with it they must.
Today we kill thousands of make believe people in games. Board games, miniature warfare games, RPGs, video games all cheapen the value of life to us. We kick in the door and slaughter goblins, or the “enemy,” or little plastic pieces representing 1 man or a whole army. Less of us will see war than in any other time in history. But we need to remember that there are a few stalwart men who give up a life of relative luxury to go off and be killed or maimed in our stead. It’s always been that way and it will probably always be so.
In conclusion killing in of itself is not wrong. It is morally neutral. Sometimes it is morally wrong to let someone live, “all it takes for evil to succeed is for good men to fail to act,” and sometimes it’s wrong to kill them. As far as I’m concerned John Wayne said it all in the film Big Jake, “There are two reasons to kill, survival and meat.” To what purpose do you kill?
"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." (John 15:13)
