How Does Kurtz Justify The Rule Of War

Apocalypse Now is a film produced by Francis Coppola in 1979 about the Vietnam war. The film was based off of the novel, “Heart of Darkness”, and is the story of an Army Captain, Captain Willard, and his mission to hunt down and terminate Colonel Walter Kurtz. The reasoning for sending Willard to kill one of his fellow Americans is due to the fact that Kurtz has become unstable and has been operating against his orders with the Montagnard army and committing murder. Kurtz has gone insane during the war and his methods are thought of as unsound and he needs to be taken care of.

Kurt Vonnegut is able to put a man’s face on war in his short story, “All the King’s Horse ”, and he exemplifies that in a time of war, the most forgotten effect on nations is the amount of innocent lives lost in meaningless battle due to unjust rulers fighting each other against a nation’s will. As Americans, we are oblivious to the fact that we have people fighting every day for our country. In addition, we ignore the fact that we do a lot of collateral damage and hurt innocent people unintentionally in order to get what we want. Vonnegut shows the reader in Pi Ying’s own sadistic way of demonstrating how he feels about war brings attention to the point that war, while unruly and cruel, is nothing

Apocalypse Now is a work of art, that encaptures the horrific and gruesome tone of the Vietnam War. My first impression of the film led me to categorize it as a “war film” or dramatization. It felt like a thriller that went above and beyond the typical formula. Coppola skillfully uses the elements of light and shadows, color, and music in Apocalypse Now to visually portray the psychological damaging effects of war.

A universal and unavoidable product of war is that soldiers get killed. Most people accept these killings as a necessary evil and that the ends justify the means. If the war is “justifiable”,the killing of enemy soldiers is deemed as a necessary triumph of what is right. If the war is unjustified, it is seen as honorable to fight for one's country, whether you agree with them or not. But antiwar pacifists do not take the lives of soldiers for granted. Everyone has a right to life and killing on the battlefield is a direct violation of that right. In a standard interpretation of basic rights, it is never morally justifiable to violate a right in order to produce some good. In war, the argument goes, kill or be killed, and that type of killing is killing in self-defense. But, according to anti-war pacifists, killing in the name of self-defense during times of war cannot be justified unless a) they had no other way to protect their

When it comes to any war, soldiers are placed in dangerous situations based on the orders given to them. They are forced to make quick decisions, usually out of their control, to defend their country against its said enemy. The act of killing is in no way ethical, but when done under the circumstances of war, military duty and survival, the wrongness of it can be debated. Consequently, the act of not killing can be unethical as well, since the outcome can be the sacrifice of a fellow comrade. The process of ethical reasoning cannot be used when faced with these kinds of decision because soldiers of war are unable to see all sides of the story, making it impossible to weigh the outcomes.

Throughout history, many people have debated over the ethics of war and peace which lead to the creation of the just war theory. There have been a number of wars in the past and even in today’s world that have been proven to be unjustified by the means of this theory. Any war in my opinion, is hard to justify due to the violence, destructiveness, the nature of humans doing during war, and the impact it has on humans and the world. However, I have chosen to discuss why America’s decision to jump in to World War II was justified and by proving it by using the just war theory, mainly focusing on jus ad bellum.

Monstrous acts are not always committed by monstrous people, but from those who have witnessed incomprehensible pain and suffering. It was reported by Jeffrey Kimball that the members of Company C had arrived in Vietnam beginning of December and were struggling to keep alive by March. During their three months in Nam, the Charlie Company had lost four soldiers along with the thirty-eight wounded. To continue, a popular Sargent had been blown to pieces two days before the My Lai Massacre, which could have acted as a triggering device for what was looming in the not so distant future. These soldiers were also fighting against guerrilla warfare, meaning they weren’t able to relaiate their frustrations and angers against the “enemy” because it wasn’t open combat. According to my uncle who had fought in the war, the men in your unit are your brothers, your family. Since soldiers have minimal contact with the outside world, with the exception through letter mail and the very occasional television news broadcasts, the fellow soldiers besides you are what keeps you sane … at least as sane as one can stay in a perpetual state of war. I argue that the men who took part in the My Lai Massacre were not born intrinsically evil, but rather it’s the condition that they

This paper will be discussing the two movies The Green Berets (1968) and Apocalypse Now (1978), and argue how The Green Berets is a propagandist pro-war film depicting the unrealities of the Vietnam War while Apocalypse Now is an ambiguous anti-war film that shows the social and political absurdities of the Vietnam War.

“War is hell” goes the commonly used phrase. While conducted with a purpose in mind, many believe war to bring nothing but violence and death. In the history of mankind and combat, men have committed many abominable acts against one another as a means to an end. The bombing of Dresden, Germany, one of these loathsome deeds, while seldom mentioned and not widely known, remains one of the deadliest air raids in history. Just as in all largely fatal events, the survivors reflect upon the unbearable guilt and emotions they have experienced. Billy Pilgrim, the main protagonist In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five, serves as Vonnegut’s vehicle to communicate his feelings and contemplations as a survivor. Throughout the story, Pilgrim, or the reader encounters an animal that Vonnegut uses to convey the range of emotions and incidents that humans are subject to as a result of war.

While some believe that unrestricted warfare is the most efficient and successful way to fight a war, it in fact creates more harm than good. As an example, events that took place during World War II (WWII) may be taken into consideration. WWII was fought with certain restrictions and principles in place. Did this stop all war crimes? No, it did not. However, what it did do was make those few war crimes that were committed, followed up by punishments, which people could eventually learn from. If such a system with rules and punishments were not established, the crime rate would be higher, and there would be no follow-up punishments to teach people that what they did was wrong. From such reasons and many more, it has been made clear that not all actions are permissible and justified during times of war, because there will be countless ‘crimes against humanity’ committed by dishonorable means- and done so without any consequences succeeding.

- My project is titled “A Renewed Sense of Hopelessness: American Sentiment Following the Vietnam War.” Since I’m interested in studying how film actively molded Americans’ interpretation of the Vietnam War, I picked Francis Ford Coppola’s film, Apocalypse Now, as my artifact. I thought that it would be a good choice because it’s one of the most well-known war films and it came out just a few years after the Vietnam War. This image from the beginning of the film shows napalm being dropped on the Vietnamese forest, setting everything on fire.

The first argument is that war involves mass killings and is unethical. This is a very true statement as it is a known fact that the death tolls of countries involved in war increase tremendously. War, according to the definition stated above, involves the use of weapons, used when proceeding to conquer a piece of land or overthrow the leader(s) of the land. Due to this, many soldiers who fight against the

War is many things. It may be many different things depending on each individual. Many soldiers get trained so their mentality is to characterize their opponents as less than human, so their lives lose all worth. Some soldiers however, are not prepared for this, even though they have been trained. One thing is training for it, another thing is actually killing a human being. As they kill more people, it becomes normalized for them. All they have seen changes their mind, while all of their dreams get swept aside by bloody hands of the hypnotized while they carry the cross of homicide. But why kill other strangers? What’s in it for the soldiers? War feeds the rich while it buries the poor. Rich people are power hungry, selling soldiers in human grocery store, using them as their little puppets who obey their master, making them go around killing each other in order to determine who is right, but in the end, war determines who is left. “The Man I Killed” by Tim O’Brien shows how soldiers who commit violence become traumatized and how that changes over time.

The film characterizes Willard’s mission as the epitome of hypocrisy: in the midst of scores of senseless killings, the U.S. military is wasting energy and lives on killing one of its highest-ranking military officials. While Kurtz may well have gone insane, it's not clear why killing him is a priority when U.S. troops and Vietnamese civilians are dying. Moreover, since the military seems to encourage assassination in war, as evidenced by Willard’s assignment, we may question why Kurtz is demonized for killing two people who may have been working against the United States. Willard points out a number of other hypocrisies in his narration. For instance, after killing the Vietnamese peasant in the sampan, he reflects, “We’d cut them in half with a machine gun and give them a Band-Aid.

The concept of war being inhumane is impossible to agree with. The reason you should believe that it's not is because it's a jovial, prehistoric sense. The same prehistoric sense that makes you love someone, and the same reason why humans collect things. It's something that we've done