An inquest looks at the death of Corporal Sarah Bryant in Afghanistan.No reflection on Corporal Bryant nor to minimise her valour nor her sacrifice, but I'd be more impressed if the inquiry spent less time on equipment and more in asking the government tough questions about what military (as opposed to ideological) reason there could possibly have been for sending a woman in place of a man into a combat zone.
Not relevant? Then why is her sex the first word in the news reports? Of course, silly me.
Sorry to get so steamed about this, but I cannot stomach needlessly sending women into combat because Feminism demands it. Even worse is politicians going along so they can stage glowing press releases about all-women helicopter crews while trying to ignore episodes of a woman sailor (and mother!) taken prisoner on the high seas and treated in violation of all the rules of war while Whitehall doesn't respond with so much as a shrug. Meanwhile, able-bodied "men" languish like drones safe back home in Civvy Street without feeling like utter bounders while women take the risks that tradition, duty, honour, and chivalry demands men shoulder first.This strikes me as one of this barbaric, unenlightened era's most degenerate traits.
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11 comments:
I can't pretend to speak for Corporal Bryant, but I suspect she didn't sign up to fold shirts back at base whilst the menfolk went and did the fighting. In case you hadn't noticed, we have a volunteer army and the people who put their lives on the line do so knowingly and by choice. You may not be able to stomach 'sending women into combat because Feminism demands it', but if a person is capable and willing to do a job that their country needs done, how can you stomach saying that their gender disqualifies them?
David, your comment would have been valid if UK had, like Finland does have, conscription.
But UK doesn't have. UK has an all-volunteer professional army.
Volunteers take a risk when they enlist, and the risk may realize in form of war. Since women are allowed to enlist, that risk may befall on them as well. They have taken the risk by enlisting, and they are compensated in salary.
My country has conscription. That means that basically each and every able-bodied man is a soldier and he can be force-levied in the army against his will and be sent to unspeakable suffering, mutilation and death in war against his will just because of his gender. No salary or any other compensation is paid, just some £4 daily allowance.
Which is more barbarian: to send volunteer women into war or to force-levy men in the army against their will and send them to war just because of their gender?
I chose my career as a metallurgist by free will and my own decision. I have worked at the floor level as well, and I proudly bear my burns on my arms. I took a risk and paid for it.
I understand about the aspect of volunteerism–in fact, I far prefer it to conscription, which I regard as one notch above slavery. A professional army is one where every man serves of his own free will and conscripts should only be employed when it is absolutely necessary in times of national emergency.
That being said, volunteering to serve has no bearing on how one serves. That is a matter for those in command. Otherwise, I doubt a single spud would every get peeled and generals would give the order to charge only to be told that the men "weren't in the mood." In return, those in command must shoulder responsibility for their soldiers. In our uncivilised age, those who have responsibility for the defence of the realm have abdicated this responsibility in favour of obeisance to Feminism as an unassailable reason for sending women into combat when there is no military reason to do so.
It isn't a question of qualification, but of morality. War is not a schoolyard game and it isn't a question of fairness about who goes into battle and who doesn't. No one, and I mean no one, should have to go off to kill another human being, to be killed himself, or to face daily the spectacle of friends and innocents put to the sword. It is a vile, foul, dirty job and as evil an activity in general as one could possibly imagine. It's stock is suffering and its product is death. That men have to fight wars is bad enough, but for women to do so when there is no need (Note the qualification: When there is no need. There are times when women must go to war and they often serve with incredible distinction, but please God, let that always be rarely) is to willingly compound that evil–especially when those women are used as cannon fodder in some grotesque social engineering experiment. When women are made legitimate targets of war and put at hazard of far worse fates than death just so some fanatical unsexed relics from the 1960s can sit back in smug satisfaction because there a are a few more officers who can sing soprano, it is obscene. It is even worse when it engenders the attitude now prevalent in the West where an able-bodied man can swill beer safe at home in front of the television while a seven stone girl takes his place on the line and that so-called man feels not the slightest twinge of shame. One hundred years ago, such a man would have been called a blackguard and a coward. But then, the word chivalry was still used without a sneer in those days.
More to the point, women do have a very real and far more vital role in warfare and they are wasted dodging bullets at the front when they could be fulfilling their true calling. It is the role of men to protect hearth and home; to face death, mutilation, and horror to make sure that none of that nor the greater evils of slavery and tyranny reach their home that they will one day, God willing, return to safe and whole. The women have the harder and more important task; to make certain that there is a home for the men to return to; that the hearth is tended, the children are safe and loved, and that civilisation continues. The wives and mothers of the Spartans, Vikings, Celts, Sioux, Zulus, Iroquois, Berbers, and Christian Europe understood this. It is a lesson that we have forgotten and will one day have to relearn in a very unforgiving school.
I should have added, Here endth the rant.
I think our difference here is this - you say that the role of women in society is inherently different from the role of men, but there is no inherent reason why that should be. There are two important things to note about the Vikings, Zulus etc. at war: firstly, victory then relied heavily on the brute physical strength of the fighters, unlike in modern warfare, which meant women were less effective in battle (although there were some cultures in which women did fight - for example, the Sarmatians). Secondly, in all the cultures you cite - correct me if I'm wrong - women were second-class citizens, in some cases reduced to property. This correlation between separation and inequality - in general society, not just in warfare - is no accident. Separation of gender roles, like separation of racial or sexual orientation-based social positions, in a society is a prison, and its members are assigned their cells at birth, just as in feudalism, or the caste system. And that's morally wrong. Part (though clearly not all) of our moral duty as a society is to free people as much as possible from the restrictions accidents of birth place upon them; the alternative is the division of society into different inescapable classes and hence the development of bigotry, exploitation, slavery and all the other horrors the past has to offer. That's not to say any society is free of social differences based on birth - look at the class system that still haunts us in Britain today, in the way the middle and upper classes spit upon 'chavs' - nor that this is the only type of evil in society (one need look no further than China or North Korea to see that). But it is an evil, and it's one that you take as a moral assumption when you say that men and women have different roles to play in warfare. Equality is not just an issue for 'unsexed relics from the 1960s' but one that is of vital importance to all of us.
The only case you could make in favour of sending men into battle in preference to women would be a pragmatic one based on their relative ability to fight, which would be rendered invalid by the impartial testing of soldiers' abilities which already takes place (or if it doesn't, probably should. Please forgive my ignorance of military procedures.)
That's a very good point that encapsulates basic feminism circa 1982, but it fails on a number of points. First, it ignores the self-evident fact that there are inherent differences between men and women at a neo-Aquinian level. These don't go away simply because they are inconvenient. Second, it falls into the Leftist fallacy of assuming that the main source of human suffering is differences and that if those differences were eliminated, then suffering would, if not abolished, would be at a tolerable level. Unfortunately, this is the sort of thinking that has resulted in the Left damning civilisation and praising barbarians in hopes that they will somehow meet in the middle instead of merely disarming the civilised and emboldening the barbarians. It is also the sort of Procrustean thinking that ends up with short men on the rack to lengthen them while cutting off tall men at the knees. Third, it overstates the plight of women by comparing the status of the highest men with that of the lowest women and by making a blanket generalisation that equates the historic status of women as being that of a slave and a prisoner. This is ardent nonsense that wouldn't last five minutes with anyone who'd actually studied how the Greeks, Romans, English, Norse, and many other lived or even took the time to read a bit of Aristophanes. More to the point, yes, women were treated abominably in the past and some were treated as property and slaves. In fact, they were property. They were slaves. But then, men were treated abominably and many were property and were slaves. Women have no special status in the misery sweepstakes. At least they didn't have to lose their wedding tackle as a condition of holding a civil service job, as happened in many parts of the world not so very long ago. Property and slaves? I suggest you read the Norse sagas and their endless stories of Viking Chieftains wanting to make peace with their foes only to be vetoed by their fearsome wives, who weren't going to stand for any of that sort of nonsense. Or of the Spartan women who told their men to return "With your shield or on it." Lady Macbeth was not an isolated case.
Indeed, the whole question of inequality as an a priori wrong doesn't hold very well. Some people become kings because of accident of birth. Others become Americans, too–a very privileged people. Does this mean that citizenship of free, prosperous nations should be determined solely by lottery or perhaps citizenship to them should be granted universally? Some become wealthy by accident of birth. Others beautiful, talented, intelligent, graceful, strong, and healthy in any of a number of combinations. Should I curse Einstein for his genius or Helen of Troy for her Beauty? Inequality of birth, station, or achievement is not an evil. What is done with those blessings and the moral choices surrounding them is where the evil lies.
Oh, and that is another point. Mashing together castes and Feudalism is hardly worthwhile, as they are as different as chalk and cheese. And don't be so quick to condemn the class system. It is actually one of incredible social mobility where things as irrelevant as money and power have little place. Where else but in England could a man rise the world simply by putting on a collar and speaking his native language with slightly better diction? Or where a Chav can spit upon the middle and upper classes?
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But what has this to do with women in combat? Absolutely nothing. War is a very different situation where Feminism has no place at all. This isn't about getting more executives on the board of ICI who don't have penises. This is about a man stuffing his guts back into his belly. It's about seeing your friend's face burned off by napalm. It's healthy young men slashed apart with three feet of sharpened steel, run down by horse, crushed by tank treads, coughing their lungs out with phosgene, and dreading every night's sleep for fear of reliving some half-forgotten nightmare that really happened. It's entire villages whee the men are forced to dig their own graves while their women are systematically raped and God knows what happens to the children. It's cities in flames and entire civilisations put to the sword. The business of war is to inflict such horror on the enemy that he can no longer endure it while doing all you can to endure the horrors he inflicts upon you. It is knowing when to fire back in self defence, or to preemptivly strike to avoid battle, or to press the enemy to the wall, or to unleash universal destruction upon him and his kin. It is knowing when it is necessary to kill a hundred thousand men to get at one man because his crimes are so heinous that no man of conscience dare lets him walk freely on the Earth. And when to rebuild the nation of a fallen enemy even if it means thousands more of your own men must die. And when to choose between Armageddon and slavery. That is the sort of situation where fairness does not exist and where leaving the fighting and the dying goes on must be limited to a clearly defined group of professional men–a limitation which leaves women, children, and the elderly clearly and unambiguously from being classed as legitimate targets and where including women in combat is not a step forward for equality, but rather the compounding of a crime. Rather, as I said previously, women have the more important task of tending the home fires. These days those fires are very hard to keep lit.
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As for the pragmatic argument, it doesn't hold at all because there is no need in today's world for women to serve except in a few very specialised categories, if at all. Great Britain has 555,000 servicemen, counting both active and reserves out of 12,046,268 men fit for service. Britain could, if called on, easily field 3,000,000 men. That is over five times the present manpower. With that sort of surplus, women are not needed unless, God forbid, we ever face invasion again or Britain descends into anarchy.
You mention impartial testing and in one way, I'd welcome it because there'd be hardly any women in uniform then. It's a an open secret that women are held to a far lower standard in service tests than men. If they were expected to chin themselves in equal competition, few women would match that of the worst male recruit. Don't assume that this is male vanity speaking either. At my age, I'd be lucky to make the grade as a hostage and in my best years my eyesight stood against me. Even the Soviets rejected me as "unreliable."
Bear in mind that we are not talking about anything comparable to civilian duty. There is no occupation in ordinary life like it except perhaps that of the most dedicated of clergymen. It's easy to say, very well, women can't carry gigantic packs at a dead run or haul a mortar footplate through the mud, but this is a technological age; it's all push button warfare. Would that it were so. Yes, a gunneryman can carry out his duties by flipping a switch, a fighter pilot sits safe in his plane tens of thousands of feet above the earth, and a communications officer surely needs quick brains, not brawn. Maybe. But that gunneryman has to carry out his duties when the superstructure of his ship has been blasted away and the bridge is a twisted mess of flaming aluminium smeared with blood and caked with body parts while the Captain fights his ship by bellowing orders down a deck hatch to the engine room. That fighter pilot is one engine failure away from being stranded behind enemy lines surrounded by men who, if they catch him, will quite happily degrade, torture, and debase him until they decide to hack his head off with a field knife in front of a video camera. And that radioman has to keep sending and receiving messages despite the fact that there is an MP pressing an automatic against his skull with orders to pull the trigger if it seems as if the position will be overrun and the information in the raidoman's head captured. That's war. It requires a great deal more than a test rigged for "fairness". It requires enduring something that only men by tradition, honour, and chivalry should endure. And it's not because it's jolly good fun that the girls are being left out of. Pardon the flippancy, but a sense of perspective is needed here.
Equally important, fighting a war is too important to be left to mere pragmatism–not if anything like the rules of war are to be observed. Let women fight on the front lines if they can do the job, by all means. If they can do it, then they should and that should be reason enough. Just remember that was the same logic that had the Nazis defending Berlin with old men and boys and the Iranians using children to clear minefields.
I suppose that's why I am unimpressed by arguments about fairness or equality in this context. The only way to be "fair" is to be without conscience and the only way to be "equal" is to reduce human beings to cannon fodder. It's the logic of the Brave New World of fitting the person to the job until the world becomes one soulless ant colony. It's the logic that starts out with fairness and equality and ends with calling for The New Soviet Man.
As a final note, what about those drones who sit safe at home while their women fight in their places? If this isn't a moral failing I can't think what is.
Cracking debate, though. Haven't had this much fun since Oxford.
Sorry, one final comment. As to the Sarmatians, you really must take Herodotus with a very large grain of salt. True, the Vikings did have their Shield Maidens, though they were of noble birth as were their Celtic counterparts. At any rate, including them would be a bit like including Richard I as an argument against the American's Don't Ask, Don't tell policy; superficially relevant, but only if you don't probe too deep.
I disagree that I fall into the fallacy of saying the main cause of human suffering is difference between groups - in fact I carefully avoided that - but you can't honestly deny that it is a cause of suffering. For example, look at the plight of black people in the US before the 1960s.
Claiming that because some women were better off than some men in the past, there was anything approaching equality of fundamental rights and dignity (which is an equality we can all agree is morally imperative) is facetious because it was simply not true, in much the same way that women aren't the equals of men in the current Iranian system, even though some women do hold positions of power. It's easy to forget, when citing concepts like chivalry, honour and tradition, that those values were intimately tied up with real oppression of women, and similarly that feminism when it was first conceived of had a valid and moral purpose, even if you believe it has overstepped that remit since. Violence and discrimination against women (of clearly reprehensible kinds, such as paying them less for the same work as a man) has become far less acceptable in our society in the past several decades, unambiguously because of feminism.
I agree that the rationale behind an army's behaviour in war should not be merely pragmatic, and that the rules of war etc. should be observed. The use of child soldiers, for example, is clearly wrong. But what we must ask is: why? I hold that it is not because of honour or tradition, but rather because of our moral duty to protect the innocent (in the broad sense) and not to force unwilling people to go to war. I would agree that if conscription were to become necessary, only those fittest mentally and physically to fight - those most able to bear it - should be called up; but in a volunteer army, within the bounds of moral rules of war (like not marching troops across minefields to clear them) all servicemen and -women may be expected to do what is required of them by the pragmatic judgement of their superiors. If a volunteer soldier is capable of manning the guns, and the guns need manning, then that is sufficient justification for them to be ordered to do it. And if it turns out that the impartial tests (of whatever kind they may be, including not dropping out of strenuous training, showing valour on the battlefield and so on, rather than just exams or tests) of the soldier's mental and physical capacity to do so end up excluding most women - if they are truly impartial - then so be it.
The main difference between us here, I think, is still that you hold that the physical and perhaps temperamental difference between men and women imply a moral difference. The selection process for military personnel, however, should eliminate both kinds of significant difference in those eligible for frontline service: firstly, if the process is impartial, those of either gender who are too physically weak will be weeded out. (As I say, if this ends up stopping most female volunteers from being eligible then so be it. To have different standards for men and women would make the military less effective and discriminate against men.) And the fact that the military is a volunteer force ought to weed out those volunteers who are not prepared to shoulder the psychological burden of war; if this is not the case, perhaps provisions should be put in place for a period of contemplation on the consequences of signing up for prospective recruits, and training involve psychological conditioning or testing to weed out those without the strength required. Any woman who comes through this process, then, would be capable of handling both the strain and the horror of war as well as any male soldier, and hence the arguments you put forth for men fighting would apply to her, and the arguments for women not fighting would not.
I have to fore go dealing with Feminism in general because my last post was so insanely long. Besides, Feminism in general is irrelevant as I said last time because war is a special circumstance.
You keep making the mistake of falling back on qualifications. Again, these are irrelevant. I can present many cases of perfectly qualified fourteen-year olds who could and did serve with distinction just in the last two wars and did so out of their own volition. I can do the same with middle-aged or even elderly soldiers. In neither case, save in extremis, does that in anyway excuse them for being put at hazard.
My point about women in combat has nothing to do with something as trivial as physical or temperamental qualifications (that word again); it has to do with the fundamental nature of men and women at a neo-Aquinian level. It has to do with their duties as men and women and their responsibilities toward one another. In this, for reasons I have already stated, it is immoral on an absolute level for women to be sent into combat in any save the most extreme cases. At the very least, sending women into combat means that women can be regarded as legitimate targets of war and that sets up an ambiguity that will one day prove a nightmare when the West faces an enemy who does not fear us. It is a time that isn't that very far off either. When a Royal Navy seawoman was taken prisoner by the Iranians, the British government spineless spun it as a "nothing to see here" episode. A hundred years ago, the London papers would have been baying for the Iranian President's head–and they'd have got it, too.
The question I pose to you is this: What quality does a woman have that makes her a positive asset as a woman in a combat unit? Specifically, what trait does she have that a man does not possess? What makes a woman superior to a man as a soldier? Until someone can answer that question to my satisfaction, I will only look on in disgust whenever someone with a Feminist axe to grind parades a woman who's had her leg blown off and claim that this abominable episode is "progress".
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