The latest Chotiner interview is horrifying, but we should also ask why so many of our moral appeals center around the mental image of “women and children” when considering why someone would assume it's okay to mark a whole category of people as worthy of death.
😔
Yep. The category of uniformed combatant is at least defensible under some sort of moral framework.
I’ve always been struck by this.
We also see a similar logic in the use of “military-aged boys/men” at play and in the intentional targeting of boys in warzones and the like.
It’s a very short skip and a jump from “all men are potential combatants" to “all of the children of the people we see as combatants are also dangerous.” And you sip a bottle of eugenics juice before you make it.
This is gonna sound grim: AFAIK the way to commit a genocide is to kill the women. Our DNA knows this so men sacrifice ourselves to ensure the survival of our people and our own DNA. Thankfully most genocidal lunatics don’t read, so don’t succeed