Re: [OT]Responsibility and the Merchants of Death

From: "Oerjan Ohlson" <oerjan.ohlson@telia.com>

> This may be a language problem. In Swedish, "responsible for" is not
the
> same thing as "involved in" - you can be responsible even if you're
not
> involved, and it is possible (though harder) to be involved without
being
> responsible - but I'm not sure whether or not this is the case in
English
too.

"Responsible for" implies "involved in" - though not the converse. That
is
you may be powerless to alter a situation, but you're still involved.
But you can easily be involved in something without being responsible
for
it.
Typically, innocent bystanders, people hit by drunken drivers etc.

> I carry part of the *responsibility* for those lives taken by our
weapons,
> certainly. For me this is morally acceptable only because I also know
> several people personally, and am aware of many others, who owe their
lives
> to those same weapons.

Yes, there are up sides. I'm lucky in that most of what I've done is
dual
use: the anti-submarine search AI will, with but a little tweaking of
parameters, do quite nicely for SAR (Search And Rescue).

> However, I've seen and heard quite a few comments from USAmericans
> critizising Sweden for not *getting involved* in the Gulf War and more
> recently in Afganistan. They clearly don't count our delivering
~150,000
> AT4s to the US armed forces prior to the Gulf War as getting involved
(and
> neither do they count the field hospital we did send there, since it
didn't
> take part in the actual fighting).

..and which was available to treat wounded Australians who were
de-mining
Kuwait Harbours. I don't know if they ever actually treated any, but
that
doesn't
matter. You sent the hospital, that's what counts. Thanks, BTW.

> and unlike our salesmen, the
> Swedish government at the time was heavily pro-VC/NVA :-(

..as were a lot of Americans and Australians. The Past is another
country,
all we can do is learn from mistakes. But even with hindsight, it seems
to
me
that the Vietnam war was perhaps not worth fighting: the people we were
fighting against were every bit as bad as portrayed, but the people we
were
fighting for were less than wonderful. But the Cambodian war we didn't
fight
was one we should have. Pol Pot & Angka => Enemies of Humanity.

> Unfortunately, a company has very little power to prevent a customer
from
> selling or giving the weapons he has bought to someone else - or even
> having them stolen by someone else.

Yes, like the Kuwaiti Naval vessels that were taken by the Iraqis when
they
did their blitzkrieg.

> The Swedish army is a big culprit here, BTW - it didn't guard
> its mobilization weapon caches very well, so criminal elements have
broken
> into several such caches with the result that the MC gangs in southern
> Sweden have used AT4s in their gang wars. Not exactly the purpose we
> designed the AT4 for :-(

Look on the bright side:
a) It proves the AT4s work
b) The MC gangsters (hopefully) tend to use them on each other, rather
than on banks, civilians etc. In which case, No Great Loss.
<yes, this was supposed to be a joke>

> Agreed. And he must remember that both the firm he buys from *and* the
> government of that firm's country need to have the same beliefs (or be
> morally bankrupt), since either of them can stop the deliveries.