It’s What Invading Armies Do
July 1, 2015
Soldiers in Sudan raped women and girls and burned them alive in their dwellings, reports the UN Mission in South Sudan. This is nothing new. Soldiers have done this for centuries. I remember that some American soldiers committed rape in Iraq, and then killed and burned the victim to destroy the evidence. And no wonder, for a line in an old Army cadence says: “Rape and pillage burn the village! Yes we can!” And no wonder, General Sherman’s soldiers were a raping, looting, plundering, murdering, and house-burning army of Northern aggression. Being a soldier is not like having any other occupation. Being a soldier sometimes means that you are a murderer if you kill the “enemy” in an unjust war.
Laurence M. Vance [send him mail] writes from central Florida. He is the author of The Free Society; War, Christianity, and the State: Essays on the Follies of Christian Militarism; War, Empire, and the Military: Essays on the Follies of War and U.S. Foreign Policy; King James, His Bible, and Its Translators, and many other books. His newest book is The U.S. Proxy War in Ukraine.
Man insults another man's wife