this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2025
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I think the Geneva conventions were also something rather new because biological warfare, civilian hostages including women and children, massacres, and destruction of vital resources like food and water were pretty standard for thousands of years of war and combat.
Of course as history has shown, no one actually bothers to follow the Geneva conventions when they face zero consequences but will totally complain if anyone else doesn't (cough Israel cough).
Biological weapons, for the time being, are mutually banned because disease is hard to control in a warzone where anything has the chance to mutate or evolve. Gas attacks are used exclusively against civilians because every army has gas masks. Although iirc Iraq used it to create a massive untraversable barrier against Iran. Otherwise everything is apparently still the same.
I think there needs to be a bit of differentiation.
There always have been particularly ruthless and brutal armys, who would pillage, rape and murder civillians, just as there have been disciplined armys and leaders who made a point of only fighting the enemies army.
However the extent to which people could go about slaughter with swords, pikes and muskets is very different than the extent of machine guns, artillery, and carpet bombing.
Also it is psychologically researched that the further someone is to another human, the less empathy they feel. It takes much more decisiveness to slay someone with a sword than to shoot at him from a hundred meters than to press a button in your drone control room while having your coffee and the breakfast you got on the way driving to work.
War always has been brutal, but modern technologies have enabled the scaled and speed of destruction to go far beyond what was historically imaginable. So the need to create some sort of rules to limit the effects also has increased tremendously.
While I'm sure there's some that are worse than others I'm pretty sure every conflict has involved widespread rape.
Someone please correct me if you can. It would help me like humanity a little bit more.
Any examples?
Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub who liberated Jerusalem from the Crusaders in 1187 was renowned for sparing Civillians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saladin
Cool, thanks for digging this out of my memory... I learned about this dude in college and had completely forgot of his existence.
Sucks that we have to go back that far to find one though...
I would also add that weaponizing rape is not a typical (though not totally absent) characteristic of peasant revolution whereas it is an extremely widespread (but not totally ubiquitous) characteristic of conquest/colonialism and political control of minorities by state projects.
Edit: Meant to respond to @[email protected]
Geneva convention only applies to losers. Winners write history.