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Good accurate answers here, in addition.
What is and isn’t a war crime is determined by the dominate power.
What is and isn’t a war crime is clearly laid out in the Geneva convention.
Even though there is established law it comes down to whom is enforcing the “law” and how they interpret it.
The “whom” that is enforcing the “law” is the victor in a War.
The West was the victor in WWII so the West got to determine what was and what wasn’t a “war crime” during that period of time.
The result was the “Nuremburg trials”, many precedents were set at this point.
The World in general deemed that the result of the Nuremburg trials was good and should set the precedent for how Nations should behave in regard to one another.
With the way the World is today it will be interesting to see how things play out from a legal perspective.
Dominate powers can and do do what ever they want, it doesn’t make it legal or moral much less ethical.
Same reason tasers or directed energy weapons are banned by the Geneva Convention; they are weapons of torture. But your local police arent at war so torturing you to death is just fine by them
Conventions of war are basically a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”. They’re ways to make wars less shit for countries without undermining the actual fighting too much.
Why not ban war? Because you want rules people might actually follow. If you banned all war, great! World peace! Until someone starts a war because it’s convenient, then all the rules go out the window.
When it comes to domestic issues, states don’t want others interfering. Everyone agrees not to interfere in internal affairs of other countries – that’s what sovereignty is. Violating that is usually an act of war.
Both sides of the same coin of countries’ governments acting in their own interests.
Wait that’s illegal in warfare? I’m going into recruit training for USMC in march and one event is called The Gas Chamber. Bunch a dudes go into a small room with burning CS gas, take off their masks after a while, then go out. It’s to “build trust in our equipment”
Then again military doesn’t really follow constitutions etc once you sign away to become gov property so I guess it doesn’t matter lol. Glad to know I won’t have to deal with it if I ever see actual combat hopefully
Same reason tasers or directed energy weapons are banned by the Geneva Convention; they are weapons of torture. But your local police arent at war so torturing you to death is just fine by them
Another aspect of the ethics is hard to put in a way that makes logical sense, but I’ll try.
It lowers your opponents ability to defend themselves to an unsatisfactory degree, making them an easy target. To then continue to engage the enemy when they are in such a helpless state that the gas brings could be argued as similar to engaging a disarmed enemy, which is a war crime. That ambiguity is another reason why it is not done in warfare, because it may be more trouble down the line for command than it’s worth.
As for why it is acceptable to use on civilians, this is because unlike in war there is no intention to then engage and destroy the civilians, thus incapacitation is not saddled with the same morally grey baggage.
Because the world has a strange abusive obsession with “not my house, not my problem.”
Nations only care about other nations’ doings if they pose a threat.
retaliation
If you get gassed by the opposition in a war, you’ll probably respond in kind before you know what the gas is that got thrown at you – so if they launch tear gas at you and you respond with sarine, now everyone is using chemical weapons, and if they launched sarine and you respond with tear gas, you look weak.
civilians tend to not have stockpiles of chemical weapons on hand, so that’s not really a concern in a domestic conflict.
Wait that’s illegal in warfare? I’m going into recruit training for USMC in march and one event is called The Gas Chamber. Bunch a dudes go into a small room with burning CS gas, take off their masks after a while, then go out. It’s to “build trust in our equipment”
Then again military doesn’t really follow constitutions etc once you sign away to become gov property so I guess it doesn’t matter lol. Glad to know I won’t have to deal with it if I ever see actual combat hopefully
Another aspect of the ethics is hard to put in a way that makes logical sense, but I’ll try.
It lowers your opponents ability to defend themselves to an unsatisfactory degree, making them an easy target. To then continue to engage the enemy when they are in such a helpless state that the gas brings could be argued as similar to engaging a disarmed enemy, which is a war crime. That ambiguity is another reason why it is not done in warfare, because it may be more trouble down the line for command than it’s worth.
As for why it is acceptable to use on civilians, this is because unlike in war there is no intention to then engage and destroy the civilians, thus incapacitation is not saddled with the same morally grey baggage.
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